Bruce Wayne drinks ginger ale at parties to help keep his body and mind in top shape. I don’t have a good source for this, in that there’s no single authoritative reference that I can link to.
There’s also Wikipedia. Just go to the Batman page, and then search in the page for “ginger ale”.
This makes me happy, because I like Batman/Bruce Wayne, and I also like ginger ale. Generally when I’m at a bar, there’s whiskey and a slice of lime involved, but this isn’t a bad idea for ending the night if I have to drive.
Also, Batman used ginger ale as a replacement for champagne. Something worth remembering for NYE. Happy 2012, everyone!
Some people love to focus on their tools — photography comes to mind.
I don’t own any photography equipment that’s nicer than my iPhone. For me, always having a camera on me is much more worthwhile than having a very nice camera and lens set that gets left at home because it’s harder to carry.
I don’t own any film cameras, and I don’t own a DSLR (although I might rent something if I’m going someplace that I expect to be particularly photogenic). I have nothing against nice cameras, and one day I will get one with a good lens so that I can take pictures with a foreground and a background, but until then, I’m content to take pictures like these:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/timrosenblatt/6374538519/in/photostream – Personal emotion. The best zoom lens in the world can’t take a picture of me in SF standing next to my uncle in NY. (Although not buying a fancy lens could fund several trips to NY to visit him, where I can take pictures with my cameraphone)
I like when Ice Cube talks about how Mr & Mrs Eames took advantage of what they had. It’s easy to impress people by working with the best tools and supplies. If they had one-of-a-kind, oversize glass panes custom-produced for the house, it would naturally be impressive to many people. Instead, by using ordinary ingredients, and treating them skillfully, they create something impressive to untrained eyes, and they get respect from pros, because the only thing really used was skill.
You see the same pattern in other areas, food, for example. There’s an episode of Kitchen Nightmares (UK) where Gordon Ramsay trains a chef on how to make oxtail delicious — and he explicitly says that it’s always a sign of a talented chef who can take a plain and ordinary ingredient, and turn it into a delicious meal. In addition, it’s an easy way to make a nice profit: cheap ingredients, impressive results. (There’s a corollary here: it’s not what you’re drinking, it’s who you’re drinking it with)
Or in life…what’s more impressive? The child of an upper class family, educated in private schools, who goes onto become a Senator; or the child who grows up in urban projects, fought and struggled to succeed, and becomes a Senator. There’s a reason we love rags-to-riches stories in America — it ties into our belief that with the right skill and attitude, you can take ordinary inputs and produce extraordinary results.
I’m sure there are many other areas that I’m not thinking of where this pattern repeats.
I don’t mean to knock an investment in tools. Even Gordon Ramsay would have a difficult time trimming a steak if all he had was a butter knife. Or a spork. Ansel Adams would probably notice if you gave him a cheap camera. A good tool has a multiplier effect — it takes the level of skill and makes the result better. But that still means that if you want to see an improvement in results, as long as the tool is “good enough”, you’re better off focusing on improving your skills — the improvement in skills will continue to be multiplied by the good tool, and you’ll have gained something that can’t be taken away.
Or to be lighthearted about it: it’s not what you’ve got, it’s how you use it that counts.
I like this. It’s a classic Zen story, and the video is good.
It reminds me of that speech Will Smith gave. Running & reading. It’s the modern day version of the body-and-mind connection that the Greeks talked about.
He’s got a phrase that he’s used in other interviews: “die on a treadmill”. I’m not sure if I should be proud that I’ve nearly done this.
There’s a story that I heard about Timbaland. Apparently if he’s got work to do but gets invited to a release party, he’ll show up for 15 minutes, shake hands, offer congratulations, and then go back to the studio. That’s how to hustle.
Of course, there’s another side to this, just to keep the universe in check: be careful what you wish for. You can get anything you want, make sure it’s what you really want.
Economists have long been divided by a simple problem. When you go to the movie theater, soda and popcorn costs a totally unfair price compared with other locations. This just tortures economists. At least 1 million man-hours have gone into trying to solve this problem. Economists understand that a first-class ticket on an airplane costs more than coach. They get that one. Its marginal utility. But they cant figure out the movie theater to save their lives.
