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Category Archives: – Quotes
Dear Friends, Gratitude and Christmas . . .
Dear Friends, this time of year may very well be the most stressful, tiring, unhappy time of the year for many and the most joyous, wonderful time for others. How can we have such a diametrically-opposed situation? One thought is that we at times don’t see that being happy and sad can exist in the same plane, the very same situation and sometimes at the most crucial moments in our lives. Children, I feel, are truly a light that help us as we get older to see in our darkness. To remind us how simple life can and should be. To remind us of what needs to be a priority. These things have impact to our health and I would like to share that with you.
Being thankful for all you have will make you feel healthier, happier, and more connected with the world…..
Be grateful in general, for it helps to create abundance.
- Boosts immunity: Reduces your stress and supports your immune system.
- Abundant thinking: Staying open to new and unexpected sources of prosperity helps you see new opportunities when they show up.
- Inspires joy: Erases your worries, turning frowns into smiles.
- Appreciate work: Thankfulness for work helps you do a better job – turning it into a job you love or attracting the career of your dreams.
- Increases energy: Helps you sleep better at night.
Be grateful for your health, for it is truly the most important thing you have.
- Take care of you: Practice self-care daily, even in little steps.
- Eat well: Drink more water, eat more plants, and reduce processed food.
- Sleep: Dim the lights before bed and make your bedroom comfortable.
- Exercise: Choose activities you love and walk more.
- Find happiness: Prioritize joy, make time for play, and think positively.
Be grateful for relationships, and cherish and nurture them, for they define much of how we live and who we are.
- Share time: Visit extended family and spend quality time together.
- Call them: Give your parents a call – they’d be thrilled to hear from you.
- Meet up: Reconnect with dear friends.
- Express yourself: Give hugs and tell friends and family you love them.
- Celebrate all wins: Cheering on successes of friends, family, and colleagues helps you recognize and attract your own successes.
From Front to Back: Giorgio, Rigoletto and Ciccia
Be grateful for everything, for it is a healthy choice.
I am thankful for my health.
It’s more valuable than money or any superficial wealth.
I am thankful for my family and friends.
Their support of me is heart-warming and knows no end.
I am thankful for children and time.
My youth I will cherish, but for it, I will not pine.
I am thankful for the food I eat.
It, among other things, sustains me – whether it’s a big hearty meal or just a tiny tasty treat.
I am thankful for my warm bed in my home.
It’s the place I rest and dream, and can call my very own.
Be grateful for our blessings by giving to others, for this is truly the reason for the season.
- Give: Do something nice for an unassuming stranger. Simple gestures like holding the door, giving up your seat, or letting them pass you in line can brighten their day.
- Volunteer: Read to the elderly, clean up local parks, serve food to the homeless, or use another special skill you have . Search for volunteer opportunities on idealist.org.
- Mentor: Be a positive role model – help a child by becoming a Big Brother or Big Sister or show the way to success by mentoring someone starting out in your field.
Wishing you all a very Merry Christmas,
and a Prosperous and Healthy 2014
From Left to Right: Alexander, Anric, Lauralouise (The Princess), Tristan, Keenan
Our Company’s Christmas Card this Year
The George Bailey Technique:
The George Bailey Technique: Mentally Erase Your Blessings for Greater Joy and Optimism
by BRETT & KATE MCKAY on DECEMBER 3, 2012
Lately, I’ve been looking at ways to be less cynical. Not that there’s anything wrong with a bit of healthy cynicism, I just have a tendency to go overboard with it so that it devolves into bitterness, pessimism, and passivity. I’m sort of morose by nature, so I’m constantly battling my inner Oscar the Grouch/Eeyore.
One thing I’ve read that’s supposed to help you overcome cynicism is starting a gratitude journal. You’ve probably heard of these things; some of you may have tried it yourself. There’s not much to it. Every day you write down the things you’re grateful for. By counting your blessings like this each day, you’re supposed to feel happier and more optimistic about life.
So they say.
I’ve done gratitude journals a few times throughout my life and I’ve never really gotten much out of the exercise. Which is really frustrating because I don’t understand why. I can flip through pages and pages of stuff that I’m thankful for and I think, “Man, I’ve got so much going for me. The world is great! Why don’t I feel any happier or less cynical about life?” On top of that, I know several folks who report that writing in a gratitude journal really helped them, so that made my failure at becoming happier through counting my blessings sting even more. I started to think that my extreme cynicism cankered my soul so much that I would never be able to feel happy or idealistic again. This of course resulted in my feeling more cynical, pessimistic, and bitter…
Damnit.
The Extraordinary Becomes Commonplace
A few months ago I was reading a book called Redirect: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change by Dr. Timothy D. Wilson. (It’s a really good book — I highly recommend it.) One little vignette in particular really stood out to me because it addressed my old nemesis: the gratitude journal.
Psychologists have actually researched the effectiveness of gratitude journals and the results are mixed. For some people, they live up to the hype. Writing down what they’re thankful for does indeed make them happier. But psychologists also found that for many people (like myself), gratitude journals have no effect on their happiness.
Researchers blame the ineffectiveness of gratitude journals on the “pleasure paradox.” Studies show we actually experience more and prolonged joy from an event when there’s a bit of uncertainty and mystery associated with it. It’s why randomly finding a measly $5 in a street gutter can make your week, but getting a long expected $1,000 raise might just cause a shoulder shrug. Because we’ve had a couple of months to think about and understand getting the raise, we’ve grown accustomed to the idea and so we don’t get much of a rise out of it. “The extraordinary becomes commonplace,” as author Ian McEwan put it in his novel Enduring Love. And therein lies the paradox, according to Dr. Wilson: “People want to understand the good things in life so that they can experience them again, but by so doing they reduce the pleasure they get from these events.”
According to Dr. Wilson, this pleasure paradox sabotages the effectiveness of gratitude journals for some folks because “people typically spend a lot of time thinking about the good things that have happened to them, and thus by the time they sit down to write about these events they have already achieved an understanding of them and robbed them of some of their mystery.”
