I wrote a few months back about some intriguing research on the power of gratitude, showing that people who kept “gratitude journals,” (keeping track of the good things that happen to them and things that they appreciate in life) not only reported better physical and mental health, their partners also noticed it as well (including reports that they slept better). A new study shows that the positive effect of gratitude on signs of well-being such as mastery, relationships with others, and self-acceptance happen over and above personality factors. Similar to the study of gratitude journals, this study by Alex Wood and his colleagues suggests, that regardless of one’s personality, taking time to notice and appreciate the good things in life can help all of us. This strikes as me as an especially important finding given the difficult times.
Here is the source and the abstract for those of you who want to know more:
Category: Entrepreneurs
An Interview with FedEx CEO Fred Smith
Frederick W. Smith, the founder, president, chairman and CEO of FedEx, built the first overnight express delivery company in the world, starting in 1971. Today, FedEx, based in Memphis, has service in more than 220 countries and territories.
Like most other businesses, FedEx is encountering economic turmoil and is operating by Smith’s belt-tightening orders. He cut his own salary by 20 percent.
Legend has it that Smith, 64, outlined his concept for FedEx in a paper in an economics class at Yale University for which he earned a C. (He corrects the record in this interview.) At Yale, he was a friend and fraternity brother of former President George W. Bush, to whom he believes history ultimately will be more kind.
In the Marine Corps in Vietnam, Smith received the Silver Star, the Bronze Star and two Purple Hearts as a platoon leader and forward air controller. It was there that he observed military procurement and delivery procedures and thought he could improve on them.
Smith is unwavering in his belief that U.S. corporate tax policy must change, but practical enough to know that the new administration and Congress will not go along with the idea. He still believes one aspect could be enacted – accelerating the expensing of capital investment that would put money into corporate hands sooner.
Chuck Taylor
Charles Hollis “Chuck” Taylor looked down at his shoes and saw opportunity.
His Spaulding basketball sneakers were killing his feet.
Tired of the pain, the player hobbled into Converse Rubber Co. in 1921 and told owner Marquis Converse what he wanted — a sneaker with a higher ankle and a patch for better support, and a rubber sole with treads that made for a better grip for faster running and breaks.
Converse agreed to cobble one together. The upgraded All-Star shoe was born.
Over the next half-century, Taylor almost single-handedly established the Converse All-Star as the most popular athletic shoe ever.
Known as Chucks in tribute to Taylor, the shoes sold 750 million pairs before Converse was bought by Nike in 2003.
Taylor didn’t just build a brand. He also changed the face of basketball through integration, boosted the careers of some of the game’s most legendary coaches and helped make roundball one of the most popular sports in the world, notes Abraham Aamidor, author of “Chuck Taylor: Converse All Star.”
A Drive in the Tesla Roadster
What transpires in the next 2 seconds is the heart and soul, the essence and spirit, of the Roadster. This is the trick this one-trick pony does better than perhaps any sports car on Earth. We in the business call it “rolling acceleration.”
At about 20 mph I nail the go pedal, and the power electronics module summons a ferocious torrent of amps, energizing the windings of the 375-volt AC-induction motor. Instantly — I mean right now, like, what the heck hit me? — the motor’s 276 pound-feet of torque is converted to dumbfounding acceleration. Total number of moving parts: one.
Street lights streak past me like tracer bullets. My little mental circuits go snap-pop with the thrust. God has grabbed me by the jockstrap and fired me off his thumb, rubber band-style. Wow.
Meanwhile, over in the Porsche, 19th-century mechanical forces are taking their own sweet time. The driver has to clutch, shift to a lower gear, and de-clutch — a regime that takes about half a second if he’s talented. When he pushes on the accelerator pedal, the throttles in the Porsche’s throat open, the fuel injectors start hosing down the cylinders with high-test, and the variable-angle cams rotate to maximize intake-valve duration. The flashing fire in the cylinders can now apply its maximum force to the pistons.
Bangle Bids Adieu
When it comes time to chart designer Chris Bangle’s contribution to the BMW brand’s aesthetic, few pundits will praise his pulchritudinous perversion of pistonhead passion, or thank him for the aesthetic affectations for which BMW is now known. In other words, the “Bangle Butt” will be Chris’ lasting legacy. Of course, this is also the man who removed the words “flame surfacing” from art school and placed them on the tip of his detractors’ tongues. That and Axis of White Power. (Oh! How we laughed!) Equally improbably, the Buckeye State native helped the expression “Dame Edna glasses” cross into the automotive lexicon. Yup. It’s been a wild ride. Literally.
CAR:
BMW design boss Chris Bangle is to leave the car industry, it was announced today. In a statement, BMW said Bangle was quitting ‘to pursue his own design-related endeavors beyond the auto industry.’
Bangle, 52, was the architect of the often controversial flame surfacing look that transformed BMW design from the Russian doll mentality of the 1990s to the edgy – some would say radical and divisive – styling of today.
The cars Bangle spannered
The outgoing design chief has overseen the launch of the current 1-, 3-, 5- and 7-series saloons and hatchbacks, as well as the raft of niche models that have seen BMW’s model range explode in recent years: the Z3, Z4, Z8, X3, X5, X6 and 6-series were all conceived on his watch.
Bangle grew up in Wausau, WI.
I give him a great deal of credit for dramatically changing what is often a very conservative business: car design.
