Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

Dateline: Portsmouth RI, 7 October 2004

I get a lot of emails praising the blog for its informal, personal tone. Most people tend to like the small details from my life, the struggle to balance work and home, stories about my kids.

Others, perhaps admiring me too much, chide me about such things, saying the vision is far too important and far too needed in today's world for its clarity to be diminished with all this intimacy.

The emails roughly match the reviews of the book, with the most ardent supporters of the content often being the ones decrying the personal narrative as a waste of time.

Let me save people a lot of effort on these emails. The blog, much like the book, is not about keeping it interesting for the reader so much as keeping it interesting for me. That's the baseline I have to protect if I'm going to maintain this volume and this focus. As soon as it starts to seem like I'm serving the blog/books rather than the other way around, I will gladly walk away.

They've done many surveys with elders and guess what? None of them ever say: "I wish I had earned more money/gotten more awards/had a loftier title/been more famous!" What they all say is: "I wish I had treated my loved ones and the people around me better. I wish I had known them all better and they had all known me better. I wish I had spent more time being passionate/honest/intimate and spent less time obsessing over status/honor/what others thought of me."

I have written in the past in the way a lot of my strongest fans would like to see me write in the future, and you know what? It bored the crap out of me, and it bored the crap out of most who read it. I write about connectivity as my core concept, and the fundamental connectivity we all seek is to be understood by others for who we are and what we seek to be. But like the prayer says, the quickest route to that it to muster the will to seek to understand as much as be understood, to love as much as to be loved, and to console as much as to be consoled. You can do those things on a visionary scale without revealing yourself, because otherwise people will not trust what you have to say. Your logic will seem sterile and unforgiving. Not to mention the whole factor of "Who the hell are you to be saying all these things?"

Yes, you risk being ridiculed along all sorts of avenues, but that is a small price to be paid for connecting with those who otherwise would never be able to connect to what you're putting out there simply because "I don't read books like that/I don't read blogs like that/I never watch CSPAN typically/I never think about issues like that."

But the real bottom line is: How can you trust a vision from someone regarding how the world must be kept in balance if the fellow in question seems to have no balance in his own life?

So I keep the mix balanced. It may bore some, but it keeps me writing, because it makes the blog and the books something necessary to my life, as opposed to some drudgery I do for money (or the lack thereof). Writing for others, like a book publisher or magazine, is always a compromise of sorts. I make those compromises when I have to, and I try to choose the collaborations on the basis of which people seem to have the same sort of values that I'm trying to impart via my content. That keeps it fun as well as interesting, and those attributes make all the difference in the world when it comes to the quality of my work.

I remember the imbalanced Tom. Whenever I forget who he was I go back and read the early portions of the Emily Updates that serve as my original blog about my life balance amidst my firstborn's struggle with cancer. That guy was one angry, desperate fellow, and his professional output was full of bile, and pessimism, and contempt.

Could I make a quicker and bigger killing with that sort of writing? You bet.

But it wouldn't answer the mail on my death bed, and having watched my Dad just pass, I realize how important that is. That man could have accomplished so much more than he did, but he couldn't have loved more than he did. Didn't mean he was perfect, but only that he tried throughout.

Trust me, you want a visionary who projects right up to his deathbed. In fact, they're the only ones worth following.

Enough self-revelation, now is the time on Sprockets when we dance!

First up is my noting an incredible honor from an unlikely source (at least some of you will think so, but it makes perfect sense to me): I've been offered "The Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz Memorial Lectureship in National Security Affairs" from the University of California at Berkeley. That's right! This alleged "neocon" (I still hope someday to meet a real one) has been offered a one-week opportunity to spread his vision within that vanguard of lefties (hmm, maybe those Prison Planets boys have got me pegged after all!).

After that little orgy of self-love (MUST . . . MAINTAIN . . . BALANCE!), it's on to today's catch (admittedly small because—damn that balance again!—we're gearing up for a family trip to the Midwest this weekend for a wedding and baptism):

■Tourism is the ultimate compliment in global connectivity

■The best time to reform the Middle East is before the "oil collapse" begins