David McCullough: "Amateur" historian

David McCullough: "Amateur" historian

For the past two months, I had been looking forward with anticipation to the appearance that David McCullough was to make in Provo, UT. For those of you unfamiliar with Mr. McCullough, he is the best-selling author of such works as "Truman," "John Adams," and "1776." I have read all or parts of each of these books and enjoyed them immensely.

I found Mr. McCullough's speech to be even more than I had expected. I have been to plenty of speeches by dignitaries: scientists, composers, even authors, and I have sometimes come away disappointed that public speaking was not numbered among their talents. This was not the case with David McCullough.

David McCullough refers to himself as an "amateur" historian in the true sense of the word, meaning, he says, that he does his work for pleasure and not for pay. His enthusiasm shined through during his speech, reflected both in his interestingly woven narratives and the depth of knowledge his interest has inspired him to attain.

As he told us stories of Adams, Jefferson, and Washington, I was especially taken with his descriptions of Washington. Mr. McCullough recounted how Washington was not a brilliant intellectual, but he was a leader who believed he must always dress and act as a leader. Washington learned from his mistakes. He made dreadful mistakes, almost inexcusable ones, but he always learned from them very quicly. And most of all, Washington played by the rules. George III commented at the time that if Washington was to turn command of the troops back over to Congress at the end of the war, he would be the greatest man in the world (which, of course, he did.)

I'll post a link to the transcript of McCullough's speech when it becomes available; in the meantime, check out this interesting interview of David McCullough.

Hurricane Rita

This post is off-topic, but with Hurricane Rita approaching Texas I've been wondering, what if they run out of hurricane names this year? What will they do? And how are hurricane names conceived in general--haven't they run out of names after all these years?

I think most of us are aware that hurricanes are named alphabetically, but here's some new stuff I dug up at the National Hurricane Center:

--Hurricanes (or more accurately tropical storms) are named whenever the storm winds reach 39 MPH.
--There are actually only 6 rotating lists of names that are used for hurricanes, so the names used in 2005 will be used again in 2011.
--Names beginning in Q, U, X, Y, Z are not used
--If there are more than 21 storms in the Atlantic in a given year, additional storms will be named using Greek letters (Alpha, Beta, Gamma, etc.)
--If a storm is so deadly or costly that using its name would be inappropriate in the future for sensitivity reasons, its name is retired (see list of retired names here).

Brian Beutler: Growing a business through hard work

Today I was at a luncheon with Brian Beutler, co-founder and CEO of Alianza, a leader in Mexican telecommunications. Aliana's business model is to enable businesses to make phone calls for drastically reduced rates by routing their calls over the Internet through a technology called Voice Over IP (VoIP). VoIP is a very hot technology; Skype, the world leader in VoIP was just purchased by eBay for $2.6 billion.

Brian is only 26 years old, comes from my hometown of Orem, UT (I didn't know him before), and just finished raising $2 million in capital for his startup company. I found Brian's thoughts very insightful. Brian has a lot going for him, but if I could boil it down to two defining items worth mentioning in a blog, they would be hard work and humility.

Hard work
One of Brian's biggest business accomplishments to date has been raising $2 million in funding, which is frankly amazing considering his company's relatively small current monthly revenues. He was able to secure this funding because of his strong business plan and the promising growth potential of his technology. However, this funding didn't come overnight. Brian pitched his business plan over 100 times before he had any takers. He and his partner were working for free and he had already committed most of his personal assets to the business before the funding started coming in. Now, with the funding in, Brian continues to take ultimate responsibility for the well-being of his 32 employees.

Humility
Brian seems like a smart enough guy, but I think the key to his future success will be his humility and focus on others. It's always refreshing to meet someone who understands the concept of humility enough to exercise it while being a strong leader. Brian's humility reminds me of one of my favorite quotes by CS Lewis (sorry I don't have the reference:-)):

Do not imagine that if you meet a really humble man he will be what most people call "humble" nowadays: he will not be a sort of greasy, smarmy person, who is always telling you that, of course, he is nobody. Probably all you will think about him is that he seemed a cheerfull intelligent chap who took a real interest in what you said to him. If you do dislike him it will be because you feel a little envious of anyone who seems to enjoy life so easily. He will not be thinking about humility: he will not be thinking about himself at all.

Anyway, it's great to see Brian succeeding in a high-flying tech company by following old-fashioned, grounded principles of hard work and humility.

Joel Otterstrom: katrinahousing.org

I attended an interesting meeting this week where Joel Otterstrom, one of the cofounders of katrinahousing.org, spoke. I was amazed how these guys could harness the power of the Internet and get this great site up so quickly after the disaster. Katrinahousing.org is a non-profit organization that provides a matching service to match homeless hurricane survivors with citizens willing to share their homes. It was most interesting to hear how katrinahousing.org interacted with the other sites that sprung up to help those affected by the disaster, such as katrinahousing.net, hurricanehousing.org, etc. It seems like in general these sites all worked together for the benefit of everyone.

Katrinahousing.org is still in need of volunteers to help answer emails and phone calls; if you are interested in helping go to their website or phone 801-373-1299.