A day at a time

Off for a week of vacation – floating quietly along on a pontoon boat with family. It starts to sink in how fortunate my family has been. From first generation immigrants, my grand parents worked hard and long to make it in America.   Children of the depression, my parents participated in actually creating things like good education, safe streets, and neighborhood communities.

As a structure for governing, a democracy is a hard thing to maintain.   In a democracy, everyone has a vote, with representation designed to balance different points of view, different geographic and philosophies.   Often, we have a tendency to accept that what is good today has always been – or was easily created.  The 15th amendment of the United States, ratified on February 3, 1870, made it illegal to deny a citizen the right to vote based on that citizen’s “race, color, or previous condition of servitude”.

We could still discriminate based upon sex, with women somehow excluded from voting or running for office in the USA until 1920.    Amazingly, Finland was the first country in the world to give women the right to vote and run for office – in 1907.   One can only imagine the fundamental belief system in place that made it a long uphill battle to earn the right to vote….in a democracy.

Freedom is an elusive thing, which quickly gets refined and reduced for the good of all.   Basic laws that help make things work like traffic rules, ownership of land (and the related rules about how free someone else is to just go ahead and use your land), and intellectual property rights.    We can’t have complete and total freedom without also giving up some level of order, stability and productivity as a society.

We have a country filled with patriots, willing to die to support our beliefs and our way of life.   We’re often willing to die for those same beliefs in other countries.   Traveling throughout Western Europe, the graveyards with hundreds of thousands of U.S. military men and women is a sobering and very recent reminder of the strength of our belief in freedom.

A great team puts their team goal ahead of those of each individual player, and a great country is much the same.   They keep working to get better, communicate well, and everyone participates.   And there lies the one thing I’d change in America.  Participation.

Some days it feels that people have an infinite amount of time and energy to complain and critique, and frankly whine about things they feel aren’t good about our country.    And yet if you ask minorities and women, things are better than 1869, or 1919.  Better because a lot of people stepped up and took part in effecting peaceful change.   So how do we increase the 50-60% turnout in major federal elections and the disappointing <30% in most local elections?   Make a law.

Australia enjoys a 95% voter turnout.  They simply made it a law with a $15 fine if you don’t show up.  A citizen doesn’t actually have to vote, but just register to vote and show up to the polls.

Can we increase participation in a democracy based on a philosophy of basic rights and aspire to freedom by taking away the freedom to not participate?   It works in Australia and Belgium, and there are a string of examples where we already give up some freedom for a lot less.

Participate to earn freedom.   Compel people to engage.   Keep improving.   That’s what I hope for on Independence Day 2010.

This week I’ve had the pleasure of being with family and friend in beautiful Santa Rosa Beach (near Destin) Florida.
Everything from the 18 hour drive from Michigan to the mornings on the beach finding various items washed up at sunrise ( a hard-hat one day, kayak paddles the next) to hearing the raccoons frolicking outside at night have been fantastic.
We enjoyed dinner last night and while waiting for our table it struck me what a great crowd was there from all over the midwest and southern states. People were enjoying time together – many having decided to drive and share a rental vs. fly to perhaps a fancier place or a guaranteed warm spring break. Families were everywhere – and in that environment I was struck with how hopeful we should be as a country.
I do believe we need to move forward – maturing as a culture. I’ve felt for some time the American evolution has us somewhere in the late potty training phase – we’ve realized it’s not cool to sit in our own waste and once that realization occurs we can move forward. I’m not sure everyone is there yet, but I’m hopeful….always hopeful!
How do we keep it going?
Pay it forward – but at a higher level than small gestures of kindness. Let’s grab this country and give so many examples of people and families helping other people and families that it becomes an expectation vs. a nice occasional sight.
Nothing stops us from redesigning our lives to have a positive impact – from using less energy and creating better sources of it to less trash. How about less stuff in the first place and shifting value back to the person, the family, the community and the environment. Some shared goals that we put at a premium to our own selfish ambitions could be a great start.

It’s simple. Not easy, but simple.

Recently I read that Tiger Woods was returning to golf.   I’m glad, as he is an amazing talented golfer and he makes golf interesting.  But Tiger apparently made some really bad choices – the kind that reveal much of the character of the person making them.   His reputation, and the respect people have for him will likely never recover.

I remember a recent President, stoically staring into the camera, speaking to his country and saying “I did not have sex with that woman”.    I once had a colleague tell me they would support a decision 100% and later learned they walked out of the room and broke their promise.    It sometimes feels like character rarely survives success.

