Happy Birthday Brother

Miss you.

Snow

There is nothing quite like the first snow of the year...

Even if Father Frost takes until January 19th to exhale.

2 roads

Two roads diverged, two approaches apart.

Education could learn a thing or two from religion.

In the process of educating people in a faith, religion infuses singing, ceremony, symbolism, ambiance, and candles. Structures to house this process call our eyes upwards with ceilings as high as mountains. Ten minutes of sermon and you're up and singing again. Sit down, then stand up again. Benches so hard no way you're dozing off. People sit together. Lights drop. Candlels flicker. Voices sing notes familiar. Echoing bells send people along their way into a cold, frosty New England night...

The last time I sang a song in a academia? Learning the alphabet. Candles in class? Negative, fire hazard. Ceilings? Keep'em low to maximize space. Walls? Try 30 year old pastel cement blocks. Stained-glass windows? Who needs windows at all? Lighting? How about we stick to eye-straining fluorescents to save a buck, ok?

Two questions...

1) How did we allow ourselves to build prisons for our children and cathedrals for our gods?

2) Since when has inspiration of our minds been any less vital than the exultation of our souls?

Centuries into the process of institutionalizing education and we're still believing that we can inspire youth with chalk and brick? Command and control?

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood...

Currency

What is the distinction between spending time thinking up ways to Save Money versus spending time thinking up ways to Build Wealth?

Consider this... time is of the highest currency. It has no exchange rate. No conversion. It moves forward only. We live it, we love it, or look back one day wondering if we lost it. Knowing this, what we spend our time thinking about is the highest form of currency exchange possible. It precedes all else.

Saving Money is the way many of us with Depression-era parents were brought up. It focuses on building budgets, reducing desires, investing for 3.125% returns. Dialogue centers around dollars. It's easy to forget how paper, cloth, and a bit of green dye are little more than someone else's creation, someone else's idea. A carrot on a stick is also an idea, an idea that provides the currency needed to keep race horses running in circles time and time again.

The problem, of course, is that money is just an idea. As such, Saving Money escapes the larger truth: if money is just an idea, then an idea is money. Think. How much time do you spend investing in your ideas versus someone else's? How many years would you spend chasing the carrot versus growing the circle?

Building Wealth goes much further than Saving Money. One is proactive, one is reactive. One individual, one universal. One runs in circles, one expands the circle itself.

What market are you in?