Evolution

Life is a series of moments. Some we forget in an instant. Some stick with us for a lifetime.

A month ago I witnessed a dying man living a life fuller than most of us could ever dream. This weekend I saw the body of a man in one place and the essence of his being everywhere else. They say that, "when the heart weeps for what it has lost, the spirit laughs for what it has found." The great spiritual leaders talk of a life somewhere else after death. What I saw this weekend tells me that immortality starts right here and now. To become an original worth copying. To begin in one form, to evolve into another; in stories, in memories, in laughter, in lessons taught for generations to come. To become part of the fabric of a collective unconscious. What man would ask more from life than this?

Albert Einstein once wrote,

There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.

Like you said Uncle Frank, "there is only one way."

Mistakes

Got mistakes? Get more. A great reminder...

1. You will learn lessons.
2. There are no mistakes - only lessons.
3. A lesson is repeated until it is learned.
4. If you don't learn the easy lessons, they get harder.
5. You'll know you've learned a lesson when your actions change.

Failing Forward by John Maxwell

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?

Only Thing Better

There's only one thing better than a good birthday after a long year and 2 hour drive through the pouring rain. A good birthday, after a long year, with great friends. Thx guys. SoCo crew still rocks. 

Define

What defines service? I mean good, ground-breaking service?

I have an oil change place I go to once/month, Economy Oil Change of Vernon, CT. Everytime I go I walk away amazed. Not just satisfied... amazed. While you wait they offer coffee, hot chocolate, free snacks, and magazines. That's nothing too out of the ordinary. The difference is that these guys get you serviced faster than it would take you to read a single article in Newsweek.

In less than 5 minutes your oil's changed, windshield cleaned, car vaccuumed, and fluids filled. My last trip I actually tried to eat through a snack pack of Cheetos before they called my name. It's hopeless. They're that fast.

Consider going to the bathroom and coming out with your car cleaned and ready for you. There's a difference between exceeding customer expectations and defining a new standard.

Consider what'd happen if biz started thinking about new ways to define a new standard, than just exceed the old standard.

The New Edu

I've been wonderfully inundated over the past several months with a slew of discussions, books, and media on the topic of mind and potential, at a time that has been one of the most busy of my life. Like a good discussion on a great movie: I want to share. I want to discuss. I want to engage a new form of dialogue about possibility and potential. What are some of the ways you see education changing? Value-added? People connected?

Consider... we enter now an age that is only just beginning to appreciate:

• Widespread acceptance of long-standing studies in Positive Pyschology.
• Web 2.0's obsession with connecting people in new ways.
• Social manifestation of Metcalfe's Law exploited by ubiquitous networks.
  
• Debates into the philosophical interpretations of quantum mechanics.

For these reasons, I believe there significant value in discussing new way of thinking and new forms of education made possible from our rapidly changing tech/net/world space. Depending on feedback from here, I'll consider expanding to a new, group-blog format. Till then, look here and comment-up. If Melcalfe was right, it can only get brighter the more voices emerge.

Leverage

Leverage
verb
1. Opposite of jaded, cynical, helpless. Assumes the ability to find a personal, unique solution to any circumstance encountered.
2. See also: Power. Influence. Connected. Involved. Originates from the create force in all of us. Unlimited in scope and potential

Two weeks ago I watched the movie, "An Inconvenient Truth." If you haven't seen it yet, you should. It's a harbinger for our generation. It's also very easy to walk out on this movie thinking an issue as big as global warming and climate change is beyond one's individual ability to influence. Nothing is farther from the truth.

Life is about leverage. Leverage is about power, influence, and connection. How much do you have and where do you want to use it? Like the change of single light bulb, each of us has the power to enact massive change in our world. If you don't believe me, follow along...

Example: At the literal level we know that a single light bulb switched over to its energy-efficient variety cuts energy usage nearly 75%. Focus on the literal one bulb and we miss the metaphorical big change. The question with all of this boils down to this:

How many light bulbs do you have?

Literally, I've got a lot of bulbs burning right now, say 60 at present. For less than $40 at my local Home Depot I can swap out every one for it's compact flourescent cousin. Assuming I have each of those bulbs on for 10 hours/day and each bulb goes from 60 to 13 watts, I've just enacted change on the scale of 13,140 to 2,846 kW-hours/year while saving roughly $3,385/year in energy costs in the process.

But hey, why stop there? What if I took others along for the ride? As a member of a local real estate club, what if I created and promoted the idea of a conversion kit for other property owners as well. The cost savings are clear. And what if we created a common logo and what if we promoted this when advertising our apts - ie: low cost, energy-friendly apartments. And it needn't even stop there. What else could we accomplish by continuing to ask, "what if..."

Abandon apathy. Surpass cynicism. Leverage begins with a simple question:

How many light bulbs do I have before me today?

Kaleidoscope

"The world is your kaleidoscope and the varying combinations of
colors which at every succeeding moment it presents to you are the
exquisitely adjusted pictures of you evermoving thoughts. You will be
what you will to be; Let failure find its false content in that poor
word, 'environment,' But spirit scorns it, and is free."

As a Man Thinketh, James Allen

The Godfather

4:03pm: It's raining out and only getting worse. I'm posting apt flyers around the central Hispanic corridor of Hartford, CT. In the process of posting I always end up talking to a lot of business owners. But today, one, in particular, stands out from the rest.

