There is a method to the “madness” of caricature. I learned to water paint in my childhood – had a good drawing sense. Freed from gardening during the winter, I picked up more drawing and decided to do some caricaturing. Picked up this book from the library and found it very educational. It does take some practice to pick up where one’s face is “abnormal” to exaggerate. This book teaches what to look for. I particularly like his teaching/describing the details of the face features in Chapter 3 and 4, and the sequencing technique in Chapter 7. This is a very complete book for a person going into caricature as a career or hobby. Very well done. Highly recommended.

I enclosed a practice sketch that I have done on Philip Seymour Hoffman, who was found dead today. I admired his acting in all the different characters he had portrayed. RIP

A quick summary:
1. What is caricature? “A caricature is a portrait with the volume turned up.” 3 elements: recognizability, exaggeration (vs. distortion), and statement (personality and editorialization). The 3 basic relationship of size (of features relative to each other), distance (between features), and angle (of features relative the central axis of the face).

2. The T-shape theory: T is created by the eyes and the nose. The relationship between the eyes and nose in action: connected by a pulley system (push and pull).

3. Head shape: the alpha shape. exaggerating the head shape creates powerful caricatures by observing any “abnormal” perception: equal distance between top of head to eye and eye to the bottom of the chin. By squinting your eyes (to blur out the details), finding points of reference (horizontal and vertical line to see where the mass of head is bigger or smaller, and widest point of the head shape), noticing the imbalance between halves, playing with the shape association (pear, peanut, light bulb, pizza slice, toaster?). The author went into the 6 basic skeletal elements of the head (cranium, brow, eye mask, nose, cheekbones, and jaws). In exaggeration, observe the following: visual weight, law of constant mass (like sculpturing with a fixed mass of clay), rubber concept (head is printed on a sheet of rubber), and constant lines of force (finite amount of energy between the features and within the head shape).

4. Drawing and caricaturing the features: the eyes (angle, size and asymmetry), the nose (angle: backward, forward, and 3/4 tilts, 3 elements: root width, end width, and distance between root and end), basic shapes), mouth (corner-to-corner line, nodes concept, negative space). This is the “meat” of the book. Pictures worth a thousand words.

5. Caricaturing the rest of the head: Jaw (the lean jaw and the heavy face), the cheekbones (strong-masculine, soft-rounded, de-emphasized), ears (size, shape and placement), eye brows (size, distance, and angle), forehead and hair (length, style, color, texture, volume, curl, gloss, bulk, etc., use nodes to see shapes of forehead and hair).

6. Beyond the face: the neck (thickness, length and forward thrust) and shoulders, hands. Caricatures and sexes (women like heart shape, makeup-rule).

7. Drawing live caricatures: challenges of live caricature: time (limited), audience (diverse), volume (many – may lose objectivity). The sequence technique: start from eyes to nose, mouth, nose bridge and brow, cheekbones and jawline, to ears, forehead and hair, and finally filling in.

8. Caricature in illustration: other elements are cohesive with your caricature. Appeal and viability of a given style hinges on 1) the final result of effect the art director is looking for. 2) the demographic and tastes of the overall target audience, 3) what’s hot at the moment,

9. Caricature and Mad: Add story telling and the journey to selling your arts.

I expected to read about all the wonderfully success stories from a self-promoting successful woman. Surprisingly, Sheryl Sandberg came across as sincere, modest, occasionally self-deprecatingly humorous, and most courageous. She encourages the women to lean in (actively participating) more at work and the men to lean in at home more. Some of the tips apply to men as well. I enjoyed and recommended this book. Hope the recently announced movie will be as interesting and helpful as the book. I think she’s doing a lot of good for women. Hopefully, my daughter’s generation of women will benefit from her advocacy.

At the time of this writing, I was just listening to President Obama’s State of Union 2014 address. He talked about equal time and equal pay for women. Looks like the Sheryl Sandberg’s effort is getting traction.

