If you follow the pink dos with your eyes, then nothing too exciting.

If you focus on the black + in the middle, you will probably see a green dot that replaces the pink dot that disappears.  This is a negative afterimage effect (neon green being the compliment to pink).  I’ve seen similar illusions before.

Then the really cool effect is if you focus on the black + long enough, all the pink dots will disapear, and you will just see the green dot spinning around the circle.  If you move your eyes, then the pink dots will come back though.

Your eyes will see all this from the same animation.  The animation doesn’t change.  You might ask yourself what else gets distorted in your life when you are focused on one thing?  Do other things tend to disapear?  When is that a good thing?  When is it not?

On one of my assignments I worked with a guy named Dave, and he was magic. Dave had long red hair that was kind of wavy, and a beard and mustache that was also red. He looked kind of like a wizard and he most always wore a hat. Not a wizards hat, but a baseball cap. I actually got a chance to learn some magic from Dave too.

Now if you never took the time to get to know Dave, you would have never expected him to be magic. In fact, most people may never meet him as he spends most of his time on another plane or even in a different dimension them most of humanity. Luckily for me, this otherworldliness didn’t scare me off. In fact, I had been to this realm before — I had worked the graveyard shift.

That’s right, Dave worked the graveyard shift. What did he do on during the middle of the night? Well, he cleaned your floors. Maybe not yours personally, but he cleaned the floors of a number of businesses around town. He had a schedule he rotated through. Typically showing up after everyone had gone home for the day. He had a key, and his own equipment. We would come in, sweep the floors, empty the trash, and then he would work his magic as he polished the floors.

Dave took a lot of pride in his work, and he did his best to teach me how to do a good job too. Unfortunately I never got a chance to run the big equipment, which was when Dave performed his serious magic. When he was done polishing those floors, he would always look at them and smile. He knew he had gotten those floors as clean and shiny as they could. I remember a few times he imparted bits of magical wisdom to me.

He would say things like “They aren’t scheduled to have a deep waxing this week, but I really think this floor needs it now, and since I have the time, I am going to do it anyway.”

Or other times, after he got a floor polished to an amazing shine, and he was showing me how brilliant it was he would say “Most likely no one will notice tomorrow, and after the first few customers come in with dirty shoes you won’t be able to tell, but doesn’t that just look amazing right now?”

So why take so much pride in cleaning floors? Why put that extra effort into polishing them just right, putting down that extra coat of wax, or running the buffer over the floors one more time? Especially when no one will notice, and people will just scuff them up in a matter of minutes as soon as they get the chance? Well, that was because Dave is magic, and he wanted to use his magic to do the absolutely best he could.

He probably could have gotten away with doing less then his best, and no one would have known, well, no one but Dave. I think that is what it really comes down to. Many us may consider cleaning floors to be brainless work that we never really give any thought too, unless we notice that our floors need cleaning. But when I was working with Dave, I realized that it makes no difference what you are doing, it is how you do it. You can bring passion, commitment and depth of skill to anything you do, and you can even bring your magic.

So what is this magic? I still don’t know that I completely understand it honestly. Dawn and I just finished watching Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium.  Our whole family really enjoyed it.  In the end Molly Mahoney (Natalie Portman) had to finally believe that she has magic in herself to save the store.  I think that is really it.  We all have magic in us, if we are willing to believe and use that magic.

So we all really have two choices:

1. Are we going to believe in and use our magic?
2. When we do, what will we use it for?

While not everyone can be fabulous at everything, I do believe we have a number of opportunities to express our magic.  We can choose from one or more of those opportunities and create magic and wonder, or keep our magic bottled up and never brighten the world.

I am glad there are people like Dave who enjoy cleaning floors, that isn’t something I enjoy, but I don’t discount someone who does.  A lot of people probably wouldn’t enjoy what I do.  I know people who think they might enjoy what someone else does, because it looks easy or glamorous – grass is always greener and all – but often times when they get a chance they find the ease boring and the glamor over powering.  Other times it is the person who is doing it who makes it look easy, or they bring the glamor to what they do.

Sometimes believing in ourselves, and then tapping into that magic can be scary.  That would seem counter intuitive that we be scared to accomplish our potential, but that has been my experience, that I worry I am not ready, or what might happen when I do.  This is why it is often easier for those around us to see our potential and encourage us, and while that helps, I don’t think that is ever enough.  To truly tap into our magic and our potential we must discover it ourselves.

I sincerely hope Dave is still out there working his magic.   I actually saw him years later.  I was out late one night, and riding my bike through a shopping center parking lot that was closed, and I saw him busy cleaning the  floor, making sure it looked marvelous.  When I think about him, I take a moment to look at the floors where I am and wonder if maybe he cleaned them, or maybe it was someone else just as magic as him, who took the time to make sure that floor looked great.

Believe in yourself, take pride in what you do, and what ever it is your are doing, do it well.  Focus on what you are doing and leave everything else to someone else.

