Are You Your Job Title?

Titles mean little.  When you meet a professional in a casual context, a simple "doctor", "lawyer", "mechanic" suffices.  It seems to explain who they are at once.  Someone in sales, management or consulting doesn't get the same benefit.  Both parties though are liable for describing their life project.  One just has to think about it harder than the other.

For example, doctor A may seek to maximize the number of patients seen to improve income potential and doctor B may seek to maximize the number of patient seen to improve the health of the community.  Both have the same potential end result; increase in income as well as an improvement in community health, but their reasons are remarkably different and provide a much better insight into their psychosocial persona.  

Bottomline: I doubt professionals with definitive titles put as much thought into their life project as people with generic job titles.  With accountablity comes transparency of one's passions, ideas and thought processes.  That can be scary and the fear only goes away if others open up in the same way.  I've certainly pored over it quite a bit myself and while its still being tweaked, my own personal life project is to find the happy medium.

See What's Behind the Curtain

In America, we tend to hear about work in the form of results.  I started a company, I fought x number of cases, I fundraised x amount of money and so on.  Well-rehearsed 30-second spiels touting one-sided stats. The process in the background is rarely shelled out; leaving the listener in the dark about the "how?".  

These achievements could be weighted by multiple factors such as how much time was spent on the project or on a different judgment level, how much time was spent with one's family during the project.  By not weighting and thereby standardizing such accomplishments, we lose the real perspective.  And I wager we also lose a sense of the person's values, priorities, and overall purpose.  The same goes for companies and nations as well.  

Bottomline: The means and ends debate is never-ending.  In the midst of major financial institutions collapsing, you have to wonder just how all this happened.  What was the process behind all this acquisition of wealth and why wasn't it protected better?  Making a million dollars sounds fantastic.  Asking provocative questions as to how one go to that million will really lets you know if their priorities jive with yours.  Don't hesitate to get a perspective.  

A Tribute to Patience

Patience is a practiced skill.  It deserves particular mention because it serves as the backbone and precursor to many other positive character traits - kindness, compassion, respect, honesty, etc.  When you're on the road and get cut off, or waiting in a long line to check out, or in the midst of an argument, patience provides a balanced perspective from which to take further action.  

Prioritizing respect (towards others), for example, isn't going to do much when you feel disrespected in a heated argument.  Your view of respect is totally subjective.  So when someone disrespects you, how are they to know you'd feel that way?  Knowing this puts you on shaky ground to begin with.  You end up fighting back with what you for a fact know will be disrespectful to the other person.  All of a sudden you've lost your original priority.  And on top of that, you eventually feel guilty about your actions.  Same goes with kindness, compassion or even honesty.  They're all subject to, well, subjectivenes.

Not so with patience.  It's independent of one's idea of it.  Why?  Because there's no real beginning or end point, no benchmark for comparison, no real action that can be taken to refute it.  To be exact, impatience isn't disturbing to those who are patient.  They're willing to wait it out.  

My Project Is To...

American Express has a wonderful ad out (see below) with various celebrities such as Robert DeNiro, Martin Scorsese, Jim Henson, Ellen DeGeneres and others boiling their life achievements down into one sentence. The sentence always starts with, "My project was to". For example, for Academy Award-winning director Martin Scorsese, the sentence is "My project was to...tell unforgettable stories".

While this is an after-the-fact statement, I bet each of these celebrities would've stated something siimilar even prior to their success. They had a very clear idea that encompassed and drove their personal philosophy, career goals and family values all in one.

This project statement can serve as a great personal tool for anyone; as a daily reminder of why you wake up in the morning, when in doubt of your ability, and when someone asks you, "what do you do?" Take a little time out to figure out what your goals are and narrow them down into one or two sentences, starting with "My project is to...". It can't hurt and I bet it'll make you think differently about what your life focus is.

You think you know, but you don't

Even for a second, if you tune your ear to the radio these days you'll hear something about the upcoming elections. Inexperience, age, gender, family values are all up for debate and personal opinion has amazingly transformed into experiential wisdom.  We all seem to have an idea of "what it takes" to be the next president/vice president of the U.S.  But in fact, we don't.

Ability is measured in layers.  Its the same old "peeling an onion" analogy, where the complexity of a job and candidate's matching skill set lie deep beneath the folds.  From our own daily work/leisure perspective, we only see the superficial; the face, the job description, the relative difference from the last 8 years.  We don't see the inhuman stamina necessary to function at peak levels through all hours of the day, the sacrifice of personal time and family life on a campaign trail, the burden and responsibility of knowing how every decision you make may change the lives of millions of people.  Our day-to-day lives are nothing like that of the candidates.  We can't possibly understand the layers beneath such a career choice.  Just by getting to this stage of the game, the candidate has revealed their ability.  

Bottomline: On a more grounded level, think of how you felt right out of college coming into the work world.  The language of business, science, technology, or whatever career you chose to venture into was the same then as it is now with very minor modifications.  Five, ten, twenty years later, you simply understand that language on a much deeper level.  

Think of any concept you were familiar with in your 20s, say "community".  The mental connections you've made over time, through effort and in seeking knowledge give that word a lot more intrinsic meaning now than they did before.  You have layers of personal growth associated with your vocabulary.  Translate that to the presidency and you get the smallest hint of "what it takes" to be at that level.   

A Visual Web Stroll

NYTimes graphic on risks associated with 10 different causes of death:























Google's venture into the browser business; Chrome:




















Be a teacher, find a teacher - The eBay of teaching:

A Ubiquitously Useful App

Scobleizer recommends a lot of apps. Recently, Robert's had somewhat of an epiphany on why he started blogging and what PR really means to him. I love his passionates v. non-passionates debate. He drives home some really great points about the influence of early adopters on advancing new technology.

