Gordian Knots

BBC’s Davis Attenborough

I’m a great fan of David Attenborough’s nature and wildlife documentaries.

An estimated 500 million people worldwide watched the 13-part series Life on Earth, written and presented by Sir David. At the time it was the most ambitious series ever produced by the BBC Natural History Unit. Its sequel, The Living Planet, came five years later in 1984 and in 1990 the final part of the trilogy, The Trials of Life was broadcast. He also wrote and presented two shorter series, The First Eden, on the long history of mankind’s relationship with the natural world in the lands around the Mediterranean, and Lost Worlds, Vanished Lives, about fossils.

In 1993, Sir David presented the spectacular Life in the Freezer, a celebration of Antarctica and in 1995, he wrote and presented the epic The Private Life of Plants. In 1996, Attenborough in Paradise fulfilled a lifelong ambition to make a special film about the elusive but beautiful birds of paradise. In 1997, he narrated the award-winning Wildlife Specials, marking 40 years of the BBC Natural History Unit. In 1998, he completed an epic 10-part series for the BBC, The Life of Birds. In Autumn 2000 he presented State of the Planet and in Autumn 2001 he narrated The Blue Planet. In 2002 he worked on the innovative new series, The Life of Mammals.

Here is a full list of documentaries that I have thoroughly enjoyed:

1975 The Explorers
1976 The Tribal Eye
1977 Wildlife on One
1979 Life on Earth
1984 The Living Planet
1989 Lost Worlds, Vanished Lives
1990 The Trials of Life
1993 Life in the Freezer
1995 The Private Life of Plants
1997 The Wildlife Specials
1998 The Life of Birds
2000 State of the Planet
2001 The Blue Planet
2002 The Life of Mammals

The set of investment analysis tools starts at the “simple” end with “applets” that pull stock prices from Web sites and report to you the value of your portfolio. It also includes much more complex “technical analysis” software that attempts to predict future trends in stock prices, which might be useful to budding “day traders.” …

* XInvest

* BB Stock Tool

* KStock “Stock Ticker”

* WMStock

* TkLoan

* RAPID (Rapid Analysis Program for Investment Decisions) for Linux and Win32 — A GPLed Technical Analysis System

* TAL: Technical Analysis Library in ISE Eiffel

* Market Analysis System (MAS)

* Finicky Financial Trading System

* SMTM Perl/Tk global stock ticker

* BeanCounter portfolio performance toolkit

A Cornell robot named Toddler learns to walk using a passive dynamic method that mimics the human gait. It takes about 20 minutes or 600 steps for the robot to learn to walk. The passive dynamic method allows the robots to expend much less energy than fully dynamic walking methods such as that used by the Honda Asimo, which expends 10 times the energy of a human to walk. Two other biped robots built by MIT and Delft are also described. For more, see the original Cornell press release. An NSF website also has more information,

photos, and video of the robots.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, nearly 1 in 5 people, or 47 million U.S. residents age 5 and older, spoke a language other than English at home in 2000, an increase of 15 million people since 1990.

Three Indian languages were among the top 20 languages spoken at home — Hindi, Urdu and Gujarati.

Hindi with 317,057 ranked 16 and Urdu with 262,900, ranked 18. Gujarati comes in 19th in the top 20 list with 225, 988 speakers. An additional 439,239 people reported speaking other Indic languages, such as Punjabi, Bengali and Malayalam.

A majority of the people who spoke a language other than English at home also reported they spoke English “very well.� According to the report, after English (215.4 million) and Spanish (28.1 million), Chinese (2 million) was the language most commonly spoken at home, overtaking French, German and Italian over the decade of the 90s.

Stuart Crainer wrote a book back in 1997 called “The Ultimate Business Library: 50 Books That Shaped Management Thinking”. Below the fold, you will find the 50 books that Crainer thought should be in your library.

# Management

* Chester Barnard (1938), The Functions of the Executive, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.

* Dale Carnegie (1937), How to Win Friends and Influence People, Simon & Schuster, New York.

