• As I See It: Digital Digs

  December 10, 2018 Victor Rozek

  My father once bought a house in San Francisco for $15K and change. By any measure it was a modest home, three bedrooms, one bath, 1,300 square feet, located in a lower-middle class district in the Upper Mission. Working class blue-collar families lived there, and our neighborhood was chockfull of diversity long before that word became both fashionable and divisive. Just on our block we had German, Mexican, Italian, Polish, and Chinese families. Kids played in the streets, and at dinnertime front doors opened and mothers called for their children in thickly accented English.

  One of the unique characteristics of …

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• As I See It: Rethinking Retirement

  November 5, 2018 Victor Rozek

  As all evangelists before and since have been compelled to do, 19th century preacher Dwight Moody gave some advice to the young. “Preparation for old age should begin not later than one’s teens,” he said. “A life which is empty of purpose until 65 will not suddenly become filled on retirement.”

  The start-early portion of Moody’s advice is well intended but wildly unrealistic. Teenagers have no more comprehension of life after retirement than elephants have of space travel. Besides, when life’s essentials are steadily provided for you, there’s little to suggest that someday they might cease to be. Regardless, the …

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• As I See It: How Can You Think That?

  October 8, 2018 Victor Rozek

  While Congress, by constitutional fiat, may not abridge your right to free speech; your employer can and does. Of necessity, corporations worry about being accused of tolerating or, worse, promoting a hostile work environment. And because harassment laws draw no practical distinctions between sexual innuendo and pornography, or religious advocacy and political endorsement, or insults and threats, or jokes, cartoons, or any other form of expression for that matter, corporations generally wish you’d just shut the hell up.

  Legally, corporations are liable for the aggregate of all their employees’ speech.

  Even something seemingly benign, if repeated often enough by enough …

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• As I See It: Estimable Hiring

  September 17, 2018 Victor Rozek

  One of the consequences of being wildly successful is that others are eager to imitate you. In a culture worshipful of winners and disdainful of losers, nothing, it seems, guarantees credibility quite as much as raging success. Whether expounding on mangos or mergers, the opinions of the successful always receive rapt attention. Their brains are picked, their writings analyzed, and every budding entrepreneur wants to harness the secrets of their success.

  So when Jeff Bezos, arguably the most successful man on the planet, says that hiring the right people is “the single most important element” in ensuring Amazon’s continued success, …

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• As I See It: Just Bag IT

  August 6, 2018 Victor Rozek

  Only two days in, my stay in Lassen Volcanic National Park was cut short by vanishing stars. Evidently the “new normal” knows no boundaries and has no respect for vacationers. It seems that every year now, there are fires, terrible fires, consuming the West. In Redding, California, 50 miles west of the park, 966 homes and six people were lost. More are missing. Over 90,000 acres of drought-stressed brush remain ablaze. As of this writing, 38,000 residents may have to be evacuated as swirling winds are spreading flames in all directions.

  But in the distant mountains I knew nothing of …

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• As I See It: The Happiness Template

  July 16, 2018 Victor Rozek

  To a greater or lesser degree, we all wear a necklace of expectations – our own and those of others. As each bead is added and the expectations grow, the cumulative weight can either feel reassuring, like having an instruction manual for your life, or crushing, like a stone.

  For the most part, expectations are well intended, and from an early age they serve as a social template for responsible citizenship. In Western countries, the basics include: graduating from high school; going to college; getting a degree; finding a job; getting married; buying a house; and having children. Broadly speaking, …

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• As I See It: The Hunt For Perfect Storage

  June 11, 2018 Victor Rozek

  I have a garage so full of stuff my car winters outdoors. For all I know, D.B. Cooper stashed his loot in there, which is why it has never been found. After a fruitless hour searching for a power washer attachment, I would have been happy to set the whole mess ablaze.

  If the first half of my life was about acquiring stuff, the second half is about trying to get rid of it. Without much success. Abundance, of course, is not the worst difficulty ever to befall humankind, but like too much of any good thing, indulging yourself is …

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• As I See It: Bot Versus Bot

  February 12, 2018 Victor Rozek

  An editor at MAD Magazine once joked that the “E” in Alfred E. Neuman probably stood for “Enigma” because no one actually knew what it stood for. Well, maybe it stands for “Entertaining” because the magazine features some wicked satire. Whatever his middle name, Neuman has graced the magazine cover since its inception in 1961. And, as an unanticipated satirical bonus, it turned out that with his boyish-bumpkin looks and deep insights (“What, me worry?”) he bore an uncanny resemblance to George W. Bush.

  One of the popular features in MAD is Spy vs Spy – a wordless cartoon that …

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• As I See It: In the Land Of Lost Listeners

  April 24, 2017 Victor Rozek

  “I should sell my tongue and buy a thousand ears.” – Rumi

  Rumi would not do well on social media. Not much listening going on there. We are a culture of speakers. From the advent of email through the current suite of thumb-enabled apps, all are designed to amplify the mouth. From sea to shining sea, we have become one long declarative sentence fragment.

  Let’s face it: Most of us speak because we want to be heard. Only a priest in a confessional begins a conversation in anticipation of listening to someone blather on about their dysfunctions. But that’s the …

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• As I See It: Expanding Reach And Shrinking Intelligence

  February 27, 2017 Victor Rozek

  For those of us accustomed to ingesting information in scraps, the Lincoln-Douglas debates would have been a month’s worth of forced-feeding. Lincoln, the challenger, and Douglas, the Senate incumbent from Illinois, jousted seven times in seven cities adhering to a format that would shrivel today’s sound bite-spouting politicians, and overwhelm voters with truncated attention spans.

  The first candidate would speak for a solid hour, followed by a 90-minute rebuttal, topped-off by a 30-minute rejoinder from the first speaker. Three hours of political debate; three hours of issues and remedies, analysis and inspiration, with speakers erudite enough to keep audiences engaged …

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