So we wanted to get our family a Nintendo Wii for Christmas. They run about $225 – $300, which is reasonable, but then you start adding games and things get carried away pretty quickly.

So back in November we decided to start shopping. We tried WalMart and the other big box department stores, and they would promise to have some in first thing in the morning in two days, but then when I would show up, they would only have more empty promises that they would be in tomorrow or the day after. That got old quick.

Next we thought we would look online. The only place we could find a Wii by itself was eBay, but the price reflected the higher demand then supply. Since we still had some time we decided to file eBay away as a possibility and keep looking locally.

Then we called GameStop (a little video game boutique store), which had 80 Wii’s in stock. They were a $249, which is about $20 more then WalMart claimed to sell them for, but they were in stock. Bird in the hand is better then two in the bush and all that, so we decided to go for it.

Before we took the plunge, Dawn and I talked about it and decided we might take advantage of the price gap between GameStop ($249+ tax) and eBay (around $300+ shipping). GameStop said they were limiting Wii’s to two per person, so we decided to pick up a second one and sell it on eBay.

The next day I stopped by the GameStop across the street from the Alderwood mall next to my office. They had no Wii’s, so they called over to the GameStop in the mall across the street, which reported to have some in stock, so I headed over there.

When I got to the game stop in the mall, they said they only had 3 Wii’s in stock, so they were limiting it to one Wii per person, but the other GameStop in the mall should have more (it is a big mall). So I took one there, and went down the way to the other GameStop. They had a few, so they sold me 2 more (which I made the mistake of putting on the same receipt – oops.)

Now to list the Wii’s on eBay. We wanted the auction to end on a Saturday evening, so on Tuesday I started a 5 day auction. I looked at a few other successful Wii listings and borrowed bits and pieces and added some of my own verbiage. Listed the Wii, and then let Dawn review the listing. She said it was good, so I listed the second one. We decided to hold on to one just in case the well runs dry.

Needless to say, hiding 3 Wii’s in our apartment isn’t easy, Sherlock Jonathan discovered them. We strongly believe in not lying to our kids, but at the same time we didn’t want to let the cat out of the bag, so we told him we thought we would sell some Wii’s on eBay to make some extra money. His immediate response was that we should take the money from those Wii’s selling and roll that into buying more Wii’s to sell until we have enough profits to buy a Wii we could keep. I told him that was a great idea and we would see how it turned out.

Saturday night rolled around and we were out to dinner for TJ’s birthday. I decided to check my email on my phone and see if they sold. The first sold for $350 and the second sold for $400. I was quite pleasantly surprised. So we decided to pick up a few more Wii’s and repeat the process.

Listing subsequent Wii’s was really easy. You just select one you already listed and tell it to list again. I would tweak it from time to time to try different shipping prices and descriptive details. None of it seemed to make too big of a difference.

I continued to buy and list Wii’s and Dawn handled counting the money (via PayPal) and shipping them (through PayPal and UPS). Once we had the weight and dimensions of the box shipping was a snap. All in all, we made an average of $80 a Wii after eBay fees (listing is cheap, but they take a percentage on the sale), PayPal fees (another percentage) and Shipping (we listed them flat rate, but UPS charged on distance, so it averaged to about a wash).

Once Thanksgiving rolled around it got really hard to find them, and the price on eBay crept up a little bit. In the end we got a number of games and accessories to go with the Wii, as well as other gifts. The great thing is the Wii ended up paying for the rest of Christmas.

Making the extra money was great, but all the thank you notes from our buyers on eBay was very cool. Most of them said we made their Christmas. We had buyers as far away as Florida (a couple there) and as close as our same apartment complex (but they had their shipped 20 miles from here).

What did we learn?

• Calculate all your fees in advance so you know what your real cost is.
• Get each Wii on its own receipt so you can include the receipt with the Wii.
• Because Wii’s were in such high demand, they were a commodity.  The listing duration (24 hours to 7 days) didn’t make much difference.  We always ended in the evening, but  different days of the week didn’t seem to make much difference.
• Follow-up on feedback and you might still get it.
• If you are willing to risk (starting your auction at $1), you can make a great payoff (all of our auctions ended in a profit).
• Risk is mitigated in volume.
• Once you find a winning strategy, repeat.
• The best purchases are the ones that pay for themselves.

It was a great experience overall.  I hope Jonathan learned from it as well.

Here is my results:

You are an Interpersonal Thinker
		Interpersonal thinkers: Like to think about other people, and try to understand them Recognise differences between individuals and appreciate that different people have different perspectives Make an effort to cultivate effective relationships with family, friends and colleagues
Like interpersonal thinkers, Leonardo had lots of friends and contacts, and was a popular figure at the Italian court.		Other Interpersonal thinkers include Winston Churchill, Mother Teresa, William ShakespeareCareers which suit Interpersonal thinkers include Politician, Psychologist, Nurse, Counsellor, Teacher

You can also view all the different thinking styles.

