Tag Archives: lessons

Steve Olson: “love is the shell’s kryptonite”

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Steve Olson, who recently stopped by to post a comment wrote about “the top causes that make my palms sweat, my heart bleed, and sends tears rolling down my cheeks” for the Caring, Compassion, Charity project.

It’s subject matter I can relate to on many levels – “Why You Should Never Give Up on a Troubled Youth”:

…When I was young, many people who claimed to be helping me, lied to me, abused me, marginalized me, and wrote me off as another statistic. I don’t claim to be special or unique in any way, I am one of millions.

I did not expect to live past 18. I lived through events that should have killed me. The fact that I am here writing this – alive and free – is a miracle. Some of my friends didn’t make it. And some that did are the walking wounded. Ghosts of what could have been.

I owe my life to a couple of inexplicable events and to those few people – and there were very few of them – who accepted me as I was.

As my mind’s eye gazes into the reflection of my past, I clearly see that every moment of every day is a priceless gift.

But the most valuable thing I’ve learned along the way is that there is only one cure for what is wrong with people and the cure is unconditional love and acceptance. It starts with unconditionally loving and accepting yourself as you are right now.

Sound hokey? Cliche? Is unconditional love and acceptance a tall order? Yes, but it’s worth the effort.

Read the whole post.

He finishes with asking me to do the same here. That’s a scary request. It’s one I got to think about. I’m not sure I have guts to let it all hang out out here. There are reasons why I start my online personal history in my late teens.

But for now, let me just say again how much I can relate to his post. I had thought at one time I was going to die by the time I was 18. Then I had thought it would be 25. Then 30. Like so many I was written off by some and let down by others who thought I never could amount to much.

I’m blessed to have found folks along the way who believed in me.

Hack Yourself

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An oldie but a goodie: Bloodletters: “Hack Yourself”:

…You know whose fault it is that your life isn’t perfect. Your boss. Your teachers. Your ex-lovers. The ones who hurt you, the ones who abused you, the ones who left you bleeding. Or even yourself. You know whose fault it is – you’ve been telling yourself your whole life. Knowing whose fault it is that your life sucks is an excellent way to absolve yourself of any reponsibility for taking your life into your own hands.

Forget about it. Let it go. The past isn’t real. “That was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead.” If we’re not talking about something that is real and present and in your life right now, then it doesn’t matter. Nothing can be done about it. If nothing can be done about it, then don’t spend your energy dwelling on it — you have other things to do.

I may sound cruel, I may sound simplistic, I may sound like I’m saying you should just “get over it,” by suggesting that you should let go of your past. I’m sorry for that. But life won’t hold still and wait for you to lick your wounds. The race is still being run. Get up and keep moving. You can’t do anything about yesterday.

You can do something about tomorrow. And about the next day. Focus your energies there.

“I don’t have time to write.” “I can’t dance.” “I can’t talk to new people.” “I’m not attractive.”

I hear this all the time. I always hear the people around me sabotaging themselves, drawing lines and borders and boxes around themselves.

To which I say, make the time; dance; just talk to people; be attractive!

Yes, again, it’s simplistic of me to say that. But it’s simplistic of you to so easily say what you cannot do!

We’re excellent pattern-matchers. That’s what the human mind does – it’s a pattern-matching engine. So we look at ourselves, at our history, at our behaviors, and we draw straight lines between the points – we assume that just because we’ve done things a certain way in the past, we’ll always do them that way in the future. If we’ve failed before, we’ll always fail.

Screw that.

From my stuff tagged “texts” at del.icio.us…

“Global naming leads to global network effects.”

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First, a reminder about what makes the Web, the Web….

W3C.org: Architecture of the World Wide Web, Volume One: 2. Identification:

In order to communicate internally, a community agrees (to a reasonable extent) on a set of terms and their meanings. One goal of the Web, since its inception, has been to build a global community in which any party can share information with any other party. To achieve this goal, the Web makes use of a single global identification system: the URI. URIs are a cornerstone of Web architecture, providing identification that is common across the Web. The global scope of URIs promotes large-scale “network effects”: the value of an identifier increases the more it is used consistently (for example, the more it is used in hypertext links (§4.4)).