You can check out the summary below or watched her two TED videos (Video 1 and Video 2) on Youtube:

1. The Leadership Ambition: Sheryl did a quick memoir on her upbringing, her career and her personal life. Also she talked about how she started speaking out about “Lean In.” (Commencement Speach at Bernard Colledge in 2011).

2. Sit at the Table: Women tend to lack confidence – “fake it until you feel it” and “Keep your hands up” is recommended. Believe in your own abilities.

3. Success and Likeability: Women are less likeable when being aggressive but not so for men. “If a woman is competient, she does not seem nice enough. If a woman seems really nice, she is considered more nice than competent. When it comes to negotiations concerning compensation, benefits, title, women tend to lose out and not negotiate hard enough. Even if a women negotiate successfully, she would lose out in the long term in goodwill. Recommended to “think personally, act communally” by prefacing with “women get paid less than men so need to negotiate harder. Also combine niceness with insistence. “When you want to change things, you can’t please everyone.”

4. It’s a Jungle Gym, Not a Ladder. Many ways are there to get to the “top of the jungle gym” but one way to get to the top of the ladder. Her story of landing a job at Google and Eric Schmidt’s comment “If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, yo don’t ask what seat. You just get on.” are interesting. She believes in 18-month plan for the team and herself. “Taking risks, choosing growth, challenging ourselves, and asking for promotions are all important elements of managing a career.” Alice Walker’s quote, “The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.”

5. Are You My Mentor? The men wanted answers, the women wanted permission and help. Mentors elect proteges based on performance and potential. Mentors continue to invest when mentees use their time well and truly open to feedback. “Excel and you’ll get a mentor.”

6. Seek and Speak Your Truth: Communication works best when we combine appropriateness with authenticity, find that sweet spot where opinions are not brutally honest but delicately honest. “Effective communications tarts when the understanding that there is my point of view (my truth) and someone else’s point of view (his truth). Make a habit of soliciting for input to avoid the “Rubin likes gold” moment. Ask what I can do for you before asking for what they can do for you.

7. Don’t Leave Before You Leave: She encourages the women to not leave the work for maternity leave until they’re ready to leave and don’t turn down an offer/opportunity because of the perceived conflict with child bearing. “Keep a foot on the gas pedal until a decision must be made. That’s the only way to ensure that when the day comes, there will be a real decision to make.”

8. Make Your Partner a Real Partner: The single most important career decision that a woman makes is whether she will have a life partner and who that partner is. Date all of them but settle with someone who will be an equal partner. “We need more men to sit at the table … the kitchen table.”

9. The Myth of Doing It All: She dispels the myth that we can be doing it all. She admitted that she still struggles with the trade-offs between work and home on a daily basis. “Guilt management can be just as important as time management for mothers.”

10. Let’s Start Talking About It: She advocates that we continue to speak up for feminism – “Someone who believes in social, political, and economic equality of of the sexes.” We can no longer pretend that biases do not exist.

11. Working Together Toward Equality: “It’s time to cheer on girls and women who want to sit at the table, seek challenges, and lean in to their careers. Women should support women instead of acting as “Queen Bee.” Her hope for the day when both of her boy and girl children will end up exactly where they want to be. And when hey find where their true passions lie, they both lean in – all the way.

Reading this book is like studying for an MBA that’s applied to your personal life – two for the price of one. The author covers a few of the business management theories and attempted to reapply to the personal life. I think he did a very good job and I learned quite a few things. Many of the high-flying executives or corporate ladder climbers seem to be good at their professional lives but did poorly when it came to their personal life. The author intends to bridge the gap, leveraging the management/business theories that the executives are already familiar with. The first section covers finding happiness in your career. The second section covers finding happiness in your personal life. The third section is about integrity. A good book makes you ponder and reflect. This is it; it’s well structured and worth a read. I highly recommend this book. A quick summary is as follows:

Summary:
Section I: Finding Happiness in Your Career
1. Just because you have feather: This chapter establishes the need for theories. Just because the birds have feather doesn’t mean it’s the reason why they can fly. We need to understand the theory behind it. The chapters that follow connect the theories to the life principles, instead of following the behaviors of the past. Strategy is what you want to achieve and how you’ll get there. In the business world, strategy is the result of: what the priorities are, how the opportunities are responded and how the resources are allocated.

