Raising successful children

Raising successful children
Tracking issues
Horse before the carriage
First who then what
Conversation with Jon de Mello

Transcript:
Tonight is October 10, 2005. This is Evan’s Journal coming to live from Honolulu Hawaii. It’s been a little while since I did the last journal and I don’t know it’s been I think I’m going to average about two per week. It’s just too tough to keep up with daily stuff. And then I want to make sure I have relevant content. I don’t want to just be doing a journal just because. The Title of this journal is called Raising Successful Children and that’s something that I think a lot of us are thinking about at this point in time. I am turning 33 in November and I have an almost three year old. He’s turning three in November and then a four month old. The thing that constantly comes into my mind is how you raise these kids properly? One you want them to have fun and be ethical and all that kind of stuff. But on the other hand I want to have the kids become successful and what I mean by successful is have a full life, something that they are passionate about doing. Financially able to do what they want to do. And then have the confidence that they can then give back to the community and be good citizens. So what exactly is that mix? That’s kind of the thing that I’m thinking about when we’re interviewing these people is what did their parents teach them? What whether it was talking to them or showing them by example or whatever. What was it that they learned in order to make them hit the levels of success? I guess that’s something that we are going to need to see. That’s something that I think I will be asking them more about in the future.
[00:01:50] The issues that we’re having online nowadays are tracking issues. I have been having, for some reason I cannot track unique visitors. In order to track unique visitors, and what that means by unique visitor is a person who comes to your website that did not come before. So you have unique visitors and then you have returning visitors, meaning someone who has come there and is returning and is not a brand new person. These are what we call metrics and we use these to track and see how we are doing. If we have growth, just kind of bench marks more or less. The thing about doing the unique visitors on our site is that we have to drop a cookie on top of them which is a little bit of information on their side and then every time they come back we access that cookie and it tells us you know who they are but we don’t want to drop cookies because a lot of people have their cookies off or their security higher because of Spam and spy ware and all that kind of stuff that they don’t want that kind of thing. It’s not really an accurate number you see we played around with it for a little bit and we noticed that the unique visitors wasn’t really, the counts just all got weird so were basically just using sessions and that’s how many time somebody is coming there from a unique IP address and browser and then it doesn’t have any pauses more then 30 minutes and that’s called a session. It seems to be a little bit more accurate. I don’t know we’ll see. But if anyone has any suggestions on that please email me.
[00:03:30] Horse before the carriage is the next topic. And this has been coming up quite a bit. I get into these discussions with people when they are saying it’s so easy for so and so to talk like that because they are already wealthy. Or it’s so easy because they’ve already made it. One that really sticks out in my mind is at the radio station we’re talking about Duane Kurisu and I was mentioning the philosophies and the person at the radio station said yeah but keep in mind that the Duane was retired by forty so it’s really easy to think that way. And that kind of bugged me because I was thinking you know what is that what happens? You hit that certain point and then you get that kind of thought process so I asked Duane. I went and asked him. I asked him in the interview also. And he said no that’s not how it is. You have to think that way first and then the other things area a result of it. So It’s not I am doing well so I have a good attitude. It’s I have a good attitude so I am doing well. Does that make sense? And these are things that I have been fighting with my own self because for a number of years there I always thought that same exact way in that I will have a good attitude or I will be positive once I become successful. But you have to have that attitude. You have to have to be positive before you become successful. And I think that’s really where these interviews start coming in because hanging out and spending personal time with the right people, really makes the biggest difference. There is a saying that says you become who you hang out with. And you can see that in teenagers especially. You know you see a pack of teenaged girls and they all dress alike. They all look alike. They talk alike. Same with the guys you know. You become whom you hang out with. That’s one of the interesting things about this show is that if you can hang out with truly successful people, meaning that one they are financially doing very well. But two they have a purpose and a sense and a social consciousness that allows them to gain the fulfillment that they need as well. And hanging out with people like that even it it’s for short amounts of time. Getting their prospective and their energy or their spirit you might call it can really truly make a difference. I’m really interested to see how that’s going to start turning out as we progress along with this program.

[00:06:00] Another thing that’s been coming up quite a bit is people; you ask them what is it that makes you successful? They say well we don’t really look at it as trying to make money. Most of them don’t look at it that way. Some of them have been just purely optimistic but a lot of them they define what they do by what they are passionate about and then by whom they want to work with. And working with interesting people that they like and they can trust. And working on interesting projects is much more important then chasing down the buck and as a result they do really well and things kind of fall into place. So this is something that came up in the book Good to Great and I really want to touch on this because it’s first who then what. Deciding first who to work with and then the right people who can form the right team and then deciding what to do. Jim Collins in Good to Great calls it driving the bus. He said if people only get on the bus because of the destination of where the bus is going, meaning the what, then when the bus changes direction they are going to get off because they got on because of the direction. If they get on the bus because of the people they are working with then if the bus changes direction it doesn’t matter that much because they got on because of the people. That is starting to shine through very clearly within these interviews. There is defiantly a pattern evolving from that. It will be another interesting thing to think about.

[00:07:40] I had a pretty long conversation today with Jon de Mello at the Mountain Apple Company. Inaudible, which is our other company is working on their commerce site looking at redoing their layout and the look. But the other things that we were talking about were kind of what inspires people and what rekindles their passion. He was talking about Brother Noland who is an entertainer here in Hawaii and he had an album out about twenty years ago I believe and kind of what we call Jawaiian now he was two decades ahead of it. And Brother Noland had an experience where he was out tracking. I guess he was out hunting and tracking and this is just my own take from Jon who was I guess heard it from Brother Noland and Brother Noland is into this hunting and tracking and kind of this nature thing. So he went to the mainland I believe it was New Mexico and spent time with an Indian friend of his. And they went out tracking the guy took him out and said what are we tracking today because he’s been use to tracking wild bore or goats and things like that. And he says today we are tracking a mountain lion. He was like wow, because normally he’s the tracker but this time they were going after a true predator. So as they were going out there I guess the tracker stopped in his tracks and said hold still and he said the mountain lion is around. He said well where is it? And he said behind us. So the mountain lion had gone behind them and was checking them out. But I guess that was a defining moment or a kind of period in Brother Noland’s life where it changed his prospective on the way things were. And when he came back and did that album that they just finished up, I guess he was just on fire. Jon’s words were he’s on fire. So another thing that I’m looking at is what was the defining moment or is their a defining moment or turning point where your life starts to have meaning or you start to see your path more clearly? What is that moment and how do you identify it? Or how do you take advantage of it? Something to think about. Anyways that’s it for Evan’s Journal tonight. Tomorrow’s interview is with doctor Hank Wuh who started the company called Cellular Bio Engineering. And they just won an award for what is it? I think it’s the R&D award. Some kind of an award you get, I think there are only about 25 per year get it. The thing that they are working on is cellular bio engineering meaning that they can take a cornea and they can basically I don’t know if you call it cloning or what but they can regenerate it so they can create a 1000 corneas. And then now they are working on I guess you take what’s called plasma in the cornea and you don’t even need a cornea anymore you just replicate it. So these can be used for eye transplants and research and so on. The other thing that they were able to do is grow nerves on a computer chip. So I guess I don’t even know man it’s all scientific kind of stuff but I’ll let you hear about it directly from doctor Hank Wuh and he’ll put it into plain English because he is real good at that. Okay that’s going to be it for Evan’s Journal tonight. Thanks. Bye.

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