Rothacker Reviews

That's Different: The Professional

The Professional falls under my original classification of The Champion.

There is a group of questions that are asked by most career guidance people.  In general, the group is  based on our interests.  What is your hobby?  What do you enjoy doing when you aren't at work?  What do you dream about?  As someone who has for his entire life been trying to figure out what I want to do when I grow up, I've asked myself these questions...three hundred and forty-four million times.  The answers are never clear.  The cook at a local Waffle House however, might have shed light on at least one thing that I love.

Rosemary and I were sitting at the counter when she said, "check out the cook with the long hair."  This forty-something year old dude had his hair in a neat, tight ponytail, halfway down his back.  My second impression of this Waffle House was now favorable.  (I noticed cleanliness first).  The grill was directly in front of us and for the next half hour or so, we had the pleasure of watching this fellow place the word art in short-order-grill cooking.  All motions were orchestrated with precision and care.  The organization of his cooking area and utensils reminded me of a hospital operating room.  Beyond aesthetics, the food was phenomenal.

Later, when thinking of the Waffle House cook, a floodgate of memories poured forth.  I started thinking about the folks who I've worked with in the past.  It seems my fondest memories of work all revolved around working with people who were at the top of their game.  Now this wasn't a sudden revelation.  I work with very technically oriented people.  I absolutely thrive being around the brightest and smartest.  But I also began to think about folks like Denton.  Denton was a truck driver and janitor.  He was (and still is) a consummate professional. 

So David, what is your description of a professional?

To begin with, there is no correlation to being paid for work or formal education that defines a professional to me.

A professional is a person who intends and strives to produce an exceptional outcome.  In methodical fashion he utilizes education, experience and resources to achieve his objective.  For his outcome to be exceptional, the professional must continually strive to build, improve and refine his education, experience and resources.

This doesn't mean that the short order cook needs a culinary degree.  It could be the addition of an improved cooking utensil, a new placement of his ingredients or a new grill cleaning technique.

Note to dave in the future: You remember and passionately followed the careers of Lew Alcindor, Walter Payton, Wayne Gretsky, Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, Annika Sorenstam and others who worked beyond hard to be the best.  You noticed and recognized folks like the Waffle House cook and others in everyday life who radiated professionalism.  Vince Lombardi, a founding member of your imaginary counsel said it best, "The quality of a person's life is in direct proportion to their commitment to excellence, regardless of their chosen field of endeavor."  Thanks Vince.

Rosa Say: The VOKR

The VOKR propels us to a heretofore deeper and richer level of understanding and connection.

World adventurer Joe Slow owns the baseball that Babe Ruth hit for his 714th home run.  One day on a visit to a remote village in the Amazon, Joe decides out of the blue, to sell the ball to the chief of a local tribe.  The chief didn't speak English, had never heard of baseball and wouldn't know if the planet was flat or round.

Pete's grandfather was at the game where Babe Ruth hit his 714th home run.  Pete's father worked his entire life in Yankee Stadium.  Pete has held Yankee season tickets for thirty years.  One day,  Pete ran into Joe Slow.  Joe offered to sell Pete the Babe's 714th home run ball.

Might one assume then, that the concept of value is different to different people?

I have been reading and interacting with Rosa Say on her Web site since November of 2004.  Had I not, this essay would mean as much to me as Joe's baseball did to the Amazon chief.  Not to say that a first time reader couldn't derive value from reading this, but the deep and rich meaning that I take away can be had in no other fashion.

This is piercing testimony to the value of not only staying connected to a person and her writing, but also of interacting on her Web site over a period of time.  This is something that wouldn't have been possible a few years back.  This is a fresh, new and exciting world into which we venture.  This is the value of knowing Rosa.

Fly Your Freak Flag

The pain, the excruciating hot, poker-iron pain pierced Jimmy's side.  He was lost in the forest without food and water.  They had given him what seemed like simple instructions.  "Go to college, get a good job with benefits, keep your head down and don't make waves."  He entered the forest at one of the firebreak roads.  The sign said Cubicle Farms just ahead.  Looking back, he should have been concerned when the firebreak road disappeared in the forest's undergrowth - on the very first day.

Jimmy entered Cubicle Farms at Hamster Wheel Alley.  Fifteen years and four sets of carpet later, he was still trapped inside the forest.  The forest and its dwellers homogenized his life.  His initial issue of horse-blinders, latex gloves and rubber pencils stood the journey of time.  The forest dwellers applied a steady drip of corner and edge rounding to all of the citizens of Cubicle Farms. 

