Those who fit in now won’t stand out later.
—Seth Godin
The caveat here being that first impressions tend to stick in a person’s mind, so beware ostracizing yourself. Be your own person and cultivate character and you will be remembered and stand out.
The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.
—Henry D. Thoreau
People are often unreasonable, illogical, and self-centered.
Forgive them anyway.If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish ulterior motives.
Be kind anyway.If you are successful, you will win some false friends and some true enemies.
Succeed anyway.If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you.
Be honest and frank anyway.What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight.
Build anyway.If you find serenity and happiness, they may be jealous.
Be happy anyway.The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow.
Do good anyway.Give the world the best you have, and it may never be enough.
Give the best you've got anyway.—Mother Teresa
“Vulnerability is not winning or losing; it’s having the courage to show up and be seen when we have no control over the outcome.”
—Brené Brown
Laura Vanderkam posted some excellent thoughts on making what little time we have more memorable.
Basically, time is elastic. When we decide that we need to do something, we find the time to do it. Other stuff either doesn’t happen, or it takes less time, or it gets punted forward. Much other stuff turns out to be more malleable than we might have imagined. And so, of course, the key to time management is treating the things we want to do with the urgency of the things we need to do. We make time for them first and let everything else take the hit.
See also her TED Talk on gaining control of your free time.
I do not recall how I happened upon the "run your own race" article, but no matter. It is dense with excellent points. Read it in its entirety.
So: cultivate your independence. Run your own race, knowing that the destination is yours to choose. Don’t enslave yourself to people who think there’s only one way to be right. Your job is to do what you like on your own terms. Your job is to keep going, to eke out good day after good day.
Oliver Burkeman wrote an interesting article titled “What if you never sort your life out?” In it, he references the provisional life, which we live until we solve our problems and become the perfect version of ourselves.
“How many things in this life will you experience for the last time? And how do you know? Long before you die, you will cease to have certain experiences—many that you currently take for granted now.”
—Sam Harris on The Tim Ferriss Show podcast
Life is fleeting.
Time flies.
We have always known that life is short and are often reminded of this when a beloved family member or friend passes away. In the post-pandemic era, many time management courses, YouTube videos, and books have emerged to play upon our fears of a life less lived.
“If you are broken, you do not have to stay broken.”
—Selena Gomez
Here I am at the start of another new year. We arbitrarily measure our time, but measure it we do. Our lives are short in the grand scheme of the universe, and perhaps the desire to feel as though our lives are not lived in vain, we use these measurements of time and accomplishments and experiences to fill our book of life so that one day we may look back and say, “There. A life well-lived, full of purpose.”
I received an email update from Herman Martinus, creator of Bear Blog, linking to his latest post on goal-setting. In the post, Herman outlines a simple and introspective system for setting his own goals for the new year while keeping focus on how to achieve them. While reading the post, I was reminded of a goal I had placed on my long-term planning list last year: to build six-pack abdominals by the age of 50.
Why?
Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart…
…This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope it’s the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept: No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.
—Steve Jobs
As I relax and watch re-runs of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine on Netflix while entertaining my seven month old son, I can’t help but wonder at how spoiled we are by all of these modern conveniences—pre-made plastic toys, televisions, Internet access, streaming video, central heat, dishwashers, and disposable diapers, to name a handful. First world problems abound, but I wonder how many of these “problems” are caused by our attachment to modern conveniences. Simplifying life will often reduce the number of perceived problems if not reduce the real problems. After all, is a broken dishwasher a problem or a reason to remove it and add some extra drawers, or perhaps it is the impetus needed to remodel the kitchen and learn cabinet-making? That may be a stretch, but you see what I mean.
I love my Kindle as much as the next person…
That’s a lie.
I love it more than the next person, but when it, or rather its battery, gave up the ghost, I turned to my bookshelves to use a traditional book for reading. There’s just something about holding written pages.