* Peter F. Drucker (1954), The Practice of Management , Harper & Row, New York.

* Henri Fayol (1949), General and Industrial Management , Pitman, London.

* Mary Parker Follett (1941), Dynamic Administration , (editors Fox, Elliot & Urwick, Lyndall) Harper & Row, New York.

* Henry Mintzberg (1973), The Nature of Managerial Work , Harper & Row, New York.

* Ricardo Semler (1993), Maverick! , Century, London.

# Leadership

* Warren Bennis & Burt Nanus (1985), Leaders: The Strategies for Taking Charge , Harper & Row, New York.

* James MacGregor Burns (1978), Leadership , Harper & Row, New York.

* Henry Ford (1923), My Life and Work , Doubleday, Page & Co, New York.

* Nicolo Machiavelli (1513), The Prince , Penguin, London(1967).

* Thomas Watson Jr. (1963), A Business and its Beliefs: The Ideas that Helped Build IBM , McGraw Hill, New York.

# Complexity

* Alfred Chandler (1962), Strategy and Structure , MIT Press, Boston.

* Michael Goold, Andrew Campbell & Marcus Alexander (1994), Corporate Level Strategy , John Wiley, New York.

* Alfred P. Sloan (1963), My Years with General Motors , Doubleday, New York.

* Max Weber (1947), The Theory of Social and Economic Organization , Free Press, New York.

# People

* Meredith Belbin (1984), Management Teams: Why They Succeed or Fail , Butterworth Heinemann, Oxford.

* Frederick Herzberg (1959), The Motivation to Work , (with Mausner, B. and Snyderman, B.), Wiley, New York.

* Douglas McGregor (1960), The Human Side of Enterprise , McGraw Hill, New York.

* Abraham Maslow (1954), Motivation and Personality , Harper & Row, New York.

# Customers

* W. Edwards Deming (1982), Out of the Crisis , MIT, Cambridge, Mass.

* Joseph M. Juran (1988), Juran on Planning for Quality , Free Press, New York.

* Philip Kotler (1967), Marketing Management: Analysis, Planning, Implementation and Control , Prentice Hall, New Jersey(1994, 8th edition).

* Ted Levitt (1962), Innovation in Marketing , McGraw Hill, New York.

* Adam Smith (1776), The Wealth of Nations , Modern Library, New York(1937).

# Global

* Christopher Bartlett & Sumantra Ghoshal (1989), Managing Across Borders , Harvard Business School Press, Boston.

* Kenichi Ohmae (1990), The Borderless World , William Collins, London.

* Richard Pascale & Anthony Athos (1981), The Art of Japanese Management , Penguin Books, London.

Michael Porter (1990), The Competitive Advantage of Nations , Macmillan, London. Fons Trompenaars (1993), Riding the Waves of Culture , Nicholas Brealey, London.

# The Future

* Peter F. Drucker (1969), The Age of Discontinuity , Heinemann, London.

* Gary Hamel & C.K. Prahalad (1994), Competing for the Future , Harvard University Press, Cambridge.

* Charles Handy (1989), The Age of Unreason , Business Books, London.

* Alvin Toffler (1980), The Third Wave , Bantam, New York.

# Renewal

* Chris Argyris & Donald Schon (1978), Organizational Learning: A Theory of Action Perspective , Addison-Wesley, Reading, Mass.

* Rosabeth Moss Kanter (1983), The Change Masters , Simon & Schuster, New York.

* Richard Pascale (1990), Managing on the Edge , Simon & Schuster, New York.

* Tom Peters & Robert Waterman (1982), In Search of Excellence , Harper & Row, New York & London.

* Tom Peters (1992), Liberation Management , Alfred P. Knopf, New York.

* Edgar H. Schein (1985), Organizational Culture and Leadership , Jossey-Bass, San Francisco.

* Peter Senge (1990), The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization , Doubleday, New York.

# Competition

* Michael Porter (1980), Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors , Free Press, New York.

