How much of your life are you selling off?

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This post below by David Cain is probably the best thing I’ve ever read about retirement. More accurately, it’s about people who are retiring much earlier than “normal” (45, or 40 or even 30) It’s long (for a blog post) but worth a read. A few excerpts:

“Those of us with jobs have arranged to sell off large parts of our lives (8 hours a day, 5 days a week, for decades) to employers, in exchange for money that we can use to build a life that makes us happy.”

“When you compare the amount of happiness we actually derive from our unnecessary spending habits to the amount of happiness that can be derived from years of paid-for freedom (not to mention a clear and secure financial position the whole way there), most of those consumer habits come to appear glaringly absurd.”

“Would you rather have five all-expenses-paid years off to spend with your family, learn a language or build a business — or drive a big car instead of a small car?”

“Common Western fallacy: that for you to be as happy as you currently are, you need to spend as much as you currently do.”

Seth Godin on Blogging, Radio and Stuff

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The company I worked for for 29 years, Learfield, brought four or five hundred employees and friends to Dallas last week to celebrate the company’s 40th anniversary. We had two speakers: Ken Blanchard and Seth Godin. Following Mr. Godin’s excellent talk, he took questions.

How important is your blog?

“There’s two kinds of important. There’s the important of ‘can I make a living doing this,’ and the important of ‘this is who I am.’ My blog has nothing to do with me making a living. I don’t run any ads on it and I don’t sell many things on it, almost nothing, and that’s not why I do it and why I’ve been doing it for ten years. I do it because this is my chance to speak the thing I want to say, to talk about what I notice. If I had to pay money to write my blog, I would. The people who have blogs you don’t want to read are doing that blog because it’s their job. So I spend more time on my blog than almost anything I do because it’s my chance to do my art, as I see my art. […] The people who say ‘how am I going to get paid for this tomorrow?’ never make good stuff.”

“My blog is read by more people than all but ten magazines in the United States. And I write the whole thing by myself, every day. I don’t expect to stop blogging any time in the next 40 years.”

What do you see as the future of radio?

“Radio means two things. Radio means audio delivered to masses of people who want to hear it, and it means FCC coveted spectrum. Spectrum is over. For sure. We’re only two years away from cars having radio in them that has wifi. Once that happens, my radio, in my car isn’t going to have ten channels or a hundred channels, it’s going to have ten thousand channels, a hundred thousand channels. When there’s a hundred thousand radio stations to choose from, I’m not going to pick the local jock who’s yelling at me because he needsw his Arbitron ratings to go up a tenth of a point, I’m going to pick someone who cares. Radio connects us if it chooses to.”

And here are some of my notes from Mr. Godin’s remarks: Continue reading →

William Gibson, NY Public Library

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William Gibson is the author of ten books, including, most recently, the New York Times-bestselling trilogy Zero History, Spook Country and Pattern Recognition. Gibson’s 1984 debut novel, Neuromancer, was the first novel to win the three top science fiction prizes—the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, and the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award. Gibson is credited with coining the term “cyberspace” in his short story “Burning Chrome,” and with popularizing the concept of the Internet while it was still largely unknown. He is also a co-author of the novel The Difference Engine, written with Bruce Sterling.

Learfield 40th Anniversary

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Sunset drive through Ouachita Mountains

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I took my time driving to Dallas last weeks. Turned south at Joplin, MO and saw some beautiful early spring hills in northeastern Arkansas. Planned to go down to Texarkana and spend the night but took a wrong turn in Ft. Smith and found myself in Oklahoma, so I decided to drive down on that side of the line.

I got a beautiful surprise when I entered the Ouachita Mountains in southeastern Oklahoma. I had no idea there was such a beautiful place in Oklahoma and the MINI loved the windy road going up into the hills. It was just before sunset and the views were splendid.

I spotted the upper part of a rusted bridge off the main highway and slowed down to look for a connecting road. In the old days I’d never have “lost time” by exploring but the little gravel road led back to the bridge/stream. Gotta wonder how many of these I missed. Sigh.

Me with two really smart guys

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Pepper Bullock calls himself a “Change-Agent.” He has been advising senior management at Learfield (where I once worked) for years and I’ve gotten to know him a little. A really smart guy who happens to be really nice. That’s him on the right.

I was a little shy about getting my photo made with Seth Godin so Pepper dragged me up for this photo. (Thanks to Alan Blake for sending this along so promptly. He was one of the photographers at this event. A really nice guy, in addition to be a very good photographer.)

Seth Godin

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I first heard Seth Godin speak at a Radio Ink conference in 2000 in Boston. He published Permission Marketing the year before and it was changing the way everybody thought about marketing.

That presentation was the best I had ever seen and I didn’t see a better one in the ensuing 13 years.

Mr. Godin was one of the speakers at an event held by the company from which I recently retired. I had a great seat down front and center and he did not dissapoint. Not sure how long he spoke but it seemed like 15 minutes (probably and hour+ in real time).

If I can get my hands on the audio or video I will take some notes and share them here. Sorry I can’t show you the video because watching how Godin used slides to help him tell his story was a thing of beauty.

Scott Adams: Universe as computer simulation

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Three of my favorite Smart People (Kevin Kelly, Ray Kurzweil and Scott Adams) have convinced me there will be a post-human stage in our evolution. And Scott Adams makes a compelling (to me) case for the computer simulation theory.

“The theory basically goes that any civilisation which could evolve to a ‘post-human’ stage would almost certainly learn to run simulations on the scale of a universe. And that given the size of reality – billions of worlds, around billions of suns – it is fairly likely that if this is possible, it has already happened. And if it has? Well, then the statistical likelihood is that we’re located somewhere in that chain of simulations within simulations. The alternative – that we’re the first civilisation, in the first universe – is virtually absurd.”

Before you dismiss this theory, compare it to this popular creation narrative:

“It is made up of two parts, roughly equivalent to the first two chapters of the Book of Genesis. In the first part, Genesis 1:1 through Genesis 2:3, Elohim, the generic Hebrew word for God, creates the world in six days, then rests on, blesses and sanctifies the seventh day. God creates by spoken command (“Let there be…”), suggesting a comparison with a king, who has only to speak for things to happen, and names the elements of the cosmos as he creates them, in keeping with the common ancient concept that things did not really exist until they had been named. In the second, Genesis 2:4–24, Yahweh, the personal name of God, shapes the first man from dust, places him in the Garden of Eden, and breathes his own breath into the man who thus becomes נֶפֶש nephesh, a living being; man shares nephesh with all creatures, but only of man is this life-giving act of God described. The man names the animals, signifying his authority within God’s creation, and God creates the first woman, Eve, from the man’s body.”

News is bad for you

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“News is to the mind what sugar is to the body. Unlike reading books and long magazine articles (which require thinking), we can swallow limitless quantities of news flashes, which are bright-coloured candies for the mind.”

“News stories are overwhelmingly about things you cannot influence. The daily repetition of news about things we can’t act upon makes us passive. It grinds us down until we adopt a worldview that is pessimistic, desensitised, sarcastic and fatalistic.”

Full article in The Guardian