Stretching

Sometimes we relax and enjoy down time. It's deserved, (or not) and we indulge a little.  Other times though we prepare ourselves, take a deep breath and stretch.  We push beyond our comfort zones knowing it is good for us.   This can happen in a workout or other favourite activity when we go harder for a defined short term - the sprint at the end of a run. Or it can happen over the long haul when we make life altering decisions such as moving away from the single life and deciding to have a family.  There's a middle ground though that I think represents the hardest type of stretch.  That extended but not permanent commitment to something that will do us good over the mid-term.  A year long decision to really change a pattern in your life.  There's no shortcut on these. 

Stretching isn't easy. It requires a degree of self motivation and will power. It requires that we put what's good for us ahead of what's comfortable.  And like anything we decide, there's is a need for commitment to stick with it.  With that in mind, when we see others stretch it impresses us - certainly it impresses me.  I think we place ourselves in the others' shoes for a moment and ask if we could do it.  We consider it, and quickly and if only superficially grasp what is needed for that stretch , for that movement outside where we feel safe.  We recognize it.  

I know someone that's stretching now.  I know she's not 100% ok with it. And I'm really blown away by her personal strength to do it.  I hope to be inspired by  her to explore new areas for myself and I'm not so secretly wishing her tremendous good fortune as we don't see this kind of thing everyday.  

Look around and give yourself a pat on the back if you 'stretch' regularly.  You deserve it.   

We are All Compound People

Some of us have numerous online identities, and some don't.  It can get creepy when an individual pretends to be something they aren't - middle aged men assuming the identities of young people in online communities for example - but I'm not talking about the questionable outliers, I'm thinking more mainstream.  I've heard it recommended more than a few times, that we "professionally" ought to maintain numerous profiles, one for our work, and one to make comments about a few beers with friends or your like/dislike for the favourite local team.  I happen to disagree.

I think we are all compound people - we have a multiple aspects or perspectives in our lives depending on whether we're at work, at home as kid/parent/spouse, or at church or the local biking club.  That's not an exception, that's the normal way we do things.  We exhibit it with our dress (business suit / casual wear / community clothes) and our talk.   When we suppress this idea in the online world, and pretend that we're always professional, or always all about this passion or that one, we are attempting to manipulate people's impressions of us.  Especially if under another online identity, we are making those personal comments or sharing instragrams that are 'unprofessional' in nature. (I don't mean questionable here, I mean not work-related) It is not genuine, and hence begs questions around trust in what's being said - because it's not the whole story.

I support the concept of being one person, and have the people that choose to listen to you understand that there are multiple interests and important aspects in your life.  I put forth that the same is true for each member of your audience, and hence legitimacy is granted.  Your listeners, viewers or audience may not like your entire interests - but that's the beauty of choice.  They can elect to un-listen in the various forms that takes.  For those I listen to, I'm not as interested when they post a picture of their dog, as when they talk about the things that I care about - BUT - and here's the important bit, I know that they aren't hiding anything, and are genuine as otherwise they wouldn't have the guts to say it all.  

There's a side-note here worth saying.  You don't have to post it all, and I'm not suggesting that you do share everything in your life.  If you only want to blog about work topics, or only talk to old friends on FB, that's fine.  Each of us adopts the personality for our circumstances as we require.  Just be straight about it, as we're all compound people.    

 

 

I'm probably wrong

I've been going through an interesting (for me anyway) mental exercise recently.  You see, I disagree with how someone close to me is treating a 3rd person we both know.  I fear this person close to me will get hurt, and let down, and I don't want to see that happen.  I tried to suggest caution and going slow...to no avail.

I'm not particularly hurt my advice (unsolicited) wasn't heeded - that's not my thing.  Rather I was concerned that we both had seen evidence that trust was abused in the past, and I didn't see that this person close to me had 'learned' from it, as I had.

So I've stewed for a few days.  Not fumed, or was angry in any way, just stewed.  You see this person close to me is probably the wisest person I know.  So the question in my head wasn't.."Why don't they see what I see?"...rather it was.. "What do they see that I don't ?"