So my inability to feel happier from my gratitude journal(s) isn’t because I’m a heartless Scrooge. I have become so adapted to having the things I’m grateful for that they no longer hold any uncertainty in my psyche, and according to research, uncertainty is the very thing that makes events and blessings in our lives more joyful and pleasurable.
Okay. Now I understand why gratitude journals don’t work, but is there anything I can do to feel more grateful for the things in my life, and as a consequence, a bit less cynical?
Thankfully, yes. There’s a simple trick to get around the pleasure paradox so you can feel happier and less discouraged about life, and more grateful for the people and things you have. Psychologists call it “The George Bailey Technique.”
A World Without George Bailey
“You’ve been given a great gift, George: A chance to see what the world would be like without you.” – Clarence Odbody, Angel Second Class
Yeah, that George Bailey from the classic Christmas movie It’s a Wonderful Life. George Bailey, if you recall, is a salt-of-the-earth kind of guy who constantly has his dreams thwarted because he’s always looking out for his friends and family. Ever since George was knee high to a grasshopper, he wanted to travel to exotic locales and build big things like skyscrapers and airstrips. Just when it seems he’s about to get started on making his dreams come true, some crisis happens that causes him to put them on the back burner so he can take care of other people.
Things come to a head one Christmas Eve when George’s absent-minded uncle misplaces $8,000 of the Building and Loan’s cash funds. Losing the money would mean bankruptcy for the Bailey Building and Loan and criminal charges for George. At the end of his rope, George decides to commit suicide so his family can cash his $15,000 life insurance policy and pay off the $8,000 debt.
Just before George leaps from a bridge to his icy, watery death, his guardian angel, Clarence Odbody, jumps into the river and pretends he’s drowning. George, being the big-hearted guy that he is, saves Clarence. While they’re drying off, Clarence tries to talk George out of killing himself. When George bitterly wishes that he’d never been born, Clarence sees a way to convince him not to commit suicide. Through angelic powers, Clarence is able to show him what his family and Bedford Falls would have been like if George Bailey had never existed.
It’s a hell hole.
George’s younger brother dies because George wasn’t there to save him, quaint Bedford Falls turns into sleazy Pottersville, his mother is a bitter widow, and people are living in slum apartments instead of the nice homes George’s Building and Loan funded. Worst of all, George’s wife is an old maid and none of their beautiful kids exist.
As you can guess, George sees the light and begs to live again. His wish granted, he runs joyously through the streets yelling “Merry Christmas!” to everybody. He arrives home to find the authorities with a warrant in hand for his arrest, but George doesn’t care. He’s just happy to hold and kiss his kids. His wife comes in shortly after, followed by what seems like the entire town. The townsfolk all donate enough money to save George and the Building and Loan, George’s old childhood friend Sam Wainwright (hee haw!) lends George $25,000, and George’s war hero brother arrives to declare George “the richest man in Bedford Falls.”
Among the giant pile of cash, George finds a copy of Tom Sawyer that Clarence carried around with this inscription: ”Dear George: Remember no man is a failure who has friends. P.S. Thanks for the wings! Love, Clarence.”
It’s at this moment that George realizes what a wonderful life he really has. By seeing what the world would be like without him, he comes to a greater understanding and appreciation for the true richness of his blessings.
The George Bailey Technique in the Real World
In It’s a Wonderful Life, George Bailey experiences what the ancient Greeks called anagnorisis: the sudden realization of truth — of where things really stand and one’s true relationship to others. A few curious psychologists wondered if real people could experience the same kind of anagnorisis that George Bailey did when he saw a world in which he didn’t exist. So they did some experiments.
In one experiment, researchers formed two randomly selected groups of people. They asked one group to write a narrative on how they met their significant other; they asked the other group to “George Bailey” their significant other out of their lives by writing a narrative on ways in which they might not have ended up with them.
The result?
The folks who were given the George Bailey condition — writing about the ways they might nothave ended up with their romantic partner — reported more happiness with their relationship than the folks who simply wrote about how they met their partner.
According to Dr. Wilson, the pleasure paradox explains the different results. The people who wrote about how they met their significant other ”had undoubtedly told that story countless times, and telling it again had little impact.” But for the folks who had to imagine their wives and husbands out of their lives, the exercise “made [their relationship] seem surprising and special again, and maybe a little mysterious — the very conditions that prolong the pleasure we get from the good things in life.”
Heartened by this study, I gave the George Bailey technique a try by thinking about the ways in which I might have never met Kate and what life would be like if I didn’t have her in my life. You can really get lost down the rabbit hole imagining the various possibilities, but envisioning my life without Kate makes me all the more grateful for her. I tried the George Bailey technique on other stuff in my life and I’ll be darned if it didn’t make me feel great about living and a whole lot less cynical.
The George Bailey Technique in Your Life
If you’re like me and want to reduce some of the cynicism and pessimism in your life, I challenge you to give the George Bailey Technique a try. What do you have to lose except for maybe 20 minutes? Pick one person, place, or event in your life that brings you happiness and satisfaction, and write down in your journal the various ways it might not have happened. Then imagine your life without that person/place/event and write that down, too.
As you do this exercise regularly, you’ll begin to feel more grateful for the blessings in your life and more hopeful and optimistic about life in general. At least it has for me.
Here’s to a merrier and less cynical Christmas, gentlemen.
Thanksgiving
“We Give Thanks” by Harry Jewell
Our Father in Heaven,
We give thanks for the pleasure
Of gathering together for this occasion.
We give thanks for this food
Prepared by loving hands.
We give thanks for life,
The freedom to enjoy it all
And all other blessings.
As we partake of this food,
We pray for health and strength
To carry on and try to live as You would have us.
This we ask in the name of Christ,
Our Heavenly Father.
and here’s my own prayer for today
Bless the food before us,
the family beside us,
the dogs below us,
the roof above us
and the love between us that unites us.
