It’s been almost a year since I read The Age Of Turbulence, but I find myself repeatedly returning to a few of Alan’s thoughts on human nature and self esteem that resonated with me. Despite being discussed in the context of human factors in economics, the following passage in my eyes stands easily on its own and speaks volumes of truth about what drives us all and why we have a strong, fundamental need for connectedness. Any time I find myself in a discussion about community, authenticity, accountability, open source or the economics and culture of “free” on the web, I come back to this. Does this speak to you?
As I’ve traveled across the globe for nearly six decades, I have found that people exhibit remarkable similarities that by no stretch of the imagination can be construed as resulting from culture, history, language, or chance. All people appear motivated by an inbred striving for self-esteem that is in large part fostered by the approval of others … People have an inbred need to interact with other people. It is essential if we are to receive their approval, which we all seek. The true hermit is a rare aberration. What contributes to self-esteem depends on the broad range of learned or consciously chosen values that people believe, correctly or mistakenly, enhance their lives. We cannot function without some set of values to guide the multitude of choices we make every day. The need for values is inbred. Their content is not. That need is driven by an innate moral sense in all of us, the basis upon which a majority have sought the guidance of the numerous religions that humans have embraced over the millennia. Part of that innate moral code is a sense of what is just and proper. We all have different views of what is just, but none can avoid the built-in necessity of making such judgments. This build-in necessity is the basis of the laws that govern every society. It is the basis on which we hold people responsible for their actions.
A week has gone by since I eagerly placed the order for The Wisdom Book on Amazon. To tell you the truth, I can’t remember the last time I’ve been this amped to get a book in the mail. When it got here this morning, I was genuinely excited. The box is massive (because the book is), and opening it felt deliberate and ceremonious – like the size and weight of the book was symbolic. I’ve been flipping through it for a half hour and I’m grinning. I normally don’t get worked up about binding, design and photography the way I am right now – I generally read happily on whatever surface, wherever the words happen to be – but I feel some empathy for true bibliophiles today. The book is gorgeous. Read More
Even though I didn’t know him personally, I was saddened to read the news that Randy died yesterday. His lecture, which made him a YouTube celebrity in 2007, was heart warming and inspiring, and his book moved me to tears several times. Among the many strong messages delivered in the lecture, Randy’s encouragement of parents to revisit their priorities, particularly their relationships with their children, was especially noteworthy and it was great to see the lecture have such a huge impact on internet communities and in popular media. The video tape of Randy’s lecture on Sept 18, 2007 in the McConomy Auditorim (included below) is such a great example of how one person can have a positive impact on millions (over 4 million views and counting).
The power of the Internet totally fascinates me. Not 12 hours goes by after I publish a post reviewing The Adsense Code and the AUTHOR shows up on my blog. That’s kind of a mind f#@$. Thank god I really liked the book. lol. It just goes to show you that even though there are millions of blogs out there, word can get around quickly and people can find you in an instant.
For the majority of time I studied and worked as a T.A. at Georgetown in 2003-2005 I lived in Adams Morgan – about 30 minutes walk from the Georgetown Campus. Not having a car, I walked to campus most days, passing the statue of Gandhi at Embassy Row. The memories I have of seeing that statue over and over on those walks are as vivid as any I have from that period in my life. The brass statue stands as a strong reminder of the legendary humanitarian.
The intended effects of the deliberate display of symbolic artifacts like this statue in public areas is undoubtedly to send a very clear message to the public – that certain ethical and moral values, for instance, are good for society. And why not remind the public of the virtues of non-violence, helping the poor and selflessness?? By any of these measures, Gandhi is a legend – which is why it makes perfect sense that this particular statue was chosen to stand amid a cluster of over 50 international embassies in D.C. – it’s the perfect political marketing message for international cooperation and peace.
That said, here are some interesting questions for those of you reading this. What if you learned something about Gandhi today that you found shocking and offensive? Would it change the value of the statue’s symbolism for you? After all, what the statue means to you (or any of us) is directly related to what you know of Gandhi (and, most importantly, how you feel about what you know). You have a relationship, so to speak, with the object based on your knowledge of it.
I, like most I’m sure, associated this statue with all of the positive P.R. Ganhdi gets. In fact, in Western pop culture it’s rare that you would hear Gandhi’s name associated with anything but praise, so our collective opinion as a society is (naturally) overwhelmingly positive. But the reality is, on an individual level, all I really know of Gandhi is what I’ve been exposed to in popular media and from books and TV. And to be honest, those opinions, until recently, have been unanimously positive. Read More
What strikes me most about Einstein’s writings (this one in particular) is how very humble he seems. For a man who has been deservedly named the greatest thinker of our time (and arguably of all time) he stresses his individuality in principal only and always makes reference to kinship, his need to give back and his endless dependence on others. I have included an excerpt of Einstein’s essay “The World As I See It” for my readers who are not familiar with Einstein’s writings. It shows, if only briefly, a window in to the soul of a very great, and very gentle human being…
“How strange is the lot of us mortals! Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he senses it. But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people — first of all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness is wholly dependent, and then for the many, unknown to us, to whose destinies we are bound by the ties of sympathy. A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving…
I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves — this critical basis I call the ideal of a pigsty. The ideals that have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth. Without the sense of kinship with men of like mind, without the occupation with the objective world, the eternally unattainable in the field of art and scientific endeavors, life would have seemed empty to me. The trite objects of human efforts — possessions, outward success, luxury — have always seemed to me contemptible.
My passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my pronounced lack of need for direct contact with other human beings and human communities. I am truly a ‘lone traveler’ and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties, I have never lost a sense of distance and a need for solitude…
My political ideal is democracy. Let every man be respected as an individual and no man idolized. It is an irony of fate that I myself have been the recipient of excessive admiration and reverence from my fellow-beings, through no fault, and no merit, of my own. The cause of this may well be the desire, unattainable for many, to understand the few ideas to which I have with my feeble powers attained through ceaseless struggle. I am quite aware that for any organization to reach its goals, one man must do the thinking and directing and generally bear the responsibility. But the led must not be coerced, they must be able to choose their leader. In my opinion, an autocratic system of coercion soon degenerates; force attracts men of low morality… The really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems to me not the political state, but the creative, sentient individual, the personality; it alone creates the noble and the sublime, while the herd as such remains dull in thought and dull in feeling.
This topic brings me to that worst outcrop of herd life, the military system, which I abhor… This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed. Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism — how passionately I hate them!
The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery — even if mixed with fear — that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man… I am satisfied with the mystery of life’s eternity and with a knowledge, a sense, of the marvelous structure of existence — as well as the humble attempt to understand even a tiny portion of the Reason that manifests itself in nature.”
Footnote: The text above is only an excerpt of the full text of Albert Einstein’s copyrighted essay, “The World As I See It” . The excerpt above was taken directly from an online exhibit at www.aip.org – The Center for History and Physics. I have included it here, with a footnote as websites have a tendency to evaporate and I want this blog to retain it’s full text beyond aip.org’s exhibition, who’s links are likely to change. For those of you who wish to read it, Einstein’s essay was originally published in “Forum and Century,” vol. 84, pp. 193-194, the thirteenth in the Forum series, Living Philosophies. It is also included in Living Philosophies (pp. 3-7) New York: Simon Schuster, 1931. For a more recent source, you can also find a copy of it in A. Einstein, Ideas and Opinions, based on Mein Weltbild, edited by Carl Seelig, New York: Bonzana Books, 1954 (pp. 8-11).
Although Brad Feld doesnt know me, he’s had a significant impact on my life (and free time) these past few weeks. As with all 6-degrees-of-separation stories, Brad came into my life through someone else – In this case, my fiance, Julie. Jules’ daily life is consumed in Venture Capital and I’ll be the first to admit that she has a much cooler job than I do. Her job makes for great after-work conversation, and a fantastic residual benefit I get from her day-to-day is that I get to hear out about a ton of exciting new startups and pre-funded technologies months before they ever hit the public’s radar. Every now and again, she’ll come home after a long day of meetings and presentations super-excited about a new technology or product that her firm’s considering funding, itching to share her news about the next-greatest medical breakthrough or internet startup. A little over a month ago she had one of those days – she had just met Brad Feld. Ever since that night I’ve been a Feld fan, and I read his blogs, Feld Thoughts and AskTheVC , regularly. Brad’s the Managing Director at the Foundry Group, and currently serves on the board of directors of a number of private companies, including ePartners, Gold Systems, Judy’s Book, NewsGator, Rally Software, and StillSecure. One of his group’s most recent successes is Feedburner, which was recently acquired by Google.
One of Brad’s newest projects is a company called Lijit, which is still gathering momentum. Last week Lijit announced that they had raised a $3.3 million financing. If you aren’t familiar with Lijit, it’s the search box widget in the far right column of my site with the “My Content” icons. The Lijit widget is free to publishers, and cake to install – just a cut and paste of couple of lines of java. I found that it had one very minor bug when it comes to WordPress 2.2.1, which is my platform of choice, but the formatting problem I was having was fixed almost immediately thanks to Lijit’s customer service, which is literally the best of any company I’ve ever experienced on or off the web — I’d also like to clarify that I’m not prone to sweeping statements like that – I have been emailing back and forth with Tara Anderson at Lijit weekly and her friendly replies hit my inbox before I close my browser every single time. Just to show you how awesome she is, here’s an excerpt from one of her rapid responses yesterday when I had a minor formatting issue
Hi Steffan,
I agree that this is a very weird problem. When did you first notice it?” Our developers are in a meeting right now but as soon as they’re out, I’m grabbing one of them (forcefully) and making them investigate this issue. I will get back to you as soon as I have an answer for you. Things are really good here and thanks for asking. Hope to have this issue of yours resolved quickly and easily….
Tara
And this was a formatting issue — That’s customer service. There must be something magic in the water up in Boulder. In any case, what excites me about Lijit is that it gives publishers and bloggers the ability to customize searches on their sites to include all the content that they publish – that’s including your bookmarking services like del.icio.us, digg, and reddit; your YouTube and Flickr accounts as well as your social networks like MySpace, Linkedin, Twitter and MyBlogLog. Especially for bloggers, who publish across multiple blogs and who are active taggers and social networkers, this means a much richer, customizable search that they can provide on their sites – which translates into increased value for readers. The ability to build customized searches based on a network of content represents a significant improvement on traditional site search. Not only does it give publishers an easier way to cross-promote mulitple sites, but it allows for a much richer interaction between publishers and readers in real time. I’ll be following my experiences with Lijit closely in this blog, but, for now, if you’d like to read more on about it, a great starting place is Brad’s recent post I’m Feeling Lijit.
