Life Lessons: Near Mrs and Direct Hits of an Eccentric Thousand-Aire - Hardcover

Randall 5th, Alexander

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1432763156 ISBN 13: 9781432763152

Publisher: Outskirts Press, 2010

Synopsis

"My life is a series of disasters punctuated with miracles."

He is not the world's richest man, nor the most famous, but this man, who created the first e-commerce business, discovered the secrets to real happiness in Life Lessons from disasters, pitfalls and from some of the great iconic teachers of the 20th century. Randall's tale is a saga of invention, entrepreneurship, sudden sharp turns and jumping off a cliff with no parachute; an exploration of family lineage and ancestor's heritage that give a picture of one life in the era when personal computers and the Internet were being born. "Randall is Excellent. Take Him!" - Margaret Mead "A Remarkable Trip" - Albert Hoffmann "Hot Media is the Message" - Marshall McLuhan "Randall is all about Synergy" R. Buckminister Fuller "The Legendary Boston Computer Exchange..." Wired Magazine

About this title

About the Author

Alex Randall is an Author, Professor, Broadcaster, Entrepreneur, Dreamer and Inventor. He is the Good News Guy for WSTA St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands, Professor of Communication at the University of the Virgin Islands and host of the Podcast from Paradise. Randall Lives on Water Island in the US Virgin Islands with his wife and five children.

For more information on Alex Randall:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Computer_Exchange
youtube.com/watch?v=wan896ZO4aY

dream-wizard.com
dr-dream.com

water-island.com

vinow.com/podcast
wsta.com

outskirtspress.com/life-lessons

From the Back Cover

Samples from Chapters
From Chapter 7: Margaret Mead and the Sapiential Circle

Margaret Mead was my guide for the next four years. I took her class each semester for the balance of my years at Columbia... lecture classes, seminars, tutorial classes, dissertation advisement and weekly office hours. I was flush with an idea I developed when I was Humphry Osmond's student at Princeton. I wondered how society separates visionaries who will lead the society from crazy people with zany hallucinations. How do we know which is which? They all have visions and new ideas - how do we pick the good visions from the lunatic stuff? I wanted to know how people with far-reaching visions of new ideas had managed to get their ideas into their community without being considered insane. All new ideas are zany in contrast to normal. If it is all zany, how do people recognize good new zany stuff from harmful new zany stuff? Somehow, society managed to pick the winners and lock up the losers. Or does it? What if some astounding genius of vast vision is babbling his zany ideas in a mental hospital? What if we have locked up someone just because their zany new ideas are beyond the grasp of the people who hear them? How would we know?

From Chapter 10: No-one reads a Dissertation, so write a Fairy Tale

I think it was the trip on the Merced River that started me thinking about a doctoral thesis as a fairy tale. I died that day. Not literally, but for all intents I was a dead man. Howard, had sold me an old 1958 Mercedes Benz, and then sold the repairs so it worked! He invited Camie and me to go on a day trip down the Merced River in inflatable canoes. This was essentially insane. In springtime, the river comes raging out of Yosemite Park rich with snow melt and roaring through canyons. It is white water most of the way. So as Howard was explaining all the safety techniques we needed to know in our two-person inflatable canoes, I was looking at the canyon Walls and the white water. Two tiny inflatable canoes... Howard and I were in one canoe while Camie and Howard's friend were in the other one. What I didn't know was that Howard was an amateur and the friend was the expert guide, full of techniques and methods. Camie's pilot knew what he was doing. Mine did not! "Even after you inflate them to firm, as soon as they hit the water the air will cool and compress. The canoes will get floppy, so re-inflate right on the water's edge."
"If you flip over, hold on to the inflatable canoe and both people get on one side and get back in at once."
"If you get separated from the canoe, and you are getting into rapids, fold your arms and sit through the rapids.
"Never try to get out in the plants along the shore, find rocks or sand. The plants will suck you down."All useful advice, except he forgot to tell us that the water was icy cold and if you fell out you would die of exposure in minutes. I learned that the hard way.

