Category: Wisdom

My Life in Weeks

On By Norbert HauptIn Need to Know, Visualizing, WisdomLeave a comment

hourglass, sandglass, sand timer, sand clockThe weeks just slip by. I enjoy my work and I enjoy my leisure activities. Like most people, I start my work week on Monday and the days roll by. Since I have always enjoyed my work, I never succumbed to the “Thank God it’s Friday” attitude that seems so pervasive in our popular culture.

I sometimes marvel at the Facebook entries of young people and how they look forward to hump day (Wednesday) because it’s closer to Friday, which signals the start of a weekend that goes by too quickly.

As a business executive, I have noticed over the years that I have conflicting priorities regarding weeks and their passage.

Since there is always good news in the future, like the signing of a new contract, the meeting of a major milestone and the associated progress payment and resulting positive cash flow, I find myself waiting for next week, next month, and next quarter – so the good event can happen. It’s like waiting for my birthday or Christmas as a child, except it’s constant and ongoing. I am basically wishing my life away by looking forward to these future events.

On the other hand, as the weeks roll by, I am critically aware of how I am getting older, how the top of the hourglass now has much less sand in it than the bottom. I don’t want the weeks to pass. I want the days to last longer. I don’t want the end of the month to come because that’s when the rent and the other bills are due.

Today I came across this wonderful article that helped me visualize my life in weeks on the WaitButWhy blog:

If you multiply the volume of a .05 carat diamond by the number of weeks in 90 years (4,680), it adds up to just under a tablespoon.

This just blew me away, as did most of the charts of this wonderful article. It should be required reading for every young person. If you’re under 30 now,  and you are reading this, do yourself a favor and check out Your Life in Weeks. It will change the way you think and it may well change what you do when you get up after reading this post.

And if you’re older, like me, it will do the same.

 

Are Atheists Immoral?

On By Norbert HauptIn Religion, WisdomLeave a comment

I always get a kick out of it when I hear or read how a religious person asks an atheist why he doesn’t go around looting, pillaging, raping, killing and stealing, because, after all, without belief in God, or in the ten commandments, what’s there to keep him back?

I remember feeling insulted. Are things written in a book really the only thing that keeps religious people from being killers and rapists? I really hope not. Interestingly and incidentally, there are a lot of things written on those books, especially the Bible and the Quran, that drives people, yes, orders people to kill. Think the crusades. Think 9/11. Think the inquisition.

I have always prided myself of being moral. I don’t lie, steal, kill, rape, and torture. My morality does not depend on my belief in what’s written in any book. I just know what’s right or wrong. Or do I? Recently I was riding in a car to Los Angeles with a coworker, and we got to talking about Christian values.

We talked about this very subject, and he challenged me. He asked me where I got my moral compass? I wanted to say it had always been there, but I really didn’t know if that was true. Come to think of it, I probably got my moral values because I grew up in a world that is dominated by Judeo-Christian value systems, whether I like it or not. If I had grown up instead of in Europe in Papua New Guinea, as an Asmat, I might have been a headhunter, and my value system would have at its roots that if I kill and eat an enemy I absorb his powers and I bolster the power of my ancestors. To me, killing and eating another human being would be moral under those circumstances.

So it sure looks like I have to succumb to the idea that I am moral today, by our western standards, because I grew up surrounded by a Judeo-Christian culture. The argument in our conversation was that while Christianity is responsible for immense bloodshed and injustice over the millennia, it did do a lot of good.

Like feeding the hungry, clothing the poor, and installing morality in me.

The Flow of Time

On By Norbert HauptIn Feelings, WisdomLeave a comment

The flow of time is relative. There really isn’t a now in the universe. I often marvel about what might be going on RIGHT NOW in the world somewhere. When watching the Olympics late at night and realizing that it’s a completely different time of day in Russia “right now.” When thinking about my daughter on vacation in Thailand  and realizing that the time zones are just about opposite. But these are just simple comparisons of the flow of time on earth. It is quite possible to think about what is happening “right now” and it still makes some sense.

This gets more fascinating when I think about historical alignments. A friend reminded me that a long time ago it blew her mind when I told her that cowboys and Beethoven were contemporaries. Then she sent me this link that points out some more such alignments, for instance that Harvard University was founded before calculus was invented. This reminded me of a few other such comparisons.

The oldest pyramids were built in 2600 BC. Did you realize, for instance, the Cleopatra is closer in timespan to us today than to the building of the pyramids? In other words, the pyramids were more ancient to Cleopatra than Cleopatra is to us. Or you can use Jesus Christ for this example too, since he was born about 30 years after Cleopatra died.

I was born closer to Hitler’s death than 9/11 is to now. So anyone born today would think about 9/11 as further back in history than I did about Hitler.

