How Watered Down is Your DNA by Corporate America?

Warning! Long article ahead!

Today in social entrepreneurship we had a rousing lecture by our professor, Ron Lindorf, who is a highly successful entrepreneur. What follows is what he said to us, usually in his words.

Ron, at age 12, experienced his older brother's death, forcing him to confront the reality of mortality at a young age. This, he says, provided the ability to "not care what other people think. There's no bets on death." While in Jr. High, he started a successful window-washing business, employing two brothers from his school at $2 an hour while making $55 from each job. While pursuing his graduate degree in communications at BYU he bought Volkswagen cars for cheap, drove or trucked them down to California, and sold them there for more than a 700% markup. Needless to say his class attendance was not the best. In fact, in 6th grade his report card gave him full marks (a 1) for achievement but the lowest marks (a 3) for effort. He says, "I did exactly the amount of effort needed to get those 1s." Speaking of his entrepreneurial spirit, he said, "I'm not like those other guys. There are those entrepreneurs who are just smart. Captain of the track team, head boy in a group . . . they're the annoying ones. I'm a reluctant entrepreneur. Nobody would hire me and so I just thought, how can I generate some revenue?"

We don't make our own decisions often enough, Ron says. Growing up in the church, our decision making skill is sometimes crippled. We are a product of the thousands of small decisions we make during our lifetime, and there are plenty of bad decisions to make even in the framework of how our lives are planned out. "Is it better to marry the right person at the right time outside of the temple or to marry the wrong person at the wrong time inside of it?" Ethical decisions are some of the decisions that we don't see as often. Those that have made some bad decisions have learned early on how to make good decisions. We need to make more of our own decisions.

An important factor is an internal locus of control. This is what Ron developed in his high school years after his brother died. This is a critical component of a successful entrepreneur. Changing the world, not letting the world change you. Figuring out that "you don't have to let other people muck around with what you decide."

Ron gave the example of the L.A. Riots. During the riots, not a single 1st generation Korean immigrant with the entrepreneurial spirit had their business burned down. Why? Because the same spirit that pushed them to come to America and start their own business (usually a liquor store), to find a location, and to push for a better life for them and their children pushed them to climb on top of their roofs with AK-47s and illegal semi-automatics and pistols and shoot at the feet of anyone who looked like they were coming to cause trouble. They had that spirit that enables them to risk it all, and then to stand on the roof and defend it when their whole life's work, 10-15 years, is threatened. Not one of their businesses were touched.

"Some time long ago," Ron said, "we all had to decide. We were pitched two different ideas. One said, 'Look, it won't be hard. I mean, you can have security, you can go home at 5 and get a pay check every two weeks, there won't be any risk.' The other one said, 'Hey, it'll be hard. There'll be times when you fail, when you make mistakes, when you risk it all. There will be rough patches. You will have to work from nine to midnight every night after your wife goes to bed. But in the end it will be fair." Every measly human on this planet chose plan B. This is how Ron sees the world. So why can we go work at the post office and show up every morning and salute and go to work and then get off at five and do that for 40 years with nothing changing? We can get up and go to work among the devil's followers for 40 years and do nothing. But can we not come up with ideas about how to make it better? Can we stay an extra hour once in a while to get some things done? A person who does this, he says, will make it to leadership positions. Moving up within the system. Even that is following Christ. Sometimes it seems like forever that things don't happen and all the extra work does nothing. But somehow it will pay off.

Instant gratification. America doesn't know how to put it off. This part kind of led into a discussion about inflation and about how it's a silent tax on the people of the lowest income level and the middle class. So what do policy makers do? They can't tax the people who elect them or they're booted out. The upper level doesn't have enough wealth to keep up with a $10 trillion national debt. So what do we do? We let people overseas buy our bonds. Of course, as Ron says, "it's somewhat patriotic to hose the Chinese when they buy up our debt and then our dollar inflates." He also brought up the fact that as American car makers fire people over here and then outsource to other countries it actually creates a middle class in China and India. Bucketloads of people who would normally earn $1 a day are now earning $3-9 a day. Our world is going on sort of it's own wealth redistribution system.

All the people who originally came from England to this country were the ones who took the risk. They said goodbye to people who they'd never see again for some fantastic story they had heard, sold what they had and acquired a little capital, and risked everything. Every single person in the country has that in their DNA. Maybe it was from a couple generations ago.

