Greetings from bachelor towers… Gabe and I are holding down the fort while Diane is down in Endicott helping her folks recover from the floods of tropical storm Lee. She has been telling me about the same kind of random acts of kindness and help happening there as they did here after Irene. Yesterday a group of folks from a nearby church showed up at my inlaw’s house to help them pull all the wet stuff (paneling, carpet, framing) out of the basement.. It’s great to see how people help out when times are tough.. Great counterpoint ,, no make that reinforcement.. to the messages of 9/11 we’ve been integrating this past week.
Life is near normal for most of us in Richmond. I love this time of year… cool nights.. warm days.. crickets.. I get really spacey.. It’s hard to focus on anything,,, especially work. Today work was pretty interesting though.. we had a customer come in to visit us from China..
He gave a very inspiring talk. He is an impressive guy.. and he runs an impressive company. They have great technology, great skills.. a great team.. but the thing that stuck with me most about his talk was a point he made about the culture of innovation in the far east right now. He said that they had learned to ‘fail fast’. Not that they relished failure.. it’s that thye aren’t afraid of taking a risk and failing.. they just want to do it quickly so they can move on to the next success. They have such a collective optimism right now that each failure presents and opportunity to move on to the next success.. I don’t mean that in the greeting card sense …(eg. if first you don’t succeed …) .. but in the pragmatic sense that in an environment with so much opportunity.. the odds are with you…

This is a good thing to ponder as I think about what I want to be when I grow up

night folks, nite sam
-me