Jimmy's Cool Thing: March 2017

Monday, March 27, 2017

Come Along on the Journey

In my Roaming Astronomer blog, I've begun a new series called Journey to the Shadow. The posts will lead to the total solar eclipse of August 21, which will span the United Status from coast to coast. Come along on the journey. Journey to the Shadow, No. 1.

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Becoming Steve Jobs by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli

The biography, Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli (2015). This is yet another Steve Jobs biography, but it has a difference. The biography is presented from the point of view of journalist Brent Schlender, who covered Steve Jobs for nearly 25 years and who also had a more personal relationship with Jobs than did most other journalists and biographers. The presented material was gathered from many interviews and personal conversations with Jobs. And while this material was not germane to the various articles that Schlender was writing about at the time, he kept the material on file for future use. Through this biography, which Schlender co-wrote with fellow journalist Rick Tetzeli, the authors hoped to present a more insightful and less-stereotypical side of Steve Jobs than was seen in the recent authorized biography by Walter Isaacson. I found that the book did give more insight into Steve Jobs. While it did not excuse Jobs' coarse behavior, it did provide a better understanding of Jobs and why he did what he did the way he did. And in some cases it did bring another, softer side to some of the popular "Steve Jobs stories" which circulate. The biography picks up just after Jobs founded NeXT and shows how his attitude gradually changed, mostly through his association with Pixar and its people, and allowed Jobs to come back to Apple with an altered management philosophy that turned the company around and revolutionized computing, again. The book also gives more insight into Jobs' battle with cancer and how it caused him to focus his outlook and to strengthen his efforts in his work and his family. This is a good read. I enjoyed it and I highly recommend it.
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Saturday, March 25, 2017

A Story About Two Builders

This Sunday, I'm telling this Bible story to my preschool class. Enjoy!

Jesus Tells About Two Builders: Following Jesus gives us strength to endure any storm that comes our way.

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Abundance and Bold by Steven Kotler and Peter H Diamandis

My Cool Thing is actually a pair of books that might give you a reality check with regard to the state of the world, the state of entrepreneurship, and what is possible. In fact, these books may get your head spinning!

The first book is Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think by Steven Kotler and Peter H. Diamandis (2012). Through their book, the authors explain that the future may not as bleak as we are lead to believe. They give a whirlwind tour of the latest developments in health care, agriculture, energy, and other fields. And the authors introduce dozens of innovators making great strides in each area. The book establishes hard targets for change and lays out a strategic road map for governments, industry, and entrepreneurs, giving the reader plenty of reason for optimism.

The second book is Bold: How to Go Big, Make Bank, and Better the World by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler (2015). This book builds on the foundation of "Abundance." It is a radical, how-to guide for using exponential technologies, moonshot thinking, and crowd-powered tools to create extraordinary wealth while also positively impacting the lives of billions. The authors use their own experiences, as well as those of Larry Page, Elon Musk, Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos, and others, to show how entrepreneurs can be bold, change the world, and make their dreams come true.

I think I could sum up my reaction to these books in one word: Wow. If you want to get a different view of the world and a better insight into how entrepreneurship is changing in the 21st century, I highly recommend adding these books to your reading list.

Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think by Steven Kotler and Peter H. Diamandis (2012)

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Bold: How to Go Big, Make Bank, and Better the World by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler (2015)

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Friday, March 24, 2017

Born with Teeth by Kate Mulgrew

Autobiography, Born with Teeth: A Memoir by Kate Mulgrew (2015). I knew Kate Mulgrew from the "Ryans Hope" soap opera, the "Remo Williams" movie, the "Mrs Columbo" mystery television series, and the "Star Trek: Voyager" television series, but I didn't really know about her life. Now I do, at least through the mid-1990s, which is where the biography ends. Perhaps she will do another down the road. There are a lot of ups and downs, interesting choices and tragedies. If you have an interest in Ms Mulgrew, you will be entertained and I recommend it.