I still feel the same way about the situation, and left to my own instincts, I probably wouldn't have done anything that took me off-course from acting in a manner that demonstrated that.  But, I'm putting aside what I think, and acting instead on what they think, and what they are doing.  You see I trust this person close to me, and while I can't get my head around their rationale, I know that's ok - one day I may be able to, and in the meantime, it's better to follow the judgement of someone that you know always makes good decisions.

I don't see it yet -  that I'm probably wrong, and they are right- but one day I hope to.

Pay It Forward

This was a lovely little movie from the year 2000 with that oh-so-cute little actor (Haley Joel Osment) that undoubtedly grew up and became less cute.  At least that's the reaction I get when people see the bracelet I wear that says "Pay it Forward".

In fact the concept goes back many many years, and is attributed to many practitioners from Benjamin Franklin, to Emerson and the phrase itself is credited to Lily Hardy Hammond in her 1916 book entitled "In the Garden of Delight".

Pop culture means historic and interesting references give way to movies though - and the movie had a core message that was conveyed in the title and the desire was to make the idea into a movement.  I'm happy to say that Charley Johnson has done that - and founded Pay it Forward, from which my little bracelet comes.  It's a wonderful idea, and one I'm happy to support, thanks to a few very smart people in my life that helped make me aware of it.

The concept is brazenly simple and elegant.  Do something nice for someone else.  Then give them the token (the bracelet in my case), and ask that they pay that kindness forward to another.  I wear it as it provides a constant reminder to me that I should be thinking of others more than myself.  That's what I 'get' out if it.  Being able to do something nice for another person - well that's just a bonus.

Interested ?  Get your own bracelet here.

Childhood's End

I try to be realistic and relative with new ideas I see, hear or read about, and don’t use labels such as “mind-blowing”, “revolutionary” or associate ideas to Toffler’s “Future Shock“ too easily.  But I've come across one of those concepts, and I’m staggered by it.  The implications are life-altering on a species-level for humanity, and I’m stunned by it’s significance.

I recently wrote about the mountain of data we were on the verge of collecting, and ironically, I think I missed a rather key point.  The real-time reality capture we’re on verge of making happen is but one of the mega-data components we’re enabling today.  The other is the object data, connectivity, rules and implicit implications surrounding the internet of things.  For those uninitiated, the internet of things is the connected-ness of inanimate objects and networking them.  At a macro-level, imagine your refrigerator connected to the web and telling you to pick up some eggs on the way home from home via SMS when you’re low on them.  Clever, yes ? At a more detailed level, it’s the labelling of each individual egg with unique identifiers that exist from production through distribution and consumption and these guide the need to create it, how to care for it, the distribution and marketing of it, the pricing of it and finally its’ consumption and recycling.  A smart egg indeed.  Every single item, in every household and every business, everywhere, in real time all connected and interacting.  Starting to see the scale ?  Complement that with real time capture of every stage in every day of both human and automated process reality.

Like any system, efficiency is achieved through scale.  With a rudimentary backbone already in place to connect (the internet) early systems, the framework for this infrastructure exists today.  The check-out is connected to the warehouse now, so demand, shipping and re-supply are all automated already. Getting more granular is straightforward.

Go forward now. The implications for us are overwhelming.  For this to happen we will need to revolutionize how we look at a number of aspects of our lives as we know them.

·      *   We will require whole new identification systems as today’s are cursory and simplistic when the   interactive and pervasive nature of the future is considered. Bar codes, RFID and IPV6 don’t cut it.  Will we need to be tagged too ?

·      *  The economics of this world will need to change as production is empowered with smart supply and smart demand.  More pointedly, the economics will need to systemically embedded so that ‘things’ understand their intrinsic systemic value.  The “Blade Runner” future vision of being hammered 24/7 with advertising we’ve been weaned on misses the point that as we’re too feeble in our attention spans to manually manage ourselves in this world, and will have to hand over ‘economic rules’ to the system itself. Who defines these ?