So how watered down is your DNA by Corporate America? The fire of creating an income generating activity as a business has gone out of 90% of the people, statistically speaking. Of course, Ron recognizes that not everybody can be an entrepreneur. As an entrepreneur, this is how he sees the world to explain what he does to himself. The whole purpose of Corporate America, he says, is to preserve the status quo. "'I don't think we can do that.' ' Even if it increases your revenue by $4 million in a $10 million company?' 'Well....'
"It's because they like security! Go home at five and have security."

Entrepreneurs are weird. Talking to many people, Ron has found that entrepreneurs all have some sort of story. Or that all entrepreneurs have some sort of story. They all had to discover, or decide, rather, what he and Gibson (the other instructor of the class) discovered. They don't let what people think affect them. At all.

So are we going to work among the devil's followers our whole lives and lay down and die when the riots start? Or are we they type of person that crawls up on the roof with our AK-47 after risking everything to come to America and start a business? Internal locus of control! Don't let what other people think affect you! Trust more in the Atonement! We're supposed to make mistakes. Honest mistakes. Learn wisdom in thy youth. How? We have to learn through experience. Ron advises to work for somebody else for five years to make mistakes on somebody else's time and money. But don't just sit around!

Anyway, needless to say, an hour and a half of listening to this brilliant, accomplished, spiritual, driving, caring man was something.

Entropy and the Gospel

In chemistry we've been learning about a concept called entropy, designated by the letter S.  The statistical definition of entropy is dependent on how many microstates a substance can have.  Microstates are determined by how spread out particles in the substance are, how much energy they have (velocity), the number of rotational and vibrational movements they can have, etc.  Entropy, in other words, measures disorganization.  Entropy also helps to measure spontaneity. 

Here's the important part:  every reaction increases the entropy of the universe.

There's a tradeoff in every reaction necessary to accomplish work.  We like the fridge to be cold, but we can't except it to get that way on it's own.  Why?  Because systems seek to maximize entropy.  In this case, the maximum entropy level of the fridge and the surroundings exist when the fridge is the same temperature as the surroundings and thus all particles are as disorganized as they can be.  If we want to cool the fridge down, we have to put work/energy into it using the compressor and the chemical properties of the Freon-like material.  By putting work in, we can cause the entropy level of the fridge to decrease and, therefore, it can sustain a colder temperature than the surroundings.

Take note of the important fact that even in this process, the entropy of the universe is still increasing.  The fridge decreased, but where did the energy come from to do it?  The power company, which produces energy by one of several means.  Each way will increase entropy in the universe more than the fridge will decrease it. The overall S of the universe will increase.

Life is not spontaneous.  Life works against entropy.  Our bodies are builders, not "sparsifiers."  Thus life has a problem.  If everything has to increase the universe's entropy, what do we do?  The truth is, we work the same way as the fridge.  We offload our entropy problem.  It's like an entropy chain.  We use the energy from the food we eat to build proteins and to do work.  That food is built from plants, which take a ton of energy from the sun to build sugars.  If we follow the chain back, we realize that we can only survive if the sun increases in entropy more than we decrease in entropy.  Essentially, we offload our entropy problem to the sun.  The only way life can exist on earth is if we take our problems and let something else deal with all of them.  Of course, we do deal with some of it; we will die eventually and our particles will be dispersed.  We are all subject to the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, but at the same time, we can use another Law (a less defined law) and transfer our problem to the sun.  It's a law because it works, and it always works.  It's what allows us to live.  Yet the first law, the law defining entropy, is not violated.  In fact, if we define life in terms of a system that auto-perpetuates a lower entropy state even with complete material turnover, the sun becomes the enabler of that.  The sun becomes not only the light, but the life of the world.

Now, as I'm sure you predicted, comes the ol' vowel switcheroo.  'u' becomes 'o' in the sun.  The only enabler of life on this planet is the Son.  The only way we can survive is if we offload our problems to Him.  Sometimes it goes through the chain - hometeachers, the bishop, etc - until it finally reaches Him, but it will eventually.  Through the Son the Law of Justice can still be fulfilled while letting us use the Law of Mercy (less defined - more abstract) to transfer the full effect of the Law of Justice to Him.  As our bodies have to do work to let the entropy changes slow and transfer the change away, so do our spirits have to do work to let our problems transfer to Christ.  It's called repentance, prayer, fasting, commandment-keeping, etc.

