Follow Your Bliss, Know Thyself, Change the World

On the E1KaD forum, December 13, 2008: I enjoyed the following, which was posted today by Steve in Texas. Maybe you might like it, too --

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There has been a lot of talk on [this] forum about focus, building your business, marketing and so on, but I have seen little about being self employed, knowing yourself and getting the most out of yourself and your life.

Here’s my brain dump on "being" for you to use or disregard as you choose.

Why are you here?
Let’s face it, working for someone else is ultimately easer than working for yourself; no accounting, chasing payments, marketing or product creation. Turn up, put the nut on the bolt, get paid, go home. So why are we working for ourselves?

For me it’s the need to create, plus I don’t play well with morons, sorry managers. I used to write and record songs for a living. A couple thousand later I got it out of my system. Now I create other stuff. I love houses and remodeling (who knew), I bang out web applications, websites and and other apps on a regular basis… I can’t help myself. As my mother said when I was debating whether to build my first recording studio, "of course you should, it’s what you do dear".

What is it that you "do" dear?

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Law 23 of Project Design: Successive Refinement

San Francisco, 1976: I got my first computer! It was a high-class Cromemco, in a kit, and had a lightning fast Z80 processor that ran at (gasp) 3 megahertz, and a full 64K of memory.

I had a buddy who knew computers in and out -- he wrote code for our satellites to determine whether a field in russia had wheat or alfalfa -- and he put the kit together for me, cause I didn't know how to solder back then. (He's rich and retired long since, because he went to work for a new startup called Cisco, and they gave stock options; but that's another story.)

He also gave me a book about beginning to program in Basic.

It showed a simple technique called 'successive refinement.' If you are a programmer then you know this technique but for non-programmers here, it's really simple. And mongo useful.

Here's how it works ...

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Remembering John Lennon

New York, December 9, 1980: In the evening, John Lennon returned from the recording session at The Record Plant in New York. The limosine let him out in front of The Dakota, the gothic stone building pictured in the movie "Rosemary's Baby", and as he and Yoko Ono approached the building, Mark David Chapman called out "Mr. Lennon?" and shot Lennon five times with a .38 revolver.

Lennon was hit in the torso and the back. He called out, "I'm shot," took a few steps, and collapsed. When policed arrived, they found Chapman standing nearby, the gun on the ground. A building security guard asked Chapman, "Do you know what you've done?"

Chapman replied, "I just shot John Lennon."

Police rushed Lennon to the emergency room at the Roosevelt hospital, but he could not be revived.

Something died for many of us that day.

The sound of the Beatles, coming from the radio, startled us, back in the day. Those were college days for me. But perhaps you remember when you first heard their harmony, the enthusiasm, the sound was new and fresh.

A memory floats, quiet, like a blossom in a busy stream, and rushing around a bend, is gone.

A Tale of Toblerone ...

A Movie Theatre near Picadilly, London, 1968: Funny how memories come back to you. Pointless little things, a turn of phrase, the way some trees looked against the clouds on a dim horizon.

One of the moments in my life that I remember, from time to time, from 40 years ago, and still laugh each time, was a snippet of conversation overheard, when I first sat down in a theatre in London, to watch the film Barbarella.

The film had not yet begun, and I gradually became aware of the two guys in the row right behind me. Being American, it seemed to me that their cockney accents were thick as bad pudding.

Said one: "I'm going to the confession, mate."

Said the other: "Get us a Toblerone, eh?"

"Save me seat?"

"Guard it wi' me life, I will!"