Principle: Global Identifiers

Global naming leads to global network effects.

This principle dates back at least as far as Douglas Engelbart’s seminal work on open hypertext systems; see section Every Object Addressable in [Eng90].

What are the global – public – URI’s of Facebook? What are they in regards to any social network for that matter?

This is an important train of thought to consider when debating how Facebook and other social networks influence our relationship with Google, and the entire Web.

Facebook’s growth devalues Google’s utility – it devalues the public Web – at least how it is described in “Small Pieces Loosely Joined” and the Web’s own architecture document.

This is why Scoble can’t be more wrong when he says “Why Mahalo, TechMeme, and Facebook are going to kick Google’s butt in four years” because Facebook and other social networks are going to not only affect how we use Google – but will eliminate the utility of the Mahalo’s and TechMeme’s of the world – because they too rely on a robust and growing *public* URI ecosystem.

Dare: Why Google Should be Scared of Facebook:

What Jason and Jeff are inadvertantly pointing out is that once you join Facebook, you immediately start getting less value out of Google’s search engine. This is a problem that Google cannot let continue indefinitely if they plan to stay relevant as the Web’s #1 search engine.

What is also interesting is that thanks to efforts of Google employees like Mark Lucovsky, I can use Google search from within Facebook but without divine intervention I can’t get Facebook content from Google’s search engine. If I was an exec at Google, I’d worry a lot more about the growing trend of users creating Web content where it cannot be accessed by Google than all the “me too” efforts coming out of competitors like Microsoft and Yahoo!.

The way you get disrupted is by focusing on competitors who are just like you instead of actually watching the marketplace. I wonder how Google will react when they eventually realize how deep this problem runs?

None of this invalidates Scott Karp’s riff on Scoble’s main point – there is a growing role for “Trusted Human Editors In Filtering The Web”. Our friends, our families, our communities. Not just machines and algorithms.

My favorite and fellow bloggers, Slashdot, Salon, the home page of the NYTimes, Philly Future, Shelley Powers, Scott himself, my news reader subscriptions, are all trusted humans, or representations of trusted humans, filtering the Web for me.

There’s nothing new to that fact that people play a direct role in how we discover what may interest us on the Web. It goes back to Yahoo!’s earliest days. Back to links.net, back to the NCSA What’s New page. It goes to the heart of what blogging is all about.

People have been way too hung up on Digg’s voting algorithms and forget that what makes Digg, Digg is its community of participants.

People forget Slashdot outright. As they do Metafilter.

So it still comes down to trust – What organizations do we trust? What systems do we trust? What communities do we trust? What people do we trust?

And just how do we share that with each other?

Here’s a thing that’s been disturbing me about Facebook and Social Networking services…

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Tim Berners-Lee, as quoted by Jon Udell in a piece that greatly influenced me back in the day, called the web “a shared information space through which people and machines could communicate.” . The original piece in which Tim Berners-Lee said that is still up for all to read, titled “The World Wide Web: Past, Present and Future”. I found the piece by typing the quote in Google. Give it a try.

As we share our knowledge, collectively with one another, across blogs, message forums, email lists, and any other services that permit indexing, and reinforce that knowledge via hyperlinking, we are, collectively, building a space that benefits humanity.

It is this collective space that helped me learn what I needed to learn to build a career.

And all this happens, not because of altruistic reasons, but because the architecture of the Web empowers, via the hyperlink, a certain form of communication and collaboration.

The conversations that occur on Facebook, and on most social networking services, happen in the public-private.

In places not indexed by Google, not indexed by Yahoo!, yet are public to selected communities that have access and privilege to them. Gated communities. Islands.

Certainly, there has always been places out of reach of search engines (and there will always be a need for some), but until the last few years, the call from the digerati was to surface these databases of knowledge to the public, behind whatever proprietary walls that may have kept them out of reach. Whether they be newspaper archives, or email lists.

Don’t get me wrong – there’s a lot celebrate when it comes to social networking services. I’m a participant in more than a few, to be sure.

But if they come to define the Web, as they are to some in the media, then I fear we are taking a great step backward.