I lived and watched the moon landings, which were, at the time, the height of science and technology. A person born today, 45 years after the first moon landing, would be as far away from that time as I was from 1911.

5th Ave 1911
New York City, 5th Ave, 1911

The cars in the photograph above in New York City were still a new-fangled invention, coexisting with horses.  They were about as new a technology then as the Internet is to us now.

Here is one that will truly blow your mind: Tyrannosaurus lived closer to our current time than to the time of the Stegosaurus. I wrote a whole post in this blog about that not too long ago. Try to wrap your head around this one.

Then, of course, things get much trickier when we consider space travel. Today we are used to instant communications. We can text message with somebody in Australia and clearly be in the same moment together, even though it’s night there and day here. But when we send people on a trip to Mars, which apparently several different space-faring entities, NASA being one of them, are now contemplating for the next 10 to 20 years, it will get more complicated. Due to the distance of Mars, and the trajectory of a spaceship to get there, it could take up to 10 minutes each way for the “instant” message to travel. So a person on such a spaceship, texting a message to me, or sending a “facetime” instant video, would have to wait 20 minutes for a response. When is NOW in that context? That lag would expand to years should we ever travel to other stars in the very distant future. Truly, the concept of NOW is much more complicated.

For a final thought, it often occurs to me that there are other intelligent life forms in the universe, most likely billions of civilizations, right now – whatever “right now” means.

The flow of time is definitely relative.

Kevin O’Leary and the Distribution of Wealth

On By Norbert HauptIn Business, Commentaries, Economy, Education, WisdomLeave a comment

Recent news by Oxfam stated that the richest 85 people on earth – yes 85 individual people which is about a half-full Southwest plane – have more wealth than the poorer half of the world’s population. 85 people control more than 3.5 billion people.

Kevin O’Leary, famous from Shark Tank on TV, said something that made no sense to me:

“I applaud that. That’s great news. If you work hard, you can be filthy rich one day!” — Kevin O’Leary

There are so many things wrong with that statement, I don’t even know where to start.

Working hard has nothing to do with getting rich, nothing at all.

Think about the miner in a coal mine in West Virginia, who started working in the mine when he was 14, and “retired” at age 54 with emphysema with nothing to show for but a few kids who are now also working in the mine, every day.

Think about the shop girl in Bangladesh who has worked 14 hour days since she was 8 years old, in a system oppressive to women, oppressive to the poor and illiterate, oppressive to everyone but the elite who live lavishly, fly corporate jets to New York so they can shop on 5th Avenue.

Think about the workers in the diamond mines in South Africa.

Think about the high school dropout in Dallas who works at Wal-Mart for minimum wage.

Think about the Chinese peasant.

Think about the El Salvadoran who is illegally in the United States to pick strawberries in the San Joaquin Valley and lives in a hovel, so he can send his money back to his family.

Every one of these people works very, very, very hard, all the time. None of these people will every be filthy rich, or rich, or even middle-class rich. Billions of people work very hard every hour of every day. Billions.

Those billions were not lucky.

Lucky to be born in an industrialized country in the late 20th century. 85% of the world do not qualify for that kind of luck.

Lucky to be born to a family that recognized the importance of education, sound health in childhood and solid family values.

Lucky to be born to parents who were not disadvantaged, in slavery, illegal aliens, uneducated, addicted to drugs, or homeless.

Lucky to be born smart, at the right time, with the right background, with the right parents, in the right country, in good health, with the right education, in the right field.

Yes, Bill Gates (and many others I could name here) had all these factors of luck. And not to take away from Bill Gates, in addition to all these luck factors, he worked hard, he took risks, and he was competitive. He earned his success.

But I am certain that Bill Gates, if he had been born in Bangladesh in a slum today, Microsoft would not have been created.

It was not just his hard work, Kevin O’Leary. There was much more to it than that. I know you worked your way up from a modest beginning yourself. I know you worked hard, you worked smart, you out-foxed the competition, you earned what you have. It was the fact that you were born in a capitalist country at a good time in history that laid the foundation so you could do that, and be what you are today.

Being a Canadian born in 1954 was one major prerequisite – omitted in your argument.

And that’s why you look like a prick in the video above.

Wisdom for the New Year – by Gitomer

On By Norbert HauptIn WisdomLeave a comment

At a time when we all seem to be making resolutions for our lives, I came across this Gitomer Newsletter that pretty much told me what I should be focusing on:

QUESTION:

  • Who’s going to win the Super Bowl?

