Transcript
Introduction
"As a young child born in a tiny cottage in a small farming village in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, I discovered three principal loves of my life, nature, reading, and unstructured learning. With school and church came increasing confinement, demands for conformity and crushing boredom, along with sharp, rising awareness of the chasm between how organizations professed to function and how they actually did. When I was 14, the fourth love of my life appeared, a beautiful brown-eyed girl. We married at 20. Sidetracked into business to support a growing family, I vowed to escape as soon as possible. It took 35 years. As partial recompense for a dislike of business, I continued to read and study voraciously.
During my business years, I developed the habit of formulating short, graphic assertions, often in the form of aphorisms, maxims, and metaphors to test and clarify my thinking. In 1980, I took the first steps to keep my vow to escape from business by purchasing 200 acres of ravaged land in Coastal Hills, overlooking the Pacific Ocean, with the intent to restore it to health and beauty through personal labor. Four years later, in 1984, I resigned as CEO of Visa, turned my back on the business world, and turned to my first loves, family, nature, books, contemplation and the isolation of manual labor on the land. A house was eventually built there containing a poor boy's dream realized, a library containing 5,000 books accumulated over the years.
Rising at 5:30 in the morning to write a thousand words or more before beginning the day's labor became an entrenched habit, unbroken to this day. Each day's writing ended with four or five short reflections on subjects then occupying my mind. By the late 1990s, my writing had grown to 5,000 pages containing several thousands of the short reflections. It occurred to me that a selection of them in the order written would constitute a history of sorts, an autobiography of a mind at work. Since the mind never works linearly by subject matter, but flutters from thought to thought and idea to idea with the agility of a butterfly, I selected one in five in the order written, then indexed them by subject matter for the convenience of readers with specialized interests.
The contents of these two volumes of the Autobiography of a Restless Mind were written in the decades spanning the turn of the Millennium. Volume one contained selections from those written when I was in my 60s. Volume two contains selections from when I was in my 70s. I make no claim to have fully believed them when written, to believe them today, or to have fully lived those I do believe. Neither do I pretend that others have not thought or written about many of the same subjects over the centuries, for most reflect common concerns of mankind. The only claims asserted are that they then occupied my mind, seemed worth serious thought, contained some truth, or indulged my lifelong love affair with the music of words. So here is the Autobiography of a Restless Mind."
That is from the preface of the first of two books that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is Autobiography of a Restless Mind, Reflections on the Human Condition Volume One, and it was written by Dee Hock. So this is part two of a two-part series I'm doing on Dee Hock. Dee Hock was the founder and CEO of Visa. He just passed away recently at the age of 93, and I thought a way to honor him in my own little small way is to reread three books of his that I've read before and make podcasts on them. And the primary reason I felt compelled to do that is because of the book that I'm holding in my hand.