Second Drafts

Weight, Weight, Don't Tell Me

Now that we're on the backside of Thanksgiving but still have Christmas and New Year's up ahead, I'm toying with an idea/practice that I hope will stick. It's new, fresh, and possibly life-changing.

Yes, though I hate it, I'm thinking of exercising...in the evening...at home...a couple times a month...maybe even a few times a week.

I first took notice of my weight (at least enough to write about it) around my mid-thirties when I began to toe the (gasp) 200-pound line. Now twenty pounds beyond that, it's probably time to revisit the topic.

Actually, I need to do more than revisit it; I need to do something about it. So, I'm starting a month earlier than the normal New Year's resolution crowd by exercising three times a week on a treadmill at night.

Why at night? 1) To keep me from falling asleep at 9 p.m. and get more than a page of a book read before bed, and 2) because the morning and afternoon have never worked for me in the past. In other words, this is my last shot. After this, I'm out of ideas.

Exercise always goes better with better eating habits, but I'll let the former lead me into the latter if it so chooses. Regardless, getting the blood pumping (and a few pounds dropping) would be a good thing going into 2012.

As the beer commercials say, "Here we go!"

Black Friday Haiku

Black Friday masses
Discounted idol worship
Redeemed by retail?

Review: Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

"He was an enlightened being who was cruel.
That's a strange combination."
Chrisann Brennan (Steve Jobs's first girlfriend
and mother of his first child, Lisa)

At last count, the Dunham family has accumulated 10 Apple products: 1 iMac desktop, 2 laptops (Pro and PowerBook G4), 1 iPad, 2 iPhones, 1 iTouch, and 3 iPods (2 Nanos and 1 Shuffle). One could say we've drunk the Apple Kool-Aid to the dregs: we love the products, have little to no trouble with them (other than sharing), and are big Apple advocates/evangelists (as of this Thanksgiving, we'll have convinced and equipped both sets of grandparents to go Mac).

Indeed, we meet the criteria for membership in the so-called Apple Cult, but this didn't make reading Walter Isaacson's painfully honest 600-page biography of Apple's founder, Steve Jobs, any easier. Even as I write this (on my MacBook Pro), I wonder to what degree my own desire for digital enlightement supported the cruelty that produced it.

Though the first 50 pages of Isaacson's book seem clunky (especially when compared with his other biographical works like Benjamin Franklin and Einstein), part of this had to do with the fact that I was reading a completed biography of a man who had just died two months previous (Jobs had asked Isaacson several years earlier to start work on his biography when he was diganosed with pancreatic cancer). For this reason - combined with the fact that forty years of my life had overlapped with much of Jobs's work during his 56 years - it was a different experience than reading about more historical personalities who lived and died 200, 100, or even 50 years previous.

But examples of Jobs's harsh leadership style didn't help, either:

"(Jobs) was flying high, but this did not serve to make him more mellow. Indeed there was a memorable dispaly of his brutal honesty when he stood in front of the combined Lisa and Macintosh teams to describe how they would be merged. His Macitosh group leaders would get all of the top positions, he said, and a quarter of the Lisa staff would be laid off. 'You guys failed,' he said, looking directly at those who had worked on the Lisa. 'You're a B team. B players. Too many people here are B or C players, so today we are releasing some of you to have the opportunity to work at our sister companies here in the valley.'

Bill Atkinson, who had worked on both teams, thought it was not only callous, but unfair. 'These people had worked really hard and were brilliant engineers,' he said. But Jobs had latched onto what he believed was a key management lesson from his Macintosh experience. You have to be ruthless if you want to build a team of A players. 'It's too easy, as a team grows, to put up with a few B players, and they then attract a few more B players, and soon you will even have some C players,' he recalled. 'The Macintosh experience taught me that A players like to work only with other A players, which means you can't indulge B players.'" (p. 181)

Here's another recollection - same song, different verse:

"Right after he came back from his operation, he didn't do the humilation bit as much,' (chief software engineer Avadis 'Avie') Tevanian recalled. 'If he was displeased, he might scream and get hopping mad and use expletives, but he wouldn't do it in a way that would totally destory the person he was talking to. It was just his way to get the person to do a better job.' Tevananian reflected for a moment as he said this, then added a caveat: 'Unless he thought someone was really bad and had to go, which happened every once in a while.' Eventually, however, the rough edges returned." (p. 461)

It was interesting how Jobs's Zen Buddhist beliefs informed (or didn't) his life. Isaacson records Jobs' estranged daughter, Lisa (for whom his first computer was named), asking Jobs why he was so preoccupied with creating great material products when Buddhism does not recognize material things as being real or mattering? Jobs was quiet and never answered the question, but one could tell the inconsistency bothered him.