2. What made us tick: “When we find ourselves stuck in unhappy lives, it is often the result of a fundamental misunderstanding of what really motivates us. Incentives are NOT the same as motivation. True motivation is getting people to do something because they want to do it. Two types of factors: hygiene factors (status, compensation, job security, condition) and motivation factors (challenging work, recognition, responsibility, and personal growth). People are not happy when they chase after the hygiene factors instead of motivation factors. You need to ask yourself a different set of questions: Is this work meaningful to me? Is this job going to give me a chance to develop? Am I going to learn new things? Will have an opportunity for recognition and achievement?

3. The Balance of Calculation and Serendipity: deliberate vs. emergent strategy. Honda’s dirt-bike. Get out there and try stuff until you learn where your talents, interests, and priorities begins to pay off – flips from an emergent to deliberate strategy. Before taking a job, ask yourself what assumptions have to be true for you to be happy.

4. Your strategy is not what you say it is: It’s created through hundreds of everyday decisions about how you spend our time, energy, and money – resource allocation in MBA terms. Short-term vs. long-term investment.

Section II: Finding Happiness in Your Relationships
5. The Ticking Clock: Capital that seeks growth before profits is bad capital, e.g. Motorola’s Iridium. Be impatient for growth and patient for profit. Once a profitable and viable way forward has been discovered – success now depends on scaling out this model, e.g. Honda’s pursuit of “Dirt Bike” (Super Cub) business rather than original targeted motorcycle market. As applied to personal life, parents engaged in face-to-face conversation (“language dancing”) with their young children will allow them to foster better verbal/vocabulary/reading skills later in their lives. Building a fulfilling relationship is ticking from the start and needs to be nurtured continuously from the start.

6. What Job Did You Hire That Milkshake For? Products often fail because focus is placed on what companies want to tell rather than what those customers really need,e.g. Ikea serves to get the furnishing done in a new place, milkshake’s job to keep away hunger and boredom for the commuters, 12-minute games to have short sharing time with children at the end of days. Empathy, a deep understanding of what problems customers are trying to solve. Changing your perspectives to deepen your relationships. Understand your role in a relationship from the perspective “what job does my spouse most need me to do?”

7. Sailing Your Kids on Theseus’s Ship: Company’s capability consists of 3 factors: resources, processes, and priorities. Dell made a mistake of outsourcing its design/manufacturing capabilities to Asus and ended up creating a new competitors. Two considerations: 1) take a dynamic view of suppliers’ capabilities – they will and strive to change. 2) Figure out what capabilities you will need to succeed in the future – they must stay in house. We can apply the same capability model (resources – financial and materials he/she’s been given, processes – the way he/she thinks, asks questions, solve problems, work with others, priorities) to help gauge what our children will need to be able do. The greatest gifts we can give to our children may be what we didn’t do for them. Children will learn when they’re ready to learn. They need to be deeply challenged and don’t outsource them to others to help them.

8. The School of Experience: The “right stuff” is about how they honed the experiences dealing with setbacks or extreme stress in high-stakes situations, e.g. Pandesic’s management’s failure, Nolan Archibald’s deliberate career path for better experience to be a CEO. As parents, we need to subject our children to the “school of experience” and allow them to cope and fail when the stakes are still small.

9. The Invisible Hand Inside Your Family: Build the family culture like a company culture. It becomes the informal but powerful set of guidelines about how your family behaves. It’s not about controlling bad behavior; it’s about celebrating the good.