Heading to my car, I pass by a store front I've driven by a thousand times before. Something's different this time. Against my traditional mindset, I turn around, ask for the owner, and end up following him into a musty old sub-street level storage shop.

Step inside and it's like another world. Blank, grey walls stacked high with random antiques, coins, jewels, and paintings. Then there, in the middle of it all, a thin old man in a chair. If not so animated at the sound of my voice, I'd have never even see him amongst the items. Like a mechanical fortune teller at a circus he comes alive with stories. I come in to talk apt referrals with the owner, I end up mesmerized by this retired jeweler/banker/car salesman/one-time millionaire who speaks 5 languages and claims possession of antique objects dating back before the birth of Christ.

Could I even make this stuff up?

An hour later and he's still showing me items from his collection. I'm on my way to the door as he continues... "I never told you... I'm a fortune teller you know."

Priceless.

Niche

12:01am: Late night real estate brainstorming session. Frustrated, I think, something's got to give. Adverts are ineffective. Calls are dropping off. The first bounced mortgage payment will arrive in less than a month. In the afterthoughts of a thousand failed ideas on how to reach the current props' target market, an epiphany hits. What if none of this is truly my target market? Dots connect. ThoughtSpeed engages. Change thoughts to the frame of a new target market and ideas begin to flow forth like a torrent.

What if more businesses got just as honest with themselves? What new, great innovations could be concocted by focusing on value-add, than just be-all?

ThoughtSpeed implies... quite a bit.

Backwards

A favorite quote of mine by Kierkegaard,

"Life can only be understood backwards; but it has to be lived forwards."

More on this to come...

Fi(r)st

Thomas Edison once wrote,

"Discontentment is the first necessity of progress."

If Tommy Boy's right, there must be some insane changes en-route...

9/11

Without getting into any of the politics, I encourage anyone reading this to take a couple hours out of the 168 available to you this week to watch Flight 93 (out on DVD now). This not a glofication, exploitation, or dramafication, but a reconstruction of one of most under-covered, yet boldy courageous stories of 9/11. No fluff. No major actors. Just a reminder (largely) put together by many of the very people involved. Five years ago. Today.

Mind Space

There comes a time when an outside perspective can best the best window to the soul. Saturday night with the SoConn crew. Good times. And it's only after talking with those who know me best I realize how far apart from self you can split by focusing strictly on work. Rendezvous in real estate, relocating, round-the-clock days, and ramping a biz have left a summer with zero time for relaxation or writing. The mind needs space. Deprive it of that and you forget to work smarter, you just work harder. That's Summer 06' in a nutshell. The end is not justified by the means if the means destroys the mind. So here a note to self: life is a journey. Do not forget it. Fall Agenda set: Have fun. Inspire mind. Find space.

A Note to Professors

Universities are funny places. Walking the hallways I feel like I'm walking down an abandoned subway line - info transit channels with millions invested, increasingly displaced by newer, ad-hoc, virtual channels of communication. Channels more and more on the cusp of revolutionizing the way we learn, interact, and share.

I've been thinking a lot about the way social networking sites and educational institutions will begin to converge (or diverge) from each other in the coming years. GenGaps aside, we need to be clear: Face/Space is more than fad. Yet the closest traditional educational space comes is podcasting and Blackboard. This is not a bridge. We need to learn from each other, yet neither side seems terribly willing to sit down and talk.


Professors, I have only this to say: today's classroom is akin to an academic asthmatic without its thought inhaler. Traditional models of command-and-control, lecture-focus like a tourneqette on the free flow of ideas and information. Consider your base. The knowledge economy means today's learner is lifelong. That means demands on specific time, locations, and social interactions are at all-time highs. In this world we need a learning structure that is ubiquitious, flexible, pausible. 1.5 hours dedicated to a single-channel, single-source can no longer be taken for granted. We need a TiVo for learning. Podcasting not a threat, merely an adaptation to changes already manifested. Consider your market opps. Spare moments in the car, a sprint on the bike, stealing a walk across campus? Priceless. Understand, captive audiences of today move faster than they did yesterday. Continue to lose our brightest by forcing traditional models or adapt to new circumstances and join us as lifelong learners.

Your move.

Craziness

There's an odd phenomenon out here in New England. Like those geese you see flying south every year, people here live in N/E for the summer, then travel to FL in the winter. Instead of traveling in flocks, generating uplift with an advanced V-formations, and honking at each other to encourage the flock leades, we New Englanders hop on I-95S, drive uncomfortable carbon-spewing cars southward for days, while continually honking (and cursing) at each other from inside our aluminum and plastic rolling boxes. Instead of fluffy, white snow, we travel south to enjoy over-priced amusement parks and cookie-cutter kiddie lands. 

Why?

The kind of humidity I hit coming off the plane back from CA leaves little doubt in my mind that Mother Nature has gone totally insane. I've never been to Mars, but I imagine it's gotta be milder than the summer we've had out here in 06'. 

Crazy New Englanders. Crazy Mo Nat. Just craziness all around.

Back in the Saddle

So it's been 3 weeks since East Coast return First lunch with spare time to write things down: today. I've got a lot to say about my frustrations with real estate. Suffice it to say this... there is simply no market more in need of innovation than real estate. More on this to come...