Though Jobs did not necessarily create anything completely "new" in the digital world (author Malcolm Gladwell asserts as much in the New Yorker a few weeks ago in his article, "The Tweaker: The Real Genius of Steve Jobs"), Jobs did redesign average products and redesign entire industries with his drive. In the last chapter of the book, Isaacson lists Jobs's contribution over three decades (some of his descriptions below could be given somewhat to hyperbole):

• The Apple II, which took (Steve) Wozniak's circuit board and turned it into the first personal computer that was not just for hobbyists.
• The Macintosh, which begat the home computer revolution and popularized graphical user interfaces.
• Toy Story and other Pixar blockbusters which opened up the miracles of digital animation.
• Apple stores, which reinvented the role of a store in defining a brand.
• The iPod, which changed the way we consume music.
• The iTunes Store, which saved the music industry.
• The iPhone, which turned mobile phones into music, photography, video, email, and web devices.
• The App Store, which spanwed a new content-creation industry.
• The iPad, which launched tablet computing and offered a platform for digital newspapers, magazines, books, and videos.
• iCloud, which demoted the computer from its central role in managing our content and let all of our devices sync seamlessly.
• And Apple itself, which Jobs considered his greatest creation, a place where imagination was nurtured, applied, and executed in ways so creative that it became the most valuable company on earth.

To Isaacson's (and Jobs's) credit, the book is as honest as one might hope for in a biography. Isaacson does a good job drawing out the themes that play through Jobs's life: his life-long insecurity at having been given up for adoption as a newborn; his passion for minimalist, beautiful design; his philosophy that closed platforms make for ultimately better user experiences than open ones (Microsoft); and his belief that people don't know what they want until they see it (or in Jobs's mind, until he shows it to them).

While I've always thought of Jobs as the last of a dying breed of innovative entrepreneuers (as so wonderfully - if a bit expletively - captured in this brilliant news clip in The Onion), I see with new eyes what the price of progress actually was at Apple. Was it worth it? Many of those interviewed seemed to believe so, but more than a few of these same people also seemed relieved that Steve Jobs was gone.

iSad.

Gone in 60 Minutes

Much to my delight, Daylight Saving Time ends at 2 a.m. on Sunday, which means we "fall back" one hour and return to "standard" time. Perhaps you share my same thought: it will really be nice to get up with daylight.

Lewis Mumford, in his 1934 book, Technics and Civilization, argued that the most impacting invention of the past 800 years was not the printing press or electricity, but the clock (created in the 1300s). Mumford explained that the Israelites were "time keepers" who evaluated their days by seasonal watches, the Romans were "time savers" who broke their days up into hours, but we Americans are "time servers," fragmenting our days into minutes and even seconds (and driving ourselves crazy in the process).

Former New York University professor, Neil Postman, quoting Mumford's theory in Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death, summarized our preoccupation this way:

“We learned irreverence toward the sun and seasons, for in a world made up of seconds and minutes, the authority of nature is superseded. The clock introduced a new form of conversation between man and God, in which God appears to have been the loser. Perhaps Moses should have included another commandment: Thou shalt not make mechanical representations of time."

I'm guessing we're all glad for the extra 60 minutes in our weekend, but how do we plan to use them? Perhaps the best use of that extra hour would be confessing our sin of worshipping the clock instead of the Creator. For most of us, eternity is going to come as a shock in terms of time-keeping (i.e. there won't be any), so why not - even for an hour - attempt a sneak preview this weekend? Perhaps we can pray anew the prayer of the psalmist when he wrote:

"So teach us to number our days
that we may get a heart of wisdom."
Psalm 90:12

In light of the extra hour, why not call a family meeting this weekend, evaluate your calendars, and talk about these things with your kids? Let's bring them into this important conversation and talk honestly about our need to resist serving time in order to serve the God who transcends time instead.

Have a good and long(er) weekend.