Your Shield

“Should you shield the canyons from the windstorms you would never see the true beauty of their carvings.” - Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

There are many "slings and arrows" perceived or actual which engulf our daily lives. There are road incidents of getting cut off while on your way to work. Did you remember or fail to kiss your spouse good-bye? The coffee shop failed to put the cinnamon sprinkle on top of the cream.

Big or small, every slight feels like a thousand cuts.

So what is our natural tendency? It is to slip into a shield of armor. A cold metallic barrier to protect us from all these misfortunate events. We build the wall in an effort to keep out and defend ourselves from any more pain.

Have you ever tried to walk in a suit of armor?

A suit of armor is heavy and very inflexible. To move forward becomes very difficult and cumbersome, in fact it slows you down tremendously. With chain mail gloves, holding that cup of coffee can even be difficult. The armor may protect you from the outside world but it also makes it very hard to truly interact with the outside world.

Let go of the hard shell we create for ourselves.

There will be plenty of cuts and bruises we take throughout life. There are also plenty of band aids, people and relationships you have developed to help heal the wounds inflicted upon us. There are others we share life and its foibles whom we can be with to defend and strengthen ourselves.

The key is in connection, not in shielding ourselves.

By building our connections with other people, a natural shield happens in our life. The strength gained by friends surrounding you will let you overcome anything that comes your way. Note that I did not say the slings and arrows will never happen for they surely will. But the healing comes from the strength of others around you.

Build a shield through connection with others, not with cold metallic armor.

And stay inspired my friends.

Amongst the Madness

“It was madness. And, as Finan had said, sometimes madness works.”
― Bernard Cornwell

I have just returned from five days working a convention in Las Vegas, Nevada. Yes, the city also known as Sin City or Lost Wages. A day or night overload of ones senses. A constant ingest of sounds, lights and visual madness. It was also a chance to conduct EMCWorld 2015, showcasing some of the world's greatest data storage technology.

It was connecting with people.

When you put on a convention in a city such as Las Vegas, the risk of what grabs a person's attention is constantly at play. One has to decide the importance of a new virtual storage system discussion over the ringing and dinging of a slot machine. It is called a vVNX if you are interested in checking it out.

It was also connecting with people.

What I find most interesting about Las Vegas are the people. I am not speaking of the residents of Las Vegas outside of "The Strip" where all the bells and whistles are. I am pretty sure Las Vegas is like any other city outside of the 4-mile strip of madness and the residents are as well. But walk through the casinos, the buffet lines, the shoppes and the convention halls; this is the interesting piece of being in Las Vegas.

It was constant connections with people.

Over the course of four days, I participated in over thirty customer meetings, there were breakout sessions to attend and the impromptu hallway meetings. I met old friends and created new friendships. There was a lot of information sharing but there was a lot of information learning from listening to people. It was not simply the noise of a Las Vegas game of chance.

It was about connecting with people.

Sure, everyone had fun in a lot of different ways. After a long year of relative peace and quiet, Las Vegas lends itself to the short term visitor offering many forms of madness. But within the madness are the people and that is what works.

Stay inspired my friends.

EMC World 2014 - The 3rd Platform

“Happiness is not so much in having or sharing. We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.” — Norman MacEwan

People ask me quite often these days, in the world of Information Technology, what exactly is the 3rd Platform. In our business, we like to show the above diagram and talk tracks describing it. Sometimes it comes off sounding like a lot of marketing and at other times it gets so deep into the technology that one can feel overwhelmed by all of it.

Relax, I'm not here to sell you a product or wow you with technical brilliance.

When you try to comprehend what the 3rd Platform means, bring your thoughts down to just you and your connections to other people. On average, most people indicate they have what they would call three close friends. If you add that to our Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and the many other social networks we probably have more than 4003 friends.

The data generated just by your interactions with these friends is enormous. In 2012, it was estimated that every household alone generated 52GB of data. That is two years ago and this data growth has only accelerated. Think of everything you do, you location services on your smart phone, use of your ATM card, watching cable television or a doctor's visit; all of these things are amassing more and more data.

Without going into the reasons (good or bad) on why all of this data is being collected, what the 3rd Platform does is to help companies handle this huge amount of data. Given the amount of data and infrastructure needed to support all of this data, if we did nothing it would be similar to needing tens of thousands of people as were used to build the pyramids.

So the 3rd Platform creates a need for simpler, more versatile and more powerful options to store, manage and use the data. This includes newer, more cost and flexible storage systems. It includes software that provides an easy method to manage, move, and measure all of this data. And we are talking lots of data.

It is estimated that every minute...

- YouTube users upload 48 hours of new video
- Instagram users share 3,600 new photos
- Brands and organizations on Facebook receive 34,722 "likes"
- Over 100,000 tweets are sent

So what you are doing in your life is adding data to this 3rd Platform data surge. And I don't mean to scare you away from generating data. I believe every connection we can make with another person, every good thing we can do, in every method available to us is a good thing. The 3rd Platform is not a bad thing, it is just a thing. What matters is how we respond as humans within the crush of all that new data.

Connect to life using your tablet, smartphone, biometric watches, laptops, televisions, cars and everything else.

Just don't forget to look up from your device and connect with other people, eye-to-eye, handshake to handshake, and voice to ear.

And stay inspired my friends.