Radical Transparency

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December 17, 2008

Not How You Are Made

Just got this from my sister.  She says it reminds her of Mimi, our granny, who died last January.  It's from The Velveteen Rabbit.

"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."

"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.

"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."

"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"

"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off and your eyes drop out and you get loose in your joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

Wisdom and inspiration come from unexpected places.  Glad Giuls is always on the lookout.

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November 12, 2008

Liar's Poker, Subprime Mortgages, and a Very Big Misunderstanding

Read this article this afternoon.  By Michael Lewis, author of Liar's Poker.  About Wall St., subprime mortgages, and what Lewis hopes is the beginning of the end of what has been an outrageously long period of frustrating and fascinating financial madness.

It's by far the most gripping and well-crafted explanation of bad lending I've ever read.

And I think it's noteworthy for another reason as well.

Lewis writes:

I had no great agenda, apart from telling what I took to be a remarkable tale, but if you got a few drinks in me and then asked what effect I thought my book would have on the world, I might have said something like, "I hope that college students trying to figure out what to do with their lives will read it and decide that it's silly to phony it up and abandon their passions to become financiers." I hoped that some bright kid at, say, Ohio State University who really wanted to be an oceanographer would read my book, spurn the offer from Morgan Stanley, and set out to sea.

Somehow that message failed to come across. Six months after Liar's Poker was published, I was knee-deep in letters from students at Ohio State who wanted to know if I had any other secrets to share about Wall Street. They'd read my book as a how-to manual.

That's crazy.  And scary.  And reason to think long and hard before you publish. 

Or, better, reason to remain engaged with your audience.  Don't tell a story and walk away.  Stay for follow up questions.  Give everyone your contact info.  And check back in from time to time, just to make sure. 

In other, smaller, and probably more immediately practical words, respond to the comments people leave on your blog.
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