Character was defined to me as the ability of a person to continue forward to overcome a challenge even after the initial enthusiasm wears off.  Abraham Lincoln once said, “Character is like a tree and reputation like its shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing.”

Sadly, across America many people place a higher importance on the value of a person’s assets than they do on the value of their character.     Making money is seen as success rather than making and keeping promises.    Athletes who can commit a foul and not get caught are seen as ‘playing the game’ vs. cheating.  

Building character is about telling the truth.  It’s about making smart promises and keeping them simply because you made that promise.  Character means not worrying who might know – because you know yourself what is right.

What we need now is for people to have the courage to expect more of each other, to exhibit some character, and to place value on people and their character.    And maybe, celebrate those who are quietly setting great examples for us – the ones with real character.

Today a friend received a note with a tone of condemnation.    She had been interviewed by a newspaper, and while her story was interesting and she was quoted a number of times – but her race didn’t come through.   Rather than a pat on the back, she was accused for somehow not making her racial heritage a central theme of her story.

All we are is the combination of our heritage, our preferences, our beliefs and our character as reflected in how we live our lives.   Hopefully tough times bring out more of the best than the worst in us.  And the best is when we celebrate what makes us unique, essential and individual.

The Olympics provide real excitement and drama matched by few events.   The passion, pain and sacrifice people make to reach the Olympics, the pressure of representing your Country and the intensity of the overall event makes this the premier event for many of the events.     Competitors in the luge or biathalon usually are off somewhere with a few spectators – but in the Olympics they are being seen by the world.

Watching the various events, it strikes me that a pure sport doesn’t need judges.  While figure skating or the mogul skiing are clearly difficult and require amazing levels of talent, for me they simply don’t stand up against cross country skiing or speed skating as sports.   If you get a score for style, or have judges rather then referees, then we need a new description for the activity.   The first person across the line in speed skating wins – no worries about how it looked.   Downhill ski racers must ski the course successfully but their form in the air really makes no difference if they are the fastest.

I love the half pipe snowboard events, but while they require incredible skill, they also require very subjective scoring by a panel of judges to decide the winner.   For me, that isn’t sport, it’s a judged activity and should be in a separate category.    Having watched figure skating for years, the consistent scoring of skaters by the judges from their home countries is evidence that somehow it just doesn’t work as a clear win or lose sport.

Consider a football game where a touchdown counted 3 points for the score, and 3 points for style by a panel of judges.    How about a marathon where the person who crossed the finish line first didn’t win because they ran with a limp the last mile?   If you have judges, then it’s not a sport.   It’s a judged activity.

Today is the last full day of TED 2010.  A speaker just raised the issue of how to describe TED to people in various situations who had different levels of interest.
My participation in TED 2009 Palm Springs, and TED India left me feeling a strangely personal connection to the conference unlike any other I’ve attended.  
Perhaps it is the genius, talent, and amazing intellect on display.   Or maybe the artistic prowess shared with us in music, dance, and other displays of creativity.
But what I’ve come to believe is that TED brings out our hope, reminds us of our dreams, our mortality and how much joy there can be in taking on very big challenges.   For me TED is a reboot of my motivation, a first meeting of people who have become my friends, and a reminder that anything is possible. 
If you ever get the chance to join a TED conference….take it.

I’m all for positive thinking, keeping things upbeat and making lemons out of lemonade.   But for just this moment I feel the need to rant…just a bit.

The lowlight of every day for me is starting my company provided pc, which is a tablet pc running windows.  It takes anywhere from 3-15 minutes to completely start up, and has (based on the past 20 times) about a 50% failure rate where it needs to be restarted.

I have to admit, I’m unfaithful to the pc world.  For years I’m using all apple at home.  My family is not a high performance computing family – but we do the normal email, searches, spreadsheets, presentations and some very light gaming.   For us, the apple system just works.   Prior to apple, my evenings were often filled with viruses, driver problems, the blue screen of death and random errors announced in code no one could understand – often even the help desk of the pc makers or MS themselves.

I waste about 20 minutes a day – time it takes pc’s to start up and shut down which is longer than my mac.   100 minutes per week or 5000 minutes per year.   I hate those 5000 minutes.

What’s the good news?   I can do most of my work at home on my mac, leaving the pc either at the office or in my backpack.   Sigh…now back to my pc.