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Thursday, March 23, 2017

Tarkin by James Luceno

The novel, Tarkin: Star Wars by James Luceno (2014). This is a science-fiction novel by James Luceno. Star Wars fans will remember the character of Tarkin from the original "Star Wars" movie (now renamed "Star Wars, Episode 4, A New Hope." In this novel, Luceno fills in the backstory of Wilhuff Tarkin. I should also note that since the merger of Lucasfilm Ltd with the Walt Disney Company, all of the various authorized Star Wars medium (TV, movie, comics, novels, etc.) are all coordinated and relate to one another. So information in this story might come up elsewhere in movies or other books, etc. It's a fun read and I recommend it.

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Wednesday, March 22, 2017

Jony Ive by Leander Kahney

The biography, Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products by Leander Kahney (2013). When folks hear the name Jony Ive, the probably think of white rooms and glorious adjectives describing what may seem to be the simplest subjects. But John Ive is more than that. Even in school, Ive had a passion for design and worked to make this creations beautiful and functional both inside as well as outside. It was his eye and his passion that caused Apple executives to attempt three times to “head-hunt” Ive into Apply, finally getting him on the third try. And it was this passion that eventually led Jony to become Apple's lead designer prior to the return of Steve Jobs, and for Steve Jobs and Ive to bond closely as they remade Apple in the years that followed. I think the book is a good read. And I would recommend this biography to anyone with an interest in design, an interest in Apple, or just an interest in very passionate people.

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Tuesday, March 21, 2017

Overcoming Impostor Syndrome

Have you ever thought people were going to find out you weren't as skilled as they thought? Then you probably are affected by impostor syndrome. The phenomenon affects high-achieving individuals who believe they either got lucky, fooled everyone else, or simply had the right timing.

The impostor syndrome makes people feel they aren’t as intelligent and competent as they really are. The good news is that it is possible to overcome the problem.

Self-motivation might help in the sort-term, but not in the long run. Here are some steps you can take to overcome impostor syndrome.

Focus on the value you bring to the table. Don't worry about the importance of your work, the people it affects, or what could go wrong.

Accept that everyone has flaws. You must reset your standards to a realistic level. It is rarely helpful to compare yourself to others because you see yourself from the inside, while you see others from the outside—a carefully edited version of themselves.

Own your successes. Whether the result of luck or personal ability, your successes are yours.

Risk it. Take a leap of faith. It takes courage to risk failure and humiliation but, as Oscar Wilde puts it:

“There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”

Recognize that everybody messes up. Michel de Montaigne, one of the most influential philosophers of the French Renaissance, argued that everybody, including kings and queens, mess up. We must stop focusing on credentials: even CEOs fail.

Recognize that you don't know everything and exposure gives you the opportunity to identify and fix your flaws. Your clients don't want perfection, but they do what you to do something they are unable to do. So give them the best possible service you can.

When possible, ask others why you were chosen for a given task. The answer will, almost certainly, motivate you and help build your confidence.

Remember that fear just means you are aware of how much you can improve. Successful author Steve Pressfield once said:

“The amateur believes he must first overcome his fear; then he can do his work. The professional knows that fear can never be overcome”.

Want to learn more? Check out these articles.

Monday, March 20, 2017

The Razor's Edge by W. Somerset Maugham

The novel The Razor's Edge by W. Somerset Maugham (1944). I'd meant to read this book for many years. I first heard about the story through the 1984 film starring Bill Murray. And I later learned of the novel and of the earlier movie version from 1946 starring Tyrone Power. Interestingly enough, both version depart a bit from the general story of the novel. But that seems to be common place in screen plays.

