THE BOOK OF JOBS

--Before we begin, am considering a new tagline, but soliciting your advice as to which works better. Do you prefer:

"JDub, putting the 'can' in cantankerous?"

or

"JDub, putting the cant in cantankerous?"

I'm befuddled myself.

So it's late June. The Yankees have lost more games than they've won, we all know that the Trail Blazers are going to pick Oden (Oden, an acronym of "Done", as in deal) who, if Norse mythology were only a little more popular, we'd all be making comparisons to him and his homonymnic equivalent, Odin , the chief god of the Norse deities. According to Wikipedia, Odin...

is also a god of war, appearing throughout Norse myth as the bringer of victory. In the Norse sagas, Odin sometimes acts as the instigator of wars, and is said to have been able to start wars by simply throwing down his javelin Gungnir, and/or sending his valkyries, to influence the battle toward the end that he desires. Valkyries are Odin's beautiful battle maidens that went out to the fields of war to select and collect the worthy men who died in battle to come and sit at Odin's table in Valhalla, feasting and battling until they had to fight in the final battle, Ragnarök. Odin would also appear on the battle-field, sitting upon the leader of the Norse as two ravens on each shoulder, Hugin (Thought) and Munin (Memory), and two wolves (Geri and Freki) on each side.

Mmmm, valkyries. Because back in the days of yore (and myne) the term "BlazerDancers" had not yet been discovered. The Blazers will select Oden because they want to be the Spurs and they've noticed there's this dude named Tim Duncan in the middle. It's a little too early to say if Oden can approach Duncan's talent--Duncan did stay all four years at Wake Forest, I believe--but you can't fault Portland for being seduced by that model. Even though I think Durant may be someone they truly wish they had taken.

Anywhy, the point of all this preamble is to say that we don't need to discuss sports today. Nothing's really happening. Even the last NCAA championship has been claimed (it's an all-Oregon [State] entry today, apparently), meaning there's at least five or six months before the NCAA will even have the opportunity to boot me from a press box for live-bloging.

So what do we discuss? Two men, Jobs and Jacobs.

Steve Jobs I just read the cover story on him by John Heilemanin New York magazine, entitled iGod . As you know, the iPhone comes out this Friday, and I'm only telling you this so that we can discuss stock price. Here's an honest personal anecdote for you: About five years ago I came into some decent cash, thanks to a book I'd written and self-published. Anyway, the thought occurred to me to sink all the loot into Apple (AAPL) stock, since the iPod was just beginning to explode. The stock price of Apple at that time, and this was before the recent 2-for-1 stock split, was around $16.

Prudently (but as you'll see, idiotically), I did not put all my eggs into one AAPL cart. Instead, I bought a few hundred shares at $16 per. And when the stock more than doubled to $36, I happily sold. Fellow Cramericans, repeat after me: "Bulls make money, bears make money, hogs get slaughtered."

However, if only I'd have been more, well, piggish, I'd be a millionaire right now. The stock is now the equivalent of $246 per share from what I bought it at, which is a jump of fifteen times. So, in the inimitable words of my buddy Ruth, "Bob's your uncle."

But I sold. And that's life. And we all have similar stories, right? Anyway, the point is, AAPL stock is currently trading at $123 per share as, on CNBC this very moment, I watch a commercial for the iPhone. And the question is, If you were to throw all the available capital you have into AAPL stock today, four days before the launch date, whether you have $200 or $200,000, what would be your fate a year from now?

Would you consider it the smartest move you've ever made? Or would you be all aboard the S.S. Jobs-tanic, as the Apple wizard's monument to megalomania and excess, the iPhone, becomes known as the huge dud some fear it to be? And, by the way, can we add "Steve Jobs" to the All-Aptly Named Team? I mean, how many jobs has Jobs created in his lifetime, since he and Steve Wozniak began building computers in his garage? Altogether now: "Yea, Capitalism!"

Me, I went back and repurchased AAPL less than two months ago--at $98--and it's already up 25% since then....due mostly to the iPhone hype. I'm not going to throw everything I have into it. But if it comes down to betting on or against Steve Jobs, well, you know what they say about an apple a day. It's good for you.

Feel free to chime in with any of your own personal "I coulda been a portfolio contender, instead of a securiites bum, which is what I am" anecdotes, or your own opinions on whether you should be sitting underneath the AAPL tree this week.

And, finally, here's my favorite quote from Heilemann's piece. It's from Business 2.0 editor Josh Quittner, describing the day that the iPhone was unveiled for the media and their euphoric response to the product: "It was as if we were all participating in a shared consensual hallucination...All these supposedly hard-bitten tech reporters wandering around like they were getting laid for the first time."

Considering they were tech reporters, and that this was a convention of sorts, that probably wasn't far from the truth.

Radical Honesty

There's a terrific piece by A.J. Jacobs in this month's issue of Esquire entitled "I Think You're Fat" (great, provocative title, as well). Jacobs does, as he himself refers to it, a "superficial dipshit job" on a fringe movement called Radical Honesty . The concept, as championed by 66 year-old Brad Blanton, is to tell the truth all the time--not just when confronted with a question, but just whenever a thought occurs to you. As Jacobs writes, "we should toss out the filters between our brains and our mouths."

Jacobs makes himself a lab-rat of radical honesty, walking around and speaking his mind to his wife, his mother-in-law, friends, his nanny ("If my wife left me, I would ask you out on a date, because I think you're stunning"), and even his boss ('I'm annoyed that you didn't respond to our memo earlier," he writes in an email. "But at the same time, I'm relieved, because then if we don't nail one of the things you want, we can blame any delays on your lack of response."). It's hilarious, and it's liberating.

And what you find, as Jacobs did, is that when you are radically honest with people, they will respond in one of two ways. Either they'll come back at you with more candor than they're used to providing--these are people you should become friends with, because they're comfortable in their own skin-- or they'll turn you completely off. Those are people you should avoid. Truth worries them.

Wasn't this always the beauty of Kramer (and, Cramer, by the way) on Seinfeld ? He was so guilelessly honest that it was hard to be offended by anything he said. When he told George's girlfriend that her nose was too big, or when he told the Miss America contestant that she needed a lot more practice, what was the result? Each of them fell for him.

Most of us are Jerrys: we're polite enough and we seek to avoid any conflict. For a month or so Jacobs became a Kramer. And what he discovered is that he was actually communicating with people. Great read.

By the way, AAPL has risen $1.25 per share since I began typing this.