Here’s the Munger approach to the problem. In the auto world, a car manufacturer will sell a car for $40,000, and charge $200 for the extra gizmo. No one cares about the extra $200 when you’re already spending $40,000. Its insignificant. The movie theater is basically the same thing. People are OK paying that much for a soda after they’ve paid so much for an admission ticket.
Now, psychologists can explain this clearly. Economists can’t for the life of them. Its so simple what happens when you think beyond your trained field. Its amusing to see someone spend 1 million man-hours on something I can solve with my left hand.
- Charlie Munger
I dig the guy. He’s a little angry-cynical, but often right. I wonder about his million man-hour claim on the above problem.
The Waiter Rule also applies to the way people treat hotel maids, mailroom clerks, bellmen and security guards. Au Bon Pain co-founder Ron Shaich, now CEO of Panera Bread, says he was interviewing a candidate for general counsel in St. Louis. She was “sweet” to Shaich but turned “amazingly rude” to someone cleaning the tables, Shaich says. She didn’t get the job.
Shaich says any time candidates are being considered for executive positions at Panera Bread, he asks his assistant, Laura Parisi, how they treated her, because some applicants are “pushy, self-absorbed and rude” to her before she transfers the call to him.
Just about every CEO has a waiter story to tell. Dave Gould, CEO of Witness Systems, experienced the rule firsthand when a waitress dumped a full glass of red wine on the expensive suit of another CEO during a contract negotiation. The victim CEO put her at ease with a joke about not having had time to shower that morning. A few days later, when there was an apparent impasse during negotiations, Gould trusted that CEO to have the character to work out any differences.
As I mentioned, I was at this investment meeting last week. They gave us a bunch of papers, and being a giant nerd, I actually read the stuff. (Hey, I do want to retire, and sooner rather than later)
There were a few things I read that I think are interesting for the long term.
According to the Employee Benefit Research Institute and the US Bureau of the Census, we’re gonna have a lot of old people soon. Yeah, big surprise. Well, let’s put some numbers to it. Here’s the number of people over 65.
1990 – 31.2 million
2000 – 35.0 million
2010 – 40.2 million
2020 – 54.6 million
2030 – 71.5 million
We’re going to nearly double the number of old people in the next 20 years. Buy stock in Ensure. No, really. Buy stock in companies that make stuff for old people. That’s one of the big reasons people are freaking out about health-care. We’re going to need lots more doctors & medical technology, and the price is going up. Apparently, health-care costs are currently increasing 3x faster than the Consumer Price Index.
Oh also, old people? Thanks for taking care of Social Security. And by “taking care”, I mean “can we get some health-care to replace Social Security’s kneecaps after that cool thing you did with the crowbar?” You people just can’t handle credit, can you?
In the early 90s, Sweden had a financial crisis. In the 80s, they had a credit boom which produced high consumer spending and real estate prices. They had a currency crisis, in the 90s, and the boom was reversed. Sounds a bit like now. I think this is what the US is looking to as a model for our current crisis, because Sweden was able to solve their problem in only a few years. They nationalized 22% of banking assets, and then created some private companies to help come up with values for, and sell off the bad assets. I hope it works in our case.
Thanks to Emil Gilliam for the link, and for his very cool looking service, Noted. I’m checking it out as a replacement for Sandy. Ah, Twitter, you sure fucked that one up, didn’t you? Even if you’re going to roll out a replacement, leave it running for the meantime so you don’t lose the momentum!
I’ve been experimenting with the Merlin Mann-popularized tip of appending text to a file from Quicksilver. And it’s cool. But, I like a good chunk of whitespace to separate some things. But how to get the whitespace in there? Hitting return just saves the text and closes the window, and putting a \n just adds those characters to the file.
The trick to getting new lines or blank lines in Quicksilver is to either press control or option while hitting return. Then, you can add empty lines to your heart’s content. It’s awesome.
Also, bonus tip: If you’re in Quicksilver and you want to browse your user directory/desktop, just press ~ after activating Quicksilver. Then you can use the arrow keys to browse starting at your home directory. I didn’t know that this existed until 5 minutes ago, but I want to start using it more.
Bruce Wayne drinks ginger ale at parties to help keep his body and mind in top shape. I don’t have a good source for this, in that there’s no single authoritative reference that I can link to.
