MountainMornings

“Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.” Sir Winston Churchill

Just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers. I’m not much of a non-fiction type, but this book was required Ivy Farm Book Club reading and I’m glad I tackled it. Book Club will be at my house next week and I can’t wait to dish! Published a few years ago, by the same author of Blink and Tipping Point, I remember Bob reading it on vacation. And I vaguely remember bits and pieces of a conversation he had with the Rocker about the Beatles. Gladwell was asking the question, ‘what makes someone a success’ in their chosen field – and it turns out he wasn’t looking at the individual tall oaks – the Bill Gates of the world – but rather the forest in which we find them. Trying not to give too much away, the argument he makes for the meteoric rise of the boys from Liverpool is that they went to Hamburg, Germany and played very, very long sets.

Naturally the book got me thinking. What is it that makes one guy plug away at a prehistoric version of a PC, and then later drop out of Harvard to start up his own company? Gates happened to be born at just the right time, to have parents and teachers who nurtured his early interest in programming, and to become a young adult in 1975, right before the birth of the personal computer. IBM released their first PC in 1981 with an open architecture for a a mere $1,568. My first published piece ran in the Berkshire Eagle about the same time. It was titled “Guns in the Woods,” and it came about because I was struck by the paradox of our simple new life as parents, on a mountain, heating by wood stove, and Bob carting the components of a PC upstairs. It was pre-IBM, very “open architecture,” purchased piecemeal at Radio Shack! Back to nature and back to the future all at once. Gates was born October 28, 1955. If only Bob, a very early computer geek, had been born just a bit later…

Last night we drove by a magnificent double rainbow in a storm shattered sky. It was unusual in that you could see the whole thing, from one end to the other. We were after some frozen yogurt and had to stop to take pictures. And then, Bob went into lecture mode about the Transit of Venus, coming up in just a few days and we’ll need #14 welding glasses to see it, and Venus won’t do this again for 150 years so everyone on earth right now will never see it again…http://www.transitofvenus.org/

Our wedding anniversary is tomorrow. And I thought to myself that yes, I will still need this outlier husband of mine when he’s 64. What makes for a successful marriage?He says it’s because he gets me. I say it’s because I love him despite getting him. He keeps me on my toes and looking up!