Author: Bobby Rockers

This Too Shall Pass

The following are some of my favorite excepts from O.G. Mandio’s “The Greatest Salesman in the World.”  They are broken down by scroll number the quote comes from.  It is a short book that is really more of a “guide for living” than a “guide for selling”.

Scroll Number I:

“Time teaches all things to him who lives forever but I have not the luxury of eternity.”

“Failure is man’s inability to reach his goals in life, whatever they may be.”

“…the only difference between those who have failed and those who have succeeded lies in the difference of their habits… I will form good habits and become their slave.”

Scroll Number II:

“I will love the ambitious for they can inspire me!  I will love the failures for they can teach me.  I will love the kings for they are but human; I will love the meek for they are divine.  I will love the rich for they are yet lonely; I will love the poor for they are so many.  I will love the young for the faith they hold; I will love the old for the wisdom they share.  I will love the beautiful for their eyes of sadness; I will love the ugly for their souls of peace.  I will great this day with love in my heart.”

Scroll Number III:

“So long as there is breath in me, that long will I persist.  For now I know one of the greatest principles of success; if I persist long enough I will win.”

Scroll Number IV:

“I am nature’s greatest miracle.  Vain attempts to imitate others no longer will I make… I will begin now to accent my differences; hide my similarities.”

Scroll Number V:

” I will live this day as if it is my last… I will waste not a moment mourning yesterday’s misfortunes, yesterdays defeats, yesterday’s aches of the heart, for why should I throw good after bad.”

” I will avoid with fury the killers of time.  procrastination I will destroy with action; doubt I will bury under faith; fear I will dismember with confidence.”

“Henceforth I know that to court idleness is to steal food, clothing, and warmth from those I love. “

” This day I will make the best day of my life.  This day I will drink every minute to its full.  I will savor its taste and give thanks.  I will maketh every hour count and each minute I will trade only for something of value.  I will labor harder than ever before and push my muscles until they cry for relief, and then I will continue.”

Scroll Number VI:

“Today I will be master of my emotions… Weak is he who permits his thoughts to control his actions; strong is he who forces his actions to control his thoughts.”

“If I feel all-powerful I will try to stop the wind. If I attain great wealth I will remember one unfed mouth. If I become overly proud I will remember a moment of weakness.  If I feel my skill is unmatched I will look at the stars.”

Scroll Number VII:

“I will laugh at the world.  No living creature can laugh except man.”

” For all worldly things shall indeed pass.  When I am heavy with heartache I shall console myself that this too shall pass; when I am puffed with success I shall warn myself that this too shall pass. “

“Never will I allow myself to become so important, so wise, so dignified, so powerful, that I forget how to laugh at myself and my world.”

Scroll Number VIII:

“Today I will multiply my value a hundredfold… To surpass the deeds of others is unimportant; to surpass my own deeds is all.”

“I will commit not the terrible crime of aiming too low.  I will do the work that a failure will not do.  I will always let my reach exceed my grasp.”

Scroll Number IX:

“…dreams are worthless, my plans are dust, my goals are impossible.  All are of no value unless they are followed by action.  I will act now.”

“Never has there been a map, however carefully executed to detail and scale, which carried its owner over even one inch of ground.”

“I will not avoid the tasks of today and charge them to tomorrow for I know that tomorrow never comes.  Let me act now even though my actions may not bring happiness or success for it is better to act and fail than not act and flounder.”

“I will act now… When I awake I will say (these words) and leap from my cot while the failure sleeps yet another hour.”

“Tomorrow is the day reserved for the labor of the lazy.  I am not lazy.”

“This is the time.  This is the place.  I am the man.  I will act now.”

Scroll Number X:

“Guide me, God.”

The book itself has got me thinking about writing down the outline for my own personal philosophy.  I am not talking about a religious creed or a statement of beliefs but a guide to define the philosophy of life I would like to follow.  In ancient Greece, and to a lesser extent in later Roman cultures, it was common for the upper classes to adopt a philosophy of life.  In fact parents sent their sons to schools of philosophy, like Stoicism and Asceticism, partly to acquire such a philosophy.

