AM

This may be the first morning that I'm actually awake in the last two days. Not to say that I haven't gotten out of bed since the day of the oral surgery, but I was moving slowly, and now, in retrospect, thinking slowly. I'm guessing that it was a side effect of one of the drugs I was taking, a pain med called Hydrocodone -- one of the noted side effects is sleepiness, another is lethargy. I definitely have felt that. But this morning, I was actually up before my wife or daughter, and we had breakfast together -- even me, though mine was limited to Rice Krispies. I've seen ads for a cereal bowl being sold in the UK called Eat Me Crunchy, which strikes me as an unusual name, but the bowl's a novel gimmick; it elevates the cereal on a platform, so that any milk added on wets the cereal, then pools at the bottom where it can't make the cereal soggy. I've always thought that if the cereal gets soggy, you're taking too long to eat it, but its an interesting design. Pity that it reminds me of the design for toilets in Germany. I've never seen them, but I've heard of them in grotty detail. Also heard very nice things about the Toto brand of toilets, from Japan - and just today, about this, which looks intruiging.

I read a New York Times article this morning about Gen Y leaders, the point of which seemed to be that Gen Y's, who are in their 20s, are energetic and enthusiastic. It wasn't a bad article, but I think that perhaps it missed the point, on two fronts. First, people in their twenties tend to be energetic and enthusiastic. They haven't been beaten up a lot, haven't had a series of bad events or worked at a mundane job or been married a long time. Those things tend to slow you down a bit. They don't deaden you to the world, but they introduce you to the fact that life's going to be uneven and unfair. If you're fortunate, you learn from the experience and build some reflex and redundancy into your style. If you're not, you become a whinger. (I love that word. I don't use it a lot, because if you're not from the UK and its orbit, you don't know it, but I love it.)

The other direction they missed, I believe was in thinking that being a leader is the bestest thing in the world. When the word leader is used, I think people tend to think of capital-L Leaders; the ones with the titles. There aren't that many formal positions of leadership in the world, and if your definition of success is becoming one of them, you'd be well advised to think about how you'll handle the mass of people -- the followers. You have to understand how to motivate and move them, and do it in a way that speaks to their values, which may not be the same as yours. If your goal is to orchestrate how the organization performs, you have to understand it -- and that means understanding the people there, how they operate and interact. When most of them are non-leaders, it takes the ability to be flexible in your thought process -- and thats difficult. Not impossible, though.