This holiday season, look for ways to simplify your life, slow down, pull a book off the shelf, curl up with some hot cocoa or an eggnog, and learn how to repair that dishwasher, because the dishes are really starting to pile up, and I’m certainly not going to wash them by hand.
The web site, Gravity and Levity, has a great article on the Gompertz law and the odds of surviving through your next year of life. At age 32, I’m looking at just over a 1 in 1500 chance of making it through the year.
Exponential decay is sharp, but an exponential within an exponential is so sharp that I can say with 99.999999% certainty that no human will ever live to the age of 130. (Ignoring, of course, the upward shift in the lifetime distribution that will result from future medical advances)
Surprisingly enough, the Gompertz law holds across a large number of countries, time periods, and even different species. While the actual average lifespan changes quite a bit from country to country and from animal to animal, the same general rule that “your probability of dying doubles every X years” holds true. It’s an amazing fact, and no one understands why it’s true.
There is one important lesson, however, to be learned from Benjamin Gompertz’s mysterious observation. By looking at theories of human mortality that are clearly wrong, we can deduce that our fast-rising mortality is not the result of a dangerous environment, but of a body that has a built-in expiration date.
So, if you make it to the ripe, old age of 95,
you have the body of a 95-year-old with only a 2-in-3 chance of making it through the year.
Puts the whole idea of "make the most of every day" in perspective.
Information systems are developed to provide mechanisms for storing, accessing, sharing and manipulating data. The most important part of the information system is the data. Preserving the integrity of the data is essential in maintaining a trusted system that users will want to leverage for use in business. Confidentiality and security are also requirements of a well designed information system. Organizations, such as hospitals, which store large amounts of highly sensitive data are becoming the focus of attacks on information systems. Because of this, policies and procedures that surround the storage and use of patient data need to be examined and adjusted accordingly.
Hospitals seek to maintain a history of patient data. This allows health care professionals to provide a higher level of care and can assist doctors in making more accurate diagnoses. However, "[e]lectronic record keeping has led to increased interest in analyzing historical patient data to improve health care delivery" (Krishna, 2007, pg. 654). Large data warehouses allow for better results from data mining and statistical analysis. They also allow for a higher risk of breaking patient confidentiality as databases will contain names, social security numbers, addresses and medical histories.
Content availability is one of the major concerns of companies. Marketing a product or providing consumer resources requires a constant stream of information to be disseminated through every available media outlet. One of the fastest growing and most leveraged is the Internet. The benefit of the Internet is the tremendous global reach that it has in the world's marketplace. The difficulty with the Internet is fierce competition. During the early years of growth, some companies sought to control the Internet marketplace through software market share, but now telecommunications companies and Internet service providers are attempting to monopolize control of the bandwidth and access in the United States.
In his text, Spinello presents several cases to illustrate the issues surrounding fair competition and Internet access. He points out that "[t]he presence of network effects, therefore, tends to bias industries toward a monopoly structure" (2003, pg. 200). In case 8.2, Spinello questions the ethics of Microsoft bundling Windows Media Player and MSN Messenger with its released Windows XP operating system. Based on the precedent of Microsoft's previous business practices with regard to bundling its Internet Explorer web browser with the operating system to "compete" with Netscape among other dubious moves, it would appear that Microsoft was continuing its trend of anti-competitive behavior.
Modern information driven societies require constant access to their information. In the United States, the proliferation of devices that allow users to access content on the Internet, intranets and every network between has raised the bar for acceptable levels of performance from computing systems. Service level agreements have risen to a demand of over 99% uptime on critical systems and often even non-critical systems. Not only must the information be available, but it must also be reliable. Computer and information systems must provide access to the data and at once protect the data from those who would misuse it.
Companies must constantly look at their level of liability and manage the reliability and safety of their systems. Spinello discusses some issues of reliability such as software "bugs" which are an inherent problem with any piece of software and are to be expected, within reason. However, the programmers of the software are expected to assume the responsibility for providing fixes for the bugs and improving upon the existing code. Another issue that Spinello examines is the reliability of information and the amount of liability that should be placed upon companies when information is misleading or incorrect.
