We each have a natural set point, a place we feel most comfortable.
We might be seers who can imagine, out of whole cloth, a future.
We might be doers who need to be neck-deep in the work to come to conclusions that mean anything to us.
We might be analyzers who see the whole field of play and can visualize which pieces need to be moved in what ways to tilt the field.
Read MoreI started running when I was a freshman in college. And once I started, I couldn’t stop.
When I moved to Chicago for school, I started running along Lake Michigan as a substitute for the competitive tennis I once played, but soon began to appreciate the solitude. Being an introvert on a social campus exhausted me and running became my surefire way to get some alone time with my music every morning. I quickly became addicted.
Read MoreA couple years ago I heard the following working definition of patience:
“Patience is the willingness to remain in discomfort”.
When I heard this definition I immediately ceased asking others to be patient. As Priscilla suggested in repeating my logic back to me, asking others to be “patient” might be equivalent to saying “suffer in silence”. ;)
Read MoreHave you hear this old Joke? When you and your friends are out in the wilderness and you’re confronted by a bear, you don’t have to run faster than the bear. You just have to run faster than your friends.
While that advice might work in the forest, in business it tends to be trouble.
I wrote blog #27 about the kindergarten class I am interning with. As I mentioned, the kids don't have the widest selection of books, or the most pristine furniture, and they don't have perfect families or backgrounds and I worry about their life after school that I probably don't know enough about BUT… I do know one thing for sure. And that’s that they DO have an incredible teacher to learn with every day.
Read More“Is this what it was like to live in Colonial times?” my 11-year old daughter asks, golden firelight flickering off her face in our living room on Wednesday night.
The power was out in our house and in our neighborhood, thanks to the late winter storm weighing down trees under layers of ice and wet, heavy snow.
Read MoreWhenever we do forward folds in yoga the teacher reminds me to "lead with your heart and then let your head follow." It's an incredibly important reminder, because of what a difference it makes.
It's funny. I've been practicing yoga for years, yet no matter how many times I reach down to touch my toes, I almost always force my forehead towards my knees, using my hands to brace the back of my legs so that I can pull just a little bit closer. I'm determined to stretch as deeply as possible. My back curves, my chest contracts, my forehead wrinkles, and my shoulders shrug up into my ears. I feel tighter than ever.
Read MoreFor the last decade, I’ve been investing in what my wife affectionately calls “Project Ski,” teaching our three kids (now in 8th, 5th, and 1st grades) to get up and down a snow-covered mountain.
Skiing is an enormous investment of time, energy, logistics, effort. Teaching three kids to ski/ snowboard…that’s a whole other level. The gear alone (skis, boots, poles, hats, gloves, glove liners, long underwear tops and bottoms, goggles, helmets, balaclavas, ski pants, fleece, ski jacket, lift tickets…times five in our case!) is enough to test anybody’s patience and strain their bank account. And with the crazy weather that is our new normal, most of our ski trips in the Northeast U.S. have ended up either being dangerously cold (well below 0 degrees F) or rainy.
Read MoreI might easily have been interpreted as callous or mean-hearted when about 15 years ago I said:
“I Don’t Want To Save The World”
The orientation of the conversation I was in was that solutions HAD TO “scale” to matter
I didn’t have great words for it other than “I don’t want to save the world” but maybe what I meant was that I think each and everything along the way matters… each smile we share with a stranger or our kindness with a cashier who has had a long shift… everything… and that when we get that sorta something sorta Silicon-Valley-ish “scale” thinking and maybe even a smidge of self-importance in us it might discourage the possibility for the beauty and grace and patience and gratitude and joy of continual tender mercies and “small" successes among seven billion people.
Read MoreThe favorite “job” I’ve ever done is that of a beekeeper. Every time I go to the hive, the bees teach me something new. Jorgen’s piece on empathy reminded me of the most powerful lesson the bees continually teach me — becoming completely present and empathic.
Read MoreAs a fiction writing minor in college, I learned to withstand criticism against something I had produced. But while a Quentin-Tarantino-esque bloodbath is typical in just about any undergraduate writing workshop, one my senior year was different due to one big mistake: I based the main character too much on myself.
The biggest issue, my classmates said, was that the main character was too passive. In fact, they said, she did not actively make a single decision in the entire story. She had zero agency. Everything happened to her. It didn’t feel like they were critiquing the story, it felt like they were critiquing me.
The other week I was asked to talk about collaboration at a company with a group of architects. They were trying to cross the boundaries of their silo’ed departments more often in an attempt to become more innovative. They’d tried many things but none of them really stuck.
Read MoreThere’s no way I can fully know and see everything you know and see (and vice versa). So how do I react when I discover you did something that seems wrong?
I start by reminding myself that what I know right now about the facts you had and the decision you made is full of blank spaces. In the absence of knowing what you know, I can choose to have a bias in favor of believing that you likely did the right thing. (did you really?)
Read MoreI was having this wonderful conversation with a colleague about their company's thought-leadership program. They have this whole program where they create white papers for their customers and teach them about leading trends in the industry. And their white papers are amazingly good. I was asking my friend about how in one paper, in particular, and how they had included details that would elude most of their beginner audience (including me). But after I’d read it a second and third time I had finally noticed.
Read MoreThis community provides so much inspiration and insight about how to live.
Recently my sister taught me how to die.
She had been sick for several years.
We knew it was coming.
She knew it was coming.
Her husband and children called me that morning and I drove the two miles to her house.
They sent me up to her room, where she lay half awake, listening to the Beatles.
Read MoreSome days you get a lot of praise for work well done.
It can feel like this praise isn’t deserved, or that it is for things that came easily to you, or that it is not worth all the fuss. Often this means that you won’t allow yourself to fully hear the gratitude and appreciation that someone expresses.
Other days you toil and sweat and put your heart and soul into a thing and nothing comes back. Or, worse, it’s exactly your best work that engenders criticism or nit-picking or downright resistance.
Read MoreBefore I lived in El Salvador, I really didn’t find much joy in doing the dishes. I mean, if they required minimal rinsing and then they all fit in the dishwasher seamlessly in one fell swoop, then some joy, yes.
But it wasn’t until I lived in a rural town with a great deficit of economic opportunities, potable water and healthy food sources that I really began to find the joy in doing dishes. I read something that said something like, “Be grateful that there are many plates to be washed, for that means you had a meal to be shared.”
Read MoreYesterday was the third day I spent pre-interning in an elementary school about thirty minutes from the University of Florida. I think I’m about as emotionally invested in these kindergartners as someone who’d worked with them for years. In fact, I’m almost 100% sure they are some of the sweetest little souls I’ve ever met.
Read MoreI have the following whacky counter-cultural thoughts and then a vulnerable story about my vulnerability.
++ Trust is scalable because of its transitory property. If persons A and B trust person C, then A + B can trust each other immediately.
++ Trust can be generated in an instant. It doesn’t have to take time to build.
++ Transparency is NOT trust. Transparency is a method for accommodating the lack of trust.
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