We thank you for the gifts you have given us and pray that you will
bless those who have none of these. Amen
Warren Buffet on Luck – what a good perspective
I liked these thoughts from Warren Buffett on Bloomberg today: He talks about “Ovarian Lottery” – its really a neat perspective
WARREN BUFFETT: Well I came up with that a long, long time ago to describe the situation that – I was lucky. I was born in the United States. The odds were 30 or 40-to-1 against that. I had some lucky genes. I was born at the right time. If I’d been born thousands of years ago I’d be some animal’s lunch because I can’t run very fast or climb trees. So there’s so much chance in how we enter the world. And –
BETTY LIU: And you were always aware to make sure your children and their grandchildren, and your grandchildren would be grounded.me up with that a long, long time ago to describe the situation that – I was lucky. I was born in the United States. The odds were 30 or 40-to-1 against that. I had some lucky genes. I was born at the right time. If I’d been born thousands of years ago I’d be some animal’s lunch because I can’t run very fast or climb trees. So there’s so much chance in how we enter the world. And –
WARREN BUFFETT: Yes. And we’re not – how you came out of the womb has really nothing to do with what kind of person you are. You decide what kind of person you’re going to be. It does decide whether maybe you never have to do an item of work in your life and maybe determine whether you’re fighting uphill all of the time, but where in my life, in my eyes is we’re all created equal, and but we don’t all have an equal opportunity by a longshot. And my kids really work every day in trying to even up the scorecard.
Berkshire Hathaway chairman/CEO Warren Buffett, board member Howard G. Buffett and Howard W. Buffett, executive director at Howard G. Buffett Foundation, talk with Betty Liu about their book “40 Chances,” their philanthropic endeavors, succession at Berkshire Hathaway and Warren Buffett’s love of the TV show “Breaking Bad.” They speak on Bloomberg Television’s “In The Loop.” – Watch the video by clicking here
Video
The most profound 30 minutes – grab a coffee and listen
Change Your Life – Earl Nightingale – The Strangest Secret 1956 – Documentary | Motivational Video. Earl Nightingale (March 12, 1921 — March 28, 1989) was an American motivational speaker and author, known as the “Dean of Personal Development. He was the voice in the early 1950s of Sky King, the hero of a radio adventure series, and was a WGN radio show host from 1950 to 1956. Nightingale was the author of the Strangest Secret, which economist Terry Savage has called “…One of the great motivational books of all time”.
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How I failed by Tim O’Reilly
Here’s the complete blog post from Tim O’Reilly reproduced verbatim – its really that good and well worth reading. He’s invested a lot of time to write this and I found it very useful. To see this instead on Tim O’Reilly’s blog, click here
As an entrepreneur, it’s just you and your idea, or you and your co-founders and your idea. Then you add customers, and they shape and mold you and that idea until you achieve the fabled “product-market fit.” If you are lucky and diligent, you achieve that fit more than once, reinventing yourself with multiple products and multiple customer segments.
But if you are to succeed in building an enduring company, it has to be about far more than that: it has to be about the team and the institution you create together. As a management team, you aren’t just working for the company; you have to work on the company, shaping it, tuning it, setting the rules that it will live by. And it’s way too easy to give that latter work short shrift.
At O’Reilly Media, we’ve built a successful business and have had a big impact on our industry, but looking back at our history, it’s also clear to me how often we’ve failed, and what some of the things are that kept me, my employees, and our company from achieving our full potential. Some of these were failures of vision, some of them were failures of nerve, but most of them were failures in building and cultivating the company culture.
What do I mean by culture? Atul Gawande summed it up perfectly in his recent New Yorkerarticle Slow Ideas. You have a system and a culture when “X is what people do, day in and day out, even when no one is watching. ‘You must’ rewards mere compliance. Getting to ‘X is what we do’ means establishing X as the norm.”
What I Got Right
I did a good job setting the guiding star for the company. The company goals you’ve heard from me over the years – “Work on stuff that matters,” “Create more value than you capture,” “Change the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators” – really have guided us. Our principles have been the lodestone that have led us into new opportunities and markets.
We were originally a technical writing consulting firm, but our desire to tell the truth about what works and what doesn’t (rather than telling the story as the product manufacturer wanted it told) led us to publish our own books. We wanted those books to be available online, so we began working with ebooks all the way back in 1987 – but influenced by the ideals of the free software movement as exemplified by the MIT X Consortium, we didn’t want those books to be hostage to proprietary software or formats, so we worked on standards for interoperability (what became Docbook XML) and adopted the Viola browser (the first graphical web browser) as a free online book reader.
Working with Viola led us to the web, and we got so excited about it that we went out on a limb to include it at the last minute in the book we published about the Internet in 1992, The Whole Internet User’s Guide and Catalog, even though there were only 200 web sites at the time. (Mike Loukides, the editor of the book, actually wrote the chapter, since there wasn’t time for the author, Ed Krol, to make the publishing deadline.) The book went on to sell a million copies, and the web – well, it went on to become the web.
Our desire to promote the possibilities of the web also led me into a career of advocacy-based marketing, and led us to build the first commercial web site, GNN (which we later sold to AOL.)
It was my outrage when no one was paying attention to the free software that powered the internet that led us to launch our conference business, starting with the Perl Conference in 1997 (which morphed into OSCON, the O’Reilly Open Source Convention) and continuing through the years as a platform for advocacy about technologies that matter. For example, we created our Web 2.0 events as a way to reignite enthusiasm in the tech industry after the dot com bust, and now run events both in “hot” areas like data science (Strata) and web performance and operations (Velocity) but also in important up and coming areas like healthcare (StrataRx) and becoming a better manager (Cultivate).
When Barnes & Noble or Borders returned books to us, stickered and unsalable, we didn’t pulp them; we sent them to Africa, where they could be useful to people who couldn’t afford them. We astounded publishing competitors in the early 90s with our Unix and X Bibliographyfor bookstores, a marketing piece that included their books as well as our own. We wanted to build the market, and so highlighted the best books, wherever they came from, not just our own. We have followed that same logic in building our digital distribution business today, reselling ebooks from other technology publishers from oreilly.com as long as they agree to go DRM-free.
We started Safari Books Online as a joint venture with our biggest competitor (who once had an internal group named “The O’Reilly Killers”) because we believed publishers needed to find new business models in an electronic future, and we thought that the models we were inventing would be adopted more widely if they included books from multiple publishers. And we have worked tirelessly on DRM-free ebooks because we believe that locking books up in proprietary file formats is a path towards a digital dark age.