ANSWER:

  • The team or the player that’s best prepared.
  • The team or the player that makes the fewest mistakes.
  • The team or the player that stays steady and keeps its cool.
  • The team or the player that creates breaks and takes advantage of them.
  • The team or the player that prepares one razzle-dazzle play, takes the risk at the opportune time, and pulls it off.
  • The team with the most dedicated players.
  • The team or the player with the best coach.

If We’re Going to Waste Our Time Like That

On By Norbert HauptIn Feelings, WisdomLeave a comment

Here is an excellent excerpt of a speech by Sam Harris, which is a timely reminder of our vulnerabilities and appropriately presented at a time of year when everyone is making resolutions. Frightening, bold, brutally honest and more valuable than gold:

If We’re Going to Waste Our Time Like That

And now I have to go and do something good.

The Preacher and the Farmer – by Earl Nightingale

On By Norbert HauptIn Wisdom1 Comment

A preacher was driving down a country road when he came upon the most beautiful farm he’d ever seen in his lifetime spent  traveling rural roads. He could only  compare it to a beautiful painting. It was by no means a new farm, but the house and buildings were well constructed and in perfect repair and paint. A garden around the house was filled with flowers and shrubs. A fine row of trees lined each side of the white gravel drive. The fields were beautifully tilled, and a fine herd of fat dairy cattle grazed knee-deep in the pasture. The site was so arresting the preacher stopped to drink it all in. He  had been raised on a farm himself, and he knew a great one when he saw it.

It was then he noticed the farmer, on a tractor, hard at  work, approaching the place where the preacher stood beside his car. When the farmer got closer, the preacher  hailed him. The farmer stopped the tractor, idled down the engine, and then shouted a friendly “hello!” The preacher said to him, “My good man, God has certainly blessed you with a magnificent farm.” And then, there was a pause as the farmer took off his cap and shifted in the tractor seat to take a look at his pride and joy. He then looked at the preacher and he said, “Yes, He has, and we’re  grateful. But you should have seen this place when He had it all to Himself.”

— Earl Nightingale

Toys R Us and Corporate Stewardship

On By Norbert HauptIn Commentaries, Education, Nature, Sustainability, Wisdom4 Comments

This is an actual Toys R Us commercial that stirred up sufficient outrage with parents and educators that the company apparently pulled it from the market.

I believe it was not the company’s intention to denigrate nature education and ridicule the efforts of tens of thousands of educators in schools, childcare centers and early education professionals by portraying their quest as boring and not worthy or valuable.

I am not saying that children don’t need toys, and I am not saying that Toys R Us is evil or misguided. It’s a big box store like all others, and it panders to our thirst for commercial extravaganza.

This commercial shows how the profit motives of a major corporation does not align with those of a society in general. The motive of the corporation is to sell its product, at a profit, and win against the competition. In retail, that is by swaying the hearts of the consumers and associate happiness with the product and drudgery and boredom with the competition.

In this case, the competition is nature education. There is no way a young child can see this ad and not take away that going to the forest is boring, forest rangers and naturalists are dry and dull, but a toy store is fascinating and exiting in comparison.

Nature was the only thing we had until things changed about a hundred years ago, and considering the course we’re going, nature may be the only thing we will have in the not too distant future, unless we start educating our young to appreciate nature, its beauty and complexity, and its value to every human on the planet.

Education starts with early education. Children need to learn what is really important in life, and they need to learn it early, so they can be responsible adults. We need more early educators and nature education programs. We need trained park rangers and nature interpreters who not only have a passion for nature, but who have training in education so they don’t appear like the “boring” actor in this Toys R Us video, but as vibrant and excited individuals that children want to spend time with.

Just like oil companies don’t have an incentive to keep the environment safe, clean and healthy, just as coal companies don’t have an incentive to keep the air clean, just as insurance companies don’t have an incentive to keep us healthy, just as drug companies don’t have an incentive to actually cure us, so do toy companies have no interest in educating our children.

This is the ugly underbelly of the free market. The free market does not have the best interest of the consumer in mind.

What is the alternative?

Education in mathematics, science, philosophy, nature, art, linguistics and literature. The more educated a society is, the more educated its individuals are, the better a chance that society has to do what’s right and best for it, and to see when commercialism goes way wrong.

Toys R Us went massively wrong with this ad, and I am sure they know it now, admission or not, but one bit of damage is done to some young minds, and to the company’s image in my mind.

My Ancestry – We Are All Related

On By Norbert HauptIn Commentaries, Nature, Wisdom9 Comments

A lot of people are doing ancestry research. Some find they are from “royal” descent in England. Others find relations that they didn’t know they had. This prompted me to think about ancestry and statistics.

I am fortunate that both of my parents are still alive, but all my grandparents have long passed away. I knew three of my four grandparents and I have good memories about them. My maternal grandmother died after childbirth ten years before I was born, so I never knew her. From ancestry research conducted by one of my sisters I also know the names of all eight of my great-grand parents, but it stops there.