Frank Paynter: “There is no room for prophets…”

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Tabs from my browser…:

The moment the writers of the Gospels set down the words of Jesus they began to kill the message. There is no room for prophets within religious institutions – indeed within any institutions – for as Paul Tillich knew, all human institutions, including the church, are inherently demonic. Tribal societies persecute and silence prophets. Open societies tolerate them at their fringes, and our prophets today come not from the church but from our artists, poets and writers who follow their inner authority. Samuel Beckett’s voice is one of modernity’s most authentically religious. Beckett, like the author of Ecclesiastes, was a realist. He saw the pathetic, empty monuments we spend a lifetime building to ourselves. He knew, as we read in Ecclesiastes, that nothing is certain or permanent, real or unreal, and that the secret of wisdom is detachment without withdrawal, that, since death awaits us all, all is vanity, that we must give up on the childish notion that one is rewarded for virtue or wisdom.

A thought to ponder for the day. (actually a few…)

Kent Newsome: “Who we really are is the best resume of all.”

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Kent Newsome: A Little Perspective Can Set You Free:

People from my work life have discovered my blog. I knew it would happen when I started doing it. It’s always a little scary to put yourself out there. But as Ayelet says, we are who we are, and there is freedom and efficiency in just letting down your guard and trusting yourself. Who we really are is the best resume of all. Other than a few well-meaning jokes about my little online journal, I have never once had a negative reaction to my blog. And I have had more than a few people tell me that it makes them more comfortable to see who I am away from work.

We can’t change the blogosphere, and we can’t make others embrace our blogging philosophy. What we can do is try to see things from other points of view.

That’s what I’m going to do.

That’s pretty much where I am, and what I try to do every day. It’s good advice, that’s hard to keep.

The enlightened ‘Groundhog’

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Philadelphia Inquirer | 02/01/2007 | The enlightened ‘Groundhog’:

…”It shouts out to you,” said George Heckert, the Buddhist director of the Philadelphia Meditation Center in Havertown.

This month, as it does every February, the center will hold a free screening of Groundhog Day and a discussion of its inner themes. For those who wish to come prepared, cable’s Comedy Channel will show the film six times in 26 hours, beginning tomorrow – the real Groundhog Day – at 10 a.m.

“It’s a very Buddhist movie,” said Ken Klein, of the Tibetan Buddhist Center of Philadelphia in Upper Darby. “It has all sorts of layers.”

In the 1993 film, Murray plays cynical, self-important Phil Connors, a Pittsburgh TV weatherman sent to cover an assignment he loathes: the Groundhog Day festivities in tiny Punxsutawney, Pa.

“A thousand people freezing their butts off, waiting to worship a rat,” he gripes.

Following the ceremony, a blizzard strands Connors in town, and when he wakes the next morning, it’s Groundhog Day again. And again, and again, and again.

Connors tries everything to break the cycle – including driving off a cliff with a kidnapped Punxsutawney Phil at the wheel – but not even death can free him.

To Buddhist fans, Connors’ endlessly recurring day illustrates samsara, the circle of birth and rebirth.

“The word reincarnation is never mentioned, yet it’s such an obvious metaphor,” said Paul Schindler Jr., an Oregon teacher whose writings on the film include the online column “Groundhog Day: The Movie, Buddhism and Me.”

For Dave.

“7 Reasons the 21st Century is Making You Miserable”

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A terrifc, biting essay, that I wish I wrote: 7 Reasons the 21st Century is Making You Miserable: I’m just going to quote number seven, because it helps point to why I do some of the crazy things I do online, make sure to read the whole thing:

7. We feel worthless because we actually are worth less.

There’s one advantage to having mostly online friends, and it’s one that nobody ever talks about:

They demand less from you.

Sure, you emotionally support them, comfort them after a breakup, maybe even talk them out of a suicide. But knowing someone in meatspace adds a whole, long list of annoying demands. Wasting your whole afternoon helping them fix their computer. Going to funerals with them. Toting them around in your car every day after theirs gets repossessed by the bank. Having them show up unannounced when you were just settling in to watch the Dirty Jobs marathon on the Discovery channel and then talk about how hungry they are until you finally give them half your sandwich.

You have so much more control in AOL Messanger, or in chat, or in World of Warcraft.