Our quest to give voice to new movements and communities led us to invest for seven years in Make Magazine and Maker Faire before the rest of the world took notice and came to the party. (Maker Media was spun out as a separate company at the end of last year.)
We published books on life changing diseases as well as life changing technologies (Childhood Leukemia, Childhood Cancer Survivors) until the dot com collapse of 2001 led us into drastic retrenchment. We have returned to healthcare with our StrataRx Conferencebecause we believe that this is a market in need of disruption, and that there is a unique opportunity to apply data both to make the healthcare system more effective and to improve people’s lives.
We’ve done the same thing with open data in government, advocating the idea that government at its best acts as a platform, working to bring citizens, civil servants and entrepreneurs together to build new ways of solving problems that affect us all. (O’Reilly no longer offers our “Gov 2.0” events but the work continues even more powerfully via the nonprofit Code for America.)
And through all this, we built a profitable group of enterprises (O’Reilly Media, Safari Books Online, Maker Media, and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures) with nearly 500 employees and collective revenues approaching $200 million.
So what’s not to like?
It seems to me that we could have been even more effective (and have been working hard over the past decade to become more effective) by paying attention to some key management skills.
In that spirit, here are some reflections on how we failed as an organization in the past, and what we have been doing to change that.
Failure #1: People Hear Only Half the Story
There’s a great moment in a Michael Lewis interview that I heard recently on NPR. (Unfortunately, I don’t have a specific link.) Why, Lewis was asked, would anyone in the financial industry talk to him for his book The Big Short after the devastating picture of Wall Street he’d painted in his first book, Liar’s Poker, nearly twenty years earlier? You have to understand, Lewis replied (more or less), that many of those people got into the financial industry after reading his book. Their big takeaway was how easy it was to make a lot of money without regard to the niceties of creating much value. He finished with the memorable line, “You never know what book you wrote until you know what book people read.”
That turned out to be a major problem for me at O’Reilly. I talked so much about our ideals, our goal to create more value than we capture, to change the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators, that I forgot to make sure that everyone understood that we were still a business. Even when I said things like “Money in a business is like gas in the car. You have to fill the tank, but a road trip is not a tour of gas stations,” people heard the “road trip is not a tour of gas stations” way louder than they heard “you have to fill the tank.”
As a result, we’ve had countless struggles to have employees take the business of the business as seriously as they should. I was always pretty good at finding the sweet spot where idealism and business reality meet, but I didn’t spend enough time teaching that skill to everyone on my team. And I didn’t check in enough about what people were actually hearing when I talked. As Lewis said, “You never know what book you wrote until you know what book people read.”
Reflective listening is an important skill. If I were starting O’Reilly all over again, I’d spend a lot more time making sure that the culture I was trying to create was the one that I actually did create! And we’re working hard today not just to get everyone on the same page but to make sure that it’s the same page that we think it is!
Failure #2: “That’s How It’s Done”
In the early days of the company, I wrote an employee manual that reflected my own homegrown HR philosophy, based on the idea that I wanted everyone in the company to have the same freedom, initiative, and excitement about our work that I did: It opened with the statement,
“I called this booklet ‘Rules of Thumb’ because every rule in it is meant to be broken at some time or another, whenever there is good reason. We have no absolute policies, just guidelines based on past experience. As we grow, we will learn, and will make new empirical rules about what works best in new situations.”
It also said things like:
“Bring yourself to your work! We haven’t hired you to act as a cog in the company machine, but to exercise your intelligence, your creativity, and your perseverance. Make things happen.”
and
“Remember too that your job isn’t just an opportunity to improve your economic standing, or that of the company, but to make yourself a better person, and this world a little better place to live. Each of your co-workers, our customers, our suppliers, and anyone else you deal with is a person, just like you. Treat them always with the care, fairness, and honesty that you’d like to experience in return.”
The only raises we had were merit raises, as you improved your skills and impact. You were expected to manage your own time, with no set hours, and the only responsibility around vacation time to make sure that no balls got dropped.
Eventually, I hired an employment lawyer to review my draft, and he said “That’s the most inspiring employee manual I’ve ever read, but I can’t let you use it.”
I complained, but I eventually gave in. As we grew, it was harder and harder to maintain our informal processes. (I remember a real inflection point at about 50-60 employees, and another at about 100.) We gradually gave up our homegrown way of doing things, and accepted normal HR practices – vacation and sick days, regular reviews, annual salary adjustments – and bit by bit, I let the “HR professionals” take over the job of framing and managing the internal culture. That was a mistake.
I’ve often regretted that I hadn’t kept fighting with the lawyers, working harder to balance all the legal requirements (many of them well-intentioned but designed for a top-down command and control culture) with my vision of how a company really ought to work. I focused my energy on product, marketing, finance, and strategy, and didn’t put enough time in to make sure I was building the organization I wanted.
Reading recently about the HR practices at Valve and Github, so reminiscent of early O’Reilly, I’m struck by the need to redefine how organizations work in the 21st century. I’m not saying that Valve or GitHub’s approach is for everyone, but they indicate a deep engagement with the problem space, and fresh approaches to the questions of how to manage an organization. Google’s People Analytics may be a more scalable application of new HR thinking to a company of serious size.
The point is that while there’s a lot of accumulated wisdom in how to run a company, there’s a lot still to be invented, and you should bring the same entrepreneurial energy to improving the culture as you do to improving the product or your approach to the market.
That, by the way, is one of the reasons I’m excited about our new Cultivate Conference. It focuses on how important it is to build leadership skills, not just tech skills. I’m hopeful that we can bring together leaders (and aspiring leaders) at technology companies to learn from each other, and come away inspired to build organizations that don’t just succeed in the marketplace, but are excellent places to work, have a positive impact on the world, and bring out the best in everyone they touch.
Failure #3: Cash and Control
In today’s venture-capital fueled market of “build it and see if they will come”, it’s often hard to remember that there are businesses built without investors, funded by revenue from real customers. I never took VC money, because in my early days as a tech-writing consultant, I saw lots of companies go from being great places to work to being just another company, and I wanted to keep control of what I did and did not do.