Now, scientifically, the sun of this world will ultimately fail.  Entropy will wear it down until it stops giving off the light and the energy the world needs.  That is where the comparison stops.  Unlike this temporal sun, the Son of Man (exalted Man) will not fail.  He has already completed the mission that allows us to apply the Law of Mercy.  It is an infinite and eternal sacrifice.  Jesus Christ, the true Son, will never wear down and we can partake of his infinite light, power, and goodness forever.  Life is not spontaneous.  We were created by God through his Son, Jesus Christ, and by Him and through Him we live.  He is the ultimate light and life of the world.

Final Days

Echoing a post by Whitney, I have mixed feelings about leaving home for a year at school.  I went to my last Stake Dance tonight, and a wave of sadness swept over me as I thought about the transition from high school days to college.  At first it was a bit weird being one of the oldest there, but then I realized that these people were my friends, and I stopped caring.  It was sad to think about the fun I've had at Stake Dances, from my first one three years ago to this one today - I can't even imagine how many times I've danced to "Boot Scootin' Boogie" in the interim.  Although a lot of my friends my age weren't there, there were still a bunch.  Plus, I do have younger friends, believe it or not.
I think I'm waxing eloquent on the subject because it hit me tonight exactly what I'm doing.  Moving away from home, never seeing most of the people going to Hurricane High, not even really associating with Hurricane High anymore.  As Whitney said in her post and I learned three years ago when we moved here, your family is the one of the only things you can count on to be there for you and support you and one of the best things that one can do is to be supportive of everybody that they associate with.  I really tried to do that and I hope that I have.
I am excited for the future - I'm not saying that I'm not - but right now I am just so grateful for all of my family, the church, and my friends.  My family and the church have stuck with me my whole life.  My friends accepted me and still continue to be friends even after they get acquainted with some of my...quirks.  For that I am eternally grateful.  It has changed me for the better by example.
Moving was hard.  I had to stick close to those two pivotal anchors in my life, now joined by a third.  They say triangles are the strongest shape.  This is kind of a more personal, emotioinal post them I'm used to writing, but I will miss everybody very much (unless by some good stroke of fortune I see you again, which should happen).  I can't think of a single person I don't like right now - I love you all!  Of course, people have their own quirks, but since I have some I can understand other's.

Goodnight!

Allegory of the...Freeway?

I was laying in bed the other night and thought this up and decided to turn on the light and write it in my journal. So here I thought I'd post it up, if I can decipher the handwriting that I wrote at midnight, and my handwriting is bad enough anyways! This will be copied word for word, because it's late right now, but in the future maybe I'll tweak it a little and improve it and maybe add some other ideas I've had since then, because this can be expanded. Additionally, both the real story and the symbolical meaning is sometimes incorporated into this mesh of words, so ideally the story will come first and then the explanation later, but that's a project for a different time. Here it is:

Life is like a highway. Sometimes we get off the exit and detour from our true destination, which is the celestial kingdom. Sometimes interchanges come up, and people take the roads to the other kingdoms. When we get off the narrow, straight freeway, sometimes the access to the on-ramp is blocked from the off-ramp. Sometimes we need to drive a little ways and then pop a U-turn (repent means to turn around) and bypass the roadblock through the help of our in-car navigation system kind of like OnStar - sometimes the volume is low - sometimes we can't remember where the volume control is - sometimes our arms don't seem long enough and we really have to work to reach it. However, a voice does come out of the navigation system, telling the will of Him who watches the position of our and every car on the satellite tracking system, overseeing legions of helpers recording every turn we make. He waits at our destination. Often we need the help of "officers" along the way, those who wear a badge of leadership and priesthood, those who venture out into the muddlesome places and attempt to direct those who are weaving ll over the road back to the main highway. Sometimes other officers (or perhaps the same one) regulate entrance to the highway by approving returners. They stand by a car wash, for being clean is of utmost importance on the highway. Additionally, it is sometimes a junior officer in training who actually raises the bar to let a freshly washed car onto the freeway. Sometimes it is hard for a car to find its way back because of the detours, but I testify there is an unblocked on-ramp for every car, if it chooses to seek it long and hard enough. Billboards along the road attempt to entice cars with their siren's song to take the next exit, but those that learn to listen and enjoy the soft music coming from the navigation radio never have need for the billboards and ignore them. Every week we pull into a rest area and refuel. Sometimes it seems the road will never end. Those in the know know that the real trick to getting to the destination is driving until your car wears out and collapses, for as we all know, roads never really end - everything is interconnected. After your car collapses, JC Grace Towing will come, evaluate your car, and decide whether it is worthy for the destination. If so, it will be taken the rest of the way by the towing company. The executive of the towing company is the only person with the key to the compound to which we all aspire. The number of dings on the front from giving those in front a nudge in troubled times might be evaluated, as well as any unwashed spots. Some try to crash early, while others take an exit and drive, trying to get away, but their car will eventually wear out too, and then they'll be in a pickle, because they will be so far away from the range of the towing company they will have to stay and roast and burn in the desert. Those who are closer but not on the freeway will have to pay a fee to be towed. Highway travelers get the service for free.