The novel tells the story of Larry Darrell, an American pilot traumatized by his experiences in World War I, who sets off in search of some transcendent meaning in his life. The story begins through the eyes of Larry's friends and acquaintances as they witness his personality change after the War. His rejection of conventional life and search for meaningful experience allows him to thrive while the more materialistic characters suffer reversals through the stock market crash. While Darrell is the main focus of the author, he also describes well the lives of other main characters. I don't consider this a spoiler, but I would say, in the words of the author, that the novel is a "success story" in that all of the main characters achieved in their own way, the goals their lives were striving for, whether consciously or unconsciously.

I should add some trivia about the 1984 film adaptation starring Bill Murray. When Murray acquired the rights to the story and told Columbia Pictures he wanted to remake the movie, they told him it would not make money and they wanted Murray to first do a movie that would make them a profit. Agreeing to this, Murray starred in the 1984 movie "Ghostbusters," and another movie franchise was born.

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Sunday, March 12, 2017

Everything I need to know about life, I learned from Noah's Ark

1. Don't miss the boat.

2. Remember that we are all in the same boat.

3. Plan ahead. It wasn't raining when Noah built the ark.

4. Stay fit. When you're old, someone may ask you to do something really big.

5. Don't listen to the critics; just get on the job that needs to be done.

6. Build your future on high ground.

7. For safety sake, travel in pairs.

8. Speed isn't always an advantage. The snails were on board with the cheetahs.

9. When you're stressed, float a while.

10. Remember, the Ark was built by amateurs; the Titanic by professionals.

11. No matter the storm, when you are with God, there's always a rainbow waiting...

(This originally appeared on MyBible.com.)

Sunday, March 5, 2017

Jesus Always Has Time for Us

This morning at my church, I will be teaching my preschool class this wonderful Bible story. If you have an interest, please check it out!

Jesus Blessed the Children

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Saturday, March 4, 2017

How Google Works by Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg

How Google Works by Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg (2014). Google Executive Chairman and ex-CEO Eric Schmidt and former SVP of Products Jonathan Rosenberg came to Google, over a decade before the writing of this book, as proven technology executives. At the time, the company was already well-known for doing things differently, reflecting the visionary--and frequently contrarian--principles of founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. If Eric and Jonathan were going to succeed, they realized they would have to relearn everything they thought they knew about management and business.

Today, Google is a global icon that regularly pushes the boundaries of innovation in a variety of fields. How Google Works is an entertaining, page-turning primer containing lessons that Eric and Jonathan learned as they helped build the company. The authors explain how technology has shifted the balance of power from companies to consumers, and that the only way to succeed in this ever-changing landscape is to create superior products and attract a new breed of multifaceted employees whom Eric and Jonathan dub "smart creatives." Covering topics including corporate culture, strategy, talent, decision-making, communication, innovation, and dealing with disruption, the authors illustrate management maxims ("Consensus requires dissension," "Exile knaves but fight for divas," "Think 10X, not 10%") with numerous insider anecdotes from Google's history, many of which are shared in this book for the first time.

In an era when everything is speeding up, the best way for businesses to succeed is to attract smart-creative people and give them an environment where they can thrive at scale. How Google Works explains how to do just that.

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Life, Animated by Ron Suskind

Life, Animated: A Story of Sidekicks, Heroes, and Autism by Ron Suskind (2014). This is the true story of Washington D.C. journalist Ron Suskind, his wife Cornelia, their older son Walter, and their younger son Owen. Owen appeared to be a perfectly normal, chatty, active boy until about 2-1/2 years of age. At that time, Owen developed the symptoms of regressive autism, a disorder which can appear between the first 18 to 36 months of life. Over the next several years, Ron and his family learned to communicate, again, with Owen through the stories and characters of Disney films, which they noted that Owen watched repeatedly and with great interest. Owen's interest in the Disney movies, and their use in helping him interact, grow and develop, has come to be called "affinity therapy." As Owen used his love of Disney to help him decipher the social world, so other children have done through their varied passions for subjects such as Thomas the Tank Engine, Anime, maps, black-and-white movies from the 1940s and 50s, and others. "Life, Animated" is a great read and highly recommend it. Here are a few of links.