I wanted control, but I missed one of the most powerful ways to have it.
Bill Janeway is the author of the outstanding book Doing Capitalism in the Internet Economy. In it, he recounts the lesson of one of his own mentors, Fred Adler, “Happiness is positive cash flow”, and talks about his working principle of “Cash and Control” – “assured access to sufficient cash in time of crisis to buy the time needed to understand the unanticipated, and sufficient control to use the time effectively.”
(I first met Bill in 1995 when Warburg Pincus (and a lot of other venture capitalists) came to look at GNN. Bill won my enduring affection with his honest advice after our lunch: “I don’t think you want our money. You’d come to hate us. You have different goals than we do.” Bill is now a member of O’Reilly’s board – I believe the only time he’s taken a board seat in a company he didn’t fund.)
I came to learn the truth of Bill’s statement about cash and control in the 90s. Publishing is a fairly cash-intensive business. You pay advances to authors – many of whom never come through with the books they promised to write, or take way longer to complete them – and as your editorial, design, and production team works hand in hand with the author, you may have years of investment before you see a penny back. And in the old days, before ebooks and print-on-demand, you then had to invest tens of thousands of dollars in inventory costs for each book.
O’Reilly was like a leaky bucket. We were always profitable on a P&L basis, but we never had enough cash. And as our publishing business accelerated through the 90s, we needed more and more of it. We borrowed against our receivables and our inventory, juggled payables till our CFO was blue in the face, but we ended up funding our growth through a variety of equity exits from companies we’d spun out and sold, like GNN, or invested in, likeBlogger (Pyra Labs), former O’Reilly employee Evan Williams’ first company.
We’d sold GNN to AOL for what seemed at the time the princely sum of $15 million, much of it in stock. We were locked up for a couple of years, but because of our pressing cash needs, we had to sell our stock as soon as it became available, netting $30 or $40 million because of the increase in AOL’s value as the Internet bubble inflated. That was a nice win, but if we’d had the leisure to hold on till the peak, our stock would have been worth $1 billion, and even if we hadn’t timed things perfectly, several hundred million.
Where the shit really hit the fan was after the dot com bust of 2001. We were seriously in debt again, our business was in free fall (shrinking by 30% over the next 3 years before rebuilding), our banks pulled our loans and nearly put us out of business. (Banks are fond of lending you money when you are doing well, but watch out whenever you’re in trouble! They are the first to the exits.)
I still remember the day I had to decide which employees to cut in our first-ever layoffs. As I pored over the worksheets, I noticed hair all over my papers. I was so stressed that my hair was falling out.
What was sad was that it didn’t need to be that way.
In the depths of the crisis, we hired a new CFO (Laura Baldwin, now President and COO), who instituted new financial controls and discipline. She renegotiated contracts with suppliers. She ruthlessly cut non-performing titles, freeing up the cash from inventory. And she was the one who persuaded me to do the layoffs rather than going down with the ship and all hands.
The difference was enormous. We rebuilt O’Reilly’s revenues and profits through successful new books and conferences, the growth of Safari Books Online (which we’d launched right in the middle of the crisis), Maker Media, and other new businesses. But the biggest impact may well have been the one that Laura had, on our cash.
Let me put it this way: during the 90s, our average revenue per title from publishing was over $250,000. After the bust, it slipped to below $100,000 and never recovered. Yet during the 90s, we were always bleeding cash, while since the bust, we have put tens of millions of dollars in the bank through positive cash flow. That has given us money to invest in new ventures and business transformation as the world continues to change around us.
There are four lessons here:
1. Financial discipline matters. It really matters.
If you’re a venture-backed startup, financial discipline gives you more control over when you have to go out for that next round. If you’re self-funded, financial discipline lets you invest in what’s important in your business. So many companies agonize over the quality of their product, and work tirelessly to build their brand, yet pay the barest attention to their financials. Money is the lifeblood of your business. Take it seriously. You have to get good at managing it.
2. Treat your financial team as co-founders.
They aren’t just bean counters. They can make the difference between success and failure. Don’t just look for rockstar developers or designers, look for a rockstar CFO. Hire someone who is better than you are, who can be a real partner in growing the business. Before Laura came on board, I was always the most numerate person in the organization, the one with the most sensitive finger on the pulse of our financials. (I would often tell our previous CFO “Those numbers look wrong – check them!” because I had so internalized the ratios and average monthly spend by category that I knew immediately when something was out of line.) Even if you’re a good entrepreneur with a nose for where money intersects your vision, a first class financial team focused on building effective controls, managing expenses, and optimizing the system will be well worth it.
3. Hold Teams Accountable for their Numbers
Every manager – in fact, every employee – needs to understand the financial side of the business. One of my big mistakes was to let people build product, or do marketing, without forcing them to understand the financial impact of their decisions. This is flying blind – like turning them loose in an automobile without a speedometer or a fuel gauge. Anyone running a group with major financial impact should have their P&L tattooed on their brain, able to answer questions on demand, or within a few moments. It isn’t someone else’s job to pay attention. Financial literacy doesn’t come naturally to everyone. Make sure it’s part of your employee training package, and make sure that people running important business functions are held accountable for their numbers.
4. Run Lean, Reinvent Tirelessly.
After the bust, we laid off 20% of our staff, and while we missed many of them intensely on a personal level, as a business, we didn’t skip a beat. So many people were doing things that just didn’t need doing! Maybe those things had once been necessary but had outlived their usefulness, but many of them were just cruft that had accumulated in the organization.
The Lean Startup methodology emphasizes measurement in quest of product-market fit, describing a startup as “a machine for learning.” This is great. But you need to turn these measurements not just outward on the market but inward on your organization. What is the impact of each activity? Who could be repurposed towards something with greater impact? Does this job really need doing? Can it be done more efficiently and effectively? (For more on this topic, see my previous post, Linking Mission to Strategy and Action.)
