Posts Tagged ‘efficiency’

Monday, September 19th, 2011

Are you impatient?

Are you impatient?

Seriously impatient?

Do you have the kind of impatience you can taste? Feel?

The kind that burns you up and keeps you awake at night and restless during the day impatience?

Impatience that you can share?

Impatience that you act on…..

Excellent!

But, here is the thing – not all impatience is good impatience…sometimes maybe it’s not impatience at all…

What I mean is:

What sometimes masquerades as impatience is laziness – a lack of desire to put in the time and thinking needed to make a difference – a shortcut for no reason other than to lessen a workload.

Some impatience is merely a lack of interest – a loss of desire – a let’s just get it over with attitude.

And, some impatience is just sheer ignorance – an absence of knowledge – with no real desire to learn more or go deeper.

Here is the thing – notice what my three examples have in common when describing negative impatience?

Lack of desire; loss of desire; no real desire…

The way I view impatience; the way I value impatience is by passion.

True passion fuels the kind of impatience that can change the world…or any little part of it.

Impatience should be articulated as “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGIY5Vyj4YM

Watch the clip – if you didn’t – it’s worth it – listen to him carefully – it all begins with passion – passion moves mountains; has changed empires; has created true marvels….

Think about all the dispassionate impatience that you know – Wall Street for one – and ask yourself if that’s how you want your own impatience to be channeled – to be articulated.

Is yours the impatience of running a red traffic light and causing an accident or is it the “I’m as mad as hell” type?

Personally I struggle. We all get caught up in the get me out of the line quickly syndrome; the I don’t need to wait at the corner – no other car is coming… sadly how many dead people had that as a last thought… I wonder.

And sometimes the notion of patience being a virtue seems so old fashioned that it’s almost embarrassing – unless you recast the very notion of it as follows…listen:

“Patience is the art of concealing your impatience.”
Guy Kawasaki

Frankly, I found this to be an interesting lesson in leadership. However, it must be coupled with passion.

And to that end I submit the following…listen:

“He who is not impatient is not in love.” Italian Proverb

And there you have it. Be in love – with what you believe in; what you do every day; what you care for; what you hope to achieve/become; what you are…don’t embrace the impatience of the path of least resistance….

This, to me, is the simple impatience with negative thinking; negative people – what is more positively passionate than love?

And, my sense is that this is the impatience that makes all the difference.

Special thanks to MDM for inspiring me…

What’s your view?

How impatient are you?

 

 

 

Posted by David on 09/19 at 03:24 PM
Monday, July 4th, 2011

History is Written by the Victors

“History is written by the victors” – so said Winston Churchill. And interestingly, wag that he often was, Churchill always said that he would write it – and indeed he did.

Truth is I use to believe that too. But in our day the lines are getting blurred and history is constantly being re-written; re-interpreted and re-construed as social mores shift and change and frankly as technology or better its applications influence and impact our ability to both record and change and share.

And it’s the record and change and share that I am focused on. Never in the history of the world have we had the ability to do all three with such efficiency and effectiveness not to mention speed and sheer capacity to store data and information.

Yet it’s the confluence of the three that concerns me.

Any recorded history was always colored by the author – victor or vanquished. And it was up to us – the reader or analyst or whatever to form opinions based on our own biases and color skew. Ergo – history is rarely if ever objective.

Ask the Israelis and the Palestinians; The British and the Irish; The Vietnamese and the Americans; The Turks and the Armenians and on and on and on.

 And no doubt –within all of the conflicting accounts sometimes clearly and sometimes buried deeply are common “facts” that while interpreted differently by the protagonists allow us as third party observers to glean some semblance of “truth” – whatever that might mean.

But here is the thing – I see two disturbing trends – one is the ability to go into records and change them to fit a particular personal view. While that has always been possible and was no doubt prevalent even in the age of parchment technology has given the perverter of history an edge. With a key stroke or two empires could disappear; despots become benign and famous events can take on new meaning.

Read this article from the New Yorker:

To me the point is not the ignorance – that isn’t new – what’s troubling is the attempt to change what was to fit a view of what someone wishes is in order to become what will be.

Scary…

The second issue is the speed with which we globally share information or misinformation and as we all know what we share must be true…No?

Innocent until proven guilty has lost its meaning; Faked news is an everyday occurrence. We have lost the ability to distinguish between PR and fact – and the stuff that was once relegated to the fringe lunatics of conspiracy and craziness has gone mainstream.

I am seriously concerned. For us and for the next generation – what hope do they have if we can’t even begin to trust our sources of information ; enlightenment and education.

How will we form opinions? Learn? Not repeat our worst mistakes?

Once we could look ahead fairly secure in the knowledge that we had a past to fall back on – yet as we re-invent our present by changing the past – how will we ever correct the mistakes?

So I am worried.

Listen:

The future ain’t what it used to be.

Yogi Berra

What do you think?

Posted by David on 07/04 at 01:19 PM
  • With power comes responsibility but I have decided to be confident in our young people. Their world will be different and they will have to make their own mistakes to make it better. Woody Allen's film Midnight in Paris isn't the perfect movie Annie Hall was but i like the conceit--that every generation thinks some other generation was the golden ...
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    Posted by Belle on 2011-07-06 15:27:58
  • I think what's changed with the advent of technology is not the accuracy of the recorded history, or the agendas of the people writing that history. Only the speed at which this information is proliferated has been affected, since people are more active cyber citizens than ever, and education is being given to more and more children. So in the ...
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    Posted by Michael on 2011-07-05 14:11:02
  • Let me qualify -- technology should be our best abiluty to preserve -- its when its abused that I get nervous
    Read more >
    Posted by david sable on 2011-07-05 12:11:01