Comparing his plight one day to that of Viktor Frankl, Jimmy remembered some long-ago advice from his brother Denny.  "Be proud of who you really are.  Be proud to fly your Freak Flag!"  Later that day Jimmy ran from Cubicle Farms into the Forest.

In an insightful essay* on freeing our creativity titled "Fly Your Freak Flag", author Ellen Rohr explains the title's roots. 

"In the movie, "the Family Stone," Sarah Jessica Parker plays an uptight lawyer.  Luke Wilson plays her soon-to-be brother-in-law and lover.  Luke's character is trying to get Sarah's character to lighten up.  He tells her, "You have a freak flag.  You just don't fly it."

Can you think of anything more liberating than climbing up Pork Chop Hill, climbing up, over and on the backs of the Forest Dwellers if you have to, but reaching the summit and driving your freak flag into the peak and proudly proclaiming, "this is who I am!"  Personally, I am not so demonstrative.  But I wouldn't mind getting a suction cup for my freak flag and sticking that baby right on top of my company issued soccer-mom-mobile.

Purple haze all in my brain.  Lately things just don't seem the same.  Actin funny, but I don't know why.  Scuse me while I kiss the sky.

*Unfortunately there is no link to Ellen's essay.

Design: Paul Rand

That's Different: Diet Dr. Pepper-Those Eyes!

11/29/07 Update - I found the commercial!  See below.

It's a diet Dr. Pepper commercial.  A familiar Tom Jones' tune provides common ground, the hook-in.  I'm not even sure what the commercial is supposed to be about.  To me, it's about the girl and those eyes...they speak about a generation.

The end of the commercial shows a college-age guy sitting on a bus.  He hears a slurping, air-sucking sound and makes a face.  This is the same face that girls make when presented with something that grosses them out.  It's usually accompanied by a "ewwwww!"  On a side note I live to be the producer of moments like these with my girls and wife.  The scene cuts away to a college-age girl sitting across from the dude, sipping diet Dr. Pepper through a straw.  Continuing to make the noise she looks toward the guy with these big, sort of innocent looking eyes.  Those eyes say, "Too bad it grosses you out, I feel pretty good about it myself."

To me this is Gen Y saying to those folks who make the ewwwww face at them, "Too bad you don't like this and that about me, I feel pretty good about myself, I don't think I'll change."  And here is why I think this girl with those eyes epitomizes this thought:  Not one facial muscle implies defiance. It's simply who she is.

Note to dave in the future:  You loved the spirit of this generation.  Folks like Anastasia Goodstein, Penelope Trunk, Danah Boyd and Lisa Johnson, worked to clear the pathway for Gen Y while educating the rest of us.

Moleskine Notebooks

It was nearly three years ago that the Moleskine product raged through the online world.  We spoke and wrote about the historic black notebooks.  The buzz died and although I've used two notebooks regularly since then, my awareness seemed to wane as well.  That is, until I read this sentence which I removed out of a small informational piece that was packed with the last notebook that I purchased.

Moleskine is a reservoir of ideas and feelings, a battery that stores discoveries and perceptions, and whose energy can be tapped over time.

What powerful and inspiring words!

One could say the same thing about a 1.99 drugstore notebook.  (It used to be Dime Store).  But the hook is that the reservoir is attached to the deep and rich Moleskine history.  This association is Gorilla Glue bond and sinks a grappling hook into our right brain, anchored to our soul.

Okay, now we're at a crossroad.  Either:

• You now exactly what I'm talkin' bout
• You gave Moleskine a try but you see the practicality of the 1.99 drugstore notebook instead
• You haven't purchased a Moleskine

If you're at point one or three listen up.  Use the connection between your heart, soul, mind and Moleskine to develop a keen sense of awareness and observation.  If you step one foot out of your house, make sure you're packin' the Moleskine.  Now, watch this...

Make notes on what captures your attention

As you continue to do this, you'll see more, and often what do see will be below the surface of what appears to be.  So basically you've used an object that hooks the emotion from your body to connect with others, with the land or with objects.  How can not this practice enrich your writing and your life?

Check out what these folks do with Moleskines.

Design: The Need to Possess

dave doesn't wanna be like Madonna.

The line between appreciation of appealing industrial design and the aching desire to possess such design is but a whisper of an impulse apart. 