News Article both Saddens and Brightens

Published on June 1st, a recent New York Times article discusses President George W. Bush's recent commencement address at Furman University. My personal discussion on the article and event appears below.

I am saddened by the faculty at Furman.

Well, not all of the faculty.

First of all, let me explain what I believe. People have the right to disagree with the President. People have the right to their own opinions. People have the privilege of signing a petition sheet:

More than 200 Furman professors and students signed a statement criticizing Bush administration policies and the Iraq war.

See, that's OK. That is fine. What gets me is when people don't show respect for the office of President of the United States, the highest office attainable in this country. Nobody but those who have sweat and labored, and yes, even lied to get there (not something I'm endorsing - completely the opposite) know how difficult, how challenging, and how pressured the President is. One may or may not agree with the President, but one should still respect the work and the will of the people in force behind him (I'll say that until there actually is a her President, then I'll worry about political correctness). The President is the Cheif Citizen. He is the Chief Executive, the CEO of the United States. He is the Chief Legislator, setting the course for public policy. He is the Chief Diplomat. He is the leader of the country, and regardless of one's views, should be held in a higher esteem and treated better than he is.

Furthermore, look at the message that President Bush is giving the students. That is just the sort of direction the country needs in these troubling times, regardless of his actions in Iraq. Let's get the country headed in the right direction.

This does kind of show though - as a coworker of my mother said:
The Republicans want to control nothing but one's morals; the Democrats want to control everything but one's morals.

When it comes to morals, I wish the country would choose to have good morals to begin with. Then the whole conundrum of whether to force morals on anybody wouldn't have to be dealt with.

Do you ever? Thoughts on thoughts

Do you ever finish a sentence with yourself? I seem to always start a sentence in my head, but I never recall ever getting to the final period. I think it's because I already know exactly what I'm going to say. It makes things awfully hard when writing, because when thinking of what to say, I only draft the first half of sentences in higher order brain levels. The rest kind of gets made up on the way from brain to fingers, and usually I don't have much of a say unless I concentrate on the ending of the sentence, which sometimes takes too much energy.

You know, I think that our brains thrive on pure thought. Pure thought is so pure that it cannot be expressed, but only...thought. I think that we each have our own "format" of thought, which might be one reason why we are all unique. However, our brains have a "translator," wherein that pure thought is transcoded into various forms.
One of these forms might be language, or, more specifically, the muscle impulses sent to our lungs, vocal chords, and tongue that will produce language. The translator also receives impulses from our ears and eyes and translates that language back into pure thought. Language is the intermediary pool that human beings contribute to and pull from. I bet it is the sub-perfect level of translation (for we have all seen evidence of misunderstanding one another or not producing lucid sentences) that also gives rise to some creativity. If our translators are different and interperet things differently, a new thought might be introduced into our brains and incorporated into our thought processes even if we don't realize it.
Another form that thought can be transcoded into could be the language that we think in our head. Imagine a chord plugged in directly from the headphone out port on a computer to the line in port on that same computer. It's a loopback. That is kind of like what our thoughts can be. It's a little like saying something outloud so we can here how it sounds. Out the mouth, and straight back to our brain through our ears. Kind of like that, but all within our brain. It may help our thoughts run through the logic machine that makes up a great portion of our brain, because our brain probably evaulates all of the thoughts it gets from the translator in a different way than it evaulates thoughts spawning in our own, local, brains. Running our thoughts through the loopback may help with viewing them in different ways.
It is too bad that all of our pure thought has to be interfaced through translation mechanisms. However, it shows again the wonder and grandeur of the human race and how amazing our minds really are, to enable this sort of communication.
But how awesome would it be to be able to interface with each other so purely we exchange pure thoughts and are able to attain perfect understanding? However, I think all of our hardware is different enough to be incompatible with each other, so we must go through intermediary devices.