Failure #4: Tolerating Mediocrity
There was another lesson that we learned from those 2001 layoffs. While most of the people we laid off were great employees who went on to find good jobs elsewhere, we were appalled to discover that there were some people who had built themselves a nice, cozy position but weren’t working very hard. While most of us were pulling the wagon, they were simply riding on it. We even discovered several cases of fraud! That goes back to my point above about the importance of a crack financial team – one of their key jobs is to have strong controls in place. I would never have believed that one of my employees would do that. It can happen to any company. The longer you are in business the more outrageous things you will have employees do on your watch!
Looking back, I had an extremely naive view: everyone was inspired by the same motivations as I was, passionate about their work and the impact that we were having. They loved their job and wanted to be great at it.
If you want that to be true, you can’t just believe it, you have to work at it! You need a real emphasis on hiring, training and mentorship – and firing! Every manager in the company has to be an expert on his or her staff – what makes them tick – and as focused on finding “employee-company fit” as the product and marketing team are in finding product-market fit. And HR can’t just be the complaint department. It needs to be an active partner in talent acquisition, culture, and leadership development.
When someone isn’t right for the job, it’s easy to shrink from the confrontation of telling them so, or to accept 60% or 70% of what you wanted because you think you can’t afford the time and trouble to find a replacement. You aren’t doing anyone any favors. An employee who is not performing at 100% is as aware as you are of that fact, and most likely isn’t happy about it. Having the courage to ask them to move on is an essential management skill. (It doesn’t even have to be firing – it can be coaching them to make the decision on their own.)
Looking back, I wish we’d worked harder early on to build an organization in which human potential isn’t just expected and taken for granted but is also nurtured, if necessary with tough love. So many times I knew that someone was doing less than we had a right to expect, but I’d let their manager protect them. I didn’t have the guts to keep working the issue till we understood what to do and took appropriate action. We ended up building a culture where managers too often compensated for the failings of employees by working around them, either working harder themselves, hiring someone else to fill in the gaps, or just letting the organization be less effective. We’re doing much better today, but we still have a long way to go.
So, if you have a bad feeling about the role someone is playing in your organization, work the issue until you feel right about it. Take management seriously!
The same lesson applies on the product and marketing side. I never regretted raising the bar – sending a book back for more work at the last minute even though the author and editor thought it was done (in the early days, I used to read every O’Reilly book), deciding that the hotel the team had selected for the first Perl Conference was too cheap and didn’t set the right tone, and we had to move to another one – but I look back at the many times I let something go by that I shouldn’t have because the team would be upset, and I regret every one of them. You can be uncompromising without being a jerk. I sometimes wish I’d channeled my inner Steve Jobs a little more often.
Those moments of giving in to convenience – the schedule is already in place, it’s too late to make a change, we’ve already announced the product (or worse, released it!), the ad is already running – gradually wear away at a company’s greatness.
At the same time, you can’t have random drive-by corrections by management. There needs to be a culture that aspires to greatness, but also understands that that is the result of a disciplined process of setting and achieving expectations, not just waiting for inspiration to strike.
Failure #5: Hiring Supplements, not Complements
Another of the things I wish I’d done earlier was to hire people who were good at things I wasn’t. As a founder, you often seem to be the best at everything – the best product designer, the best marketer, the best sales person. Sometimes that’s really true, but often it’s just because you hire people who aren’t as good as you are at the things you’re good at, and don’t hire people who are better than you are at the things you don’t do so well. You hire supplements to do more of what you already do, rather than people who really complement your skills.
I already mentioned how I went through the first 20 years of my company’s life without hiring someone who was better on the financial side than I was. We didn’t build a sales and marketing culture either – it was foreign to our idea of who we were. We were product-driven, idea-driven, and while we developed a unique and powerful style of activism-driven marketing, we never developed the kind of analytical marketing discipline that someone like Alistair Croll describes so well in his book Lean Analytics. And as for sales, that felt a little dirty to many of our employees.
In the past few years, we’ve worked hard to change that. Laura has led a successful effort to develop that analytical marketing competency and to add sales thinking to the company DNA. We now have sales training for anyone who has customer contact. We’ve built a team to focus on sponsorship sales for our events, more than doubling our yield and vastly improving the profitability of our events.
Failure #6: I’ll Take Care of That
I believe it was Harold Geneen who once said “The skill of management is to achieve your objectives through the efforts of others.” Yet like so many entrepreneurs, my first instinct was not to hire the team to go after a new product or market, but to do it myself, or with the team I already had.
Some of that was a byproduct of being a scrappy, self-funded organization, where the existing team tries new things, and hires only after it’s clear that there’s really an opportunity there. It’s great when your management team leads from the front. But overall, we took it too far, and didn’t build a strong enough culture of deliberate hiring to go after new opportunities.
O’Reilly always grew organically. That has a real charm, and accounts for many of the things people love about the company. But a company needs business discipline, identifying strategic goals, then investing and hiring to achieve those goals, just as much as it needs product, marketing, sales, financial, and employee cultivation discipline. While our ideals are what define us, combining those ideals with a results-oriented business culture is how we have continued to thrive.
Anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss wrote, in his book The Savage Mind, about the difference between the bricoleur (handyman) and the engineer. The handyman makes do with what he has to hand. The engineer thinks more abstractly, figures out what he or she needs, and acquires it before beginning work. I was always a bricoleur. As we go forward, I aspire to be more of an engineer. Although it’s good to remember that, as Marc Hedlund, former SVP Product Development & Engineering at Etsy, remarked, “People and code are…different. The approaches that work so well for getting new software to run are not directly applicable to getting people to work well together.”
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For more about my failures, and lessons I’ve drawn from them, come to my talk at Cultivate:How I Failed. The conference as a whole is about how to build and sustain great companies by building a great culture.
Quote
Over the years I have collected quotes that I have found inspiring and motivating, and, in some cases, they’ve provided me a more enlightened perspective on life. Following are some of my favorites. I hope you find inspiration in them as well.
“Keep away from people who belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.”
– Mark Twain
“Dream lofty dreams, and as you dream, so shall you become. Your vision is the promise of what you shall at last unveil.”
– John Ruskin
“When one door closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us.”
– Helen Keller
“Nature never repeats herself, and the possibilities of one human soul will never be found in another.”