Why?

I would want a high EQ.  That would make it easy to surround myself with people who know more then me (people with a high IQ and low EQ).  My high EQ would allow me to know if they were being honest with me when they gave me advice and answered my questions.  In exchange I would help them connect with others who have specialized knowledge in other areas.

It isn’t WHAT you know, but WHO you know.  I would know all the people who had all the answers, and they would want to share those answers with me.

Thanks to Tricia Ho in Australia for the question via LinkedIn.

“Practice until you get it right. Then practice until you can’t get it wrong.”

Don’t know who it is by though. I’ll research that. . .

I am also a fan of the differentiation that practice doesn’t make perfect, it makes permanent. Perfect practice makes perfect results, while imperfect practice makes imperfect results. So always improve your practice.

If you want an interesting philosophical twist on this you might consider some of the works of Buckminster Fuller and Dr. W. Edwards Deming. A simple summary is that they observed that the goal of a honey bee was to collect nectar, but the side effect was cross pollinating plants, which is essentially responsible for all life on Earth – if there is no cross pollination then their is no plants, which form the bottom of the food chain (connecting sun energy to everything else).

Nectar is the benefit for the bee, but cross pollination is the benefit for the whole of life. When the bee peruses their highest and best benefit of collecting nectar, everyone else benefits. This is similar to the theory of capitalism. Fuller and Deming theorized that if the bee instead focused on cross pollination, and let the collecting of nectar be a side-effect, then the benefit for the bee and the whole of life would be greater.

Of course they were interested in applying this theory to business and not bees, so they suggested that perusing a “noble goal” would result in material gain of greater amounts then perusing the material gain directly. You do need to allow the side effect to happen though. So the side effect remains an objective, but it is a side effect none the less. This is similar to game theory.

So, if this theory is true, then by the Mozilla foundation perusing their mission of “improving the Internet experience for people everywhere” and letting the side effect be the accumulation of money then they will end up with more money then if they perused money directly. Since Microsoft is in other businesses besides browsers, we would need to compare Mozilla with Opera or some other company that is dedicated to browsers exclusively. Best I can tell Opera doesn’t make and profits.

Check out this web site I found that does a much better job explaining Fuller and Deming’s theory (even with pictures.)

Overall I think what Mozilla is doing is brilliant. It is like the model King Gillette came up with, but turned around. King Gillette wanted to give his razor holders away at a discount, and then make all his money in the replacement disposable blades. What Mozilla has done is given their browser away free, and then made all their money from the search engines as a side effect of people using the browser. I wouldn’t discount their method too quickly as being unreproducible.

• How do you know you are not upside down and gravity isn’t really pulling you up?
• Have you ever been your imagination?
• Have you ever exceeded your imagination?

Of course part of me wants to give a simple answer, but then I realized that these questions are not looking for an answer, but consideration.  Much like the sound of one hand clapping.

I remember a question I always wondered, which these questions reminded me of, is how do we know that what I see as red everyone else sees as red?  Couldn’t we all see different colors?  What I see as red you see as blue, but we both learned that apples are what we call red, so you call blue red.  Of course if this is true then neither of us see real red or real blue.

So what do you see?

For our little boys it is a sword mostly. But it also makes a great telescope, megaphone, bat, baton, etc.

Our little girls on the other hand saw something totally different. They saw a pony, a wand or a puppy.

So what do you see? Can you see something else?

I heard a story once about a school teacher putting a white dot on the chalk board for a kindergarten class. She asked them what it was and they came up with around 50 different ides of what it was, including owl’s eye, white hole, a period, a snowflake, etc.

That same white dot on a similar chalkboard in front of high school students resulted in a long tense silence until someone ventured the guess of “a dot” and were obviously unsure of their answer.

What do you do to practice creativity on a regular basis?

The more choices you give people, the harder it is for them to choose, and the unhappier they’ll feel. See, for example, Barry Schwartz’s book, The Paradox of Choice. Let me quote from the Publishers Weekly review: “Schwartz, drawing extensively on his own work in the social sciences, shows that a bewildering array of choices floods our exhausted brains, ultimately restricting instead of freeing us. We normally assume in America that more options (‘easy fit’ or ‘relaxed fit’?) will make us happier, but Schwartz shows the opposite is true, arguing that having all these choices actually goes so far as to erode our psychological well-being.”

And in what I believe to be an amazing paradox itself, instead of linking to an Amazon link where you can buy the book, or maybe the book or author’s home page, instead he links to a site that provides 20 different purchase links. If that isn’t a paradox of choice paradox I don’t know what is.

Google provided a great example of how less choices is better then more choices. They were one of the first search engines to assume an AND between search terms instead of an OR. Other search engines would make your results larger the more words you added to your search, while Google would make it smaller, allowing you to drill into what you are looking for. Also Google’s user interface has always had very few links. Their home page still only has 13 links. I don’t even what to try counting the links on any other search engine or portal site.