Described as "pragmatically reckless with a high tolerance for ambiguity," Dr. Cliff Kurtzman is the founder of The Domino Principle. He is also an award winning entrepreneur, speaker, trend forecaster, and M.I.T.-trained rocket-scientist. Over the past 25 years, Cliff has launched several highly successful ventures by seeing technology trends in the world before they became widely realized, figuring out how they would impact our lives and then creating businesses that leveraged those trends ahead of many others. His bio is at http://www.kurtzman.biz.
Dining with my daughter at Restaurant R’evolution in New Orleans
My daughter and I were enjoying an absolutely amazing dinner at Restaurant R’evolution in New Orleans a few days ago. R’evolution is on my personal list of top 10 restaurants in the world, and we were not disappointed (more details on the meal in the addendum below). My daughter is a neuroscience major in college, and she also waitresses while going through school to help meet expenses. She’s interested in getting a different job at a much higher-end restaurant than the one that she works at now, where the tips will be much better and the food will have the sophistication to cater to a clientele of bon vivants. So she picks the cutest waiter she can find and asks him how he got his job at R’evolution.Continue Reading >>
“As in life, when playing dominoes the points of light are what matter, not the surrounding blank. Look for the dots of goodness in the world and an impressive pattern of possibilities emerges. It is here the game is won.”–M. Daniel Nickle
Did you know that there are 55 different techniques of faulty reasoning and distortion that people use when they try to convince you of something that isn’t necessarily true or factual?
Do you know how to identify these faulty reasoning techniques so you don’t get swindled?Continue Reading >>
“I lost 12.5 million dollars last year but it really raised the trust in the brand.” — Jim “Mattress Mack” McIngvale, March 17, 2015, at The After Hours Network.
Can you make money during an economic recession or industry downturn?
Of course you can.
The 10 Domino Principles provide a framework for taking control of our lives and businesses, navigating the present, and shaping an exceptional future. Over time, I am introducing and applying the 10 Domino Principles through articles on this blog. Today we are going to delve into Domino Principle #2, the principle of Determined Proactivism.Continue Reading >>
A fallen Domino. “You’re the smartest guy I ever met, and you’re too stupid to see — he made up his mind 10 minutes ago.” Hank Schrader to Walter White, Breaking Bad, “Ozymandias.” Photo via AMC.
I’m a fairly smart fellow. And sometimes I’m really good at not lying to myself. But I’d be lying to myself if I didn’t admit… for every time I’ve been good at not deceiving myself about something that is important, I could probably point out another instance where I’ve failed to let myself see a truth sitting right in front of me. Not deceiving myself is something I’m working at getting better at doing, each and every day.Continue Reading >>
The 10 Domino Principles provide a framework for taking control of our lives and businesses, navigating the present, and shaping an exceptional future. Over time, I am introducing and applying the 10 Domino Principles through articles on this blog. Today we are going to delve into Domino Principle #1, the principle of Deceptive Perceptions.
As my old friend Mr. Spock said: “In critical moments men sometimes see exactly what they wish to see” and “Humans do have an amazing capacity for believing what they choose — and excluding that which is painful.”Continue Reading >>
For the second time in a year, I’ve lost a man who was part of me in the truest possible sense. My father passed away last September. I eulogized him here.
Today, Leonard Nimoy, another man who became part of my very essence, is gone.
“You (humans) find it easier to understand the death of one than the death of a million.” — Spock, “The Immunity Syndrome,” Stardate 4307.1
I’ve struggled today with what to say about Nimoy‘s passing, or if this is even the place to say it. So much has already been said and will be said by so many who knew him better and have voices far more eloquent than mine. Yet I can’t let his passing go without comment, and surely the best way I can remember him is to speak of the many ways he and his character touched me at the very deepest level. With regards to sharing this message in this blog, I never thought when I launched this site a few weeks ago that I’d be writing about a topic like this. But this blog is now my voice and my platform, and much of what I learned from Nimoy‘s Spock applies quite directly to The Domino Principle. We will leave the business lessons for a more appropriate time, and today I’ll just talk about what Nimoy meant to me personally.Continue Reading >>
Cliff Kurtzman, overlooking Zion National Park, July 2014.
“Climb every mountain,
Ford every stream,
Follow every rainbow,
Till you find your dream.” –The Sound Of Music – Climb Every Mountain
“You can CHANGE LIVES in two minutes,” my friend Sam Horn wrote this morning (her full note is embedded later in this post, below). She’s right! It just takes a fraction of a second to knock over the first domino in a chain reaction that can change your life or the lives of others. Yet it can take days, weeks, or even a lifetime to set up the dominoes necessary to allow that chain reaction to occur.Continue Reading >>
Connections was an amazing 1978 documentary television series and book created, written and presented by science historian James Burke. Today we continue our look at the series with Episode #2 – “Death in the Morning.”
From the introduction:
“I would say it was a pretty safe bet, that the one magic wish most people would like to be granted would be to be able to see into the future. Think what it would mean. And backing the right horse! But we can’t. We have to guess about tomorrow and we have to act on that guess, and it’s never been any different. And that’s why following the trail from the past up to the emergence of the modern technology that surrounds us in our daily lives, and affects our lives, is rather like a detective story. Because, at no time in the past, did anybody have anything to do with the business of inventing or changing things, ever know what the full effect of his actions would be. He just went ahead and did what he did for his own reasons, like we do. That’s how change comes about. And it’s like a detective story because if you follow the trail from the past up to a modern man-made object, the story is full of sudden twists and false clues and guesswork, and you never know where the story is heading until the very last minute.”Continue Reading >>
Over time, I’ll be introducing readers of this blog to a series of 10 specific Domino Principles. These Principles provide a framework for taking control of our lives and businesses, navigating the present, and shaping an exceptional future. In this article, I’m using the news of the past week coming out of Marathon Oil to introduce “Domino Principle #4: Distress Potential.” (The Domino Principle framework is still evolving and somewhat fluid. Things may change.)Continue Reading >>
“It may be taken for granted that, rash as the Americans are, when they are prudent there is good reason for it.”
— Jules Verne, Around the World in Eighty Days
Who wins and who loses from the drop in the price of oil? That is a complex question, one which we will continue to explore on The Domino Principle for some time to come. Today we take a look at it from a broad geographic perspective, examining which areas around the world win or lose overall, heavily referencing 13 articles I’ve found which address the topic in great depth. In each case I provide the link to the source material for a fuller explanation.Continue Reading >>
Strategies for taking command of our lives through seeing "deep repercussions" in world events and realizing how chain reactions can produce future outcomes.
