Just for fun. A bit US centric in some regards. Also the Girl Scout and giving birth line make me think this was targeted at women originally. I have made adaptations.

Things you’ve already done: bold
Things you want to do: italicize
Things you haven’t done and don’t want to - leave in plain font

1. Started your own blog. 
2. Slept under the stars. 
3. Played in a band. 
4. Visited Hawaii. 
5. Watched a meteor shower. 
6. Given more than you can afford to charity. 
7. Been to Disneyland/world. Both several times. 
8. Climbed a mountain. Not sure what counts so I’ll say yes. 
9. Held a praying mantis.

10. Sang a solo.
11. Bungee jumped. No. It's not going to happen, either.
12. Visited Paris. 
13. Watched a lightening storm at sea. 
14. Taught yourself an art from scratch. 
15. Adopted a child. 
16. Had food poisoning. 
17. Walked to the top of the Statue of Liberty.  Very hot in the summer.
18. Grown your own vegetables. 
19. Seen the Mona Lisa in France. 
20. Slept on an overnight train. 
21. Had a pillow fight. 
22. Hitch hiked. 
23. Taken a sick day when you’re not ill. Hasn't everyone?
24. Built a snow fort. 
25. Held a lamb. 
26. Gone skinny dipping. 
27. Run a marathon. Not happening either. That’s crazy talk. 
28. Ridden a gondola in Venice. 
29. Seen a total eclipse. Of both the sun and the moon.
30. Watched a sunrise or sunset. 
31. Hit a home run. Does stickball count?

32. Been on a cruise. 
33. Seen Niagara Falls in person. 
34. Visited the birthplace of your ancestors. Visited the farm in Norway where my grandfather came from and Fredrickstad where my grandmother was from. 
35. Seen an Amish community. 
36. Taught yourself a new language. 
37.Had enough money to be truly satisfied.

38. Seen the Leaning Tower of Pisa in person.
39. Gone rock climbing. 
40. Seen Michelangelo’s David in person. 
41. Sung Karaoke. 
42. Seen Old Faithful geyser erupt. I have seen the original geyser in Iceland though.
43. Bought a stranger a meal in a restaurant. 
44. Visited Africa. 
45. Walked on a beach by moonlight. 
46. Been transported in an ambulance. An over rated experience. 
47. Had your portrait painted. 
48. Gone deep sea fishing. 
49. Seen the Sistine chapel in person. Been to the Vatican but somehow missed this stop
50. Been to the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris. Wonder if the half size version in Vegas counts for anything? 
51. Gone scuba diving or snorkeling. 
52. Kissed in the rain. 
53. Played in the mud. 
54. Gone to a drive-in theater. This one is getting harder all the time 
55. Been in a movie. I was an extra sitting in the stands for the movie Celtic Pride. Does that count? 
56. Visited the Great Wall of China. 
57. Started a business. With my wife a retail store.
58. Taken a martial arts class 
59. Visited Russia. .
60. Served at a soup kitchen. I
61. Sold Girl Scout cookies. I sold Boy Scout stuff very well. Helped take orders for Girl Scout cookies from time to time.
62. Gone whale watching. 
63. Gotten flowers for no reason. 
64. Donated blood. 
65. Gone sky diving. I don’t like to leave operating airplanes.
66. Visited a Nazi Concentration Camp.
67. Bounced a check. So it happens. 
68. Flown in a helicopter. 
69. Saved a favorite childhood toy. 
70. Visited the Lincoln Memorial. 
71. Eaten Caviar. Surprised to find that I liked it.
72. Pieced a quilt. 
73. Stood in Times Square. Used to work near there and walked through all the time.
74. Toured the Everglades. 
75. Been fired from a job. 
76. Seen the Changing of the Guard in London.  Seen it other places though.
77. Broken a bone. 
78. Been on a speeding motorcycle. I owned a motorcycle for years.
79. Seen the Grand Canyon in person. 
80. Published a book. Several textbooks.
81. Visited the Vatican. .
82. Bought a brand new car. 
83. Walked in Jerusalem. An inspiring trip to say the least. Want to go back. 
84. Had your picture in the newspaper. 
85. Read the entire Bible. 
86. Visited the White House. 
87. Killed and prepared an animal for eating. Fish.
88. Had chickenpox. 
89. Saved someone’s life.
90. Sat on a jury. 
91. Met someone famous. Bill Gates count? How about Bobby Kennedy?
92. Joined a book club. 
93. Lost a loved one. Too many..
94. Had a baby. Does becoming a father count? It should so I’m making this bold. 
95. Seen the Alamo in person. .
96. Swum in the Great Salt Lake. No but I have swum in the Dead Sea. 
97. Been involved in a law suit. 
98. Owned a cell phone. This one maybe doesn’t belong these days.
99. Been stung by a bee.

