Sweet Sixteen

My grandmother ("Mood") turned 99 this past week, and Mari and I went to visit her at the nursing home in Manchester, NH.  For several years, Mood has suffered from dementia, and she doesn't recognize her family members.  

We've gotten used to it, though at the beginning it was wrenching.  As with many elderly people, she has stronger recall from the distant past, and until last year she was able to remember stories and songs from her youth in the 1910s and 1920s.  She would also respond to questions in Finnish, her parents' native tongue. But for the most part, she had a distant look in her eyes when we visited her.

Early this year, Mood took a sharp turn for the worse, and stopped eating or responding to any verbal interactions.  She lost a lot of weight and became extremely gaunt.  On our previous visit a couple of months ago, I was shocked to see her wasting away in bed. The nursing home staff told my mom that the end was near, and we decided to commence hospice care.  

Over the next couple of months, the caring hospice people came several times a week to spend time with Mood - talking to her and stroking her arm - notwithstanding her lack of apparent response.  My mom called to say that Mood was improving, and even sitting up in a chair.

Mari and I sat opposite Mood on our visit last week, and I searched in vain for a connection with her.  Nothing worked.  I could remember only one word of Finnish.  So finally I just decided to ask her:  "Mood, do you know how old you are?"  No response.  My mom told me that I would have to shout, since her hearing was bad.  

"MOOD, DO YOU KNOW HOW OLD YOU ARE?" I practically yelled.

Mood cocked her head suddenly, and her eyes cleared.  

"Sixteen," she responded impishly, with a slight smile.

Then she was gone again.  So we sat there some more, and I rubbed her arm, and my sister called from Seattle and sang some songs to her, and Mood's head nodded slightly with the beat as she stared into the distance.

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In honor of Mood's birthday, my mother and uncle made a donation through GlobalGiving to Help Feed 200 Neglected Elderly in Guatemala.  I was happy to see that they joined 58 other donors who together have provided enough money to feed over fifty women for a year.

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Mari does CNN...

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If Homer can give...

If Homer can give, we all can give.

That is from a post over at What Gives by Katie Taylor, one of our fabulous summer interns.



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Not what I used to want to be, I hope.

Success seems to be largely a matter of hanging on after others have let go.

That is William Feather, quoted in The Week. It reflects my own experience. But James Richardson, also quoted in The Week, adds the following:

The man who sticks to his plan will become what he used to want to be.

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All together now...

Next week a group of us are going to spend an afternoon volunteering at the N Street Village here in Washington, DC. I never fail to marvel how much I enjoy doing these things, though I started later in life.

Here is a nice post from Alison Schrager on her own recent experience volunteering:

The economist in me always saw beauty in the discerning market.... But successful community-building thrives on inclusion rather than exclusivity.... Economies and communities thrive together, which means even an economist can (and in this case will) achieve a sense of community.

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A thousand small leaps

[T]here’s an enigma to the Toyota Production System: although the system has been widely copied, Toyota has kept its edge over its competitors. Toyota opens its facilities to tours, and even embarked on a joint venture with G.M. designed, in part, to help G.M. improve its own production system. ... So how has Toyota stayed ahead of the pack?

The answer has a lot to do with another distinctive element of Toyota’s approach: defining innovation as an incremental process, in which the goal is not to make huge, sudden leaps but, rather, to make things better on a daily basis.

That is James Suroweicki writing in the New Yorker about how Toyota has overtaken GM to become the world's largest car maker. It is a good complement to Mari's post about the Japanese concept of continuous reform (kaizen) over at the GlobalGoodness blog.



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Is Google Making Us Stupid?

That is the title of a good article by Nicholas Carr in the Atlantic. He notes that in the new age of the web, his own attention span has gotten much shorter. He now finds it much harder to read long articles or books that present sustained arguments and stimulate deep thinking.

(Thanks to my friend April for the tip.)

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Keep on brooming

Outside the entrance which we would shortly transit was a little man in overalls and a cap, and he was brooming. And it wasn't a nice broom with uniform nylon bristles, more like the broomstick stolen by Dorothy from the Wicked Witch of the West. And this guy was pumping it like an Olympic brooming champ, as if his was the single most important task between civilization and the barbarians. And maybe it was ...

This is from a very nice post by Tim Kane titled The Key to Human Capital? Edison Knew.

It is a nice reminder that the vast majority of breakthroughs and successes arise through lots of brooming over many years, and not a single eureka insight.

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I wish I were as smart as Steve Jobs

I wish I were as smart as Steve Jobs. His innovations at Apple are extraordinary in terms of both the products and the marketing. If you want to see a master at work, watch Jobs' most recent talk announcing the new iPhone.

I am probably going to break down and get an iPhone; even the luddite Steve Pearlstein says he is going to do the same.

Alas, I am not as smart as Steve Jobs.

But you know what? It does not matter, because I am surrounded by a lot of people who know a lot more than I do about a lot of different things. And those people are responsible for the fact that GlobalGiving grew by over 500% in the first five months of 2008. (This amidst reports that philanthropy overall will be flat or even down this year.)

Who are these people that more than make up for my mediocrity?

First and foremost are the amazing people and groups who run the projects listed on GlobalGiving. If you want to learn something about innovation, these are the among the most creative people in the world. They achieve extraordinary results with extremely limited resources.

Then come the donors and partners on GlobalGiving who generate more ideas than I could ever even dream of. If you want to know how we stay ahead of the curve, you should read the results of our surveys.

And last but not least are the exceptional people we have here at GlobalGiving. The challenges of creating a whole new way to connect people around the world are huge. Not only do we have to keep the operation running smoothly and efficiently every day, we also constantly have to invent new things - or more often respond to the ideas proposed by our users. This requires great skill, imagination, and coordination among our supply, marketing, BD, finance, and tech teams, who are truly awesome.

These are the heroes of GlobalGiving. And, fortunately, they free me from the burden of worrying about being as smart as Steve Jobs.


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Supergrads vs. Underdogs

There was an obnoxious piece in the Washington Post Magazine this past weekend called The Amazing Adventures Of Supergrad, which has the following blurb:

The most sophisticated, accomplished, entitled graduates ever produced by American colleges are heading into the workplace. And employers are falling all over themselves to vie for their talents.

It features a number of "supergrads" whose resumes read like Nobel Prize winners at age 18. Why do I have a sinking feeling that many are going to crash and burn from all the early kudos and pressure?

Contrast this with one of the great recent underdogs, JK Rowling, who was down and out shortly after her own graduation. Here are some excerpts from her speech at last week's Harvard Commencement:

I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all - in which case, you fail by default.

Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong will, and more discipline than I had suspected; I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly above rubies.

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