Biased Randomness?

You know, I've been thinking.

It is so typical to choose randomly at fun, casual sporting events. For example, everybody lines up and are numbered off, or names are randomly drawn from a list or something. This is supposed to be the most unbiased way to make teams, right? Wrong. Here's an important fact about "randomly" drawing teams:

The drawing is always biased toward the winning team, especially in a tournament structure.

The teams are already biased! The best team is going to win, regardless of the method of choosing! The teams will always be biased in a tournament structure, because one team will end up as the winner. They're already better than everybody else, they just haven't proved it yet. A tournament always has unfair teams. Nobody starts on a footing commensurate with anybody else. The only thing a tournament is for is to tell everybody where they are in relation to everybody else. Then the question becomes: what is the motivation for joining a tournament? If one team is already better than everybody else, why does everybody think they have a chance?

I tell you, we all see things wrong when it comes to selecting teams.

Recap On Theories Previously Mentioned

A while ago I posted a theory on our minds. Just today during fourth hour (after helping the librarians with their daily crossword puzzle), I found a book in the library called Brainscapes, by Richard Restak. It is eight years old. However, I was thumbing through the book and found that as well as being a very interesting book it quoted a certain philosopher and his theory. Here's a direct quote:

"The philosopher Immanuel Kant, although he never spoke about the brain, expressed a similar belief when he suggested that we do not experience things as they are in themselves but only as filtered through the medium of the mind-we would now say the brain. This clearly implies a direct relationship between our brain's organization and operation and what we can learn about the world and about ourselves as part of that world." (pg. 134-135)

The book also matched my theory on recursive thought. It talked about frames of mind and how the brain can think about itself. All in all, I was excited, because it was talking about many of the things I had previously considered! I think I might check it out someday. If only I had time to read for fun.

What is the present tense....

...of wrought?

Essays and the Nature of Us

I am horrible at writing essays. I try to have a catchy opening, and I fail miserably. I try to add in details that add substance, and I fail miserably. I cannot express my ideas in writing very clearly. Maybe clarifying some ideas on this blog will help me to create a strong essay.

I've been working on an essay about us as humans. Where is our intellect stored in relation to the "real world"? It is my belief that our minds, our intellects, ourselves are held seperate from the reality of realness by a barrier, through which brick pinpricks of light break through and serve as channels for information. These channels are our senses. No mortal human can in full measure understand the purest nature of reality because our senses are always there, acting as an interface into our brains. Reality itself as humanity and mankind sees it is just the result of collective translation of reality to a form our brains can understand. For example, the taste of something is just a property of something that is so real we cannot comprehend it. Our taste takes that property of the real object and transforms it into something our brains can understand; we only perceive it as taste. All matter is energy, and all energy is linked somehow, but we cannot understand that because our brains can only see through those little pinpricks of light in the isolating barrier, or membrane...or...perhaps...veil? All matter has certain properties that can only be sensed and acted upon by our bodies. Perhaps matter as we know it is just energy with a few more properties than pure energy. Perhaps all energy has certain properties; in the case of most matter that we can sense, the property of the ability to be sensed by the senses that we have could be a property (yeah, you might need to read that sentence one more time). Everything is linked, but the intelligences that were organized before the world was as independent, free willing agents sit isolated, taking streams of input from several channels and acting out its decisions through several channels like muscles.

The next important concept is deciding whether our consciese selves, the thoughts that we can think, are part of this independent mind or part of the output of this independent mind, and we have some sort of sensor in our brain that senses the output of our souls/ourselves to our minds and repeats the message? Is there a distinction between what is truely the most pure form of us and the mind and consciese that we can feel every day? In other words, is there another component besides just our physical bodies and brains and the electrical impulses therein? Of course, we know the answer to that. There is - our spirit and our body are two different things.

OK, I'm sorry I can't explain stuff better. However, it was good to philosophize. Who knows - I might be incorrect on all this stuff. Remember, it's just a theory, and completely subject to change.