My 3rd Toastmaster speech (Project 3 Get to the Point)

Title of My Speech: How many of you would like to cut down your living expense?
General purpose: inform the audience on ways to cut down living expense
Specific purpose:
After hearing my speech, the audience should have a list of action items that they can followup in their daily life to cut down living expenses.
Illustration on the board:
I draw a pie marked income and split it into two sections expense and saving. Using the pie chart, I illustrated to boost savings, you need to reduce expenses.
I also listed the 3 steps and 5 categories on the side. They serve as the take-home message for the audience as well as my own cheat-sheet.

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Below is the body of my script. I skipped some of them and improvised some on the fly (like the anecdote of Lehman Brother chairman Richard Fuld selling his modern art collections to make extra income.)
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Raise your hand if you think you would like to have more savings and less debt.

OK, I see quite a few of you are interested in the topic. Today I am going to share with you the 3 steps to increase your saving by cutting-back on unnecessary expenditures.

Step 1) Tracking

Use a budget spreadsheet to record how much money you spend on everything, from mortgage/rent payment to groceries. From car insurance to miscellaneous spending. Putting down those records will give you a clear picture of where you money went.

Step 2) Examining

Going through the spreadsheet to determine what is necessary and what is not.

Most people's list can be divided into the following 5 categories.

1. Food and beverage

Make your own coffee in the morning to avoid spending a dollar to two dollars a day on the way to work, which amount to $50 a month. Cooking your own meal and taking your own lunch to work can save you $400 a month. Staying away from vending machines can save you up to $60 a month.

Buy nonperishable groceries like coffee and tea on special, in bulk. Buy generic brand instead of attach to a brand. Look for items on sale. Buy fruit and vegetable in season.

Alcohol can be a major drain on the household economy. No suggestion that you eliminate it altogether, but consider cutting back.

2. Transportation

Fuel is one of the growing expenses on our day to day lives. Limiting the fuel that we use is a priority. Plan your journeys to include everything that you need. Avoid unnecessary repeat trips to the shops and rediscover the joy of walking. Learn how to drive more economically, and make sure that your tires are inflated correctly.  Learn to service your car yourself. Consider exchanging the fuel guzzling vehicle for a more economical model. Moving closer to work can save you commute time and fuel.

3. Utility

Heating and electricity bill can be very high in winter.Turn the thermometer down and wear more clothing at home. Make sure there are no leaks around windows and doors.

Health inspector say washing dishes in cold water is as effective as in hot water, so you can save heating expense by using cold water. If you are using dishwasher, you can safely lower the water heater temperature to 110 to 115 degree and stop the dishwasher before it hits the dry cycle. Shutdown the dishwasher and open the door will let the dishes dry faster.

Switch off whatever you are not using, including lights and computers. Swap your light bulb to energy efficient equivalents can save you 90% of the electricity. Put a brick in your toilet will save you a litre of water per flush.

If you are using high-speed internet, consider sharing the service with a neighbor.
Cut out or downgrade your cable TV. Borrow movies from the library instead of renting.

4. Impulse buy

Before buying a particular item, always ask yourself: Is the item something you want rather than need. If you really need the product, then the purchase can be justified. Be careful of what you put into your shopping cart, make a list before you come to the store, and then committing to the list while shopping. It not only makes your shopping more efficient, but keeps you from overspending.

Don't go grocery shopping while you're hungry. You'll end up thinking everything looks good and buy more than you need. Be careful with membership warehouse stores, researchers show that Costco and Sam's club membership make you buy more than you need.

5. Rent/mortgage payment

If all those small savings are still not enough, consider changing your accommodations. Move to a cheaper area.

Step 3) Budgeting


After examing the 5 categories, decide how much you would spend in each category per month. Minus that from your monthly income, you will find how much you can save each month. Put that money away at the beginning of each month.

If you are short on money at the end of the month, you know you are over-spending and need to adjust the budget next month.

Finally, I would like to close my speech by encouraging everyone to follow the 3 steps. It can make real difference on your own bottom line.

Bailout and Excutive Power

Since the Bush Administration took office in 2000, they have been playing the same trick again and again.

The basic plot is:

Mess up big time,
Use fear and panic to manipulate the media and general public,
Ask for a blank check from congress,
Spend taxpayer money for their own benefit.
 
This weekend, we will see the bailout plan following the same route. The rich and powerful lawmakers sitting in their million-dollar water-front house will vote on whether to use poor tax payers' money to pay for their mortgage and their CEO friend's red-ink. 

5D Mark II

HD video quality is great. Storage card would be a bottleneck if anyone want to use it for serious film production.
But the concept is great, one day Canon will ship a DSLR with built-in hard drive.

Management vs Leadership

Excerpts from this weeks I, Cringely . The Pulpit | PBS


"Management is telling people what to do, which is a vital part of any
industrial economy. Leadership is figuring out what ought to be done
then getting people to do it, which is very different."