And now for something completely

Working on an install of kubuntu that is farily non-standard and my lvm configuration caused grub to go totally insane. So are some notes I am posting from the live CD (that doesn’t have lvm configured.)

If separate /boot
$ sudo mount /dev/mapper/Qmail-root /mnt
$ sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/boot
$ grub-install –root-directory=/mnt /dev/sda

And here and here are some specific grub2 install information for Ubuntu.

If Only for Financial Reasons

February 19th I attended the Dave Ramsey Live event here in Oklahoma City.  I can say that if you have been listening to Dave for any significant length of time, read any of his books, or attended his  Financial Peace University; you are not likely to get any new information out of his live event.  This really shouldn’t come as much of a surprise as Dave’s message is one of simplicity and focus over depth and sophistication.  All that said, Dave’s events are fun.  The event is as much a pep-rally as a financial training event.  Here are the only two tidbits (seriously, there are the only two) that I had not heard from Dave during some previous encounter with his material:

If you walk around life without a plan, you will loose your money to those that do.

89% of people who own $1,000,000 homes do NOT make a million.

While the information I got from the Live Event wasn’t exactly new it does work and sometimes everyone can use a little pep-rally.

If you can prove you don’t need it

For years, I have watched the number of technology companies that operate without debt.  The trend has always been popular among IT/IS companies because of the fundamental instability of intellectual property over hard assets.  The logic is hard to argue with.  If everything you “own” of value only has value as a direct cause of its perceived importance, then a shift of public perception doesn’t just hurt your brand, but fundamentally devalues your property.

Think of it this way; if tomorrow everyone stopped trusting Google for their search results (say, you know, someone found out their code sent all our personal information to the Chinese) then overnight they could loose 95% of their US market share.  How much is Google’s code-base worth at that point?  Currently Google is trading at 183 billion so a 95% loss in usage would probably translate to a market value somewhere south of 3-5 billion.

Physical assets don’t behave the same way.  1,000,000 lbs of steal doesn’t just loose 98% of its value overnight.  Even in heavily over-inflated markets things like… I don’t know… homes, don’t loose 98% of their value.  People may be upset that their 350,000 home is now worth 260,000 but just image if one NIGHT your $350,000 home was worth $7,000.  THAT is the danger for companies whose primary assets are intellectual property.

I will give you another concrete example.  Once upon a time there was a company who made A LOT of money in the energy trading business.  Basically the company had sold off almost ALL its physical assets because they made so much money acting as a broker for energy trading.  Think of them as the stock market (or eBay) for energy.  The only problem was that their principal value lay in the fact that people trusted them, trusted their market, trusted their systems, and trusted their software.  Then one day  it was demonstrated that this company lied, cheated, and stole in almost every way you could imagine.  Enron’s stock dropped from $90 to just under $1 in a matter of weeks.  Basically, Enron’s major asset was trust, which it lost, and the company disintegrated overnight.

So how does a company protect itself from such quick devaluation?  The same way you and I protect ourselves from economic turbulence; a big savings account and as little debt as possible.   Microsoft, for example, is famous for “saving” close to a billion dollars a month… yes, a MONTH!  At the same time, Microsoft doesn’t borrow money.  I have been told, by people I put NO trust in to know this information, that they don’t even lease the copiers.  Competitors who want to beat Microsoft can certainly do so, but it will not be an easy fight.  That kind of financial position means that competitors must beat them dollar for dollar, customer for customer, year in and year out… for YEARS!

So who else do you know that doesn’t use debt?  Here are are couple names both in IT and outside of it.  Accenture, Activision Blizzard, Apple, Bed Bath & Beyond, Broadcom , Citrix Systems, eBay, Gap, Google, Infosys Technologies, Juniper Networks, Marvel Technology Group, Qualcomm, Research In Motion, Stryker, Texas Instruments, and Yahoo.  Want to see something more amazing?  Check out those companies 1, 3, and 5 year average returns compared to the market average!