* Sun Tzu (500 BC), The Art of War

# Efficiency

* James Champy & Michael Hammer (1993), Reengineering the Corporation , Harper Business, New York.

* Frederick W. Taylor (1911), The Principles of Scientific Management , Harper & Row, New York.

# Strategy

* Igor Ansoff (1965), Corporate Strategy , McGraw Hill, New York.

* Gary Hamel & C.K. Prahalad (1994), Competing for the Future , Harvard University Press, Cambridge.

* Henry Mintzberg (1994), The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning , Prentice Hall International, Hemel Hempstead.

* Kenichi Ohmae (1982), The Mind of the Strategist , McGraw Hill, New York.

# Fun

* C.N. Parkinson (1958), Parkinson’s Law , John Murray, London.

* Robert Townsend (1970), Up the Organization , Michael Joseph, London.

So, what’s the synergy? NYT runs a story on disaster recovery efforts in Asia. A sidebar on how some lovely small-town tourist attraction has already got back on its feet, and is open for visitors. Find out more at about.com, where several tourist agency links are ready to take your order. This, I suppose, is less tacky than the NYT simply running the agency ads alongside the article.

Where exactly is that line between news and marketing?

The philosophical and moral issues aside, lets look at the business side of things:

Did they overpay? Yeah, probably in the short term, but let’s look at the situation…

While the deal was certainly rich by price to cashflow and cash to revenue metrics, there are a limited number of these internet spaces for sale. CBSmarketwatch.com just went for over $500 million as a comparison.

The NY Times currently has a market cap of around $5.4 billion. They expect this deal to be accretive to earnings two years out. It doesn’t represent an enormous purchase, just a pricey one by many measures.

The ad market for printed newspapers has been flat. Growth is expected to be anemic this year.

Newspaper circulations in general are down.

They picked up approximately 22 million unique eyeballs a month to target ads to via this deal, and a high traffic established internet site. The internet advertising market is growing.

Digitial media / advertising is a growth industry compared to the lackluster printed newspaper market that is unlikely to get better any time soon.

Traditional media outlets like the NYT need to continue to build internet presences to avoid obsolesence.

The deal while a bit expensive makes a whole lot of sense to stay competitive as media evolves and changes.

Old joke:

The people who run the world read The Wall Street Journal.

The people who think they run the world read The Washington Post.

The people who wish they ran the world read The New York Times.

Just back a few minutes ago from a day long ski trip to Wintergreen resort in Virginia. One of the most memorable days that I have had in the last few years. The mountain slopes were great fun. A wonderful clear and cool weather, with bright sunshine and mild winds. The resort is about 200 miles southwest of Washington DC in the state of Virginia.

After driving for more than four hours today and skiing for more than six hours, I think I should now get my much needed rest.

Slashdot on Humanoids: “There are a few robots that do amazing things. Honda’s Asimo can walk backward and climb stairs. Sega’s idog can dance to music. A tougher nut to crack has been making robots walk like humans. Today, scientists introduce three humanoid striders at the annual AAAS meeting. Unlike other robots that have to power every move, these three save energy by letting gravity do a lot of the work. Like humans, they pick up their feet and just let ‘em drop. Engineers say they’ll inform the next generations of humanoids and also improve design of robotic prostheses for people”

Here is a list of 100 great classics. I’ve read about 35% of them. Others are in the pipeline.