Failure: The Secret to Success
The Checklist
he damage that the human body can survive these days is as awesome as it is horrible: crushing, burning, bombing, a burst blood vessel in the brain, a ruptured colon, a massive heart attack, rampaging infection. These conditions had once been uniformly fatal. Now survival is commonplace, and a large part of the credit goes to the irreplaceable component of medicine known as intensive care.
It’s an opaque term. Specialists in the field prefer to call what they do “critical care,” but that doesn’t exactly clarify matters. The non-medical term “life support” gets us closer. Intensive-care units take artificial control of failing bodies.Typically, this involves a panoply of technology—a mechanical ventilator and perhaps a tracheostomy tube if the lungs have failed, an aortic balloon pump if the heart has given out, a dialysis machine if the kidneys don’t work. When you are unconscious and can’t eat, silicone tubing can be surgically inserted into the stomach or intestines for formula feeding. If the intestines are too damaged, solutions of amino acids, fatty acids, and glucose can be infused directly into the bloodstream.
The difficulties of life support are considerable. Reviving a drowning victim, for example, is rarely as easy as it looks on television, where a few chest compressions and some mouth-to-mouth resuscitation always seem to bring someone with waterlogged lungs and a stilled heart coughing and sputtering back to life. Consider a case report in The Annals of Thoracic Surgery of a three-year-old girl who fell into an icy fishpond in a small Austrian town in the Alps. She was lost beneath the surface for thirty minutes before her parents found her on the pond bottom and pulled her up. Following instructions from an emergency physician on the phone, they began cardiopulmonary resuscitation. A rescue team arrived eight minutes later. The girl had a body temperature of sixty-six degrees, and no pulse. Her pupils were dilated and did not react to light, indicating that her brain was no longer working.
Jason Bentley Takes over Morning Becomes Eclectic
One of the biggest issues on listeners’ minds is the direction you’ll take KCRW. They wonder how much like Nic Hartcourt you’ll be and how your electronic influences will affect the morning slot. What say you?
My responsibility in this position is to integrate the influences of all the Music Directors before me, and take it to another place altogether–which means all genres of music from all over the world.Besides a reverence of Joe Strummer and The Clash and a good ear for underground bands that could appeal to a wider audience, I don’t have that much in common with Nic musically. Nic’s been great at the helm of MBE, but I’m going to bring my own music experience to the program with an appreciation of where it’s been. Yes, that does mean an affinity for Electronic music and global club culture, but that’s not all and I certainly will consider what works best during the morning hours.
Will you start focusing locally?
I feel like I do already to a great extent. I’ve been producing events locally for nearly two decades. I’m very involved in the LA scene, and KCRW is totally invested in local music, while at the same time actively making connections abroad. Personally, Silversun Pickups and Morgan Page are among my favorite local artists.
What considerations and thoughts will go into who you choose to play in studio?
Mostly looking to mix it up – everything from Afrobeat to Neo Soul and quirky Folk.
Oregon Gears Up For Chinese Auto Imports
Last week, Oregon Governor Ted Kulongoski clinched a deal to bring Nissan’s pure-electric cars to his state. Then, he went on to Shenzen, China. “At BYD Auto Co., China’s fast-growing automotive star, a plug-in electric hybrid sedan is just weeks from meeting millions of Chinese consumers” writes the Oregonian. “The F3DM, which runs up to 80 miles on a single charge and packs a 7-gallon tank, will probably launch in the United States by 2010.” The Governor wants it to be built in Oregon. On Friday, he met with BYD President Wang Chuanfu. On a 10-day business trip through Asia, Kulongoski had laid out his vision to automakers in Japan and China: Electric charging stations every 60 miles along interstates. Tax incentives for Oregonians to buy electric cars. Tax bonuses for drivers to build car chargers in their garages. And, unspoken, but you can bet on it: generous incentives for those who bring their factories to Oregon. Then, Kulongoski has guanxi, connections, indispensable for a successful Chinese deal…
Fordlandia
The album has a theme, although it’s more loose and open to interpretation than on my last album, IBM 1401, a User’s Manual.
One of the two main threads running through it is this idea of failed utopia, as represented by the “Fordlândia” title – the story of the rubber plantation Henry Ford established in the Amazon in the 1920’s, and his dreams of creating an idealized American town in the middle of the jungle complete with white picket fences, hamburgers and alcohol prohibition. The project – started because of the high price Ford had to pay for the rubber necessary for his cars’ tyres – failed, of course, as the indigenous workers soon rioted against the alien conditions. It reminded me of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, this doomed attempt at taming the heart of darkness. The remains of the town are still there today. The image of the Amazon forest slowly and surely reclaiming the ruins of Fordlândia is the one that gave spark to this album. For the structure and themes of the album I was influenced by the films of Alejandro Jodorowsky, Herzog and Kenneth Anger. I was interested in a kind of poetic juxtaposition and an alchemical fusion of themes and ideas, which I feel is similar to the way Anger uses montage as an alchemical technique – as a way of casting a spell. During the making of the album, I also had in mind the Andre Breton quote about convulsive beauty, which he saw in the image of “an abandoned locomotive overgrown by luxurious vegetation”. There is a strong connection to the IBM 1401 album in terms of both thematic and musical ideas and I see the two albums as belonging to a series of works.
Fascinating and quite pleasant. Clusty Search: Fordlandia.