New Year's Eve reflection on "Zen"

Wonder:

Life is a marvel and a mystery.  To watch a sunset or the play of light on a leaf, to experience the taste of our food or the movements of our bodies is to be in the presence of a mystery.  Yet most of us have become so numb that we miss what is happening around and within us.

Every child is full of simple wonder.  How have we become so numb?  Part of this numbing is the result of having shut down from past psychological pain, and part is a function of the culture in which we live.  In our efforts to protect ourselves from physical and emotional pain, we shut down to life and shut out the wonder of it. 

Today we are bombarded with more information than we can possibly process.  We often must fit ourselves into someone else's schedule and are constantly rushing about, without taking the time to really experience our own bodies or life around us.  How marvelous to return to the simplicity of the child, to once again see and appreciate the joys and mysteries of this life.  The wonder is all around us.

Letting Go:

We can speak of letting go in two respects: letting go in the moment and a deeper letting go, or surrender, of the ego.  On a deeper level, letting go means releasing attachment to the ego.  The life of Zen requires giving up the notion that the desires of our egos will ever make us happy.  In Buddhism, cravings are considered to be the origin of all human suffering.

In truth, letting go of the ego and letting go of struggle are one and the same.  When we give up the struggle to prove that we are worthy of love or approval, the struggle to justify our existence, the struggle to hold onto limited benefits and concepts of how things should be -- we free ourselves to enjoy life as it is.

Mindfulness:

When asked, "What is Zen?" a master replied:  "Attention! Attention! Attention!" 

Mindfulness is nothing more or less than the practice of attention.  Zen wants us to wake from the sleepwalk of the routine and automatic -- to bring full attention to our walking and talking, hearing and breathing, eating and working, indeed, to every aspect of our lives.

Zen recognizes that awareness transforms experience.  There is no right or wrong way of doing things; there is only being more or less conscious.  In the practice of mindfulness, the goal is not to correct ourselves but to become more fully conscious of ourselves.

All Too Human...

December 18, 2011


Dear Chelle-chelle,

If you wonder why sometimes you are so sentimental, stop wondering -- it's from your Mother!

Do you remember when we had our family vacation at Yosemite in the summer of 2004?  That's the first time we went to Reno and I had my job interview with Alere during that trip.  At Yosemite, I bought a CD album called "Acoustic Garden."  I loved it so much that when I first moved to Reno in the winter of 2004, I played that CD in my car every day.  It made me so sad every time I listened to it, as it brought me nothing but loneliness in the dark winter... Starting summer of 2005, I finally decided to stop listening to it because the sadness it brought to me was pretty enormous.

Well, seven years later, today, I am playing the CD again, and it made cry...  Once again, it brought me back to that dark winter when I did not know anyone in Reno.  Chelle, thinking back, I couldn't understand where I got the guts to go so far away for a job.  I don't regret it, but I have trouble understanding it.  Sometimes I love my fearless youth and my courage -- I just didn't realize how significant it was at the time. Think about it, Chelle, how on earth could I come to America all by myself in my early 20s?  What was I thinking?  I really, truly, literally gave up EVERYTHING I had back in China and came here from nowhere as nobody...

Chelle, sometimes it's "the road less traveled" that leads us to a whole new world.  Try to take that road when you are young, because as you grow older, you will have more concerns, more worries and more hesitation, which will undoubtedly limit your ability to charge ahead to reach your own special stars.

Maybe Mama is getting old!!  Tomorrow seems to be so challenging.  Taking a job 7 miles away from our house seems to be more difficult than going to Reno...  Well, for 20+ years working in this country, Alere is the place where I have worked the longest, so hope you understand the stress here.  Sometimes I tell myself to detach from everything, as I don't need all the baggage to drag me down.  However, sometimes I think because we are human, maybe it's okay to be sentimental, maybe it's okay to look back, stop and reflect, maybe it's okay to be sad and to cry...  Sometimes our emotions may enrich us and allow us to cherish every little stop on our journey.

Yeah, tomorrow, I will tell Alere that I am leaving...

Love,

Mom

Steve Jobs (Legacy)

Yeah, I know it sounds crazy... but I did finish reading this book the 2nd time. It still has not changed my obsession about him!!  Here is Steve Jobs's legacy I extracted from the book.

Legacy

 

The Brightest Heaven of Invention

 

His personality was reflected in the products he created.  Just as the core of Apple’s philosophy, from the original Macintosh in 1984 to the iPad a generation later, was the end-to-end integration of hardware and software, so too was it the case of Steve Jobs:  His passion, perfectionism, demons, desires, artistry, devilry, and obsession for control were integrally connected to his approach to business and the products that resulted. 

