I know it’s graduation season, so it feel like a good time as we look over the lengthening light the Winter Solstice brings to offer the light of Paul Hawken’s words, here. One of the best I’ve read in past few seasons of speeches was the one Paul Hawken presented here below, as this…
I hope you find new people & new ideas & new ways to see the way it all works….good place to start (if you don’t know him already) is Randall’s xkcd webcomic….he gets it, and has fun getting there. Here’s the link to the one above, and his site….be careful, you’ll get lost in the…
There was a man who had four sons. He wanted his sons to learn to not judge things too quickly. So he sent them each on a quest, in turn, to go and look at a pear tree that was a great distance away. The first son went in the winter, the second in…
Most of us will do anything to avoid being wrong. But what if we’re wrong about that? “Wrongologist” Kathryn Schulz makes a compelling case for not just admitting but embracing our fallibility. I always like her work with Grist – when you check this out, you’ll see why.
Fans of The World According to Brother Ian know that we here at the editorial offices are huge fans of Derek Sivers, and the clear way he both puts things, and makes us think. See if this little essay of his strikes a chord – I know it does for me. Fixed Mindset vs Growth Mindset,…
In the old days, one of the cool jobs I was lucky enough to fall into was teaching drama at a junior high. We had a great time. One of the things we did was improvise scenes. It was easy – we’d put two or three kids on the floor, give them a first line (something…
Ikigai (生き甲斐, pronounced [ikiɡai]) is a Japanese concept meaning “a reason for being”. Everyone, according to the Japanese, has an ikigai. Finding it requires a deep and often lengthy search of self.
Does your company really want to hang out with me? by Derek Sivers Imagine you have a crush on a girl at the bank. Every time you talk, it’s only business. But one day she says, “Here’s my cellphone number. Call anytime.” Wow! She likes you! You call her and ask her out. She says…
Bushmen in the Kalahari Desert talk about the two “hungers.” There is the Great Hunger and there is the Little Hunger. The Little Hunger wants food for the belly; but the Great Hunger, the greatest hunger of all, is the hunger for meaning… There is ultimately only one thing that makes human beings deeply and…
I’ve heard this story in several places, most notably as told by Dan Millman, Derek Sivers, and others. I feel it’s a nice cautionary tale about celebrating too early, before we know how the whole story is going to turn out, or getting down because we think we’re losing in the game. Either way, wait…
I think this is a little nutshell sharing of how you think you’re doing one thing – in this case, doing a portrait photo shoot – and getting different results, because different people, different stories, and different perspectives are involved.
I remember reading years ago that William Blake wrote, “Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, are necessary to human existence.” At first I had a gut feeling that he was wrong – people disagreeing with each other, fighting with each other – that’s the problem in the…
When I dropped by the doctor the other day, I got the chance to look over the magazines in the waiting area, partly because it took an hour for her to get to me, and partly because I thought my appointment was at one (it was at two). This gave me an opportunity to review…
A friend of mine who is practicing to be a teacher asked me (since I’ve worked as a teacher for kind of a long time), “What makes someone a good teacher?” I believe this: It’s luck. It’s timing. And it’s a belief in sharing and healing. Here’s why. It’s luck. You have to have a…
When tv writer & actor Charlie Day was asked to address this year’s grads at his alma mater, Merrimack College, they probably didn’t expect him to say, “I don’t think you should just do what makes you happy. Do what makes you great. Do what’s uncomfortable and scary and hard but pays off in the…
Long ago, in my first year of teaching high school in New Orleans, I can still remember writhing with angst (that’s the way I talked then, too) when the kids would ask me something I didn’t know. They would ask, “Well, what year WAS it that Shakespeare wrote Hamlet?” or “Did they make YOU study…