Prior to exploring the need angle, I must tread into the waters of appreciation.  In the last two years I've read extensively on the topic of design.  Perhaps because I am a relative newbie to this right-brain world, I have yet to understand why some people who choose to express appreciation of a person or their work, do so in the language of tongues.  If they were able to tone down the references to movements in gone-by eras, the invocations of people's names who are only familiar to scholars and the excessive use of plain old gobbledy-gook language, they could increase their audience threefold.  (Unless of course their desire is to only speak to a small circle of people).  Listen to what this person wrote in the forward of a designer's book:

Half a century ago, Raymond Loewy pioneered a methodological axiom he termed MAYA.  It was much maligned by modernists purists as a cynical strategy meant to appease the public with designs that proceeded toward the "most advanced" possible but willfully stopped at the threshold of local market acceptability, and he was criticized for believing that in order to maximize market potential, one must target the lowest common denominator.

Perhaps I am not educated enough to understand this or perhaps I do not fit into the author's targeted readership.  It's a shame though.  Because I am eager to learn and I'm the kind of person who talks (or writes) to folks who have HUGE networks.  As I become more educated in the various fields of design I refuse to engage in this type of rhetoric.

It's amazing what you see when you really look.  What is that that the biz folks say about creating a business plan?  The process of putting one together is of equal if not more importance than the outcome.  I believe if we focus on the hunt, on the search for stuff that we like, documenting and chronicling these adventures as we go, our need to possess would lessen.  Of course this plan might work in reverse and actually increase our desire.  Note to self - "place a hold on any adventures involving above referenced example."

Perhaps if we insert cognition between the acts of appreciating and possessing, we can get things under control. 

My daughter needs to go to college.  I do not need that Rolex.

We need to pay off the truck.  I do not need that Corvette.

We need to eat.  I do not need that rich, leather briefcase.

We need clothes.  Honey, you do not need the diamonds.

Hopefully the process of writing and thinking about the need to possess, will squelch and tone down that need.

"Honey, I need an economic method of transportation.  Preferably one that has two wheels and rumbles a tad."

Murphy's Law

As a little kid, I loved Cowboys.  Since we didn't have a horse, there were only two ways for me to imitate my childhood idols, strapping on a pair of toy six-shooters and using my mom's clothesline as a lasso.

Nostalgia sidetrack - Ahhh, remember when you helped your mom take the clothes off of the clothesline?  Remember the smell of the sheets?  You could hardly wait to go to bed.  Remember trying to attach those wooden clothesline holders to certain anatomical features of your siblings?

From the time I was six years old until I turned fifty, I was never able to lasso one single thing.  Granted, early on my brother and sister presented a rather difficult challenge - they didn't seem to want to stay still long enough for me to rope them.  But the truth is, if I wanted to, I couldn't lasso a bedpost if I were standing three feet away.

"If-I-wanted-to"  I believe that these words were written into Mr. Murphy's first manifesto.  Because every time that I didn't want to lasso something, I'd secure and hog tie that sucker better than Buffalo Bill.  My first recollection of the fine art of not wanting to lasso something involved a household device that disappeared from my bathroom sixteen years ago...my hairdryer. 

Nostalgia sidetrack - Did you ever drop the plug end of your hairdryer on your naked big toe?  Have you ever felt such pain?

I would get the hairdryer out from under the sink and untangle its cord.  As the cord would be flying around it sometimes got caught on the drawer or door knobs.  Now I'm not talking about the kind of getting caught that a simple flick of the wrist would undo.  No, I'm talking about hog tying that drawer so tight that when you went to yank on the cord it nearly tore out of the dryer, or ripped the drawer from its tracks.  The reason that I know Murphy was involved in every single one of these episodes that happened to me over a twenty-year period is, when I purposely tried to use the cord and lasso the drawer I failed every single time...and then usually ended up bouncing the cord end off of my big toe in the process. 

Today my lassos of choice are the cords attached to mice, battery chargers and USB devices.  I know beyond a shadow of a doubt, if there was a rodeo contest and I was unaware that I was in it, and it involved these types of cords, I'd win by a landslide.

Ok, as today is Thanksgiving I am going to reverse engineer Murphy's Law.  I am going to try and not eat anything.

 

That's Different: Nikon Picture Town

Picture your back yard butting up to a busy freeway.  You become used to the drone of traffic.  It just beats on...and on...and on.  You live with it, and to you, it's not even there.  Until it isn't.  Now that freeway has your attention.

