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#28 If given the choice, which time period (past, present, or future) would you like to live in and why?
It’s The Best Of Times
Should anything be changed?
You can only imagine what your parents were thinking as they held you for the first time, and what hopes and dreams they must have laid out in their minds.
As a young business executive, my very business was distributing a product that no one else had in the country. Today, it’s used on walls and underground everywhere.
Before my birth came lighting, telephones, and cellophane tape. In 1964, when I graduated from high school, came the commercial use of computers, cell phones, sticky notes, VOIP, 512-bit encryption, and thumb drives that can hold several gigabytes of data. And, let’s not forget the personal computer, the touch screen computer, and, of course, the Internet. Many of the people I’ve been fortunate enough to work with have helped develop some of the technology we use today.
After I had already owned and sold two successful businesses, I made a Bill Gates remark, “The Internet was just a fad,” from his book, The Road Ahead. When I was in my late twenties, I said, “All the really cool stuff had been invented.”
The first time my hands were physically programming on the IBM 360, someone in the class said, “Are there any practical applications that we can develop on this platform? That was 1965.
We have come further in the last ten to fifteen years than we did in all of the 1900s. That’s why this is the best of times to live in. It’s possible that as each new idea, hack, invention, or process comes along, it has the power to refresh and encourage our soul.