No that title is spelled correctly. On the social networking, micro-blogging service Twitter a user’s message is called a Tweet. When someone reads a tweet, and sends it on to their followers it is called a retweet. It’s a fairly common thing and when people retweet other retweets a message can more to a lot of people very quickly. Yesterday on a whim I sent out a Tweet that asked“who would you rather retweet something you twitted @Scobleizer or @guykawasaki in 140 characters or less, why?”

Within minutes Guy Kawasaki sent me a Twitter reply “guykawasaki: @alfredtwo You should run a social survey for a question like this. Check out socialtoo.com to do it.” So I created an account on socialtoo.com and then a survey. (The survey is here.) I added “someone else” as a voting option. (The survey results are here.) When I sent out the link to that survey Guy retweeted it. OK he left out my name but that is ok. There is only 140 characters to get a message out.

Very quickly the number of replies jumped way up and as I write this 160 people have replied. Not surprisingly Guy is winning in the poll with 109 votes, 34 votes for “someone else” and 17 votes for Robert Scoble. Actually given how much of the traffic the survey must have gotten from Guy’s followers I think Robert did pretty well. I have no idea if Robert even saw the survey.

So what did I learn from this? Well, clearly I did not learn that people were more likely to want Guy to retweet their tweets. This was so far removed from a scientific survey that it actually is funny. But what I did learn was that, as far as I can see, Guy is more likely to retweet something I tweet. Now of course there was some self-interest in his retweeting my survey but at the same time I can’t see that being a huge motivator. Scoble didn’t retweet it and he has a huge ego. (But I like him anyway – really I do.) But it doesn’t fit into his twitter style I don’t think. So even if he saw it he’d need more motivation to retweet. I should say under full disclosure  that I have had Twitter conversations with both men. Robert knows me personally. Guy just from Twitter and a couple of emails.

But I also think, that as I thought about the whole retweet idea, that I learned something more important. When deciding who is the best person or persons to retweet what matters most is who are you trying to reach. That may run in parallel with who is most likely to retweet who also hits your target audience.

For example Vicki Davis (http://twitter.com/coolcatteacher) has about 3,150 followers and Guy has over 37,000. But if I want to reach teachers specifically Vicki is the one I want to retweet my Tweet. Vicki has retweeted things for me and I really appreciate it. As I do several other teachers who have retweeted some of my tweets. Now Guy is a great one to have retweet if you want to send out something interesting that may be fun. Robert may be the guy if you want to reach a lot of high tech influential people. Guy probably reaches a lot of them too of course. BTW There are others with readership as large as those of Guy and Robert but these two make good examples because I follow them and I don’t some of those other people.

The followers matter as much or more than the person who does the retweet. My perception is that Guy has more followers who are willing to have fun with things they see on twitter. They retweet Guys’ tweets often. Robert’s followers largely (and again this is my unscientific perception) take Twitter seriously, more business focused. Oh sure they use it to create meet-ups. And they pass around the occasional joke. But it so often seems like a networking cocktail party conversation while Guy’s conversations are more often like purely social chat amongst friends. Casual though that friendship might be. My mental picture is that Guy tweets with a smile on his face and Robert tweets with a serious business pundit look on his face. Well not always. Robert cracks into a smile easily and a laugh almost as easily but he so often starts serious. Guy feels to me like he has to work at being serious and pundit like.

To some extent Twitter is about “making friends and influencing people.” Which is more important though? Along the continuum I see Guy and a lot of people I follow as leaning to the “make friends” side. As you make friends and as you build a relationship the “influence people” part may come. And clearly Guy has seen his influence grow to help alltop.com and Truemors before that. But people seem to really like Guy.

Robert seems more towards the “influence people” side. Oh sure he has lots of friends on Twitter. I like to think I’m one of them. But it feels like people are interested in influencing him and on being influenced by him more than making friends with him. That is not a criticism BTW. It’s an observation.

Lots of people use Twitter for lots of different things and with lots of different motivations. Someday I hope someone does a real study on the Twitter cultures. That would be interesting.

In just about a month from now the US will have a new President. He will bring change both foreign and domestic. Will he bring in common sense as well? We all hope so. Common sense has long been lacking in American policies. The last President with any serious  foreign common sense was  Nixon. Both men had other flaws of course but at least in this area I was impressed with them. Carter and Reagan? Not as bad as the last two Presidents but and they seemed focused on small parts of the world. They didn’t pay that much attention to south America or Africa. Not enough anyway. And forget India because most of our recent Presidents seem to have while in office. And in my mind the only President who really understood China was Nixon.

