June 16, 2008, 3:29 pm Arthur C. Brooks’ book “Gross National Happiness” was mentioned a few days ago on World On the Web. What I found interesting was the statement that his research shows there are three basic things that make people happy: meaning in their lives, control over their environment, and success in creating value in the world.
How does one achieve these things? Certainly not with money, nor with power or fame. No, they are to be found through a serious pursuit of personal values—in your life, your family, and your community.
I think this also means there is a great challenge when one of these three things goes out of whack. For instance, suppose you lose control of an important part of your environment. No matter what you do, how hard you work, or who you appeal to, the situation is out of your control. That’s a huge producer of stress in your life.
When such an out of control situation occurs in a group, the team, whose every effort at achieving their goal is blocked, tends to go dysfunctional. As happiness goes away, patience wears thin and the team can begin to self-destruct. With loss of control comes the danger of placing blame and assigning poor performance to those (often team members) who may not deserve it. And that’s a shame because the bad situation just gets worse as meaning in life and success in creating value in the world go out of whack too.
June 14, 2008, 3:28 pm Many folks are celebrating the release of the iPhone 3G next month as a great price drop. The 8GB iPhone drops from $399 to $199, and you get the higher speed (if you use the phone in a 3G network area—generally large urban areas). Few look beyond the initial buy-in cost and calculate the total cost of ownership.
Unless you jail-break your phone, the iPhone in the US is locked-in to a 2-year contract with AT&T. The minimum plan with the current model phone is $40 per month for voice and $20 per month for data (and includes 200 SMS messages per month). That’s $1,440 for the service and $400 for the phone, totaling $1,840 TCO for the current iPhone. But the new, less expensive 3G phone requires a 2 year contract that costs $30 per month for data, and doesn’t include any SMS messaging. Although not announced yet, adding 200 SMS messages to the iPhone 3G plan will probably cost $5 per month. So guess what, the TCO on the new iPhone will be $2,000 ($200 for the phone and $1,800 for the service).
None of this is to say that the new iPhone isn’t worth $160 more to the user. With its new features, it probably is. The point here is that the better acceptance of the new iPhone because it only costs $199 instead of $399 illustrates the “get it now” attitude of our culture and the unwillingness to deal with total costs as long as the monthly costs can be squeezed into the budget.
Update: Gizmodo has a good price comparison.
June 5, 2008, 8:18 pm After breakfast we drove east on highway 20 to very near Emigrant Gap and took Bowman Lake north to the Carr Lake trailhead. Only the last bit of the road was dirt, so a passenger car could make it.
 Island Lake
We hiked just a short ways in to Island Lake, where we found a couple of caches. The trail was still snow bound in a lot of places, so our going was slow, although pretty.
After returning to the car, we drove on to Bowman Lake. This was a much rougher road—high clearance required I think. It’s an interesting shelf road in a beautiful, deep canyon. At one spot I think had a cache been at the bottom of the canyon the GPSr would have said it was only 300 ft away, but the straight-line distance would have been at least 2,000 feet. It sure seemed like a cliff to me (’course, I don’t like heights).
Links:
—Island Lake photo gallery
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Consider this:“Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for he who loves his fellowman has fulfilled the law.” Romans 13:8 |