– Elizabeth Cady Stanton
“If you can change your mind, you can change your life. What you believe creates the actual fact. The greatest revolution of my generation is the discovery that individuals, by changing their inner attitudes of mind, can change the outer aspects of their lives.”
– William James, 1897
“The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.”
– Mark Twain
“Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.”
– Will Rogers
“To strive for excellence is admirable. To strive for perfection is a character defect.”
-Tony O’Brien
“The most important single ingredient in the formula of success is knowing how to get along with people.”
– Theodore Roosevelt
“Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence.
Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent.
Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb.
Education will not; the world is full of educated failure.
Keep Believing. Keep Trying.
PERSISTENCE and DETERMINATION alone are omnipotent.”
– Calvin Coolidge
“Power is standing strongly in your own center and living from your heart.”
– SARK
“The greatest good you can do another is not just share your riches, but to reveal him his own.”
– Benjamin Franklin
“A leader is one who… Has more faith in people than they do, and . . . who holds opportunities open long enough for their competence to re-emerge.”
– Margaret Wheatley
“We learn wisdom from failure much more than from success; we often discover what will do, by finding out what will not do; and probably he who never made a mistake never made a discovery.”
– Samuel Smiles
“I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you look at it the right way, did not become still more complicated.”
– Poul Anderson
“We must assume our existence as broadly as we in any way can:
Everything, even the unheard-of, must be possible in it.
That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us;
To have courage for the most strange, the most singular, and
The most inexplicable that we may encounter.
Only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing,
Not even the most enigmatical, will draw exhaustively from
His or her own existence.”
– Maria Rilke, 1904
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
– Viktor E. Frankl, Nazi concentration camp survivor in “Man’s Search for Meaning”
“Goals create direction and pace; goals help us achieve a meaningful life that is directed in the course we choose for ourselves.” A study conducted by Cornell University indicates that when we look back over our lives we regret actions and risks not taken far more than the mistakes – even the big ones – that we made. In a study of several hundred people of varying age groups, Thomas Gilovich, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at Cornell, found that when we make decisions to do things and they go badly, we suffer intense pain, but for a brief period of time. “Then we begin to adapt to the situation,” he explains. “But when we don’t take the risk, we suffer the pain of inaction, and the regret is much longer lasting.” The most common regrets? The study showed that mother was right: number one was not getting a good education, following closely by not “seizing the moment,” whether in romance or career. Perhaps we should all adopt the Nike slogan: Just do it.
“Are you strong enough to handle critics? It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes short again and again because there is no effort without error and shortcomings, who knows the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at best knows in the end the high achievement of triumph and who at worst, if he fails while daring greatly, knows his place shall never be with those timid and cold souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”
– Theodore Roosevelt
“In the end we can never be given knowledge by others; we can only be stimulated. We must develop our own knowledge.”
– Charles T. Tart
“As we grow in maturity and wisdom, we learn that although we cannot choose what life will deliver to us we can choose how we will respond. As we begin to live our lives more consciously – going back and sifting through the events that helped shape our lives, examining how and why different emotions are triggered in our hearts – we can begin to build an entirely new framework for who we want to be, instead of simply accepting who we ended up being. Through this deep understanding of the events that have influenced our lives, of the values we hold most dear, and of the things we need to be happy, we can begin the exciting process of taking control of our lives. From that solid foundation, we can act freely and fearlessly, knowing that our actions will reflect our being out in the world.”
– From the editors of Random Acts of Kindness
“It isn’t the thing you do, dear, it’s the thing you leave undone which gives you a bit of heartache at the setting at the setting of the sun.”
– Margaret E. Sangster
“Aspirations are the greatest predictor of results.”
– Carl Larson
“The forest is a quiet place if only the best birds sing.”
– Kay Johnson
“All we are given is possibilities – to make of ourselves one thing or another.”
– Jose Ortega y Gasset
“We will be better & braver if we engage & inquire than if we indulge in the idle fancy that we already know.”
– Plato
“The fastest way to succeed is to double your failure rate.”
– Thomas J. Watson
“Results? Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results. I know several thousand things that won’t work.”
– Thomas Edison
“Error is only the opportunity to begin again, more intelligently.”
– Henry Ford
“Most of my advances were by mistake. You uncover what is when you get rid of what isn’t.”
– Buckminster Fuller
“Your work is to discover your work, and then with all your heart to give yourself to it.”
– Buddha
“When you feel like you don’t have time to relax or reflect on your life is EXACTLY when you gain the most from doing so!”
– Michael Arloski
“Temper is what gets most of us into trouble. Pride is what keeps us there.”
“Try not. Do, or do not. There is no try.”
– Yoda, the Jedi Master, from Star Wars
“Imagine life as a game in which you are juggling some five balls in the air. You name them – work, family, health, friends and spirit, and you’re keeping all of these in the air. You will soon understand that work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. But the other four balls – family, health, friends and spirit
are made of glass. If you drop one of these, they will be irrevocably scuffed, marked, nicked, damaged, or even shattered. They will never be the same. You must understand that and strive for balance in your life.”
– Brian Dyson – CEO Coca Cola Enterprises
“An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory.”
– Friedrich Engels (1820-95)
“Anger is what happens when you don’t express your truth as it comes along.”
“At least half the troubles in life can be traced to saying yes too quickly and not saying no soon enough.”
“The greatest problem with communication is the illusion it’s been achieved.”
TRUE SUCCESS
“To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of ones critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you lived. This is to have succeeded.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
“If I will calm myself my world will quiet down.”
“He who blows his top loses all his thinking matter.”
“People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can’t find them, make them.”
– George Bernard Shaw
“Learn to say ‘No’ — it will be of more use to you than to be able to read Latin.
– Charles Haddon Spurgeon
“Leadership is a concept we often resist. It seems immodest, even self-aggrandizing, to think of ourselves as leaders. But if it is true that we are part of a community, then leadership is everyone’s vocation, and it can be an evasion to insist that it is not. When we live in the close-knit ecosystem called community, everyone follows and everyone leads.”
– Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak
“Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired, and success achieved.”