1. Beowulf

2. A Death In The Family by James Agee

3. Poetics by Aristotle

4. Pride And Prejudice by Jane Austen

5. Waiting For Godot by Samuel Beckett

6. The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan

7. The Way Of All Flesh by Samuel Butler

8. The Rebel by Albert Camus

9. Sartor Resartus by Thomas Carlyle

10. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

11. My Antonia by Willa Cather

12. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

13. The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler

14. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer

15. The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov

16. No Name by Wilkie Collins

17. Heart Of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

18. The Last Of The Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper

19. The Red Badge Of Courage by Stephen Crane

20. Inferno by Dante

21. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe

22. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

23. Crime And Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

24. The Hound Of The Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle

25. Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser

26. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas

27. Middlemarch by George Eliot

28. The Wasteland by T. S. Eliot

29. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

30. Ask The Dust by John Fante

31. The Sound And The Fury by William Faulkner

32. Joseph Andrews by Henry Fielding

33. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

34. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

35. Aspects Of The Novel by E. M. Forster

36. New Grub Street by George Gissing

37. Faust by Goethe

38. Lord Of The Flies by William Golding

39. She Stoops To Conquer by Oliver Goldsmith

40. I Claudius by Robert Graves

41. Brighton Rock by Graham Greene

42. The Glass Key by Dashiell Hammett

43. The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy

44. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

45. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

46. A Farewell To Arms by Ernest Hemingway

47. The Odyssey by Homer

48. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

49. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

50. Ulysses by James Joyce

51. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

52. On the Road by Jack Kerouac

53. Captains Courageous by Rudyard Kipling

54. Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence

55. Inherit The Wind by Jerome Lawrence

56. To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee

57. The Call Of The Wild by Jack London

58. The Prince by Machiavelli

59. The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maugham

60. Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier

61. Moby Dick by Herman Melville

62. Death Of A Salesman by Arthur Miller

63. Paradise Lost by John Milton

64. Utopia by Thomas Moore

65. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

66. 1984 by George Orwell

67. Metamorphosis by Ovid

68. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

69. The Republic by Plato

70. Collected Works by Edgar Allan Poe

71. The Crying Of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon

72. The Mysteries Of Udolpho by Ann Ward Radcliffe

73. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

74. The Catcher In The Rye by J.D. Salinger

75. Hamlet by William Shakespeare

76. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

77. The School for Scandal by Richard Brinsley Sheridan

78. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair

79. Oedipus Rex by Sophocles

80. The Grapes Of Wrath by John Steinbeck

81. Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne

82. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

83. Dracula by Bram Stoker

84. Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

85. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift

86. Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray

87. Walden by Henry David Thoreau

88. War And Peace by Leo Tolstoy

89. The Warden by Anthony Trollope

90. Fathers And Sons by Ivan Turgenev

91. The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain

92. Around The World In Eighty Days by Jules Verne

93. The Aeneid by Virgil

94. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

95. The Time Machine by H. G. Wells

96. Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton

97. Leaves Of Grass by Walt Whitman

98. The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde

99. A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams

100. The Code Of The Woosters by P. G. Wodehouse

Mutual Amorous Distraction. The idea being that we’re both in love with the same thing…This is one fo the reasons that some small businesses start, because the founder loves something to the point of being distracted by it.

Seth Godin has talked about Rice to Riches, the little cafe in New York that specializes in Rice Pudding… you just know that the owner loves Rice Pudding.

There is a Used CD store near my house and, interestingly enough, the employees are all super nice. Want a rare CD? They’ll keep a note on file and call you if it comes in. I’ve used this service several times. This is a store for music lovers (seemingly) by music lovers.

I think that this is one of the best secrets to a succesful business: offering something that you truly love.

“That salesman is one of the best men in the business and he knows more about diamonds than I do. I pay him a good salary for what he knows. But I would gladly pay him twice as much if I could put into him something that I have and he lacks. You see, he knows diamonds, but I love them.”

I think that this type of business doesn’t need advertising or marketing – the community naturally coalesces around this shared affinity. People will find you… they’ll beat a path to your door.

The well at the center of town… Long ago, there was a desert village with a well at its center. The houses clustered within a distance that a jar of water could comfortably be carried. In the cool of the evening the people came to the well to collect the next days supply of water, and they lingered there to exchange gossip and conduct business with one another. The well supplied a scarce and necessary resource, and in doing so also became the social center – the gathering place that held the community together.

What an aspiration for a business – to become the well at the center of a community of people who have this mutual love.

These businesses aren’t always the greatest money makers, but, then again, that isn’t what it is all about.

So, what are some of the businesses that you know about that are like this?

