divineguitar

tonight i think about a phrase seth godin said ‘what have you shipped?’  it’s been on my mind for months… what does it matter if you’re the first ever twitter user to capture the picture of lady gaga, or the 3rd person in line for the iphone, or you toil away at work 20 hours a day…what have you shipped?

also thinking about the book linchpin, and how the new personal advantage is ‘mental churn,’ often writers block creeps in and you have to make a conscious effort to beat it back into place.

what will life for me look like in a year?

• lots of travel, every three day weekend to a different country
• immersion in the Italian language, in effort to be the best American diplomat I can be
• Information Security and the CISSP will probably consume the remainder of the year, staring next April I’ll be getting an MBA with hopeful emphasis on the BRIC’s, I don’t just want to graduate, but I want to be #1 in the international class
• extreme nutrition and continued fitness
• even less tolerance for ‘point / counterpoint’ topics such as politics, economics and religion
• more culture and aesthetic
• more understanding of the European Union, its connectedness and its place in the world
• a pizza and pasta plate or two
• divergence away from live indie rock to stadium rock in big cities
• lots of ‘wow, this is interesting’ type conversations, along with seeing things my eyes won’t believe
• more fondness to the 500 years of the history and culture of the Roman Republic, even closer looks at Cicero and Seneca
• still debating on weather or not to drive a 2011 BMW M3 off the assembly line in Munich, since I’ve been writing about it for 5 years now, and thinking about it even longer.  it is the sports car that smacks the other ones in the teeth, period.
• looking forward to learning about the side streets of Venice, looking for people who want to exchange English for Italian dialogue
• dwindling down my twitter feed, and actually reading them and giving them thought, USArmyAfrica being a great example of what I need to plug in
• gateway to entry for a conversation on geopolitics, the awknowledgement that every ‘ism’ has pros and cons

Ultimate goal?  In the flat, connected world, does it really make sense to live in the first world, or is it better to roll the dice and trust your instinct, live somewhere like Latin America, Africa or China, where all the talking head bankers and bureaucrats say is volatile.

Knowing my competitive advantage of being a straight shooter, I’m hoping to get enough credential to work anywhere, doing what I want, largely responding to inquiries of ‘what do you think about this?,’ and the ‘shipment’ will be a 10 page pdf.

What will it take?  more acknowledgement and respect of conventional wisdom and who has it, while understanding it is far from the truth, and the new scribes to lead and govern us this century have yet to be written.

at some point in the next year i’d like to eek out my first critical though PowerPoint, which will consist of:

• a growth, sustainability and aesthetic model for civilization, and how they can keep each other in check while allowing society to evolve
• an ‘enough’ analysis, which poses answers to the question, what is enough, and what does someone need to be happy.  where is the benchmark, and if you stick to it and be responsible, you won’t be tempted with what the company tries to ram down your throat.
• a sketch of how if we do stay on the perpetual high velocity growth models, idiocracy will come true, eventually costco merges with apollo group and you WILL be able to get your law degree at isle 172 of costco
• how hubris and ideology are detrimental to the developed world and if emerging nations pick up anything CLOSE to nationalism or theocracy, what does that mean and who will hold what cards.
• more analysis on the great commodity grab and the interesting twists and turns, especially things like ‘mining taxes’ in Australia, and ‘commodities for infrastructure’ trade b/w Africa and China.
•  taking one derivitive, or collatoralized debt obligation and breaking it down to its core / unfunctional pieces (for you computer folks, think of it as reversing engineering a compiled .dll)
• articulating and defending why Ayn Rand’s objectivist philosophy of hard work will still get you ahead, and this can no longer be correlated with greed

While I suppose the news fills us with things that make people opinionated and tense, and how many doom and gloom scenerios occupy the airwaves, best seller lists and heart and minds of people all over the world, mine is still tuned to optimism and a keen eye for the actual truth, if i’m retired by age 45, i will have been right more often than not.