Cowboy wisdom!

Some time ago I was reading "Life matters" from A. Roger Merrill and Rebecca R. Merrill. It's a really good book. It even helped me and my wife to organize our expenses and save a lot of money during our weekly shopping. But something I found especially interesting is a quotation: "If you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging". It sounds so obvious! But from the time I read that I found myself and others in a hole and all of us continued digging!

In other books they are talking about something similar called "proactivity". It's the opposite of being reactive. It also means to act fast to solve problems and avoid more complications. Like a sample here is something that happens all the time: in a meeting about a new product it's needed to identify a provider, then a member of the team suggests a name, so the responsible says "Ok, I'm taking note and I will give them a call tomorrow"; a proactive person would make the call right away to be sure that the provider is available or in the opposite situation get more ideas and contacts from the rest of the team. A proactive person is not telling "why they are not cleaning the office if they know that they let it dirty!" probably is telling "Hey guys what do you need to let the office clean after you use it?”. It is easy to identify when we aren't being proactive in our work or during our family times right?

The problem happens when we are not trying to recognize that we are in troubles or when we didn't stop to think about the situation.

Life Matters in Amazon.com

Cawboy wizdom in Google

A World of awareness

Some weeks ago the World received the terrible news of the explosions in the subway in London. A few weeks later the hurricane Katrina was one of the worst natural events against U.S. Just this weekend an earthquake in Pakistan killed more than 18000 persons and some hundreds are dead in Guatemala as well.
In all cases technology, especially the Internet played a very important role. Even the Internet is not able to offer relief to the victims directly at least is increasing the awareness in the entire world about what is going on and giving information about "how to help". Pictures, videos, emails are immediately posted on the Internet and of course the bigger news networks are covering the events using the TV and also the Web.
During the catastrophic damage that hurricane Katrina caused some very interesting reactions happened and I’m positively surprised because I believe that this is the start of a new age.

In a matter of hours after the hurricane Katrina passed, hundreds of Web sites displayed links to help people donate money for the relief campaign.
Survivors got the chance to communicate with their families in different parts of the world using email.
People from all the world massively donated money to relief agencies
Mobile phones captured videos and pictures, digital cameras made easier for people to post pictures on the Internet.

The world was connected. No matter the reason why but the people reacted against the pain of others. No matter religion, race, politics, wars.

Our world is aware and the individuals and families within are reacting, the support agencies are learning to use technology to react faster than ever. Now I think is the turn of the authorities, now they should publicly state the importance of using the Web and all available technologies to setup systems for support and emergency relief. Of course, richer countries are going to be able of getting more advantage and poorer countries where the usage of technology is reduced will have to use more traditional methods.

Now is the time for individuals to show that between continents, countries, races and religions only exists “stone walls” made with paper. Awareness is the way to jump and break those walls. Now we can participate and help people from all the world.

Thinking about the human being

Somewhere Talkien said that the God gave a good present to the humans, it was a short life, it was to make them mortals. Short life means short time to achieve goals and specially short time to let something in the world for the rest to remember.

Somewhere I've read about "collective intelligence", a kind of organization that manages and shares the intelligence, experiences, memories and capabilities of the members of that group. Something like the "borgs" in Star Trek.

It is interesting to think that the Human is already something like that, where the short life of the individual adds variables to the living society, some kind of bigger "organism". The death of the individual doesn't affect the success of the Human like species but can change the course of the history. So if we see the Human history from the start to the present we can see that we are growing, improving and evolving, no matter on the bad and good things that happened. From the bad things we can learn and from the good ones we can feel proud and get energy from that to go on.

Working on technology I feel very happy, living in this time makes me witness and part of the revolution of the communication between humans, the start of the most interesting way of get advantage of our "collective intelligence", get the best of the wisdom and culture and of course get advantage of the bad things that are going on around us by understanding that we are the only ones that are able to put them on the past, avoid the same mistakes in the future and learn from that experience. In fact that is the way I find to let something after my mortal being will left this world.