Section III: Staying Out of Jail
10. Just This Once…
The trap of marginal thinking – Blockbuster’s losing the war to Netflix and Nucor’s decision against building mini mills because marginal costs almost always lower than the full costs. When applied to making a right and wrong decision – living a life of integrity, the marginal cost of “just this once” always seems negligible, but the full cost will typically be much higher, e.g. Enron, Nick Leeson, the 26-year-old trader who brought down Barings in 1995. Good advise: “The only way to avoid the consequences of uncomfortable moral concessions in your life is to never start making them in the first place.

Epilogue:
Have a purpose: 3 parts: 1) likeness, what is built when they reach each critical milestone in their journey. 2) deep commitment, 3) one or a few metrics, to calibrate their work, keeping them moving together in a coherent way. #3 is the essence of this book.

Picked up this audibook hopig to learning some thing new. I did learn a few interesting apps but not much else. Most of the “new” things are already happening and happening fast and seem obsolete. The author started a few internet companies that were the ones bring about the changes. At times, I feel the author is tooting his own horns or promoting his own companies (e.g. Infusionsoft.). Here is a quick summary of the book:

On how we live:
Family living: Ceiva.com ‘s auto upload of photos to picture frame on a monthly plan. Facial recognition Billboards like Minority Report. SceneTap, a new app that uses facial recognition to profile the current customers base in a public place like a bar. On cooking: “How to Cook Everything,” “The Professional Chef” and “Fromage.” I couldn’t seem to find the others mentioned in the book. DIY Health: people are sharing symptoms, and illness experience on the net. Police Videos on the net to prove innocence or guilt. Voting via Smartphone. Manage and organize our lives using LifeStream. Even at death, we could have “living” memorials and final farewells. I also learned about “qurify” your own URL (neat), creating Facebook fan page vs. personal page.

On how we learn:
No doubt that the internet is transforming how we learn things. In fact, I can practically learn everything I want to learn on Youtube and Itune University without paying a dime. It’s simply amazing. The author showed a table of old vs. new answers to how we learn. It’s quite a contrast and not exaggerating. To take advantage of those benefits, we need to have 10 characteristics of online learners: self directed, less top-down, inclined to capture new information, more dependent on feedback and response, inclined to collaboration, open to cross-discipline insights, oriented toward people being their own units of production (like a Youtube channel), learn how to search and find the data we need, class is in session 24/7, access to the the best and brightest. I learned about the new website “turnitin.com” that checks if the homework paper has been plagiarized. The author predicts that “as the number of e-learning participants goes up, the number of kids heading to college may go down.” What I don’t understand is why the college tuition keeps going up at a faster-than-normal inflation rate. Is it a bubble?

On the way we buy:
Empowered educated buyers, money exchange through mobile phones, apps that consult, reviews, price compared, trading vs. buying, and etc.
Something new to me are the interesting apps.

On the way we sell:
Renting more (apparel and accessories, cars, experts, and etc.) vs. selling. Use of on-line mobile, location-based coupons, APPvertising (ads in mobile apps), retargeting and relationship targeting, facial recognition to try out accessories, ad targeting, and selling through Twitter.

On the way we work:
More freelance worker for hire (guru.com) and collaboration at work and in the cloud, social network for business referrals, crowd sourcing, and crowd funding.

On the way we play:
Video games, of course, but for the fans in the sports world (integrated entertainment and sports), total musical experience as a club member of a musical group, Bromance (young adults going out together for fun), mobile gambling, creative lyrics through tweeting, creating music via skype, and etc.

On the way we communicate:
Communicating via Facebook, personal web pages, blogs, youtube, Twitter. The use of “augmented reality” (like the yellow scrimmage line in a football game) enhances the sports experience. There are several apps that do a good “augmented” reality job like Goldscape (range finder), DanKam (color blindness), SpyGlass, SpotCrime and etc.

Cybercrime:
The danger of usual cybercrime are lurking due to the open/connected world. The need to protect our children are ever important.