And so it is with advertisers.  We live with them, and to us, they're not even there.  Until they are. Like Nikon.  Nikon captured my attention.

This is old news.  Nikon actually ran this initiative back in the latter part of spring.  But I was reading Rolling Stone yesterday and came upon a Nikon ad.  In it, a woman in a yellow dress and a Nikon camera around her neck, is holding a large picture of a little boy holding a puppy.  Here is how this ad registers on dave's notice-an-ad-meter. 

Nikon D40.  Camera give-away.  Blue collar, American woman.  Real.  Spectacular smile.  Community.  Man Nikon!

Nikon gave two-hundred D40 camera's to folks from Georgetown, South Carolina.  Here is their story.  Matter of fact, you'll see the girl in the yellow dress when you follow this link. 

Giving stuff away for promotional benefit is not a new thing.  Oprah gave away a bunch of cars.  But cars don't foster community.  Cars don't cause people to interact.  Those folks drove their cars away, in different directions.  The citizens of Georgetown however, are a community.  A community running around taking pictures of everything and everybody.  How can that not be good?

Note to dave in the future:  Nikon connected with my human side.  (dave, is there any other?)  They made something real to me.  Maybe because, for a moment, I didn't perceive them as a company.  I perceived humans trying to connect with other humans, while promoting their product.  This is a good thing dave.  Hope companies are still doing this in 2027!

That's Different

What captures your attention?  No.  I mean really, what really captures your attention.  Yes.  To the point where your mate's voice fades into the background like the symphonic cadence of a forest on a warm Georgia night.

I love different.  Different captures my attention.  The problem is, while I can focus my attention and take delight in something, I can't remember the next day what it was that nudged my Richter scale.  So I am creating this category to track this stuff for myself.  I want to look back in twenty years and be able to remember what caused my eyebrows to raise and my breath to shorten.

From a fifty-thousand foot view, here are some things that dave, at the age of fifty-one, notices.

The Champion - In sports, I love those teams and individuals who are on top of their game.  While some folks root for the underdog, I love to see a chap like Tiger win the Masters by fifteen strokes.  Right now it's the New England Patriots.  I'd love to see Tom Brady throw sixty touchdowns in a season and for the team to go undefeated.  For the record I am not fond of the Bill Belichick who we see in public.

The Challenged - The human spirit, deployed to overcome challenges.  Whether it's a woman or child who have been abused, someone strung out on drugs or a mentally handicapped individual, the folks who fight to overcome seemingly impossible odds hold a Texas-sized ranch of real estate in my heart.

Teachers - But not the noun part of the word, the verb part - with three-part harmony and full  orchestration.  I'm talkin' about those who slow our world down a bit using the most powerful force in the universe - care.  I'm talkin' about those who will put an arm around our shoulder and say, "come with me."  I'm talkin' about those who work their guts out so our pathway has one less boulder in it.

Youth - A relative term here, but I refer to those from thirteen to thirty.  I love tween, teen and post-teen spirit!  (use of poetic license just enacted).  For those of us who are over thirty, our job is to keep enlarging this group's sandbox.  We must not stifle.  We must endorse play and creativity.  We should stay close though, with a safety net and shoulder.

Design - On the industrial side - stuff that makes our lives easier and more comfortable.  On the graphic side - stuff that enhances communication and is aesthetically pleasing.  I am a compulsive sort of fellow and right now I am completely infatuated with these two types of design.  As I look back in twenty years, this must, somehow have been a major portion of my life.

Seasoned Wisdom - This comes from folks older than I.  As our youth is a gold mine of what can be, this group of folks is a gold mine of what was (and of course what still can be).  It is beyond important to harvest and utilize the wisdom and knowledge of our older citizens!

The Family Unit - Family comes first.  No exceptions.  My definition of family begins with the blood of the immediate unit but quickly encompasses those people who come together, irregardless of race, religion, age or sex, for the betterment of the unit.  There is a resurgence of the family unit.  Pay attention and continue to build upon it - blood relative or not.

Technology - Technology enables.  This is the best time in history to be alive.

Freedom - I so appreciate the efforts of our country's forefathers.  So appreciate!!!!

Engaged: Heart-Mind-Back - Is there a much more precious commodity in this universe than the individual who loves what they do for a living?

Perhaps when I look back, experiences from the above fields will make my list.  Perhaps they won't.  The important thing for me though, is to get it down on paper and screen.  I might keep this as a work-in-progress.  My hope is that you can relate.  Thanks!