Author Archives: Rusty Rueff

About Rusty Rueff

Rusty Rueff, author of purposed worKING. Rusty Rueff is the former Chairman Emeritus of The GRAMMY Foundation in Los Angeles. He most recently completed the successful 16 month leadership role as Coordinating National Co-Chair for Technology for Obama (T4O) for the reelection of President Obama and ten-years of Board service and President of the Board of Trustees of the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. Corporately, most recently Rueff was the Chief Executive Officer at SNOCAP, Inc. until the acquisition of the company by imeem, Inc. in April 2008. Before joining SNOCAP in 2005, he was Executive Vice President of Human Resources at Electronic Arts (EA) from 1998 until 2005. He was also with the PepsiCo companies for more than ten years, with the Pratt & Whitney division of United Technologies for two years, and in commercial radio as an on-air personality for six years. Rusty holds an M.S. in counseling and a B.A. in radio and television from Purdue University. In 2003 he was named a distinguished Purdue alumnus, and he and his wife, Patti, are the named benefactors of Purdue’s Patti and Rusty Rueff School of Visual and Performing Arts. He is a corporate director of Glassdoor.com and runcoach. He is the co-founder and Executive Committee Member of T4A.org, serves on the Founding Circle of The Centrist Project and a founding Board Member of The GRAMMY Music Education Coalition. He is also the co-author of the book Talent Force: A New Manifesto for the Human Side of Business. Rusty and his wife, Patti, reside in Hillsborough, CA and Charlestown, R.I.

day 2359: The Forgetting Curve

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“My child, never forget the things I have taught you. Store my commands in your heart.”

It’s been within many of our lifetimes that there wasn’t much of an opportunity to externalize our memory.  What do I mean by this term, externalize memory?  There was a time, where there were only three ways to assure a memory of something that occurred and that was to remember it ourselves and hold onto that memory, write it down with drawn pictures or words and store that memory on whatever material was available at the time, or to tell it to someone else and when we couldn’t remember, ask them to remember it with or for us.  And then all of that changed when we could take a photograph and use that medium to reach back and remember. And then we stayed along this path of written word and pictures for a long time.  Books were written and published that we could learn from and then reference for those things that we couldn’t remember.  We passed written and pictorial history from generation to generation to try to keep memories alive, but it remained important that we strive to remember ourselves what we could.  And then, this thing called the computer showed up on the scene and changed everything.  For the first time, we were able to externalize our memory and let others remember for us in a way like never before.  Not only were we able to personally externalize our memory on hard-drives, etc. but we could begin to just call on a search engine to remember what we decided to not recall.  And, it gets easier and easier now with Siri, Alexa and Okay, Google. What does this mean for us?  It means that in order to keep our memories sharp, we must fight the forgetting curve with regular inputs to those things we want to store internally in our mind, not externally.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Why do we even question why God directs us to seek out our daily bread instead of imagining that we could hear or read of Him once and that would be enough?  Let me ask you this – and don’t ponder on it, just answer to yourself quickly, “What was the message you heard in church last Sunday?  What was it about?  What were the key verses used?”  Were you able to answer?  If so, then you are beating the Forgetting Curve.  If you weren’t don’t feel bad, you are like the rest of us and we need to continually be infusing our minds, hearts and spirits with God’s Word.  Reminder: there is nothing external about the relationship that God seeks with us.

PS: Don’t forget Monday is President’s Day – PwK will be back on Tuesday.

Reference:  Proverbs 3:1 (New Living Translation)