What I learned from rereading Autobiography of a Restless Mind: Reflections on the Human Condition Volume 1 and Autobiography of a Restless Mind: Reflections on the Human Condition Volume 2 by Dee Hock.
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 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 profess 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 5000 books accumulated over the years rising at 530 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 5000 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 and 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 contains selections from those written when I was in my sixties.
Volume two contains selections from when I was in my seventies.
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.