John T. Reed’s analysis of Robert T. Kiyosaki’s book Rich Dad, Poor Dad

John T. Reed’s analysis of Robert T. Kiyosaki’s book Rich Dad, Poor Dad is fascinating. I read Rich Dad, Poor Dad a few years ago, and believed it, because I had no reason to believe otherwise. My wife read it too. We thought for a while about trying to follow his advice in the long term but didn’t really end up doing anything about it, and eventually I concluded that, well, it’s all well and good that that’s how rich people get rich, but it’s really not me, I’ll just be as rich or poor as I happen to be and not stress about it.

It turns out, at least if John Reed is to be believed, that there’s no particular evidence that the author, Robert Kiyosaki, ever got rich in any other way than pitching financial success schemes in seminars and books, and a lot of the things he claims to have done to get rich, and recommends to his readers, are either wildly implausible or outright illegal.

I have no way of judging who is right on this issue but Reed sure sounds credible to me. It is also reassuring for me to hear this, because Kiyosaki’s approach to getting rich seemed, when you thought about it clearly, pretty Macchiavellian and sleazy. It’s reasurring to me to know that that is not really what you have to be like to get rich, and it is helpful to me, being rather left-leaning, and therefore tending to think the worse of people who are well off, to find out that Kiyosaki’s highly cynical guide to getting rich is not the way actual rich people think. It makes me think better of rich people to know that.

Always good to have your prejudices challenged.

DeMuDi

DeMuDi is the Debian Music Distribution, and you can get an installable ISO of it from the Agnula Project.

It installed well on my Acer laptop, and yes, the sound setup was great out of the box, including recording.

Jack is installed and runs automagically on startup and there’s a widget to configure how applications interact with each other — all easy to use and graphical.

Every Linux audio app I’ve ever heard of and a number I haven’t are available precompiled. Alas, two of my favorite, Ardour and Freewheeling, proved rather crashy. I fear I may need more memory on that beast before it’s really happy.

But I had hella fun playing around with ZynAddSubFx, the most gorgeous software synth EVAR. Serious, you’ve got to believe me, it comes installed (at least on DeMuDi) with many dozens of fascinating sound presets, and it’s so damn rich you feel like you’re Rick Freaking Wakeman on his $10,000 synthesizer or something.

Oh, I plugged in my PC-300 USB piano keyboard and it autodetected it right out of the box.

I threw together this piece of nonsense by plunking around on the keyboard with one of the cool sounds. OK, the pitch bend in there sounds pretty stupid. I just wanted to try it, give me a break. :)

Anyway, the few crashy apps make the Baby Linus cry, but overall it’s the *best* experience I’ve ever had with Linux sound, ever ever ever ever. I was blown away. So much goodness… free… on a CD.

I would highly recommend it to anyone who wants to play with Linux sound and who knows their way around Linux at least a bit. You may have to teach yourself a little Jack-fu, but it’s pretty easy to grasp.

Bad Is Good

One of the ideas I’ve been interested in lately is the idea that you don’t necessarily need to worry about becoming “competent” before you do things, because “incompetence” can be advantageous as well as disadvantageous.

Competence as an unqualified, universal advantage is part of the mythology of our culture. But competence is only ever competence according to a particular standard of measurement, or competence in a particular way of doing things, and sometimes competence itself can get in the way of innovation. You know the “right” and “wrong” ways to do things and you don’t think of doing them the “wrong” way.

Part of the mythology is “you have to learn the rules before you can break them!” That old saw is a bulwark supporting the myth of competence. You see, even if you point out that some great artist or engineer or something doesn’t follow the rules, you can say that he is only allowed to break them because he knew them perfectly first, and therefore knew how to break them.

Except it isn’t true. Some people learn the rules and follow them, some people learn the rules and break them, and some people never learn the rules, they are always making up their own rules all the time, and never necessarily staying with any given set.

I want to start keeping track of instances of “bad is good” — incompetence as an advantage — when I see it. It doesn’t even have to be a matter of competence — I’m interested in situations where something we might think was a disadvantage turned out to be an advantage.

Here’s today’s post on that topic — David Anez apparently created the subgenre of “sprite” webcomics inadvertently.. He wanted to do a traditional drawn webcomic, but did not own a scanner, so he did some temporary filler comics using video game images until he could afford a scanner. Turns out that people liked those comics a lot better than his “real” comics, and there are now many imitators.

I don’t follow any sprite comics, but the large number of people who do suggests to me that there is something to them. Sometimes….. bad is good.

A Little Wisdom from Alan

On work, play, fulfillment, and selling out.

I find it hard to fathom that our parents and grandparents saw work as a duty. You punched a clock whether you like it or not, and in return you were granted pocket change and a small measure of job security. In contrast, I come from a new generation, one of the first to claim that work and play can be the same, and one that recognizes that lifelong employment is a rare exception.

Work is so much more than punching a clock. It’s a calling to do things I love and that make my own little corner of the world a better place. What am I made for? In the words of McNair Wilson, “What can I do better than anyone else I know?” When you’ve found a job that matches what you do best, you’re excited to be there. Most days, anyway. (The fit of a job can change over time, but that’s tangential to the topic at hand.)

Selling out is what happens when there’s a disconnect between what you believe and what you do, and that disconnect has been precipitated by a desire for financial security. You chase jobs for the salary offer, and not because they’re that perfect union of work and the core of your being. With the salary comes bling-bling, but I’d take job satisfaction any day.

Even worse than selling out is settling. With selling out you can make the arguement that you’re just doing it until you hit $yourFinancialGoal. Then you’ll drop out to live on a sailboat or something. Settling is different. Settling is when you stay in a mediocre situation because it’s familiar and reliable. Settling is “safe.” A place that starts off as a calling can turn into settling over time as your skills grow and the stetching and challenges decrease.

I think that the “work as play”/”work as calling” thing is, or at least seems, out of reach to most people in whatever generation. (I’d argue that the Boomers were probably the first to really want or expect that, but most of them got over it.)

It kinda hurt to read this post because despite a really good job situation right now, which has just substantially improved, I am totally not in that spot where I’m truly where I want to be, doing something that is totally awesome to me. I don’t know exactly what that spot would be. I am closer to it, I think, than I have been in a while but I’m not there.

Actually one of the people whose job/life situation I most envy doesn’t have a Super Creative Dream Job, he has a job that is sorta low on the totem pole, but secure, well within his abilities, he’s valued there, it’s a good environment, good people to work with, strictly 8 to 5, and then he can come home and have fun with his life. I’ve almost never heard him complain about that job. It does what it’s supposed to — makes him rent food and fun money and doesn’t aggravate him — and that’s enough. That ain’t a bad way to live. I’ve got a lot more people depending on me than he does so I can’t quite swing that but man, it seems like a good way to go to me.

I have this feeling that if I keep my eyes and ears and mind open I will be able to find something I truly groove on. I want to do this because I want to set an example for my kids of doing something you love and really care about.

Maybe it will be in computers, maybe it won’t be. Maybe it’ll be in illustration or maybe something I haven’t even figured out yet. But I’m keeping my eye on maximizing the grooviness of my work life. For my kids’ sake, I’m not gonna settle for something that just pays the bills for the kids’ sake. Not in the long term.