Happy Wisdom

Beware of Unicorns!   http://skia.deviantart.com/art/Unicorn-287148950 Haven't posted for a while, having chosen to contribute to  InfoQ.com .  My first time with that site and I had a great time.  I found the experience edifying. I had to do something before every company manager thought it a good idea to follow the  Bezos/Amazon employee "hunger games" model .  They're not going to get away with it; not with the feedback I've gotten. People are seeing through the "I'll work to death and maybe get rich" scheme more and more.   Again, I don't judge people who work there as long as they're being mindful about the opportunity costs of doing so.  In that vein, I've got to tell you about the dangers of unicorns.   Unicorns being the new jargon for private companies estimated to be worth over $1B USD.    First lets be honest - most startups aren't unicorns and never will be.  That's why they chose this as a met...

Just  a quick update.   Found this article on Buffe r, and thought of my own creative pursuits.  I think there's something to be said about the shields of rationality, of your inner critic, fading as you get more tired. More coming soon!

4th Quarter of 2015 - GO TIME What does it mean?  By the end of this month the year is 3/4th over.  For those good at looking at calendars and math, you might ask - why is this blogger telling me Q3 is over?  Its September!   Well, lets face it, the year is basically over after Thanksgiving.  Even if you're in sales, you have to prep for December now...not in December. We are in the 4th Quarter.  When all sales folks want to make quota. When football teams make a press to win, putting in that extra doze of effort.  The players all hold up four fingers. Its a sign to GET SERIOUS .  Hold your hands up high with four fingers up.  Do it.  This is when you open your dream capture system ( aka LifeSparcs ) and open that thing up to the front and review the Dreams, Goals, and Musings section.  What in this area gives you energy, gives you passion, provides heart and meaning?  Big questions.   We must us...

What is it with New Yorkers and Seattle? First they blasted us out of our coffee-induced happy-place with a piece on how everyone west of Interstate 5 will be cast into the Pacific Ocean by a massive, continent changing earthquake, putting the odds at 33% that it'd happen within fifty years. Now we have this this one on Amazon   and how they've built a modern day Hunger Games workplace. You see, it is well known in the Seattle area that Amazon does not consider work-life balance or anything remotely like that. Everyone in the area knows this, because we all know a friend or a spouse that worked or used to work there.   Its not a sweatshop, but its close.   Most people know this going on an interview there know this.  They figure they'll stay four years until they vest and they get out.  If they survive the infighting and bullying, that is. But I have to admit it - I had no idea how bad it really was.  If half the things in this article are true it's th...

Remember the mission of HappyWisdom? To counter the negativity found so often on line . Well, here's a nice piece from Vox . "In the 19th century, extreme poverty — defined here as living on less than $1.25 a day* — was the norm. In 1820, 94.4 percent of humans were below that line." While we're not done yet,  this is the best possible time to alive by far. 

Hanford Reactor B National Museum Summer is a time of adventure, a time where the normal structure of the days of school fall away and much of our culture runs around the countryside. This was me.  I ran to a place called  Hanford, and for those who don't know, this site was an important part of the Manhattan Project, the race to build the first atomic bomb.   After a very long bus ride across a WHOLE lot of nothing in Eastern Washington, we come upon two buildings.  The larger is the reactor, shown above. They chose this place because they wanted something far away from population centers.  And believe me, it is still away from population centers !  Now, since this is Happy Wisdom, I'm not going to get into the politics of the events that surrounded the creation of this site.   I'm going to focus on this as raw human achievement.  It's all science and willpower here.  This is a monument to human creativity.  I...

“You only have to do a few things right in your life, so long as you don't do too many things wrong.”  - Warren Buffett Since launching LifeSparcs, I've been obsessed with minimalism.  I've r emoving clutter, working on doing fewer things, and really using intention to determine those few things. I'm teaching my kids this - be intentional. But there's so much noise. When I hear this I think Social Media, and media in general, but its more than that.  I've been reading  Greg McKeown's  book Essentialism , and he's got some great articles online as well.   One of my favorites is The Unimportance of Practically Everything , where he discusses items that readers of this blog and LifeSparcs will be familiar with  -  putting things in a short list, and focusing on those things alone for  period of time, or as we call it in the agile coaching business, a timebox.  Then you reflect on what you've done...and repeat...