“You have power over your mind — not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.” — Meditations by Marcus Aurelius I have been thinking about personal responsibility, and the idea of starting change with oneself. This is continuing the thinking of my recent post about updating our mental software. Some background: I started […]
Category: people
Updating mental software and our reality
The new Wait but Why post, purporting to understand Elon Musk’s “secret sauce” in being so innovative is a very long, but great, read. And what Tim Urban suggests is that Musk is proactive in updating his mental software to reflect reality, and the real question he gets into is: why aren’t the rest of […]
How the Prisoner’s Dilemma applies to my behavior
I have often called myself an amplifier. If I’m on a good team, I make the team better by bridging communication gaps, figuring out what everybody does well and steering that work to them, etc. If I’m in a bad situation, though, I can use those same skills to make things worse by undermining the […]
Corporate culture as illustrated by monkeys
I was talking to a friend tonight about organizational culture. She was wondering about how one can institutionalize or productize culture. And I laughed out loud. And she asked me why I thought it was so funny. So I thought for a second, and told the story of the five monkeys. The story is that […]
Does Amanda Palmer’s model of asking scale?
A friend asked in response to my last post whether I thought Amanda Palmer’s model of asking could scale. Could everybody find success that way? Do you have to be a rock star public figure to make it work? Does the “doing your work for free and then asking people to give you money” model […]
The Art of Asking, by Amanda Palmer
Amazon link Given my last post was about charity, I thought it was appropriate to follow up with my long overdue review of Amanda Palmer’s book The Art of Asking. The book is an amplification of Palmer’s TED talk with the same title, discussing the connection between an artist and her fans. But it’s also […]
One step at a time
I was helping an entrepreneur friend with his investor pitch last week, and something was bugging me – the pitch didn’t feel right, even though I think the idea is good. He is passionate about how to run a company, so he was describing his philosophy of management in the pitch. And I realized that […]
The challenge of humanity
[This is a response to an email prompt from a design-y list I’m on, where the original poster posited that “Computing is all around us” and “we are a part of the computer”, but after writing the response, I thought it was general purpose enough to post here] I think it is a mistake to […]
Challenging oneself
In my last post, I talked about instigating unhappiness as a way to spur change at organizations. I’ve also been thinking about it in a personal context of challenging myself, and when I should be satisfied and happy with where I am vs. stretching myself for the next goal. One of the reasons for the […]
There are no shortcuts
I was having an email thread recently with a friend where she pointed me at this article on the middle class getting ripped off. I don’t agree with most of the article, but this quote stuck out to me: For my entire life (and I don’t think this will ever change) I’ve watched friends and […]
