“Leave all things and follow me”You have to have it before you can give it away. You have to know yourself before you can move beyond yourself. Most people therefore just glaze over when they hear such impossible idealism.“Take up your cross”By and large, young people are not yet ready to understand “the cross.” It becomes a piece of jewelry instead of a real agenda for life. People in the first half of life are about growing up, not growing down. Most people are not psychologically capable of truly grasping the full need and importance of letting go until their fifties or sixties, and many not even then... In the first half of life, you can’t let go or turn around. You’re rightly focused on creating a name for yourself, finding a spouse and job, accumulating money and possessions. But you must eventually let go so you can fall into your True Self that was always there, but that you were just not ready to meet.“Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you.”The first half of life uses the dualistic language of good guys and bad guys. The illusion is that some are all good and some are all bad, and the delusion is that we’ve got to kill all the bad ones. The first half of life is where we’re taught to separate from evil (see Leviticus 16-25). Paul says “Jesus became sin” (see 2 Corinthians 5:21). Jesus became the problem; he became the broken, imperfect one. He entered into solidarity with the sin of the world rather than stand above or apart from it. Jesus absorbed evil. He didn’t think for a moment he could kill it. He let it wreak its havoc on his body to transform it there, rather than perpetuate violence on others... Not willfulness but willingness.. I’m not surprised that a well-dressed, thirty-year-old man wants his titles and diplomas on the wall. I surely still carry some status symbols, but it doesn’t mean much now. If you’re my age and you still need external symbols of prestige to tell yourself and others that you’re important.. I don’t know why we picked and chose among Jesus’ teachings. But I think it reflects first-half-of-life morality. The church just wasn’t ready to follow Jesus all the way with his second-half-of-life wisdom.
Bridgewater’s Bosses Are Fighting Over Something
The way power struggles at investing firms usually work is, there’s some non-transparent process by which someone wins and someone loses, and then the loser is either kicked out or subjected to some sort of symbolic loss of status. The symbolic loss of status that I often think about is this one, from a power struggle at Pimco:
After the forum, Gross devised a seating plan for a meeting of portfolio managers, relegating Balls, Ivascyn and Mather to the rows of the conference room instead of at the main table. The arrangement was perceived as a snub, according to a person familiar with the matter.
.. Balls, Ivascyn and Mather got their revenge, and Gross was gone a few weeks later. But imagine contesting power at a trillion-dollar investing firm that way, with seating arrangements. Actually, I bet you can imagine it pretty easily. “Next to comp, seating is the most important issue on the Street.” Human beings care deeply about their status, and there are lots of indicators of status — like seating arrangements — that are both instantly legible to humans and weirdly difficult to parse logically.
.. “About 25% of new hires leave Bridgewater within the first 18 months.” A “core tenet” of the firm is “Pain + Reflection = Progress,” and I gather that a lot of pain goes into the progress.
.. If your returns are just so-so, what justification remains for running your hedge fund like an intense New Age meditation retreat?
.. “Many of the alleged discriminatory acts involve such minutiae as…Pao’s office not being in ‘the power corridor’ (whatever that means).” Sounds silly, right? But based on managing partner Ted Schlein’s testimony, it seems seating arrangements at Kleiner do say a lot about status: Asked why he didn’t sit in the back of a conference room to make space at the front table for Pao and other junior partners, he responded, “That’s not how the meetings work.”
.. Not sitting at the main table is as often a power move as it is a snub, really.
Why Gold iPhones And Cheap iPhones Make Perfect Sense
A sleek iPhone with an understated gold back that would sell for top dollar is a perfectly understandable product from a company like Apple. Call it gaudy or call it a gimmick, people will want to be seen with their gold iPhone 5S. The gold option would also make it stand out from the supposed multi-colored plastic back of the iPhone 5C.