Carl Setzer

Check out my friend Toby's JibJab video. I love these things.

Was just reading a lending market update which included a note about the puzzling behavior of the stock market last week. Faced with a number of positive economic indicators, the market sold off pretty heavily. Well, with my time at Fortune 500s, I’ve seen this before. I learned a long-time ago that Wall Street, the stock-markets and prices of such things is driven, on a day-to-day basis primarily by emotion. This also feeds into the quarter by quarter mentality of most stock valuation. Time and time again, in most markets, it’s those with long-term views and understanding that do well. This is true in real estate as well. If you can shift your view out 5, 10, 20 years in the future, you can escape the variability of these emotionally based fluctuations.

For many years now, I've been a Franklin-Covey devotee. For decades it's been live changing/life affirming in the richest way possible. At one point, I was recruited to be a training facilitator. That didn't align with my objectives, but was very flattering, and shows my commitment to these principles. Anyway, this week brought several reminders of all that. First, my son is getting introduced to the concepts more formally. He's enjoying the fact he knows all the concepts. And it's very satisfying to hear that attributed to my teachings. Also, at my latest team meeting, my boss broke out my beloved "Importance/Urgency" grid. (Side note: I understand that this was developed by Eisenhower, but I was introduced to this by Steven Covey.) As we were talking, the group was talking about focusing on quadrant I, what I call the hyper-urgent. Mostly, this is the land if crises and drama. No, we don't want to live in this space. Of course it needs to be dealt...

I've been a fan of Wil Wheaton's Radio Free Burrito for years. It's hard to conceive he's been putting those things out for a decade. Anyway, today's episode: Radio Free Burrito 43: my next mistake , hits on a few things that I've been thinking about lately. He talks a bit about Taylor Swift and how crappily she's been treated by the media, and by a certain cadre of the internet. I, too, have been discovering more in her music than I expected. And what made me take a deeper look was the grace and humor she's shown while facing down the trollish brutes. Gotta love and admire anyone like that. When talking about Pax and the hater-vibe he was feeling, he struck a nerve that's been raw. In geek circles lately, there's this whole "gatekeeper" thing going on. I hate this mentality. Perhaps it’s because I’m an old school geek from back when geekiness lined you up for bullying (at best). When you found ANYONE who shared those interests an...

I'm moving all my more formal business and technology focused writing over to my new website, Forward Facing . The goal is for CarlSetzer.com to be more of a personal site. Forward Facing will showcase my writing and web work in a more professional manner. At least that's the plan. Part of the fun with this, though, is that ForwardFacing.net is showing up in Twitter's spam/malware database. I guess the prior owners were nasty with it. Anyway, I've made the initial request of Twitter to get removed from that list. Which me luck.