“What do goat milk, spiders, and fishing lines have in common? Sea urchins and lollipops? Music records and airlines? Ant behavior and telecommunications routing? Most of us would assume nothing. But out of each of these seemingly random combinations have come radical innovations that have created whole new fields and in ways large or small, changed the world.”

The Medici Effect: Breakthrough Insights at the Intersection of Ideas, Concepts, and Cultures.

The book’s message is that we have the greatest chance of innovating at the intersection of different disciplines or cultures such as those listed above. It looks at why this is, and outlines the special challenges involved in executing intersectional ideas – and how to overcome them.

“the Medici Effect�—referring to the remarkable burst of creativity enabled by the Medici banking family in Renaissance Italy. The culmination of three critical factors— the movement of people, the convergence of science, and the leap in computation—are increasing the number and types of intersections we can access today. By stepping into these intersections we enable an exponential increase in the number and types of idea combinations that can occur.

The (Mis)Behavior of Markets: A Fractal View of Risk, Ruin, and Reward by Benoit Mandelbrot and Richard Hudson.

A financial transaction is like a small explosion. Conventional financial theory, as taught in business schools around the world, holds that prices change continuously, and that each investor is as unimportant as the next. Their trades are like the collisions of molecules in a gas chamber — millions of tiny energy exchanges. Nonsense, Mr. Olsen says. His tick-by-tick data show plainly that prices jump. Quotes stutter. And investors vary greatly in importance and impact on the market. A more accurate metaphor is the chamber in an internal combustion engine: Millions of small and large explosions drive the car forward, as the sparkplugs fire and the pistons churn.

Another book I’m plowing through at the moment is C.K. Prahalad’s The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid.

His argument, in two sentences, is this: “The real source of market promise is not the wealthy few in the developing world, or even the emerging middle-income consumers. It is the billions of aspiring poor who are joining the market economy for the first time.” Prahalad has uncovered all kinds of innovative practices at the BOP–the Mexican cement market Cemex building houses for the poor, the remarkable Aravind Eye Care system in India, Hindustan Lever’s sale of soap in India which helps combat the critical health issue of diarrheal disease.

The Latest Mergers: Why Some Will Fly, And Others Won’t – Knowledge@Wharton

Far from being slam-dunk strategy moves, mergers and acquisitions often fail to create value for the parties involved. Now that merger mania has returned — witness the number of recently announced deals, plus other rumored ones — it’s worth considering what distinguishes successful mergers from unsuccessful ones. In the four stories below, Knowledge@Wharton looks at the proposed mergers between Procter & Gamble and Gillette, and between SBC Communications and AT&T; analyzes why many mergers fail; and examines both the ‘victims’ of mergers (those who lose their jobs) and the alleged ’survivors’ (those who don’t).

Wired: “Genetically modified plants may be the green solution for cleaning up contaminated soils.

The results of a successful field trial in California last year were published last week in the online arm of Environmental Science & Technology. They showed that genetic engineering boosted a plant’s ability to absorb selenium, a toxic heavy metal, by 430 percent.”Phytoremediation — the use of plants to absorb or break down contaminants — has been used over the past decade with varying success. Genetic engineering offers the potential to ramp up the slow-growing phytoremediation industry with a new generation of toxin-cleaning super plants.

Terry chose Indian mustard, a fast-growing plant with natural abilities to tolerate toxic soils. He genetically enhanced the plant’s ability to convert selenium into a nontoxic form. That allowed the plants to accumulate more of the contaminant without being killed.

The test plants were grown outside in heavily contaminated soils taken from the San Luis Drain, a concrete-lined canal that was used to channel irrigation wastewater from Central Valley farms until the pollution starting killing birds. In conditions that would kill other plants, the genetically modified mustard thrived, doing nearly as well as the non-modified control plants in normal soil, Terry said.

Selenium contamination is a serious problem in California’s Central Valley and other farmlands in the West that use irrigation water. As it evaporates, low levels of selenium in the water build up in the soil year after year. Selenium is considered an essential trace mineral for both humans and animals, but it becomes toxic at high doses. As much as 2.6 million acres of Western agricultural land are considered susceptible to selenium contamination, according to a U.S. Department of the Interior study (.pdf).

