James Farm: 1981

Jazz You Too

Personnel: Joshua Redman: soprano saxophone (10), tenor saxophone (1-9); Aaron Parks: piano, tack piano (1), Prophet-5 synthesizer (1, 8), pump organ (2), humming (2), Fender Rhodes (4), Hammond Home Organ (4, 9), celeste (8); Matt Penman: bass, whistle (2); Eric Harland: drums, vocalization (7).

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Book Quote Corner

All Romance Reads

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Everything Counts

Barataria - The work of Erik Hare

Life has become bizzy.  With summer budding green on every tree it’s time to reflect for a moment even when life makes that difficult.  Especially because life makes it difficult.  This piece is from nine years ago – back when Barataria was more like a normal blog of personal reflection.  Father Clay is now 90 years old and still going very strong.  West Seventh is still West Seventh.  Small miracles abound everywhere.

I had the pleasure of attending a banquet for the West Seventh Community Center honoring a man who is part of the glue that holds our community together, Father John Clay.

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Denver RTD gears up for construction on Southeast Rail Extension

Construction on Denver Regional Transportation District‘s (RTD) $233 million Southeast Rail Extension project will begin May 10, the agency announced earlier this week.

After receiving a $92 million award from the Federal Transit Administration, RTD gave Balfour Beatty Infrastructure Inc. a notice to proceed with building the project. The remaining costs will be covered by local funding sources, RTD officials said in a press release.

The project calls for extending the agency’s light-rail system 2.3 miles south from its existing terminus at Lincoln Avenue in Douglas County, Colo., along with purchasing eight rail vehicles. Slated to open in 2019, the extension will include three new stations and 1,300 parking spaces.

“This project wouldn’t be happening without the support from the local jurisdictions, as well as our federal partner,” said RTD Chair Tom Tobiassen. “It is because of our strong partnerships that we continue to expand public transportation throughout the Denver metro area and create a city that is ready for the future.”

Map of Denver RTD’s Southeast Rail Extension project
(Click to view larger.)
Source: Denver RTD

Chris Cheek: Saturday Songs

Jazz You Too

Jorge Rossy – drums, vibes & marimba
Chris Cheek – tenor sax
David Soler – pedal steel
Steve Cardenas – guitar
Jaume Llombard – bass

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8 Highly Effective Habits That Helped Make Bill Gates the Richest Man on Earth

Adopting these habits may not make you a billionaire, but it will make you more effective and more successful.

How did Bill Gates get to be the richest person in the world, with a net worth around $80 billion? Being in the right place with the right product at the dawn of the personal computer era certainly had a lot to do with it. But so do some very smart approaches to work and life that all of us can follow.

The personal finance site GOBankingRates recently published a list of 10 habits and experiences that make Gates so successful and helped him build his fortune. Here are my favorites. How many of them do you do?

1. He’s always learning.

Gates is famous for being a Harvard dropout, but the only reason he dropped out is that he and Paul Allen saw a window of opportunity to start their own software company. In fact, Gates loves learning and often sat in on classes he wasn’t signed up for. That’s something he had in common with Steve Jobs, who stuck around after dropping out of Reed College, sleeping on floors, so that he could take classes that interested him.

2. He reads everything.

“Just about every kind of book interested him — encyclopedias, science fiction, you name it,” Gates’s father said in an interview. Although his parents were thrilled that their son was such a bookworm, they had to establish a no-reading-at-the-dinner-table rule. That love of reading continues, with Gates publishing an annual list of his favorite books of the year. Reading a lot is a great habit to cultivate. Just don’t do it while having dinner with your family.

3. He gives credit to others.

When asked in an interview to name the best business decisions he’d ever made, Gates replied, “I’d say my best business decisions really have to do with picking people.” Even though he and Allen have had a complicated relationship, he went on to say that choosing Allen as a business partner was at the top of that list. We all need to be good at promoting ourselves, but it’s smart to give the credit to the people you work with whenever possible.

4. He trusts his own judgment.

You can have a really good career if you always listen to other people’s opinions and predictions. But to have a breakout career like Gates or Jobs, you need to listen to yourself first and foremost, even if the entire world is telling you you’re wrong. That’s what happened when Gates and Allen launched Microsoft. In a speech, Gates said the company was “based on this wild idea that nobody else agreed with — that computer chips were going to become so powerful that computers and software would become a tool that would be on every desk and in every home.” Everyone said they were wrong, they launched it anyway, and the rest is history.

5. He’s conservative with cash.

“I wanted to have enough money in the bank to pay a year’s worth of payroll even if we didn’t get any payments coming in, and I’m true to that almost the whole time,” he told an interviewer in 1998. “We have almost $10 billion now, which is pretty much enough for the next year.” How much money do you have set aside to cover payroll just in case something bad happens?

6. He learns from his mistakes.

In an 2008 interview, Gates credited some of Microsoft’s success to his and his leadership team’s ability to quickly recognize a mistake, say, “Oops, this isn’t working,” and try a different approach. He’s certainly made plenty of mistakes over the years that he can learn from. Remember Windows Vista?

7. He gets plenty of sleep.

We all know how important sleep is. Instead of bragging about how late he works and how sleep-deprived he is, Gates makes sure to get seven hours a night, because he says he can’t be creative otherwise. That’s definitely a good habit that everyone should follow.

8. He really concentrates on what he’s doing.

Too many of us are easily distracted and guilty of multitasking, even though we know it’s dreadfully inefficient. Not only does Gates resist the temptation to multitask, he also exhibits really deep concentration while working on tasks. So much so that he’s been known to drift off to sleep while coding, wake up an hour later, and pick up right where he left off.

You don’t have to go that far. But the more you can focus on what you’re doing instead of wandering away to check Facebook or stock prices, the better work you’ll do and the more effective you’ll be.

There you have it — the habits that I believe helped make Bill gates a multibillionaire.

 Minda Zetlin

Co-author, ‘The Geek Gap’