-Helen Keller
“Flaming enthusiasm, backed up by horse sense and persistence, is the quality that most frequently makes for success.”
-Dale Carnegie
“I would never have amounted to anything were it not for adversity.
I was forced to come up the hard way.”
-J.C. Penney
“You can make more friends in two months by becoming more interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get people interested in you.”
-Dale Carnegie
“Show me someone who has done something worthwhile, and I’ll show you someone who has overcome adversity.”
-Lou Holtz
“If you want to succeed you should strike out on new paths rather than travel the worn paths of accepted success.”
-John D. Rockefeller
“One doesn’t discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.”
-Andre’ Gide
“Far better it is to dare mighty things, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those who neither enjoy much or suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.”
-Theodore Roosevelt
“A smooth sea never made a skilled mariner.”
– English Proverb
“You miss 100 percent of the shots you never take.”
– Wayne Gretzky, Pro Hockey Player
“A year from now you will wish you had started today.”
– Karen Lamb
“Try not to become a person of success, but rather to become a person of value.
– Albert Einstein
“The greatest crime in the world is not developing your potential. When you do what you do best, you are helping not only yourself, but the world.”
– Roger Williams
“There has never been another you. With no effort on your part you were born to be something very special and set apart. What you are going to do in appreciation of that gift is a decision only you can make.”
– Dan Zadra
“You have to think anyway, so why not think big?”
– Donald Trump (I can’t believe I’m using a quote from Donald Trump…)
“Leaders are pioneers. They are people who venture into unexplored territory. They guide us to new and often unfamiliar destinations. People who take the lead are the foot soldiers in the campaigns for change . . . The unique reason for having leaders – their differentiating function – is to move us forward. Leaders get us going someplace.”
– Kouzes & Posner, 1987
“Well done is better than well said.”
-Benjamin Franklin
“If we study the lives of great men and women carefully and unemotionally
we find that, invariably, greatness was developed, tested and revealed through the darker periods of their lives. One of the largest tributaries of the RIVER OF GREATNESS is always the STREAM OF ADVERSITY.”
– Cavett Robert 1908-1997
“Doing what you like is freedom. Liking what you do is happiness.”
– Seen on Poster
“Leaders attract the voluntary commitment of followers, energize them, and transform organizations into new entities with greater potential for survival, growth and excellence. Effective leadership empowers an organization to maximize its contribution to the well-being of its members and the larger society of which it is a part.”
– Burt Nanus
“I’d rather attempt to do something great and fail than to attempt to do nothing and succeed.”
– Robert Schuller
“Nothing splendid was ever created in cold blood. Heat is required to forge anything.
Every great accomplishment is the story of a flaming heart.”
– Arnold Glasow
“Have the courage to say no.
Have the courage to face the truth.
Do the right thing because it is right.
These are the magic keys to living your life with integrity.”
– W. Clement Stone
“Love cures people–both the ones who give it and the ones who receive it.”
– Dr. Carl Menninger
“You are not here merely to make a living. You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement.
You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand.”
– Woodrow Wilson
“Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could.
Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can.
Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit
to be encumbered with your old nonsense.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
“High expectations are the key to everything.”
– Sam Walton, Founder of WAL-MART
“Achievement is always preceded by spectacular preparation.”
– Robert Schuller
“Remember not only to say the right thing in the right place, but far more difficult still, to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.”
– Benjamin Franklin
“Cowardice asks the question, ‘Is it safe?’
Expediency asks the question, ‘Is it politic?’
Vanity asks the question, ‘Is it popular?’
But conscience asks the question, ‘Is it right?’
There comes a time when one must take
a position that is neither safe, nor politic,
nor popular, but one must take it because
one’s conscience tells one that it is right.”
– Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Life is pretty simple: You do some stuff. Most fails. Some works.
You do more of what works. If it works big, others quickly copy it.
Then you do something else. The trick is the doing something else.”
– Tom Peters
“If I had thought about it, I wouldn’t have done the experiment.
The literature was full of examples that said you can’t do this.”
– Spencer Silver, Inventor of Post-It Notes
“No pessimist ever discovered the secrets of the stars, or sailed to an uncharted land, or opened a new heaven to the human spirit.”
– Helen Keller
“Call it a clan, call it a network, call it a tribe, call it a family: Whatever you call it, whoever you are, you need one.”
– Jane Howard
“To every person there comes that special moment when they are tapped on the should to do a very special thing unique to them. What a tragedy if that moment finds them unprepared for the work that would be their finest hour.”
– Winston Churchill
“Don’t give up at half time. Concentrate on winning the second half.”
– Coach Paul “Bear” Bryant
“It is in quiet that our best ideas occur to us. Don’t make the mistake of believing that by a frantic kind of dashing around you are being your most effective and efficient self. Don’t assume that you are wasting time when you take time out for thought.”
– Napoleon Hill and W. Clement Stone
“In a recent survey, 73 percent of Americans described their lives as ‘very busy’ or
‘insanely busy.'”
– Wired Magazine
“Don’t say you don’t have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein.”
– H. Jackson Brown
“An unfulfilled vocation drains the colour from a person’s entire existence.”
– Balzac
“Yes, risk taking is inherently failure-prone. Otherwise, it would be called sure-thing-taking.”
– Tim McMahon
“Change favors the prepared mind.”
– Louis Pasteur
“Pay no attention to what the critics say; no statue has ever been erected to a critic.”
– Jean Sibelius
“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream.”
– Mark Twain
“It is good to have an end to journey towards, but it is the journey that matters in the end.”
– Ursula K. LeGuin
“This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purposed recognized by yourself as a mighty one, the being a force of nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no “brief candle” to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.”
– George Bernard Shaw
“At the point of commitment, the universe conspires to support you.”
Favorite Quotes
1 in a 100 year flooding happens again – time to wake up to reality of climate change yet
Says it all, right?
The Danube river is hitting record highs, thousands are being forced from their homes, and dozens of people have lost their lives.
This is the second time in just 11 years that Central Europe has had ’100 year’ floods. Please SHARE if you think it’s time for the world to wake up — our climate has changed.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-22811172
by anric
ANRIC BLATT 