Monthly Archives: October 2005

On Grief

Comments: 1 Life October 22, 2005

I’ve been thinking a lot about grief. I’ve never felt the deep, searing grief that is only associated with death. Why? No one super close to me has ever died. I’ve been to one funeral in my life. I know that – as much as I may be a cynical and jaded bastard especially when compared to my idealistic friends from school – I still have the badge of innocence that only someone as young as I could sport.

A few weeks ago a classmate stood up at an all-school assembly and told a touching story about a good friend of hers who was tragically killed. Just a few days ago I heard about a young guy – 18 or 19 years old – who was hit by a car on his birthday walking home at night.

I knew no one in the Gulf Coast, no one in the World Trade Center, no solider in Iraq.

I DO know that some day, maybe tomorrow, maybe in a week, maybe in a year, chance will have it that I am faced with a great tragedy. And I sometimes wonder,  in bed in the darkness of my room, how I will react in such a circumstance. Will I cry? Will I buy a book on "how to deal with grief"? Will I try to forget it? Will I try to "celebrate" the person’s life?

Steven Levitt, the author of Freakonomics and Chicago professor, did a post this evening on his blog commemorating his son’s death six years ago. He was one year old. It spoke to me and inspired this post. Probably because of the reference to the Rent song "Seasons of Love."

Book Reviews: Going Deep on Buddhism

Comments: 1 Books October 21, 2005

From time to time I go deep on something. This is rare because I like the variety in my book selection as my interests are broad. Over the summer I dove deep into race and affirmative action. This time it is religion, and more specifically Buddhism.

I’ve always been fascinated by religion because there is simply no authority. Every religion is a leap of faith, which puts all of us on common ground, regardless of status or accomplishments. Over the past year I read Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith (Anne Lamott), The Gita (the Hindu text), Under the Banner of Heaven (Jon Krakauer, a must read on fundamentalist Mormonism), The Secular City (Harvey Cox), When Jesus Came to Harvard (Harvey Cox), Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience and Other Confusions of Our Time (Michael Shermer), and The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the End of Reason (Sam Harris).

Over the past few weeks I’ve read:

1. The World’s Religions by Huston Smith – this is probably the most authoritative and accessible text on contemporary world religions. It covers Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. It’s essential for a broad understanding.

2. An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World by Pankaj Mishra – a more in-depth look at the Buddha’s life and Buddhism’s spread around the world.

3. The Universe in a Single Atom by the Dalai Lama – a fantastic and humble look at why Buddhism embraces modern science and reason and how both spirituality and science can co-exist.

I do not currently subscribe to a religion. If I must put myself in a box, I check "Spiritual but not religious." I meditate and I have a value system. But I do not yet believe in all the tenets of Buddhism (such as total selflessness), which is why I cannot go all the way into that camp. Buddhism’s emphasis on reason and science (over scripture) is very appealing. Its emphasis on concentration and focus is also great. And it certainly kicks butt over, say, Hinduism, which essentially banishes a large part of the population from birth based on their caste system.

I was curious to hear what the only hard core secularist in my address book would say, so I emailed David Cowan for his thoughts on Buddhism. He replied that Buddhism is most consistent (with a rational world of physics) but still NOT consistent. He asked, "Why the need for etheral elements of any kind when the laws of physics explain everything so well?"

The Dalai Lama says: "Because scientific materialism upholds an objective world independent
of the preconceptions and perceptions of the scientist analyzing them." He says that it is dangerous if science is divorced from our common humanity; that is, humanity serves to advance scientific progress and not the other way around. That reductionism (psychology reduced all the way to chemistry and then physics) is problematic from a human perspective b/c it can impoverish the way we see ourselves. Not as beings endowed with consciousness and moral capacity but as random biological creatures. Are we the products of random gene organization with no imperative other than to reproduce? Is this ALONE a suitable worldview?

David’s response: "But we ARE random biological creatures. The fact that you may not like
it does not change it. Close your eyes and wish if you want, but it doesn’t change reality. If the worldview fits, wear it."

My explorations continue….

Legal Affairs Debate Club – What's Wrong With the Patriot Act?

Comments: 0 Current Affairs October 19, 2005

Link: Legal Affairs Debate Club – What’s Wrong With the Patriot Act?

This is a print-length back and forth between Richard Posner and Geoff Stone, two Chicago law school profs, on the balance of civil liberties and seecurity in the U.S. specifically around the Patriot Act. The analyses are top notch and it teaches me a lot about deconstructing another’s argument. Finally, it is very entertaining and often laugh out loud funny, especially when they trade hypotheticals – would it be justified for a police officer to punch a kidnapper in the nose if he tells where the victim is? What about tying electrodes to his testicals? Where does it end? Also, good thoughts on the ACLU.

Fan Mail and Hate Mail

Comments: 4 Random October 18, 2005

I get a lot of email from this blog, many of it encouraging/interesting/thought-provoking, some of it not. Today is a great example. This morning I got a nice email from a fellow who’s going across the country on a grant for the Young Americans Project: Exploring America’s Future. This evening I received a few emails from a "Jacob," who spent 45 minutes leaving lengthy comments on a few posts…basically ripping into me. I particularly enjoyed:

" i dont even know you and for some reason i just want to take those glasses off your face, stamp on them 7 times and place them back on your face and walk away….the only thing sadder then that is going to be the look on your face when you suddenly wake up and realize that you have lived your entire life wrong and while you were busy reading books so you can feel smarter then everyone else, you shoulda been out being normal. normal is normal for a reason: because it is good.  you are not good."