"Modern corporations suffer from systemic-level issues that emerge in
top-down hierarchies. Managers are there to control staff and budgets,
not to lead. Although you can make valiant and often successful
attempts to control things and processes, you will never again be able
to control people. We've evolved, basically, and the information age
has had a lot to do with it. So we still "manage" companies the same
way as when we actually operated assembly lines in America--the good
old days! Now, people need leaders, not managers, and that's what a
fractal organization enables.

"Most start-ups are fractal in their nature, especially those that
have exciting visions and get everyone on the same page with collective
purpose, goals, and objectives. Most investors, however, are bought
into the conventional org chart; when the company devolves into
top-down, the turnover begins. That's because of the internal
competition that emerges in top-down organizations. The perception is
that there's only so much room at the top. At each level of management,
the competition increases as cooperation decreases. Thus are created
the ubiquitous "silos" of information that thwart collaboration and
encourage redundant, wasteful business practices.

"Managers are
supposedly promoted because of their ability to outperform others and
not because of an intention to provide inspiration, guidance, and
mentoring to their staff, nor are they openly rewarded for this
behavior, even though it usually produces a healthier bottom line. The
usual way of rewarding based upon meeting financial goals and managing
budgets keeps the focus on short-term financial results only, whereas
continuous improvement leadership by frontline staff creates more
long-term successes.

"When managers don't mentor staff, focusing
only upon numbers and bossing people around, it leads to an illusion of
control, of which there's no such thing. In these situations, they
begin to feel they must continually prove their worthiness and so
defend their territories against possibly brilliant staff working
"beneath" them. This is a systemic issue, not a personality quirk,
though some personalities are more susceptible than others. In most
companies, the idea of climbing over others on your way to the top and
throwing people who get in your way under buses is de rigueur. The
top-down hierarchy was designed to manage industrial-age processes, not
information-age challenges. You didn't want the door guy getting
creative when attaching the door. Nor did he need to collaborate with
the bumper dude. The information age is vastly different. Each scene
we're in presents new circumstances and opportunities.

get lost and find your way back

This is the time of the month when I ask myself. What do I do next?
I have archived what I was planning to do and had a relatively happy life. What I realize is that 99% of the time, I was driven by fear rather than anything else. I am afraid of losing what I have, afraid of changes. What in the world is defining what a perfect life is? Definitely not those TV commercials picturing white-sand beach and a big yacht.

So I am lost.

And I started trying to find my way back. I felt fortunate that I realize my lost situation before strolling too far without an aim.

Below is something I happened to see when I was searching for my way back to the starting point. I am by-no-means endorsing it, especially not for it's commercial promotional purpose. These days you have to be diligent to filter out the commercial from infomercials that is omnipresence.



Five Tips for Your Preferred Future

By Brent Dees, President, Focus Four

Imagine if every morning when you awoke, there was a card table with a
mound of jigsaw puzzle pieces on it. And your job every day was to put
those pieces together to create a finished puzzle. And tomorrow morning
when you awoke, there would be another new mound of pieces to add to
today’s.

Only, you have no idea what the final picture is
supposed to look like, because they didn’t give you the box with the
finished picture on it! How would you proceed? How would you know how
far you had to go to get done? How would you know when you were done?

This is life without a plan, life without a Preferred Future. And the
law of this life is this: “If you don’t know why you’re doing what
you’re doing, you’ll never have enough time to get it done.”

Our personal life and our work are both a series of choices – choices
of activities that we will perform next. The activities that we choose
to perform determine our results. And the choice we have is between a
future or a Preferred Future. If the culmination of the activities we
perform is automatically a future, why not have those activities
culminate in a future we choose to have? In a future we prefer?

If life is like assembling the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, why not have the final picture be something we’d like it to be?

We can.

And we do that by starting with a goal that’s almost too big to achieve.

When a city needs to lure or retain a sports franchise, they need a
big-dream goal of a new stadium, not an incremental goal like fixing up
the old stadium by adding logos!

There’s no way that a new stadium can be completed in a day, a month,
or even a year. It takes about three years to finish a project of this
size. When it’s first talked about, it’s hard to believe it will ever
happen. But every day another piece of the puzzle is put in place and
eventually the picture on the box becomes a real-live stadium. And the
impossible dream comes true.

Remember, now, that the stadium, even though an almost impossible goal,
is not really the final goal. The ultimate goal is to get a new team in
town (or keep your present one). Even that goal likely has a larger
focus such as keeping your city financially healthy by creating a
positive living environment.

Each of us has goals like these, too. But without action steps or plans, these goals are merely dreams.

Have you ever wanted to earn more money? Have you ever told yourself,
“If I just earn 15% more, I’d be okay?” While this seems a reasonable
and doable goal, it’s actually difficult because your options are
limited. Usually something like “I just need to get a raise!”

If, however, you set a goal to double your income in three years, you
have to start to think differently to achieve that. And you’ll also
have to stop doing something you’re currently doing to reach this
Preferred Future. As you look at the obstacles along the path to this
Preferred Future, you’ll discover that these obstacles are actually the
action steps you’ll need to take to reach your goal.

