Steve the Owl's Blog

Hi, everyone. It has been a busy time for me as of late, what with visiting my family in West Virginia, preaching a sermon nine days ago, tracking down paperwork to make sure that credentials are in order, and starting another semester at Temple University. However, one thing that I have been thinking about for several days now, after Martin Luther King Day, is about the nature of what it means in order to have lived a multi-faceted life with a challenging and complex message, only to be remembered as a two-dimensional character.

The Impetus for the Post

Eight years ago, while I was stationed in northern Iraq, I saw a drawing for some material commemorating Martin Luther King, and the winners would be announced on Martin Luther King Day. I went to the mess hall the next day, and I saw my name on the list of winners. To my surprise, I found out that there were more free books than there were people who entered the raffle, so I was allowed to get whatever book I wanted. When I picked my book, I saw one that compelled me more than the others: A Knock at Midnight: Inspiration from the Great Sermons of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.

In this book, there are several of Martin Luther King’s sermons, from the 1950′s into 1968, the year he was assassinated. A lot of people think of Martin Luther King as someone who gave a great speech on the Washington Mall with the refrain, “I have a dream…” Anyone who has ever written music or any oral form of communication knows the importance of repeating a key word or phrase in order to help the audience remember it, and anyone who has studied at a seminary can recognize the preacher’s rhythm of the words and tone of the I Have a Dream speech, and can probably sit down and diagram each of the major points of a well-crafted sermon. Here is the speech in its entirety:

Many of us in the United States hear of that speech, and we also hear of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the 1955 event spurred on by Rosa Parks’ refusal to get up from her seat on a bus, that eventually prompted an effort by black people in Montgomery to refuse to ride any bus that would not treat them equally, which eventually broke the back of the bus system in Montgomery, and after a year, it ended in victory.

However, this sanitized version of Martin Luther King is not the whole truth. Civil rights was and is an important part of King’s legacy, but it is not the only part of his message. He was a brilliant man who was taken from us far too soon, dying at the end of a gun at the age of 39. However, he began his national role at the age of 26 years old. He went across the country preaching a message of justice, and making sure that the message of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution applied to all, and not just a few.

A Broad Message

As I read the book, I found that this book covered one area more than any other: poverty. Over and over, he pointed out the unjust nature of an economic system that too often focused on greed and focused on the haves rather than everyone. In his lifetime, King advocated a national guaranteed income and he opposed the Vietnam War, both because he opposed violence, and because of what he saw happening to poor people in the region whose farmland was destroyed. As a matter of fact, when he died in 1968 in Memphis, he was not there for a civil rights march, he was there to stand in support of striking sanitation workers, as part of his Poor People’s Campaign. If you have never heard Martin Luther King on poverty, here is a powerful video juxtaposed with images of what poverty really means:

Martin Luther King was a great man with a great message, but I believe that we do him a disservice by ignoring the whole message of Martin Luther King.

How do you fight to make sure that someone’s entire legacy is remembered and not turned into a cartoon?

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Hi, everyone. I hope you are having a good day today. Over the past few days, I have been thinking about the legacy of co-founder and former CEO of Apple, Steve Jobs, who died of complications from cancer at the age of 56. There are a lot of people who have talked about his brilliant work with the products that begin with the letter “i” (iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad) since his return to the company in the mid-1990′s. However, I thought about the nature of foresight and how it made Apple’s success possible to build his legacy.

Finding Smarter People

Steve Jobs was so admired at one point that plenty of people have referred to Apple fanatics as the “cult of Jobs.” However, those who may have fallen victim to this thought process seem not to realize that Apple would’ve never existed without the other co-founder of Apple, Steve Wozniak. The man affectionately known as The Woz was part of a computer club that started based on learning signals that made it possible to make free long distance phone calls in the early 1970′s (the Phone Phreaks). Eventually, the two (with Wozniak taking the lead) built the Apple I for their friends at the club, and they worked on a product that could be marketed to the masses, the Apple II, which is considered by many to be the world’s first personal computer.

Finding Opportunity

Jobs was forced out of Apple in 1985. He sold his stock (ironically, if he had simply kept all of the stock he owned in 1985, he would’ve been the fifth-richest man in the world, rather than 110) and started Next Computers. However, his true resurrection in the world of business came when he bought the computer arm of LucasFilms, which he renamed Pixar, in 1986. Eventually, Pixar began to work on the first full-length computer animated movie, Toy Story. This was an idea that many thought was impossible, but we have now reached a point where hand-drawn animation is so rare that one of the working titles for The Simpsons Movie was The Simpsons in 2-D, to demonstrate its insistence on staying true to the show’s roots.

