Run Family Like Michael Corleone
Hint # 1. Have exacting focus on the welfare and success of everyone you care about.
No one else will. Be ambitious and ruthless in this goal. Being an asshole is a tool like any other. Use it. This will probably involve making morally ambiguous choices. You will probably have regrets.
Be that person to the world, because you have to. But unlike Corleone, maintain a firewall. Be another, worthy person to those you care about. Humble, kind, modest, giving, patient. Good. You will have to struggle with those within the group who can’t separate the external persona from the internal. But that’s on them.
Ignoring Godfather III, Corleone wasn’t able to navigate this line. It takes more will- and brainpower than being a sociopath. Why? Because it is honest. You want a family, and you want to be successful. You aren’t repressing either impulse. The rewards are real and much more meaningful: Strong relationships, a tribe, and plenty of smiles along the way. A lasting contribution to a better future.
On Life Arcs
There are hints in historic precedent and fictional construct as to who you could be, what stories your life arc may echo, shoulders you can rely on and shadows you should walk in.
Emulating will get you some of the way. Subconscious reconciling of your own experience and mythology will do the brunt of the work. But explicitly selecting a few models helps you make better decisions everyday.
Review – Black Market Billions: How Organized Retail Crime Funds Global Terrorists
This book is probably what happens when you write a book about something interesting – organized retail crime (ORC) – but your agent/publisher wants you to connect it to a bigger market – global terrorism. The whole thing suffers.
This would have been a stronger book had it just focused on ORC (those sections are well researched and communicated), but the terror components come off as an afterthought of “oh, and it fuels terrorism.”
The author is clearly out of her element, and it shows: Repeated assertions of links between ORC and terror that go un- or vaguely substantiated. Does the link exist? Of course. But she didn’t find it or explore it in a meaningful way.
You’re better off reading Gilman, Neuwirth, Naim, Glenny.
Reading + Listening
I listen to audiobooks of tomes I won’t be notating extensively. (Boyd said that if you didn’t write more than what was on the page in the margins, you weren’t reading closely enough.) I listen at 2x speed, perhaps the coolest feature on my aging iPod. I can kill a book a week on top of what I’m reading – while walking, showering, heading to bed, playing video games. Otherwise each of these things bores me to no end.
But sometimes, as when listening to this biography of Marx, I find myself wanting to annotate. Which means I have to scrounge up a copy of the book (stupid that a PDF does not come with every audiobook), find the right page, then mark it up. Or just write notes in a separate (or physical) document, that will forever remain untethered from the text itself.
A cool trend on the iPad is that the audio is paired with the text. You can read along but also zone out and listen. It seems to be primarily geared towards children’s books, but I’d use this now. Pause and markup. Pick up listening from wherever the text is. Export notes.
We’re not there yet on the voice software that tries to read text locally on an ad-hoc basis, or even Siri. The inflections are jarring. When you put out a book, just produce audiobooks using actors trying to make it. Podcast-ify the whole thing. At home, with a mic and a voice for radio, for a couple hundred bucks.
A side note: I read a lot as a kid. Lots. My vocabulary – the words I knew and understood within and outside of context – was huge. I had no idea how to pronounce them. Still, once in a while, I’ll find myself stumbling over a word, equally surprising myself and whoever I’m having a conversation with. That’s something read-along books will cure for future generations. And that’s very cool.
On Money
I don’t make much money. I haven’t for a while. I’m OK with that.It only bothers me when I’m at a dinner party I don’t want to be at and someone confuses immediate liquidity with success.
Success isn’t about now. It’s about trajectory. If you’ve got a Fortune 500 brand name and a 50k job right out of school, but your trajectory has you… older and better paid at 55, that’s not admirable. That’s linear. Boring. Dependent.
Some facts. The average CEO is 55. I have my entire current lifespan to get there. Most successful entrepreneurs are older than 30 and on their second or third enterprises.
I make enough to where I can provide someone I care about with a nice little secure house, great fresh food everyday, and sustain hobbies and passions and experiments.
Simply, I don’t make much money. I haven’t for a while. I’m OK with that. It’s an aspect of success I’ve punted on, even going so far as turning down lucrative gigs. Instead, I work and talk to and share with exceedingly smart people on the issues of our time.
Why? I’m young. I’m hungry. Unevenness helps me think, tinker, build. Money? That’s later.