Randy Cantrell

Randy Cantrell is the founder of Bula Network, LLC, a boutique coaching company specializing in city government leadership.

Does Your Printer Have Paper? (and other urgent questions for the digital age)

Does Your Printer Have Paper? (and other urgent questions for the digital age)

It’s a digital age and I fully embrace it. But I still need paper in my printer.

Let’s ruminate on these and other urgent analog matters facing us in the digital age.

Randy Cantrell

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Turning Over A New Leaf Won't Help If It's Poison Ivy

Turning Over A New Leaf Won’t Help If It’s Poison Ivy

 

Jo Marsh is the dreamer and a scribbler character in Louisa May Alcott’s novel, Little Women. Here’s an observation about her life in the book.

“I keep turning over new leaves, and spoiling them, as I used to spoil my copybooks; and I make so many beginnings there never will be an end.”

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It means making a change. Improving. Doing something differently. Doing different things.

Our unwillingness to make a change is detrimental to our life and everybody else influenced by us. It’s rebellion. And selfish.

My willingness is high. I wouldn’t describe myself as stubborn, but I do know I’m resolved about some things – mostly things in which I believe deeply. Beyond religious truths, there aren’t very many things that qualify because I have lived long enough to experience getting it wrong. Getting eternal things right is important because the stakes are so high.

Eternity changes everything.

Let’s consider what it means to avoid poison ivy and to turn over a new leaf.

Randy Cantrell

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How's Your Clock Speed?

How’s Your Clock Speed?

Computers have a clock speed.

The clock speed measures the number of cycles your CPU executes per second, measured in GHz (gigahertz). A “cycle” is technically a pulse synchronized by an internal oscillator, but for our purposes, they’re a basic unit that helps understand a CPU’s speed.

The higher the clock speed, the faster the computer. There are other factors, but depending on your computing – gaming, graphics, CAD, video rendering, and other intensive tasks – you’ll want the highest clock speed CPU you can afford.

Humans also have a clock speed. I’m not a neuroscientist so I have no idea if it can be measured, but you know it when you see it. We talk about how fast or slow somebody is. Some of us are fast at some things and slow at other things. Some of us are fast most of the time while others are slow most of the time.

Clock speed is evident in our walking pace, communication, handling adversity, facing opportunities, navigating new or strange situations, and just about everything else. Ben Shapiro has an extraordinarily high clock speed.

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William Buckley had a high clock speed, too. It illustrates how clock speed isn’t merely gauged by how fast somebody talks. Like Shapiro, Buckley had a high clock speed intellectually.

 

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We mere mortals definitely are operating at a slower clock speed than these guys. I’m not sure what, if anything, we could do to rise to their level.

Let’s think about our potential, our natural inclinations and upping our performance.

Randy Cantrell

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Always Improving (A.I.)

Always Improving (A.I.)

There are about 9.84 BILLION search results for A.I. – which we mostly think stands for “artificial intelligence.” ChatGPT is the latest, greatest, coolest, trickest A.I. It is pretty spectacular. For mere mortals like me, I don’t know how A.I. improvement could even be measured, but I do know there’s a data gap that is a constraint. A.I. needs high-integrity data.

I’m intrigued by artificial intelligence, but I’m far more obsessed with a different A.I.

Always Improving

“Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Do not bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.”    ― William Faulkner

We all have default behaviors driven by default viewpoints or approaches to life. One of my major default behaviors spawns from a default viewpoint that things can always be better. Not in some, “let’s give it time and it’ll sort itself out” kind of a way – but in a “what can we do to improve this?” kind of a way. It’s how I see the world. It’s also how I see most things. It’s a default because I’m not consciously trying to do it…it’s more of an auto-pilot thing for me.

Years of self-introspection and self-examination taught me that I did a poor job of properly communicating this for too many years. The power of others – seeing how others view things – proved most helpful so I could see things more clearly. Through my eyes, it looks and feels like the never-ending quest for improvement based on my belief and optimism that just about anything can be made better! It hasn’t got anything to do with dissatisfaction necessarily – although I admit I can be dissatisfied with the status quo. It doesn’t look or feel critical to me either.

The most helpful thing to me was learning the power of personality traits, specifically my own personality traits. Part of my personality that drives my passion to ALWAYS IMPROVING is summed up in a phrase I’ve seen when studying about those of us who lean toward perceiving or judging.

Making Things as They Ought to Be

That typifies my life for as long as I can remember. The judgment comes in my view of how things ought to be – that’s where that perception comes in.

The contrasting personality trait tends to be more reactionary and flexible, taking things as they come. Their default behavior makes it harder for them to focus on one thing at a time.

Randy Cantrell

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The Yellow Studio version 3.0 Is Now Live (kinda sorta)

The Yellow Studio version 3.0 Is Now Live (kinda sorta)

It’s happened. The Yellow Studio is in a new iteration.

The Yellow Studio v3.0

Let’s catch up a little bit and talk about whatever version of your life you may be working on.

Randy Cantrell

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