It is January 2nd, 2018. A new year, with new inspirations and new occasions and experiments. How wonderful it is to have a new year again.  I don´t know about you, but in my case,  each beginning of the year is the opportunity to start something new. There is an inner feeling around all of us for new beginnings. New Year Resolutions are plenty. There are personal resolutions for each of us and there are social, political, environmental, and economic resolutions to accomplish everywhere. For example, my first priority this year is to be thankful. I wish to express gratitude for and in everything I do. I wish to learn to say thank you with and through actions. I am thankful to God for the miracle of life. Moreover, I wish to be closer to God by learning more about his words and teachings.  As a typical Gen X member, I google “devotional Christian daily“, and many websites appear with daily subscriptions which will be sent to my inbox every day. For learning about God, I don´t visit Facebook neither Instagram nor Pinterest.  I use the latter socially. Nonetheless, I go directly to Google in my quest for what I wish to learn. For example, let´s explore several daily reading devotional websites such as  Our Daily Bread, Proverbs31, The Word Among Us, Living Faith, Bible Gateway, Daily Guideposts, Magnificat, Daily Hope Devotional Rick Warren, Joel Osteen Daily Devotional, Daily Readings by the USCCB, etcetera, etcetera, and etcetera).

I still have not decided on which devotional yet,  it may be possible that I will choose the  Getting Ready for Marriage devotional. This is a good habit before my future marriage, if this occurs, and before my pregnancies or having babies.  I will have to teach by example, not by words. Actions matter more than words. 

In summary, independently of which Christian denomination we belong to, it is a good habit to read the Bible at least one time per day.

I usually subscribe to one Catholic and one Protestant daily Bible reading online sites. I like to read both. If you belong to the Gen Y or Gen Z group, it is easier for you to go directly to download the daily devotional reading applications at Google Play, or maybe directly ask for a subscription on YouTube or Facebook which will post the daily devotionals directly at your fingertips. And if you are a Baby Boomer, as my mother, she will go and buy a paper book of “Nuestro Pan Diario 2018” at her church this coming Sunday. Each generation has its preferred way.  I admire people who immediately after waking up, read the Bible. I will try to stick to creating this habit every day.  Other of my resolutions is to continue with a healthy lifestyle, try to lose weight, exercise more this year (I need to lose at least one or two dress sizes), eat better, read at least 2 books per month, focus more on my present and future, and forget the past, try to forgive others past offenses.   It is a good thing to make new year’s resolutions. It helps us to evolve each year, and become better citizens too.

Now, let´s go to our Volvo Ocean Race boat buddies. All of them left Melbourne yesterday (Melbourne is 17 hours ahead of San Salvador). And they expect to have many challenges during this 5,600 nautic miles up to Hong Kong, “Asia´s World City”. Their bet is to arrive safely in 16 or 17 days.

I wish to communicate to you in advance that I will do some changes in the overall timeline. When in Hong Kong, Leg 5 is just a tiny race of 100 nautical miles (Hong Kong-Guangzhou-Hong Kong) and I have to adjust my timeline properly. I will introduce the new timeline soon. As far as the content of this blog for the following days, I will race to finish this Leg 4 with two themes.  Porter´s Generic Strategies and Social Media Segmentation (do you remember, we moved this theme from Leg 2 to Leg 4 some time ago).

Here is the outline for Leg 4.

If you wish to download it in PDF Format: Click here Eliescalante Leg 4 Outline Syllabus.

Before finishing my intervention for today, I just wish to share what it means to me, the following phrase: “Our generation’s problem? We all tried to grow up too fast”.

Since the industrialization of the world and the emerging technologies innovations coming out “fresh from the oven” every day, I believe the big problem of humanity is the rhythm of rush and lack of maturity in our endeavors.

We have been forced to grow up too fast. We have lost the meaning of the importance of time and we have lost the concept of doing prototypes and testing first. 

We are all the time rushing to act, without thinking about the consequences first. As an observer of how we do things right now, my main criticism of humanity is: We do not test the waters first several times, (particularly in politics, business, and economics),  before selling or using our innovative productions. Scientists are well grounded in the concept of testing or experimenting. They test one time, two times, ten times, and sometimes more than a thousand times.  Scientists wait for more than 20 or 30 years before releasing their experiments to the public. One thing is to experiment. Another one is to release and sell to communities. A long time ago, the business and financial community lost the concept of doing prototypes and testing … forcing everything to be done quickly for the purpose of selling faster, and recovering the money or investments back “as soon as possible”. Everything is done quickly in order to be sold as soon as possible, before knowing the consequences.

And that is our main problem. We are in a “fast track” mood all the time.  We figure out the consequences when we face them. This was not the way it was supposed to be.  From the point of view of growing up or maturing: I understand kids and teenagers have to learn by experience and defend themselves from danger, but they have the right to play and to keep their innocence as much as they can. Kids and teenagers have the right to be raised with candor, with a lack of malice, lack of bad intention, or mischief. The problem is that in order to teach our kids how to protect themselves in this “difficult” world, we start to teach them how to fight and defend themselves before the time is right, and we have forgotten to teach them to keep their innocence no matter what, by forcing them to grow up too fast. It is beautiful to meet adults of my age, who have that look that is attributed to the innocence of children. I hope 2018 will be a year to recover our naivety and love for natural simplicity again.

The decision-makers and doers in business and economics have to mature and be ready before taking the place of ruling the institutions of the world. To be ready means to be prepared emotionally, intellectually, socially, economically, spiritually, and politically for that. I believe anyone who wants to be in a position to lead an institution, has to mature first. It takes at least 50 to 60 years of your life. Of course, there are the youngest stars who are outliers, but that is not the norm. It is a sin to condemn someone to lead when he or she is not ready yet. It is costly to fix the bad consequences later.

Many examples of where humans have raced before the time is right are written in our history. There have been engineering failures as much as financial or business fiascos, military failures, or economic theories breakdowns. Recently during the last century, I would like to remind you of some: The Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster (1986),  the Long March 3B rocket carrying the Intelsat 708 telecommunications satellite in Sichuan-China (1996), the China’s Banqiao dam ruptured in 1975, September 11 Twin Towers Collapse, the detonation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs and  CBRN weapons of mass destruction.  Man-made disasters are numerous. The same happens with wars and military mistakes. Like the frightening Chernobyl explosion, Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon Oil spills serve as further warnings to man’s inability to control his own technology. With this new digital era, we have to be cautious to design our technologies, to test them many many times before releasing them in fairs or global IT events such as CEBIT or CTIA or other IT expos in the world. Let´s open our minds to avoid digital or wireless technology disasters too. The more time we let our business prototypes be tested and mature, the better. The more time we give to people to mature, the better.

See you in the next post. Thank you.

14:44 pm. San Salvador

Disclaimer: All the pictures or videos shown on this blog are not mine. I do not own any of the lovely photos posted unless otherwise stated.