But here’s the thing. You are hard-wired by evolution to need to do things for people. Everybody for the last five thousand years seemed to realize this and then we suddenly forgot it in the last few decades. We get suicidal teens and scramble to teach them self-esteem. Well, unfortunately, self-esteem and the ability to like yourself only come after you’ve done something that makes you likable. You can’t bullshit yourself. If I think Todd over here is worthless for sitting in his room all day, drinking and playing video games, doesn’t it follow that I’m worthless for doing the same thing?

It doesn’t matter what you tell yourself, or what slogans you memorize about how everyone is special. You’ll think of yourself as special when you do something special. If you think of yourself as special prior to actually doing something special, you’re not healthy and well-balanced. You’re a narcissist, disconnected from reality.

You want to break out of that black tar pit of self-hatred? Brush the black hair out of your eyes, step away from the computer, and buy a nice gift for someone you loathe. Send a card to your worst enemy. Make dinner for Mom and Dad. Or just do something simple, with an tangible result. Go clean the leaves out of the gutter and listen to the sound of the free-flowing water the next time it rains.

It ain’t rocket science; you are a social animal and thus you are born with little happiness hormones that are released into your bloodstream when you see someone else benefitting from your actions. You can line up for yourself a spread of your favorite liquor, your favorite video game, your favorite movie and your favorite sex act, and the sum total of them won’t give you the same kind of lasting happiness you’d get from helping the cranky old lady down the street drag her garbage to the curb.

This is why office jobs make so many of us miserable; you don’t get to see the fruit of your labor. But work construction out in the hot sun for two months, and for the rest of your life you can drive past a certain house and say, “holy shit, I built that.”

That level of satisfaction, the “I built that” or “I grew that” or “I fed that guy” or “I made these pants” feeling, can’t be matched by anything the internet has to offer.

Except, you know, this website.

“the more it starts to look like real life”

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Slate: Paul Boutin: A grand unified theory of YouTube and MySpace:

When trying to rope in the movie and TV studios, YouTube should point to MySpace, where A-listers like Eminem peddle their wares alongside unsigned bands and lip syncers. MySpace makes it easy for musicians, kids, and grandparents to post their own pages by removing the technical hurdles. I created a profile page in three minutes, complete with an auto-play jingle. I’d planned to upload an MP3 of a band I used to play in, until I found they already have their own MySpace page. Clicking “Add” instantly copied the song from their page onto mine. Another one-click tool imported my Gmail and Hotmail address books so I could mass-invite everyone to join me.

MySpace isn’t that much easier to use than Friendster, or than other shared-user-content sites like Flickr (photo sharing), del.icio.us (bookmarks), or Digg (tech news). But it mixes multiple publishing models–blogs, photos, music, videos, friend networks–into one personal space. Most important, it doesn’t presume to know what your goals are. The site’s management ditched their early focus as a home for musicians when they realized Margaret Cho and my crazy friend Kenny wanted spaces of their own. Next, MySpace may let marketers set up profiles for brands. That’s a great idea–the same people who’ll bitch about Snickers having a page will add Wikipedia as their friend.

I think MySpace’s popularity has to do with its puppylike accessibility. A typical page looks like something a Web-enthralled high schooler might have put up in 1996, but with more pics and a soundtrack. I agree with design guru Jesse James Garrett, who says the site’s untrained layout sends a “we’re just like you” message to newcomers. That encourages them to experiment with content genres the site’s designers didn’t build into templates. If tech builders want to hand the controls over to their users, shouldn’t they presume they haven’t thought of everything? Apple’s iWeb publishing system is easy to use and way more attractive than MySpace, but we’d have gotten old waiting for Apple to invent a Lip Sync Video template.

The secret to success is to make everything one-button easy, then get out of the way. If you think collaborative architecture matters more, click the charts: The same Alexa plots that show MySpace and YouTube obliterating top sites reveal that Flickr, Digg and del.icio.us have plateaued with audiences barely bigger than Slate’s. Photos, news, and other people’s bookmarks just aren’t as interesting as bootleg TV and checking out the hotties. The easier it gets to use, the less geeky the Net becomes, and the more it starts to look like real life (emphasis mine – Karl).