As the baby boomer generation ages, we found ourselves increasingly dealing with our aging parents’ passing. The author, Will Schwalbe, spent a good precious 2-year time with his mother, who battled her pancreatic cancer and endured one chemo therapy after another. During these time, they formed a strong bond through sharing their takeaways from the books they read in their de facto book club. There were cheerful books but mostly books about life and death experience. There were wonderful teachings throughout this book about books.

Will is fortunate to have a very capable and avid-reader mother. I wish I could share my reading experience with my parents and loved ones. From this book, we see a wonder human being Mary Ann Schwalbe was. After working in academic field, she plunged into the woman refuge commission to help the most disadvantaged people in a war-torn Third World like Afghanistan, Pakistan and others. Until her death, she never wavered from her mission.

In a way, this book is an autobiography of author mother subtly told between the book club sharing – very skillfully written. It doesn’t get too boring nor overly melancholy. There were so many books they read. Unfortunately, there was just one or two books that I’ve read, hence it’s hard to relate to their discussion. I wish I will someday read some of the books they read and shared, though most of the books they read are fictional which are not my cup of tea. Also Will’s mother has a strange habit of reading the ending then read from the beginning. That should have spoiled the fun of reading a fictional novel, no?

Will Schwalbe should be very proud and honored to have a mother like Mary Ann Schwalbe. Hope her legacy in the refugee endeavor lives on.

Who would have thought I would pick up a book like this. I’ve heard so much about this book and I was curious. so I picked up the audiobook from the local library and listened to it during my half-hour commute each way to/from work in the car. Let’s just say it would definitely distract you from all the car traffic in front of you but you’re looking for literature, this is not for you. Entertaining, definitely – if you enjoy the “adult” kind. This reminds me somewhat of the “little” book I used to read during my teenager years.

A “50-way-fucked-up”, obsessively-controlling, handsome young (27 years-old) billionaire, named Christine Grey, met a young, virgin, independent woman, named Anastasia Steele during an accidental interview (arranged by her roommate who happened to get sick that day). The interview went well. So well was the encounter that set off Christine Grey in pursuing this young woman and introduced her to all kinds of excitement and “first-times” that include a self-piloted helicopter ride, gliding plane ride, and more importantly, the orgasm, the “fucking” and darker yet – punishments like slapping, handcuffing, riding crops, whipping, and etc. Of course, the billionaire had to protect himself from legal liability by the use of non-legal-binding contract between a dominant and a submissive that got Anastasia thinking and thinking. The internal debate between her inner goddess (sex-craze, emotional self) and her subconscious (logical and self-protective) was deafening. Christine swept Anastasia off her feet with his material wealth and sensuality, and yet he’s not able to commit to anything beyond having a good and yet physically painful (to Anastasia) and high-charged sexual relationship. So hot and vivid were the sexual encounters that I believe the film version of the book will probably be NC-17 or effectively X-rated. But I digress. The key seductive attractions were Christine’s magnificent body (mentioned more than a few times), and Anastasia’s constant lip-biting, challenging, and etc.

As they fell for each other. All rules were being broken. And the need for control and inflicting pain by Christine was so strong due to his poor childhood and being adopted into a “perfect” Grey family at age of 4. Also, this Mrs. Robinson figure that introduced Christine to the dark world of M&A became a shadow in their relationship. Eventually after being belt-whipped by Christine in the “red room of pain,” she called it quit. It was too much for her to bear. That was the end of Book 1.

It has a simple plot, but what keeps the readers going were the hot sexes, Christine Grey’s mysterious background (how he became the way he was), and the innocence of Anastasia as she discovers along with the readers what drove Christine Grey. The writing is rather juvenile and the email exchanges between Anastasia and Christine are outrageously silly. Overall, it was a good listen/read. Brought back lots of memory from my younger days when hormone ran rampant. Just be careful listening to this audiobook while driving.