willie jackson

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  • Some perspective on Ferguson

    This was posted on Facebook by one of my friends and intellectual heroes. We disagree on a great number of things, but this is not one of them.

    I’m going to offer this very long comment as my last viewpoint on the Ferguson shooting and all of the rhetoric surrounding it. I understand it’s long but I think it’s something to consider. Have a great day.

    What you and everybody is failing to realize while you’re all trying to place the blame within the black community and not toward the racism outside of it, is that the treatment of black people in this country happened long before 106 and Park and articles about sagging were on CNN news pages.

    If, for a second, we can consider the history of the negro in this country, the pretenses that brought us here, our subsequent enslavement, jim crow, civil rights assassinations, drug wars, the merciless jailing and murder of black men, women, and children that has far reaching effects until this day in 2014 and God knows how long in the future, the propaganda written in newspapers and drawn on posters depicting negros as monkeys, having smaller brains and also being considered 3/5s human, having our land stolen, zoning laws that make sure our schools are underfunded, living situations being neglected, children under educated, glass ceilings at work based on skin color and all the psychological effects that came with those decisions, there is a very real reason why the negro is in the position he’s in, today.

    With that said, 90% of crime for black folks is committed by other black folks. By comparison, 84% of white crime is committed against other white people in violent situations. Suffice it to say, if one simply looked at the numbers, white people have more to fear from other white people than they do of negros. It doesn’t make sense to compare black on black crime to police brutality for the simple fact that one has absolutely nothing to do with the other. Explaining that black folks are somehow implicitly responsible for being shot down, while unarmed, by the police is absolutely and unequivocally stupid rhetoric. And that’s putting it mildly.

    Do black people need to treat other better? Yes. Still, that has nothing to do with the fact that black men in america are hunted, feared, and executed by police officers who can somehow manage to arrest a white person who randomly shot 70 people in a movie theatre and had his apt booby-trapped with explosives, or manage to arrest someone who planted a bomb at a race in Boston who later ended up on the cover of the Rolling Stone (or Time Magazine, I forget which one) but seems to have trouble arresting unarmed negroes who were simply walking on the street and minding their business.

    (via)

  • Talk me out of this

    About a month ago, I was on a war path.

    An exciting opportunity was presented to me, and I was certain that I wanted to move forward with it. The circumstances couldn’t have been more favorable in my mind—it aligned with a number of things that are interesting to me and represented a new and exciting challenge.

    In my frothy lather of enthusiasm, I had the foresight to enlist the opinions of my trusted advisors. This task was attacked with gusto as well, I probably booked two dozen meetings in the space of a couple weeks. Feedback was uniform and resoundingly positive and I was full steam ahead.

    [I recognize in retrospect that this was at least partially attributable to how convincingly I sold the idea, but that’s another hastily written post for another busy day.]

    But I recognized that nothing in life worth having comes that easily, so I changed my posture and the questions I was asking. Specifically, I asked people to talk me out of it. I actually created a Powerpoint deck entitled “Talk us out of this” wherein I started outlining the facts and figures for my advisors to consider.

    Well, I got what I was looking for.

    It only took one quick call with a friend of mine who’s intimately familiar with the vertical I was entering to take the wind out of my sails, which is precisely what I needed. The nature of the opportunity, the risk I would have assumed, and the objective viability of the idea are all immaterial.

    What matters is that my advisor clearly saw the gulf that existed between my vision and the realities I would soon face. I was blind and I knew it.

    This isn’t to say that I couldn’t have been successful had I moved forward, or that considering was a waste of time (it wasn’t). The fact of the matter is simply that I avoided a potential disaster by changing my posture to accommodate my natural inclination to view something exciting through rose colored glasses.

  • We made a thing

    I don’t talk about work stuff here on my site very often.

    Well, that’s not true. I talk a lot about work stuff, but it’s moreso the challenges faced by creative professionals who want to make a difference…in the work that they do.

    The point is, I just published a post on the W3 EDGE blog and you might find it interesting if you run WordPress and care about security and performance.

  • Quote by Warren Buffett

    “The difference between successful people and very successful people is that very successful people say no to almost everything.”

  • This is a problem

    Yes, we know: everything is broken.

    But instead of making more work for someone else to fix, you can add value by proposing (or even providing) a solution.

  • What do you know?

    “I write to discover what I know.”
    —Flannery O’Connor

    I remember when I first started investing in my personal growth and development aggressively.

    I started by reading Tim Ferriss’s book and discussing its principles with friends. I was living in Atlanta at the time, desperately wanting to live a life of freedom and purpose (devoid of IBM Thinkpads and expense reports).

    I recall very vividly how impassioned my speech would get when talking about freedom and success with friends, and how I “heard” myself producing paragraph after paragraph of eloquent insights into the nature of success.

    Sure, they were my thoughts, but there was a certain level of insight into my subconscious that wasn’t available to me at other times.

    I noticed the same phenomenon when I started journaling regularly. When I put pen to paper and let the words flow, I would frequently reflect on my own writing with wonder, as if the words had been penned by a more insightful and self-aware version of myself.

    The best explanation I have for this is…the brain is weird.

    And while it would be awesome not to have to “hack” self-reflection, it’s not worth spending even a moment wishing things were different. We can simply pretend we’re advising someone else on the steps required to achieve success if we want to become better self-counselors.

  • Quote by Thomas Edison

    The successful person makes a habit of doing what the failing person doesn’t like to do.

  • Career advice from Jim Carrey

    Many of you have seen this, but this is for those of you who haven’t.

    So many of us choose our path out of fear disguised as practicality. What we really want seems impossibly out of reach and ridiculous to expect, so we never dare to ask the universe for it.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajMpfPYlHi4
    [Click here to see the video if you’re viewing this via Email or RSS.]

    I learned many great lessons from my father, not the least of which was that you can fail at what you don’t want, so you might as well take a chance on doing what you love.

  • Everything is Everything

    Lauryn Hill said it best.

    But what comes to mind when I hear that phrase is something I’ve learned from life and my mentors over the past few years: everything is a metaphor for everything else.

    Put another way, there is a clarity that comes from slaying dragons that demonstrates what’s required in order to repeat that process in other situations. Subsequent battles become easier, and you learn what’s needed to ensure victory.

    You also learn how to better pick your battles (and weapons). [See? Metaphors abound (smile). ]

    The next step is figuring out how to go faster, and how to leverage force multipliers to your advantage. To the uninitiated, it will look like magic. To those in the know, it will look like growth and evolution.

  • I can’t do this by myself

    That might not actually be true.

    Sometimes we conflate our inability to accomplish a monumental task…with our inability to care enough to see it through. Maybe you just need to get fired up.

    “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.”

    -Friedrich Nietzsche

    Meaning matters.

    Find it.