Summary

My life is about serving others. It was not always about that. :)

I am creating you creating me creating you. That is the most profound thing I can think of. It translates something like, I have a say in who you are, and you have a say in who I am, we have this connection whereby we each get to say who the other is. And I acknowledge you acknowledging that, and vice versa. There's mutual knowledge and agreement for this quite intimate connection between us.

My professional experience is in investing, fixing up houses and managing properties, neighborhood revitalisation, creating markets, sustainable economic development & poverty elimination.

I read a lot of books on education, psychology, philosophy, energy, sex, and music. My favorite authors are Kafka, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Vergil, and Lao Tsu.

I have had major transformative experiences through reading Napoleon Hill: Think & Grow Rich, Tony Robbins: Unlimited Power, George Clauson: The Richest Man in Babylon, Richard Carlson: You Can Be Happy No Matter What, and from taking the Landmark Forum, Advanced Course, Self Expression & Leadership Program, Communication Access To Power, and Introduction Leaders Program. I highly recommend ALL those to EVERYONE. Seriously! (And if you only have time for one, take the Landmark Forum. :)

For the past 15 years I've been developing a unique real estate investment strategy, which is described and discussed here: http://www.omidyar.net/group/foo dchain/news/147/

History

In 1993 I was working as a Computer Programmer at Johnson and Johnson, and I had a realisation one day that the president of that company was no smarter than I was. Coming to terms with the fact that I could do just about anything I wanted (inspired by a course called "Priority Management" where we developed a whole set of personal goals), I decided I wanted to be a composer like JS Bach and live in a garden where I could pick ripe fresh fruit all year round.

Bach's music (I have listened to and played just about all of it, many times) still has a profound impact on me. It's better than sex. In 1977 (I was 12) my older brother Dennis was practicing Invention Nr 1 on the piano, playing it over and over, until I realised I wanted to learn piano just so I could play that piece.

Dennis taught me the basics of piano in a dozen or so lessons, and from then on I taught myself, primarily through three books: Scott Joplin's Complete Rags, Popular Songs of the 1890's, and Bach's Two and Three Part Inventions. Later I spent thousands of hours on the Well Tempered Clavier, the French Suites, English Suites, Partitas, and Cantatas and Oratorios and Masses.

More recently I have worked on Brahms Rhapsodies, Schubert Impromptus, and stuff like that, but I always go back to Bach, who remains in my mind the epitome of densely accessible innovation. I've written 50 or so short pieces for piano and various ensembles, I'd say my main influences in composing are Vivaldi, Dvorak, Bizet, Gershwin, and Kurt Weill, because although I've taken classes on theory, I still have no idea what Bach was actually doing. Read Douglas Hofstadter's "Godel Escher Bach".

When I wasn't playing the piano, I was riding my bicycle all over Orange County, teaching piano to 30 pupils, and reading, while listening to Bach recordings I got from the public library. My reading program was the Britannica Great Books, which ranged from Homer to Freud (they have added some volumes since my dad bought this set in the 60s). http://store.britannica.com/imag es/us/local/page_specific/custom /GreatBooks.pdf

Reading Vergil's Aeneid in Latin and then in English, I realised that the two experiences are completely different. So I decided that I needed to read each of those great books in the original. I did read all the Latin works in Latin, and it was wonderful. I studied Greek, but never got quite advanced enough to read Aristotle, Plato, Euclid, Euripides, and Sophocles, so I did those in English.

I can communicate in Spanish and Italian now but have yet to tackle Cervantes and Dante in the original. I did read Freud and Goethe and Eichendorff and Novalis and Kafka and Hesse and Anne Frank in German. I started on Russian but haven't made it to Dostoevsky yet. I also started Turkish, Mandarin, French, and Japanese, but who knows which one I will actually learn next. It probably depends on which country I decide to spend some time in.

To be continued...