“Phytoremediation is very cheap compared to bulldozing the soil and carting it off for landfill or to some decontamination facility,” said Terry.

His success so far is just a “proof of concept” and not good enough to consider commercially. The next step is to turn the mustard into a super-duper selenium vacuum and magnify its absorption abilities 100-fold. Terry thinks he may already have the solution. Instead of engineering the plant to absorb more selenium, he plans to enable the Indian mustard to transform selenium into a harmless gas and release it from the leaves.

“We’ve been able to do it with plants in the lab,” he said. An application to grow the new plants outside is before the U.S. Department of Agriculture, but obtaining permission is “very difficult,” he said.

That’s as it should be, said Doug Gurian-Sherman, senior scientist with the Center for Food Safety.

“We don’t know enough about the unintended effects of genetic engineering,” said Gurian-Sherman. The toxicity of plants can change, or a modified plant could interbreed with wild plants, he said. “What happens when an insect eats one of these plants, and then something else eats that insect?

“Just because GM plants could be used in phytoremediation doesn’t absolve them from careful safety assessments,” said Gurian-Sherman.

Selenium isn’t the only target. Applied PhytoGenetics is working on cottonwood trees with a bacterial gene that will allow them to absorb mercury from contaminated sites and release a less-harmful form into the atmosphere.

Mercury is a potent neurotoxin, often found in sediments of water bodies. The company chose water-loving cottonwoods because they grow fast. Field trials have been under way for less than two years, and, while the process seems to be working, researchers don’t yet know how much mercury is being removed from the soil at the test site, said CEO David Glass.

Putting mercury back into the air isn’t a long-term solution, said Glass. “We’re hopeful we’ll develop a plant that will hold onto the mercury.” But that’s many years away, making it difficult to attract investors, he said.

“It’s too early to know how big a market this product will have,” said Glass. “However, there’s a growing problem (mercury contamination) out there that needs to be fixed.”

“Great post from Light Reading and Om Malik on Cisco software centric strategy. I’m wondering what this means for Alcatel, Siemens, Eriscson and Co…

Cisco has already set up a special software group (yet unnamed) to develop middleware, Web applications, and services products, says one reliable source who is close to the company but asked to remained unnamed. Other sources say Cisco has indeed set up a new software group but that it may have less dramatic goals…

…So why would Cisco do this? Experts point out that with networking technology becoming increasingly commoditized — and with a looming fret from low-cost hardware competitors in China — Cisco could help insulate itself from these trends by moving up the software stack and marketing consulting services and developing more sophisticated software…

…Given the company’s dominance in routers, something like consulting might be Cisco’s best way to create new revenue streams. ‘There’s nowhere else to go,’ Dzubeck says.”

PC World has posted online an article by Erik Hellweg written for the December print edition of Digital World. The article gives a broad overview of the state of the robotics world. It mentions robots of every type from the latest commercially available robots like the RoboSapien and Roomba, to DARPA Grand Challenge robots, and even mentions some well known robots built by members of robot groups like the DPRG. It’s good to see an article that presents hobby robot builders evenly aside commercial products. In some cases, I think the amateurs are still a bit ahead but I wonder how long that will last.

Fiorina Steps Down: “The question I don’t think she ever answered is: ‘Why does the world need another computer company?’…ie, an assembler of components and software made primarily by others.

I think that much of HPs value went with Agilent when the decision was made to spin this off as a separate company. If I have the timeline right, this decision was made pre-Fiorina.”

I lived in solitude in the country and noticed how the monotony of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind- Albert Einstein

I know from experience that when I get bogged down in operational business issues that just keeping up, I feel significantly less creative. But at the same time it is exposure to new ideas – the kind that challenge my views and help me learn – that makes me more creative. That certainly doesn’t happen much in a monotonous quiet lifestyle. I guess creativity needs a little bit of both. Being busy is good, but reflection time is important too.