300 Seconds

How many decisions or commitments would end up more positively if you had a five-minute snooze button on hand?

The hasty one-liner, the rushed reaction, the action we end up regretting--all of them can be eliminated with judicious use of the snooze button. It's a shame there isn't one built in to our computers when we're communicating online...

When in doubt, go for a walk around the block.

The Bannister Method

Roger Bannister did something in 1954 that many people had said was impossible.

He ran a mile in less than four minutes.

The thing is, he didn't accomplish this by running a mile as fast as he could.

He did it by setting out to run a mile in one second faster than four minutes. Bannister analyzed the run, stride by stride. He knew how long each split needed to be. He had colleagues work in a relay, pacing him on each and every section of the mile.

He did something impossible, but he did it by creating a series of possible steps.

It's easy to get hung up on, "as possible." As fast, as big, as much, as cheap, as small... 

The Bannister Method is to obsess about "enough" instead.

Roger Bannister passed away at the age of 88 on Sunday 4th March, 2018.

BBC Radio in 2012, Sir Roger Bannister speaks to Eleanor Oldroyd about the day he became the first man to run a mile under four minutes.
(25 Minutes).

Billy Graham and Bono

With the passing of the Rev. Billy Graham today at the age of 99, it seems appropriate to share Bono’s poem. He wrote it about Graham when he visited him and his family on March 11, 2002. (The poem and photographs are on display at The Billy Graham Library)

May you rest in peace, Billy Graham.

U2, the psalms, Billy Graham, words worth following.

Walt Whitman

“After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on — have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear — what remains?”

Walt Whitman asked this in his diary as he contemplated what makes life worth living after a paralytic stroke, then answered:

 “Nature remains; to bring out from their torpid recesses, the affinities of a man or woman with the open air, the trees, fields, the changes of seasons — the sun by day and the stars of heaven by night.”

What shall I do today?

“I began to appreciate time. There is nothing more wonderful to have in one’s life, than time. I don’t believe people get enough of it nowadays.

I was excessively fortunate in my childhood and youth, just because I had so much time. You wake up in the morning, and even before you are properly awake you are saying to yourself: ‘Now, what shall I do with today?’ You have the choice, it is there, in front of you, and you can plan as you please.

I don’t mean that there were not a lot of things (duties, we called them) I had to do–of course there were. There were jobs to be done in the house: days when you cleaned silver photograph frames, days when you darned your stockings, days when you learnt a chapter of Great Events in History, a day when you had to go down the town and pay all the tradesmen’s bills. Letters and notes to write, scales and exercises, embroidery–but they were all things that lay in my choice, to arrange as I pleased. I could plan my day, I could say,

‘I think I’ll leave my stockings until this afternoon; I will go down town in the morning and I will come back by the other road and see whether that tree had come into blossom yet.’

Always when I woke up, I had the feeling which I am sure must be natural to all of us, a joy in being alive. I don’t say you feel it consciously–you don’t–but there you are, you are alive, and you open your eyes, and here is another day; another step, as it were, on your journey to an unknown place.

That very exciting journey which is your life.

Not that it is necessarily going to be exciting as a life, but it will be exciting to you because it is your life. That is one of the great secrets of existence, enjoying the gift of life that has been given to you.”

-Agatha Christie, autobiography.

Where did you go to school?

An interesting question, perhaps, but irrelevant to a job interview. The place you spent six years in thirty years ago makes very little contribution to the job you're going to do. Here's what matters:

The way you approach your work.

What have you built? What have you led? How do you make decisions? What's your reserve of emotional strength like? How do you act when no one is looking?

You are not your resume. You are the trail you've left behind, the people you've influenced, the work you've done.

26th Jan. 2018 Reggie, Philip, Richard, Arthur

Es war Mountjoy School, Clontarf, Dublin.

New years day

Happy New Year zu allen perbit'ler, insbesondere unser Kollege Ralf Scheidl. Programmierer und Freund seit 1987.