This made me think about putting a chart together, showing how many ancestors I have as we go back through the generations. Here is the chart:

Ancestors

To make it simple, I assigned 25 years for a generation. This assumes that our parents and ancestors waited until they were about 25 to have their offspring. This leads to stunning insights:

Going back only 17 generations or about 400 years, my ancestors fill up a football stadium. In other words, if I collected all the people whose eggs and sperms were necessary to make me around the year 1600, I’d need a football stadium to seat them all.

Going back 20 generations, it’s a million people.

There is a magic crossover point at 28 generations, highlighted in the chart. The estimated world population 675 years ago was about 450 million and the corresponding European and North American population then was 130 million (highlighted in yellow in the chart).  Also, my ancestor count is about 130 million at that time. Since I happen to be Caucasian and don’t show any obvious African or Asian traits, I would presume that most of the people that made me were European. That means that it took every single European in the world alive in the year 1325 to make me.

Statistically speaking, if you are a white North American or European right now, you and I are fully related. Your ancestors (all Europeans) are also my ancestors. All of them.

It is worth pointing out that the numbers in the ancestors column are not cumulative. Each row counts just the ancestors necessary to create me at that generation. To count all of them, I’d have to add up all the columns down to the target generation, so the total number is about double that given row.

Of course, going down to only generation 34, not even a thousand years ago, it takes more than all the people in the world today to contribute, no matter what race or continent we are talking about.

So, yes, King Henry II was my grand-daddy.

 

100 Reasons Not to Go to Graduate School

On By Norbert HauptIn Education, WisdomLeave a comment

I know a number of people who are going to graduate school, and I know other people who are thinking about going to graduate school for a variety of reasons. I never went, so I may not be  the best person to give advice, and therefore I am not going to.

But I found this wonderful blog titled “100 Reasons NOT to Go to Graduate School” that lays it all out. Anyone considering graduate school should read all the entries in this post before making that crucial decision. The posts are well written, nicely cross-referenced, well commented and illustrated with classic paintings.

I know there are a number of eminent professors, graybeards and professionals bestowed with advanced degrees who occasionally stop in here read my blog – and I invite them to comment and set things straight.

I might also add that I am not sure if I am in favor or against graduate degrees in general. I believe it greatly depends on the dreams, goals and dispositions of the individuals. But it is good to read about “the other side.”

Therefore, read, oh young ones, read, before you make your wise and fateful decisions!

No Arms, No Legs, No Worries

On By Norbert HauptIn Cool People, Feelings, WisdomLeave a comment

The story of Nicholas James Vujicic, a young Australian man, is unbelievably inspiring. The next time I feel sorry for myself, I just have to come here and watch a few minutes of this video.

Book Review: World Changers – by John A. Byrne

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, Business, Four Stars, WisdomLeave a comment

25 Entrepreneurs Who Changed Business as We Knew It

Reading World Changers was like having 25 long lunch meetings, and getting a chance, one on one, to talk to some of the greatest entrepreneurs of our time, the likes of Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Howard Schultz and many more.

Here is the table of contents:

  • Whole Foods Market – John Mackey
  • The Home Depot – Arthur Blank and Bernie Marcus
  • Netflix – Reed Hastings
  • Starbucks – Howard Schultz
  • Amazon – Jeff Bezos
  • Southwest Airlines – Herb Kelleher
  • Apple – Steve Jobs
  • Kohler Co. – Herb Kohler
  • Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette – Dan Lufkin
  • Dell, Inc. – Michael Dell
  • LinkedIn – Reid Hoffman
  • Microsoft – Bill Gates
  • Virgin Group – Richard Branson
  • Harpo, Inc. – Oprah Winfrey
  • Turner Broadcasting – Ted Turner
  • FedEx – Fred Smith
  • Infosys – Narayana Murthy
  • Google – Larry Page and Sergey Brin
  • Charles Schwab – Charles Schwab
  • Grameen Bank – Muhammad Yunus
  • Tata Group – Ratan Tata
  • Nike – Phil Knight
  • Organizing Committee for Rio de Janeiro Olympics – Carlos Nuzman
  • Facebook – Mark Zuckerberg
  • EBX Group – Eike Batista

The lessons were valuable. I read usually just one chapter at a time, over lunch, before going to sleep, waiting somewhere. It’s impossible to read a book like this in a sitting.  It’s like visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which causes complete sensory overload for an artist. Anybody even remotely thinking about starting a company, or already running a company, cannot afford to skip this book. Every line is valuable, inspiring and motivating.

I should read this once a year.

Rating:  ****