I think it was Warren Buffett who said, “Leverage [i.e. debt] is a funny thing, people who don’t understand it shouldn’t use it; and those who do, don’t.”

Little, Nameless, Unremembered Acts

Yesterday, during the last of my two snow days from the blizzard of 2011, I was giving my wife a hard time about her Twilight vampire affinity when my daughter spoke up.

Emily said, “Edward is weird Daddy. He never smiles.”

I replied, “No kidding Em.  I mean, would you really want to marry someone who didn’t smile?”

Her answer was, “No! I want to marry someone like you.”

It was the greatest compliment I have ever received.  I hope she does better than me, and that I become more like how she sees me.

The Sincerest Form of Flattery

Dear god in heaven, Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 has yanking and pulling!  I don’t know how long MS has had, what they call, the clipboard ring but I have a new found respect for Visual Studio (VS08.)  For those who are not familiar with this feature, yank/pull is a Unix staple (especially among EMACS users) that effectively saves a clipboard history for you.

Using a modified paste command will cycle you through your history pasting the your most recent copy to the edited text (and then highlighting it,) using the command again will paste the second most recent copy (and thus removing what was just highlighted.  Some versions of this feature will allow you to view a list of your clipboard history and arrow down to select it.  Imagine having a list of commonly pasted text instantly available to add to any document without your hands ever leaving the keyboard.

Once someone starts using this feature it because almost addictively beneficial. Trying to live without it is similar to trying to edit text without copy/past and has been one of the main reasons VS08 (or any other Windows text editor) is PAINFUL to use.  Admittedly there are a number of third party applications that give you this functionality, but really, should a user be paying for a feature that is as fundamental to using a computer as copy & paste… or virtual desktops?

Wait… oh well, back to Linux.

A Thousand Furlongs of Sea

We must learn not to disassociate the airy flower from the earthy root, for the flower that is cut off from its root fades, and its seeds are barren, whereas the root, secure in mother earth, can produce flower after flower and bring their fruit to maturity.
–Kabbalah

Generally speaking I work behind a desk eight hours a day (OK, more like 12) but once in a great while I will get to go out with a field crew to do actual physical work.  While physical labor is generally pretty scary stuff; I love getting out-of-doors.  My most recent excursion was to the western side of Oklahoma on a GIS mapping project.

I have driven through the panhandle a couple time previously but really didn’t spend any time there.  It is absolutely BEAUTIFUL.  For someone who is used to the lush green of the Ozark mountains; the naked beauty of the gypsum hills and high plains was like landing on another planet.  This trip was actually months ago, but I forgot I had taken pictures until today. You can check out the photo gallery by clicking the link below.

Oklahoma Gypsum Hills and Eastern Panhandle

To have thrust upon them

Got a couple great quotes from Drive, by Daniel H. Pink:

“Greatness and nearsightedness are incompatible.  Meaningful achievement depends on lifting one’s sights and pushing toward the horizon.”

“Rewards, we’ve seen, can limit the breadth of our thinking… They can focus our sights on only what’s immediately before us rather than what’s off in the distance.”

13 Deadly Sins

The “Deadly Sins” from P. J. Brown’sWriting Interactive Compilers and Interpreters Wiley 1979.

–to code before you think.
–to assume the user has all the knowledge the compiler writer has.
–to not write proper documentation.
–to ignore language standards.
–to treat error diagnosis as an afterthought.
–to equate the unlikely with the impossible.
–to make the encoding of the compiler dependent on its data formats.
–to use numbers for objects that are not numbers.
–to pretend you are catering to everyone at the same time.
–to have no strategy for processing break-ins.
–(A break-in is when you interrupt an interactive compiler, and then possibly continue it later. This is meaningful in an environment in which the compiler is run dynamically, such as many LISP and some BASIC environments. It is not meaningful for typical uses of C/C++ (although there was at least one interactive C environment according to Chris Lattner).)
–to rate the beauty of mathematics above the usability of your compiler.
–to let any error go undetected.
–to leave users to find the errors in your compiler.

This entry comes to us from the GCC Wiki.