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Neil Armstrong: A Life of Flight by Jay Barbree

Neil Armstrong: A Life of Flight by Jay Barbree (2014). Barbree has been an NBC News space correspondent for many years and a pilot in his own right. Barbree was a close friend of Armstrong and writes out of 50 years of conversations. Considering Armstrong's quiet and soft-spoken manner, I expect it would be impossible to find a more intimate and straightforward of account of the life and times of this U.S. Navy aviator, veteran of the Korean War, test pilot, X-15 pilot, professor of aerospace engineering, and the first human to walk on the moon.

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Rocket Boys by Homer Hickam

Rocket Boys by Homer Hickam (1998). This is the #1 New York Times bestselling memoir that inspired the film October Sky. Rocket Boys is a uniquely American memoir--a powerful, luminous story of coming of age at the dawn of the 1960s, of a mother's love and a father's fears, of a group of young men who dreamed of launching rockets into outer space . . . and who made those dreams come true.

With the grace of a natural storyteller, NASA engineer Homer Hickam paints a warm, vivid portrait of the harsh West Virginia mining town of his youth, evoking a time of innocence and promise, when anything was possible, even in a company town that swallowed its men alive. A story of romance and loss, of growing up and getting out, Homer Hickam's lush, lyrical memoir is a chronicle of triumph--at once exquisitely written and marvelously entertaining.

One of the most beloved bestsellers in recent years, Rocket Boys is a uniquely American memoir. A powerful, luminous story of coming of age at the end of the 1950s, it is the story of a mother's love and a father's fears, of growing up and getting out. With the grace of a natural storyteller, Homer Hickam looks back after a distinguished NASA career to tell his own true story of growing up in a dying coal town and of how, against the odds, he made his dreams of launching rockets into outer space come true.

A story of romance and loss and a keen portrait of life at an extraordinary point in American history, Rocket Boys is a chronicle of triumph.

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Failure is Not an Option by Gene Kranz

Failure Is Not an Option: Mission Control From Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond by Gene Kranz (2000). This memoir of a veteran NASA flight director tells riveting stories from the early days of the Mercury program through Apollo 11 (the moon landing) and Apollo 13, for both of which Kranz was flight director.

Gene Kranz was present at the creation of America’s manned space program and was a key player in it for three decades. As a flight director in NASA’s Mission Control, Kranz witnessed firsthand the making of history. He participated in the space program from the early days of the Mercury program to the last Apollo mission, and beyond. He endured the disastrous first years when rockets blew up and the United States seemed to fall further behind the Soviet Union in the space race. He helped to launch Alan Shepard and John Glenn, then assumed the flight director’s role in the Gemini program, which he guided to fruition. With his teammates, he accepted the challenge to carry out President John F. Kennedy’s commitment to land a man on the Moon before the end of the 1960s.

Kranz recounts these thrilling historic events and offers new information about the famous flights. What appeared as nearly flawless missions to the Moon were, in fact, a series of hair-raising near misses. When the space technology failed, as it sometimes did, the controllers’ only recourse was to rely on their skills and those of their teammates. He reveals behind-the-scenes details to demonstrate the leadership, discipline, trust, and teamwork that made the space program a success.

A fascinating firsthand account by a veteran mission controller of one of America’s greatest achievements, Failure is Not an Option reflects on what has happened to the space program and offers his own bold suggestions about what we ought to be doing in space now.

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The Innovators by Walter Isaacson

The book The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution, written by Walter Isaacson. If you want to get an overarching history of the computer and the Internet and learn about the responsible people, their personalities and their motivations, then this book is for you. This book spans the gap from Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage through to Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. I knew about many of the folks in this chronology, but there were several that were new to me or that I learned more about. The book is well put together and I highly recommend it. Below are the publisher's notes on the book as well as links to Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Audible.

"Following his blockbuster biography of Steve Jobs, The Innovators is Walter Isaacson’s revealing story of the people who created the computer and the Internet. It is destined to be the standard history of the digital revolution and an indispensable guide to how innovation really happens.