·      *  The rules or law itself will need to morph from what’s happened, which typifies our current legal approach to the web, to being enforcement of design rules.  Over-production, or faulty production (Sorry we accidentally killed your husband, the factory had a glitch) will cease to be human-caused, and so our liability concepts will evolve to allow statistically acceptable levels of error.

·      *  We will live always-connected, a cog in the wheel in a system we don’t actually run any longer, but enabled.  ‘Opt-outs’ will be a lifestyle choice I might imagine until it’s clearly uneconomic for the system, so will be eliminated.

·     *   Power in the form of politics and nations will have to evolve as protection of systems rises in importance equal to people.

·      *  Power in the form of electrical generation will also develop, as today’s data storage and management already takes the energy of 30 nuclear plants. 

I'll go out on a limb here and suggest that by and large, we don’t see this coming. 

"Much like a body slowly infected with a virus, the invitation to this future won’t be announced and the milestones missed.  The move to this future ‘utopia’ will be as fundamental a change to our species as the evolution into nations from villages 2500-4000 years ago was.  That was the dawn of civilization, and we’re verging on the end of its childhood.

Design - The Issue with Electric Cars

Like many of you, I'd like to do my part for the environment.  Like many of you, I would like to make good choices where possible, and where the 'cost' of doing so isn't prohibitive, or problematic.  And like many of you, I don't own a pure electric car.

I think of the core issue here as one of design, or specifically poor design.  It isn't that the automobiles in questions aren't attractive, they are.  It's the use-case design that leaves much to be desired.

Let me explain.  I have two flashlights at home, and one is a battery powered flashlight.  When the batteries die, I replace them.  If I need light immediately, this works fine.  It does require I have a supply of spare batteries handy, otherwise this plan doesn't work so well.  I also have a rechargeable flashlight.  After some prolonged use, the light dims, and I must recharge the flashlight. At times, this isn't feasible as it's often required when the power itself is out..  If I need light immediately, this doesn't work fine, in fact, it remains pretty dark in this latter situation.   Now, I have two flashlights as both use-cases support one another, and act as spares if one situation wouldn't work out...I may not have spare batteries, or may have to use the light for an extended period, or perhaps it isn't fully charged.  But let's get back to cars...

Now the issues with the pure electric car isn't a choice - replaceable battery or recharge station, as the former option doesn't actually exist.  In fact, the principal issue (besides the general lack of recharge facilities) is that the recharge takes hours.  Think of the lines you've seen at the gas pumps.  That takes 5-8mins to re-fill a gasoline or diesel tank. Now imagine the lines if it took 5-8 hours to refill/re-charge.

Herein lies the problem.  What we need is a hybrid (no pun) design so that I can borrow (think propane tank refills) a battery pack, connect it to my car and be off for the next 300-400 miles before I have the time and access to a proper re-charge station. That proper recharge might be at my home, office or destination.  And for what it's worth, the gas/electric hybrids don't cut it here..their mileage isn't great as the battery is an afterthought, and so they're just cumbersome, slow and awkward.  Don't believe me? Drive one.

If we focus on pure electric vehicles and the concept of 'battery packs', there's even a pricing model here that would offer benefits for the return of a fully charged portable battery pack, versus say an empty one.  But...as I said, the design doesn't allow for this, and on top of this
a few issues exist that would be problematic, such as standardized connections, moving them, storing them and so on.  Battery technology remains heavy and well behind where it needs to be...just think of your cellphone and the endless recharges it needs.  Even before this technology gets better though (and it will), someone needs to apply some common sense design-thought to how we actually use cars if the pure electric vehicle is ever to go mainstream.

Otherwise Tesla, Fisker and others will go the way of the dodo.

Short & Sweet

Sometimes you can hold someone's attention for a long period of time. Other times (most times) you have to be efficient, eloquent and succinct and make your point quickly and clearly. Often, we don't do that.  We should more.