Tony Dye

Wealth Attitudes

"Wealthy people save first then spend what's left over.  Poor people spend first then save what's left over."

That may not be an exact quote, but it catches the essence.  Jerry Black of Legacy Legacy Planning Group attributes that statement to his father.  For years, I've been trying to teach my boys the value of saving first, and here's a great statement that captures it so quickly.

But wait...doesn't this same thing apply to a lot more than finances?  This would seem to be the same underlying theme as the "big rocks in the jar" story as retold by Stephen Covey, among others.  Is it maybe as simple as saying "plan first?"  I know many of us in Church IT have had the discussion at Roundtables or on the Podcast about the need for dedicated planning time, and also about how hard it is to accomplish.  It's sure a constant challenge for me, but it's a lot like savings: a little bit each month, and things add up over time.

Maybe I need to come up with my own variation of Jerry's statement:

"Successful Church IT people plan first, then execute in the time they have left over."

Hmmm...doesn't quite have the flow of Jerry's statement.  I'll have to work on it more.

Most Exciting Phrase

"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds the most discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I found it!) but 'That’s funny…'”

     - Isaac Asimov

Somehow, this almost applies to IT.  Except often after 'That's funny,' things don't go well...

Success & Value

"Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value."

– Albert Einstein

Synonyms

"A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the word you first thought of."

- Burt Bacharach

The Key to Training Success?

This dates back to the 1700s.  Picked it up from Keith Lowe's blog.

“People need to be reminded more often than they need to be instructed”

- Samuel Johnson

When I think of many of our "training" problems, it's not that we failed to train...it's that people failed to remember.  Or wait...maybe that's our problem -- we need to keep on doing those reminders.

Failure & Success

"Success is 99 percent failure."

- Soichiro Honda

The Outsourced Brain

the Sacred Order of the External Mind

"...I had thought that the magic of the information age was that it allowed us to know more, but then I realized the magic of the information age is that it allows us to know less."

- David Brooks, NY Times

The Scarcest Resource

"Time is the scarcest resource, and unless it is managed nothing else can be managed."

– Peter F. Drucker

Are We Still Using Megabyte Tools?

During the Optimus Solutions seminar, Doug Shofield, the IBM presenter, said something that speak volumes to the storage management issue.  This is NOT a direct quote, and I don't know if he might have been quoting someone else, but here's the idea:

"We've quickly moved from Megabytes to Gigabytes to Terabytes to Petabytes, and we're evening touching Exabytes.  Are we still using tools designed for Megabytes, to manage those larger volumes?"

Something to think about...  If anyone has a direct quote on this, please let me know.

Some Other Place

"Many people think that if they were only in some other place, or had some other job, they would be happy. Well, that is doubtful. So get as much happiness out of what you are doing as you can and don’t put off being happy until some future date."

– Dale Carnegie