My advice to Jacob? Go read some Mike Tyson quotes to take your attacks on me to the next level.

Are You a Freak?

Comments: 6 Entrepreneurship

I remember one of my first days of high school and I hadn’t yet adjusted to the culture that is adolescence. At the lunch table I went on and on about something. Then there was a long silence. Then someone said, "Ben, you know, you’re really a freak." I thought about that for a second, and then responded: "You know, I think you’re right." Good news: Tom Peters is imploring that people hire freaks:

Never hire a human being who had a 4.0 in college. If they had a perfect GPA, it means they bought the act and never screwed around. Now a 2.0 is probably not so good. But the ones who had 3.0, yeah! Those are the freaks you want!

In his companion PPT, he lists six reasons why he loves freaks:

(1) Because when Anything Interesting happens … it was a freak who did it. (Period.)   
(2) Freaks are fun. (Freaks are also a pain.) (Freaks are never boring.)
(3) We need freaks. Especially in freaky times. (Hint: These are freaky times, for you & me & the CIA & the Army & Avon.)   
(4) A critical mass of freaks-in-our-midst automatically make us-who-are-not-so-freaky at least somewhat more freaky. (Which is a Good Thing in freaky times—see immediately above.)   
(5) Freaks are the only (ONLY) ones who succeed—as in, make it into the history books.   
(6) Freaks keep us from falling into ruts. (If we listen to them.) (We seldom listen to them.) (Which is why most of us—and our organizations—are in ruts. Make that chasms.)

Thanks Ian Ybarra for the link.

Recognizing Great Storytellers – Strengths in Autobiographical Memory

Comments: 0 Random

We read a lot about how telling stories is important in business, but it’s also important in just building rapport in a room of people (especially a dinner). My favorite Eide Neurolearnaing Blog has an interesting post on recognizing great storytellers:

There are great storytellers all around us, and yet we don’t always recognize them. As children, these are children who can tire out their parents with all their talking. They have a knack for vivid sensory detail, and may have almost ‘photographic memory’ for events and details that they personally experienced. Richness of sensory detail or colorful point of view is not a problem for them, although simplification or summarization may be. They may have problems prioritizing or generalizing what they know, but they can play the film loop back in living, breathing detail.

These children, and adults are temporal lobe story tellers, experiencing and remembering personally and with all their senses. These children are natural writers and poets, but they may present paradoxically as poor students because they may forget impersonal information like math facts or spelling conventions, and be lost with bland memorization of factual lists. Exasperated parents may throw up their hands – why can’t they remember when they have such a fantastic memories? The answer is – is that personal and impersonal memory stores use very different parts of the brain.

Another lesson on why cognitive science is A Big Deal.

My First Date

Comments: 2 Friends of Ben October 17, 2005

No, this won’t be the tell-all you’ve all been waiting for (I haven’t had time for romance in high school, but maybe later), but I did make my date with Seth Levine. And it was well worth it. Seth is at Mobius VC and a blogger.

Our chat – which left me with more energy afterwards than I had going into it, always a sign that it was quality use of time – reinforced two things. 1) How great blogging is to connect people and build the foundation of a relationship. Small talk doesn’t exist between two people who meet for the first time but have been reading each other’s blogs. 2) How electronic interactions will never give you the total picture of someone.

Seth is a Friend of Ben who is compassionate, thoughtful, successful, and laid back (in an intense way). If you think these are important traits in business or life, you should read his blog like I do.

Must Teenage Girls Consult Their Parents Before an Abortion?

Comments: 0 Current Affairs October 16, 2005

"It’s nice to think that all girls feel comfortable talking to their parents about sex, birth control, and abortion. Nice, but absurd." Well put, LA Times.

If you live in California, vote No on Prop 73, which would require doctors to give parents 48 hours notice before carrying out an abortion on a girl under 18.

Since I can’t vote myself, this is the next best thing to do.

Continuous Partial Attention

Comments: 0 Web/Tech

Link: Meet the Life Hackers – New York Times.

This is a nice article in today’s NYT that speaks to one of my obsessions: managing my energy, my time, and being super efficient at everything I do. I will always have several windows open, emails coming through all day, different tasks, etc. I wish I had several big monitors at my desk – as this article indicates is helpful – or had a program that only delivered urgent emails immediately and didn’t even let me know I had other emails until I was really ready to read them. Below is an excerpt which I found interesting because it speaks to why people are so intent on receiving and responding to email within minutes:

We are so busy keeping tabs on everything that we never focus on anything. This can actually be a positive feeling, inasmuch as the constant pinging makes us feel needed and desired. The reason many interruptions seem impossible to ignore is that they are about relationships – someone, or something, is calling out to us. It is why we have such complex emotions about the chaos of the modern office, feeling alternately drained by its demands and exhilarated when we successfully surf the flood."It makes us feel alive," Stone says. "It’s what makes us feel important. We just want to connect, connect, connect.

What Defines a Satisfied Customer?

Comments: 0 Entrepreneurship October 15, 2005

I was talking to my partner Dave tonight and, as our Saturday night chats are wont to do, we meandered into a few big picture ideas that affect our business. One thing we talked about was what defines a satisfied customer. One definition of a satisfied customer is someone who will continue to buy from you (or renew their subscription, if you’re in the on-demand market like we are). That’s a pretty minimal definition, but people don’t often think about having customers that are TOO happy. If they’re too satisfied, are you spending too much on that account? When do you face diminishing returns where the benefits accrued from high customer satisfication is not worth the expense to maintain such a strong relationship?