Chapter 13: Unemployment is the Mother of all Enterprise


At my wedding, my newly minted father-in-law wrapped his long arm around my shoulder and said, "Son, I'm gonna tell you one word that will make your future." He paused as I expected the line from the hit movie "The Graduate" where the one word is "Plastics" but instead he said in a solemn tone, "RS-232".
I was dumbstruck. I had no idea, but he went on, "It's the connector that lets computers communicate with modems." I still had no idea. But he was right. Years later I created America's very first e-commerce business and at the core was my modem.
In those days I thought I knew all about computers. I was the godson of the Pres Eckert, the chief engineer who designed ENIAC, the first all-electronic computer. I'd been taken as a child to see ENIAC and various UNIVAC computers. They were huge monsters, dozens of massive steel boxes with massive tape recorders, all of them housed behind glass walls in climate-controlled environments. I'd learned as a child that computer work required engineering genius like Uncle Pres had. So when my father-in-law regaled me with the wonders of modems, my eyes glazed over and I went on with my life. In Bali, Indonesia, that Australian ecologist we'd me was doing research on rice yields. He had built himself a home-brewed computer: no glass room or monster metal cases; his was housed in a homemade wooden box and powered by a car battery. I was fascinated. A few weeks later at an air base in Japan, I met some grade school kids who were all twitterpated with their Apple computer and were talking about DOS. I was shocked that a 10-year-old knew all about something of which I knew nothing. My first computer came with three pieces of software: DOS 1.0, EasyWriter and a game called Asylum. EasyWriter was, well, easy. Asylum was build with IBM's block graphics, a vain effort in those days to use the space of a letter to make a shape. Someone had obviously spent a lot of effort creating "rooms" and "people" that all looked like stick figures done by Mondrian. It was as much fun as playing with a stick and a string.
SNIP

Still driving, I was struck with a vision; I stopped on the roadside to called Camie. "What if we made a market, a trading post where people could sell the machines they outgrow - We'd help make them cheaper with an organized market? We'd help people move up to their next machine. We'd help people on tight budgets get a good used computer at the fair price and mostly we could get really good gear for ourselves." She understood instantly. By the time I got home she had drafted our cards - not business cards, trading cards. The blue one said "I want to Sell." The orange said "I want to Buy". Fill in the blanks for Maker, Model, RAM, disk drives, printers and other peripherals. We printed 100 copies and took our cards to the next meeting of the Boston Computer Society. I boldly stood up during the question time and announced, "If you want to buy or sell a computer, see me and fill in one of these cards." We were inundated. Everyone in the room wanted to sell their old computer. Everyone had something they wanted to buy. They filled in ALL of our cards and we spent the whole evening laying them out on the living room floor shouting out, "I got a guy here who wants to sell an Apple II at $1,200." "Here's a buyer for that at $1,300." We made dozens of phone calls the next day and by week's end we'd concluded 30 deals collecting a 10% commission from the sellers. Checks came in and The Boston Computer Exchange was a success - for us and for our customers. We had no idea what we were doing, no experience starting a business, no money and no idea about the laws and rules... so we were ideally suited to create a new business.


From Chapter 53: Aphorisms


Wizard's Principle: On every mountain there is a single pebble - Move it and unleash an avalanche. Find that pebble.

Law of Ample Supply: Only ask people to bring to the table what they have in abundance and can share generously -- we all come out way ahead.

Motherball's Law of Options Shock: Whenever you choose something, you are NOT choosing everything else.

Good News Guy's Maxim: "Speak in Sound Bites"

Writers Perplex: When you are writing a book or a dissertation, everyday feels like Tuesday; there is no relief in sight.

From the Inside Flap

My life is a series of disaster punctuated by miracles. It is all about near misses and direct hits, sharp turns, sudden stops, changes of direction and jumping off a cliff without knowing where I'd land.

No one ever sees the whole movie of your life. Your parents only see the start, in fact, you are hardly there for the beginning and certainly don't remember much form the baby era. Your kids see the end game, but miss the early stuff. College friends only get a thin slice. Spouses see their era but no more. So I wrote book so all of my kith and kin can see the whole thing.

I may not be the richest person on earth, but I may well be the happiest. I have had a wonderful life - so far - full of excellent adventures, daring highs and spectacular falls. I wrote this because, along the way, I have learned a lot... in spite of getting an excellent school education - little of what I learned came from books or classrooms. I figured out how to live... so some of this might be valuable to you.

I wrote this because so many people's life stories are lost. Within two generations, folks barely remember your name and within three or four generations - no one remembers what jokes you liked or what ice cream you enjoyed or what stories you told. So I wrote my stories down, and some family history and some of the stories the ancestors told. So long as people are telling the stories - you are not dead.

Edition details

• Publisher: Outskirts Press
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1432763156
• ISBN 13: 9781432763152
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 348