 

The unified field theory that ties together Jobs’s personality and products begins with his most salient trait: his intensity.  This intensity encouraged a binary view of the world.  Colleagues referred to the hero/shithead dichotomy.  You were either one or the other, sometimes on the same day.  The same was true of products, ideas, even food:  Something was either “the best thing ever,” or it was shitty, brain-dead, inedible. 

 

His quest for perfection led to his compulsion for Apple to have end-to-end control of every product that it made.  He got hives, or worse, when contemplating great Apple software running on another company’s crappy hardware, and he likewise was allergic to the thought of unapproved apps or content polluting the perfection of an Apple device.  This ability to integrate hardware and software and content into one unified system enable him to impose simplicity.  The astronomer Johannes Kepler declared that “nature loves simplicity and unity.” So did Steve Jobs.

 

In the early 2000s Jobs’s insistence on end-to-end integration gave Apple an advantage in developing a digital hub strategy, which allowed your desktop computer to link seamlessly with a variety of portable devices.  This strategy worked.  In May 2000, Apple’s market value was one-twentieth that of Microsoft.  In May 2010 Apple surpassed Microsoft as the world’s most valuable technology company, and by September 2011 it was worth 70% more than Microsoft.

 

Jobs’s intensity was also evident in his ability to focus.  He would set priorities, aim his laser attention on them, and filter out distractions.  If something engaged him, he was relentless.  But if he did not want to deal with something – a legal annoyance, a business issue, his cancer diagnosis, a family tug – he would resolutely ignore it.  The focus allowed him to say no.

 

He attributed his ability to focus and his love of simplicity to his Zen training.  It honed his appreciation for intuition, showed him how to filter out anything that was distracting or unnecessary, and nurtured in him an aesthetic based on minimalism.

 

Unfortunately his Zen training never quite produced in him a Zen-like calm or inner serenity, and that too is part of his legacy.  He was often tightly coiled and impatient, traits he made no effort to hide.  Most people have a regulator between their mind and mouth that modulates their brutish sentiment and spikiest impulses.  Not Jobs.  He made a point of being brutally honest.  “My job is to say when something sucks rather than sugarcoat it,” he said.  This made him charismatic and inspiring, yet also, to use the technical term, an ass-hole at times.

 

Was he smart?  No, not exceptionally.  Instead, he was a genius.  His imaginative leaps were instinctive, unexpected, and at times magical.  He was, indeed, an example of what the mathematician Mark Kac called a magician genius, someone whose insights come out of the blue and require intuition more than mental processing power.

 

Steve Jobs thus became the greatest business executive of our era, the one most certain to be remembered a century from now.  History will place him in the pantheon right next to Edison and Ford.  More than anyone else of his time, he made products that were completely innovative, combining the power of poetry and processors.  With a ferocity that could make working with him as unsettling as it was inspiring, he also built the world’s most creative company.  And he was able to infuse into its DNA the design sensibilities, perfectionism, and imagination that make it likely to be, even decades from now, the company that thrives best at the intersection of artistry and technology.

 

 

Steve Job’s legacy in his own words…

 

My passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products.  Everything else was secondary.  Some people say, “give the customers what they want.”  But that’s not my approach.  Our job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do.  Henry Ford once said, “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me ‘A faster horse!’”  People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.  That’s why I never rely on market research.  Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.

 

Edwin Land of Polaroid talked about the intersection of the humanity and science.  I like that intersection.  There’s something magical about that place.  There are a lot of people innovating, and that’s not the main distinction of my career.  The reason Apple resonates with people is that there’s a deep current of humanity in our innovation. 

 

It’s easy to throw stones at Microsoft.  They’ve clearly fallen from their dominance.  They have become mostly irrelevant.  And yet I appreciate what they did and how hard it was.  They were very good at the business side of things.  But they were never as ambitious product-wise as they should have been.  Microsoft never had the humanities and liberal arts in its DNA.  Even when they saw the Mac, they couldn’t copy it well.  They totally didn’t get it.

 

You always have to keep pushing to innovate.  Bob Dylan could have sung protest songs forever and probably made a lot of money, but he didn’t.  He had to move on, and when he did, by going electronic in 1965, he alienated a lot of people.  His 1966 Europe tour was his greatest.  The Beatles were the same way.  They kept evolving, moving, refining their art.  That’s what I’ve always tried to do – keep moving.  Otherwise, as Dylan says, if you are not busy being born, you’re busy dying.