There are seven areas of your life – each of which needs to have its
own Preferred Future. The first six are: Spiritual (Legacy, purpose),
Physical, Family, Social (friends, community), Intellectual, and
Financial. Once you have achieved balance in these six, you can then
focus on the seventh area of your life, your Career. And when you have
a Preferred Future there, and begin to achieve it, you will discover
that the success in your career is helping you achieve your Preferred
Future in the first six areas of your life.

The secret of achieving your Preferred Future is this: “Focus on your
Preferred Future, but respond to the present.” When you do that, you
automatically identify your highest priorities, for example, and you
will find yourself doing not the easiest thing on your to-do list, nor
even the next thing, but rather the thing that will help you achieve
your goals. Here are the five steps you’ll need to follow to reach your
Preferred Future.

1. Clearly define your Preferred Future. I want to make money is not
   clearly enough defined. I want to double my income so I can pay off my
   debts and retire by age 50 is a clearly defined result. Getting a new
   job is not clearly enough defined – being in charge of the hydraulic
   engineering department is. If you don’t know what the final picture
   looks like, there is no way you can successfully assemble the pieces of
   the puzzle.
   
2. Know why this Preferred Future is important to you. Knowing why the
   result matters to you, will allow you to make decisions and judgments
   along the way that will help you get there sooner. Is that new job
   important to you because of the money, or because of the status in the
   eyes of your peers? If you don’t know why, you might make the wrong
   choice for the wrong reason, and the goal is always to do the right
   thing at the right time for the right reason. You can’t do that if you
   don’t know why your Preferred Future is important to you.
   
3. Identify a small step that will open the door. Just like you can’t
   build a stadium overnight, you can’t reach your Preferred Future
   easily. But every journey has its first step, and each step leads to
   the next. And while all the steps are not the same and some are much
   harder than others, you have to finds a place to start and then begin.
   You journey nowhere without moving your feet.
   
4. Monitor your progress. As you progress, look at what you’re doing.
   Keep a record. Make a daily plan. Make a monthly plan. Make a quarterly
   plan. Make a yearly plan. Make a three-year plan. And take notes.
   Determine what worked and what didn’t. Decide what you would do
   differently and what you would do better. If you don’t keep track of
   where you are, you won’t have any idea of where you’re going.
   
5. Modify your actions based on what you’ve learned. When you have the
   information on what worked and what didn’t, change you action steps
   accordingly. When you know what you’d do better next time, do it. And
   consistently revise your plans. If a sailor doesn’t change course, he
   can never reach his goal. The better the sailor, the more frequently he
   monitors his actions and the more frequently he changes course.

When you focus on your Preferred Future, you are applying the
pre-eminent law of body-building, and of life. That is, what you focus
on gets stronger.

When you create a clearly defined Preferred Future and focus on it
constantly, you will discover that every day you are choosing the most
important puzzle pieces in your life that will best help you to build
your Preferred Future.

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日本人，他们仿佛搞定了一切。 they got it all figured out

我一直想说，我很羡慕日本人。因为他们有一种对自己的民族和文化的自豪感。但是鉴于中日的历史，我不能冒被人标为汉奸的风险。
今天WSJ上Paul Theroux的访谈录，再贴切不过的表达了我的这种感觉：“日本人对外国人并没有怀疑和不信任，他们只是根本不感兴趣。因为他们已经确信自己有最先进的文明，超越所有其他国家；确信他们的食物，生活方式是最好的。除了地方狭小，他们几乎搞定了一切。”

相比之下，中国人一直为我们的近代史而蒙受耻辱，卧薪尝胆，但仍然无法改变历史或是现实。作为为美国人富强而工作的中国人，我更是没有任何自豪感可言。每天醒来都觉得自己是一只在别人屋檐下偷生的蝼蚁。看奥运会的时候，我觉得自己没有为国家做任何事，不属于体育场里的那些中国观众里面的一员，也没有资格为中国的金牌而骄傲。因为中国并不需要我，我也暂时不需要它。

文字的力量

文字的力量在于把人带到另一个世界。如果世界上有一种可以直通大脑的幻想制造机，那它的接口，一定是文字（而非图像）。
可是由于文字的这种力量，商业社会把它用来控制人的思想和行为（tell me one commercial that doesn't have text），正如集权统治的社会用它来作为“宣传”的武器。

网络和博客在某种程度上重新解放了文字，让平民百姓获得的一定的话语权。但是这种话语权注定被更高分贝的噪声所掩盖。闪烁的广告条的层出不穷的弹出窗口后面，每个人的注意力集中时间都被缩短到刚刚可以说一句“不错”

公司里marketing的人升的最快，因为他们是研究人的心理，并运用文字控制人的行为的专家。公司被marketing department的人操纵，可以带来更多短期利润。但是他们没有预见disruptive technology的远见。因为真正改变世界的智慧，注定来自于想法和大多数人不同的人。他们有勇气和能力逆潮流而证实自己的主见。
这样的人，不能被成熟的大公司里的marketing主导的管理层所认同。