However, before Toy Story, the rap on computer animation was that it could not match the feeling of the world of hand-drawn animation. A scene from my favorite Pixar movie, WALL-E, puts that to rest in my opinion, as evidenced by this scene where WALL-E and EVE dance in space with the help of a fire extinguisher:

Steve Jobs ultimately had his biggest financial success through Pixar, and its subsequent sale to Disney. However, his legacy is mainly based on his journey from a 20-year-old working out of his parents’ basement with a friend that changed the way we communicate. So, as I write this on an Apple, I salute Steve Jobs for everything his work has meant to the world over the last 40 years.

How do you work to build your legacy?

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Hi, everyone. I hope you had a good weekend. In some ways, I must admit that I was saddened by two e-mails that I saw Friday, but a lot of people in the business world said that it was a matter of when I would get it rather than if. The reason why I say this is because I receive e-mails from the second-largest book retailer in the United States, Borders Books & Music.

This spring, Borders filed for Chapter 11, and started to look for someone to buy the 40-year old book chain. They also closed some of their stores in an effort to become more lean and mean. However, I knew that things were pretty bad when I noticed that one of the stores that was on the chopping block this spring was the location in Center City Philadelphia. (This is the part of town a lot of places would call their “downtown” area, but it is to the north of South Philadelphia, whose big business is the Sports Complex; hence, the name.) This was usually where you’d see the big book signings, and considering that they had just released a new version of their eReader, I thought that they were in good shape to restructure and that they just decided to focus on the suburbs and shopping centers to cut down on rent.

Changing with the Times

It was with this background that I was saddened as I saw an e-mail from the CEO of Borders thanking people for their 40 years of loyalty and the chance to serve us. The second advertised a going out of business sale at all locations. (I saw a news story that they were closing the stores, so I thought that it might have simply meant that they were switching to an online format, but this was not the case.)

As I read the e-mail, it explained what a lot of people saw as the demise of Borders was complete: they simply couldn’t compete with online bookstores. In some ways, this was true, but I think that part of it was because they couldn’t see what happened with online books until it was too late. A lot of people thought that the fact that Amazon didn’t turn a profit for several years meant that they would ultimately have to raise their prices, and they would ultimately lose their biggest advantage. This did not happen. By the time Borders realized this, they struck a deal with Amazon that would direct people to their online store, but Amazon was not really interested in helping Borders out, and they didn’t really do a good job with this.

What They Had

In this way, Borders ultimately ended up behind the curve, and they paid dearly for this mistake. However, I come not to bury Borders, but to praise it. While it is true that the business world changed and they couldn’t keep up, the simple fact is that their efforts made things like Amazon possible, because Borders was the first high-volume bookseller. Some in the world of independent books probably see this as poetic justice (After all, a lot of independent bookstores couldn’t keep up with the economy of scale of Borders.) but there were a lot of good things that Borders did that other booksellers both large and small copied. After Borders, it became far more common to see bookstores that had places to sit as people browsed through the books or waited for friends and family at the store. Even a lot of independent bookstores serve coffee, which would’ve been unthinkable before Borders did it.

This leads to the ultimate question of whether Amazon and eReaders have killed the bookstore. In some ways, there will always be bookstores, but they are far different than what they once were. As long as people love actual books and reading for its own sake, there will still be brick-and-mortar bookstores.

People say that independent bookstores are dead, but there are at least two within a two-mile radius of my house. I think that there will always be a place for bookstores because they still provide a service people like. Sometimes, I’ve gone into a bookstore not having any idea what I wanted, but just started looking around, and I found some great books this way. Paperback publishers have admitted that this is where they get a lot of their sales, because people search engines for online bookstores tend to reward newer books (and thus hardback books) when people are just looking in general. So, for this reason, while Borders may be gone, their legacy will survive, even by the companies that beat them in business.

How have you enjoyed things that many have declared dead or learned to adapt with the times?

If you like what you read, please leave your comments below and share with your friends using the buttons above.

If you would like to learn more about the principles of personal development that have stood the test of time, please fill out the form for my Seven Day eBook Giveaway in the upper right-hand corner of this page.