What were the talents that allowed certain inventors and entrepreneurs to turn their visionary ideas into disruptive realities? What led to their creative leaps? Why did some succeed and others fail?

In his masterly saga, Isaacson begins with Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron’s daughter, who pioneered computer programming in the 1840s. He explores the fascinating personalities that created our current digital revolution, such as Vannevar Bush, Alan Turing, John von Neumann, J.C.R. Licklider, Doug Engelbart, Robert Noyce, Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, Tim Berners-Lee, and Larry Page.

This is the story of how their minds worked and what made them so inventive. It’s also a narrative of how their ability to collaborate and master the art of teamwork made them even more creative.

For an era that seeks to foster innovation, creativity, and teamwork, The Innovators shows how they happen."

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Thursday, March 2, 2017

747: Creating the World's First Jumbo Jet

747: Creating the World's First Jumbo Jet and Other Adventures from a Life in Aviation by Joe Sutter and Jay Spenser (2006). The book is the autobiography of Joe Sutter, a Seattle native and World War II Naval officer who grew up loving aviation and, in 1965, while still relatively young, was appointed Boeing's chief design engineer for the world's first jumbo jet, the Boeing 747. The project began as important but not the main focus of Boeing. But by the time of the rollout of the first 747 airframe, the entire company had bet its future on Sutter and the viability of the 747. Sutter goes on talk about the interesting design variations that filled out the 747 family, and how that family continues to grow and improve several decades on. In addition to the 747, Sutter shares about his life and family, about his work on other Boeing airframes and about his appointment by President Reagan to the Rogers Commission to investigate the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster.

This book describes yet another group of folks who found themselves in an exciting and difficult position, and how they rose to the challenges and persevered. If you have an interest in aviation or history in general, I highly recommend this read.

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Lindbergh Book by A. Scott Berg

The book "Lindbergh" by A. Scott Berg (1998). I have been a fan of Charles A. Lindbergh since I first watched the 1957 movie "The Spirit of St. Louis." But I have also heard a lot of bad about the man. Also, I have heard from some that learning more about Lindbergh would not be worth one's time. But I disagree to some extent. While knowing the reality of a person may dispel the myth, we can still learn from the good and the bad. This particular biography was made with the blessing of the Lindbergh family and the author was given full access to the papers and journals of Charles Lindbergh and wife Anne Morrow Lindberg. Because of the material available at the time, some aspects of Lindbergh's life are omitted, such as the children which Lindbergh fathered out of wedlock while traveling the world in his later years. But the personalities of Mr. and Mrs. Lindbergh, the family tragedies, Lindbergh's self-imposed work ethic and travel schedule, and the other family dynamics, suggest that this part of Lindbergh's life was not out of the question.

What a book recommendation! Anyway, There is much to learn from this "first family of the air" and the world in which they lived. I recommend it for lovers of history and aviation.

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Jim Henson Books

In this entry, I have two Cool Things.

Cool Thing #1: Make Art Make Money: Lessons from Jim Henson on Fueling Your Creative Career, by Elizabeth Hyde Stevens (2013). This book began as a college paper by the author. It talks about the economics of creating and selling artistic endeavors. It proposes principals by taking examples from the life and career of Jim Henson, who is one of my heroes. Granted that not all of Jim Henson's business and personal decisions were perfect, and the book notes this. But even so, an alternate title for the book might be "What Would Jim Henson Do?". If you are creative in any way, or if you enjoyed the work of Jim Henson, I highly recommend this book.

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Cool Thing #2: Jim Henson: The Biography, by Brian Jay Jones (2013). I began this book a while back, but set it aside as I got distracted. But reading "Cool Thing #1" drew me back to this read. The book was written with the cooperation of the Henson family and presents Jim Henson, a very private and personal man, with his warts and all. I highly recommend this read, as well.

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