His most recent recommendation, a Firefox add-on called Ubiquity, is universally useful and deserves mention. Check out the video below.


Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Weekend Quotes

The report's authors "estimate that in order to provide services to these medically disenfranchised Americans, as well as current patients, health centers will need up to 60,000 more primary-care professionals, and up to 44,500 additional nurses."

-National Association of Community Health Centers (article link)

If pure thought is a body, it is our emotions that supply the heart that can really bring it to life. Our thoughts and feelings exist in relation to one another, and they form a feedback loop through which they communicate and empower each other.

-Daily Om: Undistracted Energy

“Redefining smoking not as a behavioral habit but as a pharmacological addiction may sound like good public policy, but it works against the public health when it reaches people that it is impossible to quit. Indeed, instead of having the intended effect of steering potential smokers – that is, children – away from cigarettes, demonizing cigarettes via nicotine reinforced smokers’ feelings of pharmacological enslavement and undermined their will to quit.

The tobacco habit should be characterized as an habituation rather than an addiction…”

-Smoking, A Behavioral Analysis, published in 1971

Dog Training Ourselves

Ian Dunbar gets dogs, but he also gets human behavior. I'll timestamp the latter first just because it's so on about relationship skills and interaction skills.

12:00: Training ourselves to be better at relationships
7:35: Insights on punishment without force
4:00: Really simple dog training techniques

Reminding Patients To Take Their Medication

Patients being non-compliant with taking their medication negates the value of going to the doctor, creates confusion in setting up treatment plans and in the case of antibiotics teaches the exact bacteria you're trying to kill how to fight back (MRSA).

Luckily, next generation devices such as Zuri aim to help remind patients to take their medication and also provide an electronic record of time and dosage to the doctor. Real-time interfacing with your medical provider is the only way to monitor medication activity successfully.

Here's more from the WSJ.

...the Zuri, an iPod-sized device that sends patients reminders to take their medications and records their compliance, which users and, if they choose, their doctors can track through a companion Web page.

Intel's care-management tool, called Health Guide, combines an in-home patient device with an online interface that doctors can use to monitor and remotely manage care. The in-home patient device collects readings from specific models of wired and wireless medical devices, such as blood-pressure monitors and glucose meters. It then displays the data for the patient on a touch screen and sends the readings to a secure host server, where health-care professionals can review the information and provide feedback via video conferencing and email.

Meanwhile, Microsoft is working with home-health and fitness-device makers to integrate vital-signs data into HealthVault, an online service the software company recently launched that allows consumers to store, manage and selectively share medical data.

Uplifting, Thought-Provoking Daily Inspiration

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August 20, 2008
Being Clear About Desires
Getting What We Want

The best way to get what we want from life is to first know what we want. If we haven’t taken the time to really understand and identify what would truly make us happy, we won’t be able to ask for it from those around us or from the universe. We may not even be able to recognize it once it arrives. Once we are clear about what we want, we can communicate it to those around us. When we can be honest about who we are and what we want, there is no need to demand, be rude or aggressive, or manipulate others that are involved in helping us get what we want. Instead, we know that we are transmitting a signal on the right frequency to bring all that we desire into our experience.

As the world evolves, humanity is learning to work from the heart. We may have been taught that the way to get what we want is to follow certain rules, play particular games, or even engage in acts that use less than our highest integrity. The only rules we need to apply are those of intention and connection. In terms of energy, we can see that it takes a lot of energy to keep up a false front or act in a way that is counter to our true nature, but much less energy is expended when we can just be and enjoy connections that energize us in return. Then our energy can be directed toward living the life we want right now.

Society has certain expectations of behavior and the roles each of us should play, but as spiritual beings we are not bound by these superficial structures unless we choose to accept them. Instead, we can listen to our hearts and follow what we know to be true and meaningful for us. In doing so, we will find others who have chosen the same path. It can be easy to get caught up in following goals that appear to be what we want, but when we pursue the underlying value, we are certain to stay on our right path and continue to feed our soul.

The Secret To Happiness

8:00: What's bad about having too many choices
15:06: The Secret to Happiness

The whole thing's worth watching.

Hellooooo Health!

Jay Parkinson to me is the definition of a brazen careerist. Health care is a very conservative sector that's eons behind in technology, rife with political machinations and just filled with complexity on all ends. Dr. Parkinson has single-handedly taken on the industry and changed the paradigm from health care to patient care in less than a year. There's a lot of history behind this, and rather than rehash it in prose, I'll hyperlink to milestones that have led to the launch of Hello Health, Jay's company. Safe to say, this model of care delivery is not going anywhere and may spark a revolution in the years to come.

• Original Website & Philosophy - In a nutshell, doctors making house calls like the old days with an iPhone packing in the patient records instead of a briefcase.
  

• The Video Brief - Think medical Facebook. Why not just add your doctor as a "friend" on a privatized network and message him with a problem?
  

• Summary Article on Hello Health Launch - Scalability is occurring one doctor at a time and I only foresee trailblazing growth in the future.

Bottomline: While most of us are used to email, IM, Facebook, iPhone, Google and overall internet-based communication, health care has only just turned on the computer. Jay Parkinson has skipped decades by providing patients real-time access to primary care services. The progress is exponential considering the industry context. The start-up's in Brooklyn, but at this rate Hello Health might be in your neighborhood sooner than you think.