China and India are two of the main focuses of Fareed Zakaria‘s book The Post-American World. It’s loaded with common sense as well. I think there are two types of people who absolutely must read this book. People who are interested in politics/foreign affairs and people who are interested in business. This book lays out not the decline of America but the rise of other parts of the world. It brings a lot of history into it as well.

I’m a strong believer that to understand the present one has to understand history as well.  This book taught me a lot of history of both China and India that I didn’t know before. Of course US schools are notoriously bad for covering history other than of the west which is probably why we screw up so badly in the middle east, the far east and Africa and South/Central America. We just have too few clues about what is going on and how things got the way they are. Common sense requires knowledge.

So what are my key take aways from this book? Close to home we really need to do two things. Get our energy house in order and get our schools in better shape. Some greater level of energy independence would greatly increase our future development options. China and India are going to require a lot more oil and if we keep our current level of dependence on it prices are going to get higher. Education is the key to innovation and we are going to need that. Really our education system is not as bad as a lot of the media would have us think – at least in the top students – but clearly we need to do better to stay competitive. We do a better job of teaching creative and critical thinking than the rest of the world but that edge is shrinking and we cannot afford that. And by golly we have to turn out more people who have a clue about the world outside our boarders.

Globally the growth of China and India can be a huge opportunity for us if we just grasp it correctly. And as long as we keep our innovation lead. I tell you if every America needed a program like FIRST its now.

But I fear that too much of America, including its politicians and business leaders, are focused on short term fixes, ignoring history and a quick buck over long term growth and stability. How else to explain the current financial melt down? And our failures in the middle east with regards to terror and stability. Of course we are not alone in this. In my opinion both sides in the Arab/Israeli conflict are lacking in common sense. The situation in Saudi Arabia is of dubious stability. And could Africa possibly in a bigger mess? Darfur in the Sudan, Mugabe in Zimbabwe and piracy off the coast of Somalia, just to name a few!  But we can’t count on the rest of the world to screw up worse than we do. Clearly it is time to really get smart about some things.

The book Tribes by Seth Godin seems to be all the rage these days. I keep reading about it in blogs, Twitter, and email from people I know. It’s the latest “answer” though I’m not sure to what problem. So naturally I decided to get a copy and read it. I’m pretty much tired of making up my mind about ideas in books unless and until I’ve read the book myself.

Tribes is an easy read. At about 150 pages I read it in one evening. There are some good things in the  book but I can’t say I learned a whole lot. This is far from the first book on leadership that I’ve read though. At least Godin does point out that knowing the steps of how to lead isn’t enough. There is the art of actually doing those things that is important. He doesn’t get to that until page 121 though and I was thinking it at about page 42 when he started talking about the F word. The F word is fear.

When I was in college I was a pole vaulter. I knew how to do it. In my head. Getting my body to actually do it and do it well was the problem. Could I have overcome my lack of physical prowess? Perhaps but at a cost greater than I was willing to pay. And there is a certain element of natural talent that I’m not so sure I could have ever have overcome. I think it is that way with leadership. Some amount of talent is required and some amount of hard work is required to develop the execution skills. The balance for each individual is different. To say that anyone can be a great leader is like saying everyone can play basketball in the NBA. Of course almost anyone can play basketball and almost anyone can be some sort/level of leader. Some just have to work harder than others to get the same results.

In my opinion fear is the greatest inhibitor to success there is. I’m glad the book addresses it. This is not a book about how to conquer fear though and that is what a lot of people really need. Fear is not a bad thing by the way. Not in and of itself. People who have no fear often fail. They do so because they do not properly evaluate the circumstances and are not properly prepared for what happens. To me, understanding the issues that cause the fear and being able to overcome those problems is the way to beat the fear aside. Oh you do still have to be willing to take risk and jump past things that you can’t completely see a solution for but there is a balance. Sometimes luck is involved and you have to be willing to take that risk.

Two other things in the book stood out for me. One is that no one is going to make you a leader. People who wait for someone to come along and “promote” them to leader are usually going to wait forever. One has to act like a leader; to actually lead. Leaders are recognized (sometimes) but they become leaders on their own and without anyone’s permission. Leaders do not wait for things to happen. They make things happen. Trite? True!

To be a leader you have to be a believer. You have to be passionate about what you are doing. If you need to take a vacation to get away you may not be passionate enough or you may not believe in the value of what you are doing enough. You can’t lead people in a direction you know is wrong. That will fall apart and take you with it.

So I liked Tribes. I’d recommend it to young people and to people who are starting to ask themselves if they have what it takes to be a leader. If you are already a leader you are probably already doing most of the things in this book. Maybe you want to give it to someone you think has unrealized potential as a leader. If you are in marketing or sales you have to read this book because all your peers are reading it, talking about it and trying to figure out how they can create their own tribes to lead. Just don’t forget that you have to actually have great products to hype or your tribe will turn on you and eat you up. :-)