psychart

For a good part of 5 years in college I spent countless hours attempting to understand the psychology of separation, of stereotypes and discrimination in societies and individuals. There are volumes of these studies out there.

And yet one visit to the local art gallery and these latent biases are similarly confronted. Trading complex social experiments for abstract creativity and images. My own assumptions of order and structure and color and form challenged with the utmost subtlety.


Images to the right of a local exhibit from the wonderful Real Art Ways...

Heather Hart
Notations of a Hybrid, 2008
Notations of a Hybrid explores context, power, literature, and intention in regards to identity development. Hart invited people to give her titles of two books that they have found most helpful in defining their identity. The selection could be based upon the book's title, content, contrast or collaboration.

Hart then obtained these books and encased them in yarn, thereby creating a portrait of each participant. Each object consists of two books that are cozied together, rendering them inaccessible. While the yarn protects these books, it also conceals and restricts their content. This collection of books becomes unusable in their utilitarian sense and become decorative evidence of an obsessive reclamation process - the yarn taking control.

rudder vs sail

It is a strange feeling. That loss of memory you incur when the jagged edge of stress and blind ambition have cut their way clear into your soul. When the pursuit has eclipsed the pursued. When the intoxication of inspired thought has devolved into the relentless repetition of recycled actions.

When you are paddling upstream.

There is wonder in the heating of the mind, of the solemn intensity of inspired thought. for the heightened sense of awareness that comes from a mind on fire, in purpose. And there is within this space that golden opportunity in transforming thought into action, into tangible substance that leaves the world a little better.

But along this road there are many diverged. So easy to lose one's way. So essential to have that rudder. To steer yourself back home.

Never forsake the rudder for the sail.

Well, hello there blog. Nice to see you again. How have you been? Oh fine, here too. Yes, I look forward to future rendezvouses with you too. 12:36am or otherwise. Welcome back old friend. Let the conversations begin anew...

Chasing Leprechauns

I caught a leprechaun today.

Coming out of work late to see a blinding wall of water amidst an ocean of breaking sunshine. Looked out a bit further and there the most fabulous rainbow just hanging around in the sky.

After chasing it around campus a bit I found myself out by Horsebarn Hill. Apparently even the horses love those little green men because they were just galloping around the fields under fading rainbow beams chasing them for now reason at all.

I mean its a Friday for crying out loud. You'd think these horses would have something better to do than chase these grumpy Irish faerie men around all afternoon. Strange things.

Other cars stopped by to watch this amazing scene too. Several in fact. A small crowd of strangers putting aside horse brushings and drives home to catch a glimpse of something magical. People with mouths open like a fireworks display on the 4th. Popping out of cars snapping photos and then back in and off again.

Leprechauns aside. It's an odd place this point and shoot world we live in. Staying just long enough to capture a moment. Perhaps not quite enough to savor.

I stayed a little longer. Sometimes these leprechauns have a bit more to share about the world than a 3 second point and shoot can capture.

melody

Melody is my medicine.

I was reminded of this on the way to work today: how there is simply no bad day bad enough, no rude driver cursing enough, no unfortunate circumstance tragic enough to overcome the effect of beautiful melody on my heart. The fact that I can't sing a note to save myself is beside the point. Just the sound of others constructing this wonderful language is enough.

Perhaps the sight, sound, or experience differs, but I believe every one of us has this direct channel, the one thing that lifts our souls beyond our selves. Our unique path to ephemeral euphoria through momentary immersion. Our own escape hatch. 

If you're stressed out, try it.

If you're still searching, find it.

What's yours?

1:10

What does it take to move you to care?

Would you come to the aid of dying man in the street?
If you said yes, you'd be wrong 9 out of 10 times.

A little more than a week ago ago in my hometown of Hartford, CT, and 10 minutes from my house, a 78 year old man was hit by two cars, thrown over the hood, and left unassisted by a small crowd of bystanders as the man lay motionless on the ground. You might have missed the story entirely if not for an actual video of the incident and top story from the New York Times circulating the net. The reaction is one of are now referring to the "scary anonymity of the modern street." The police chief himself issuing the blistering statement:

“At the end of the day we’ve got to look at ourselves and understand that our moral values have now changed. We have no regard for each other."

But it's more than it, really.

Hartford's far from being a cradle of good Samaritanism, but it's no poster child for apathy either. In times of strong emotional reaction to horrifying events, the mind has a tendency to rationalize otherwise unacceptable events by distancing itself from reality. It's a protective, knee-jerk reaction, but it doesn't make it an appropriate long-term response.

You see when I was an undergrad I had the honor of working with man by the name of Ervin Staub. Dr Staub was a Holocaust survivor and now speaks internationally on the topic of mass violence, genocide, and international relations. What is more timely to this post is that Staub began the path to uncovering the roots of international phenomenon by studying the basic willingness of people to help one another on the side of the street. In the aftershock of the now famous Kitty Genovese case of the mid 1960's he conducted study after study trying to isolate the specific factors that motivate us to help each other. As written about by the NY Times,

In one of those now most often cited, students at Princeton Theological Seminary were asked to go to a nearby chapel and give an extemporaneous sermon on the Biblical parable of the Good Samaritan. As they walked to the chapel, they passed a man slumped in a doorway, moaning for help. About two-thirds of those who thought they had plenty of time stopped to help, but only 10 percent of the students who thought they were late did so.

9 out of 10 people are too busy to assist... even when on the way to the chapel to deliver a lesson to others on assisting others. This is not reality TV. It's real social phenomenon referred to as the Bystander Effect. It's what Staub has spent his entire life and dozens of similar studies dedicated to connecting to genocides like the Holocaust and others across the globe. It's what you and I claim would never happen in our hometown. It's what we all assume we would never let go by unnoticed. It's what happens every day, in every nation, within every generation.

It begins with everyday people observing everyday events. And ends with nations massacring millions of people in the name of ethnic cleansing or political agenda.

And if you think 1 in 10 are bad odds, think again. The number of people and cars that passed by Angel Arce Torres before a police cruiser stopped to assist him on May 30, 2008?

20.

$

As we charge head first into the epidemic otherwise known as America the Indebted, the following 7 sites provide a wonderful, free roadmap to navigating the carnage. 

(For those of you that look over NCN's resources you'll notice I cheated a bit with the list.)

:-)

No Credit Needed

All Financial Matters

Consumerism Commentary

Free Money Finance

Get Rich Slowly

Mighty Bargain Hunter

Wise Bread

PS: MacHeads... automate your financial IQ by combining all these website's RSS feeds into a single view. Great timesaver!

Not all free iTunes songs suck

White Daisy Passing
by Rocky Votolato

Great tune.

Corps

First class back in MBA program last night. 40 minutes in we're watching a Clinton era video on the effect of outsourcing and decline of unskilled assembly line workers in Oklahoma. Workers complaining. CEO's preaching about the need for eight figure incomes. The massive corporate void between have and have nots.

The lesson is The Stakeholder Theory, but I can't help feeling like I'm outside the Twin Pines Mall and Doc Brown just chucked this video out of his ice-covered Delorean. It's been only 10 years since this video was produced and it already sounds like someone speaking from another century. Have things really changed this much in the last decade?

Unskilled labor, job security, and company paid everything. Relics. As I listen to the words of these CEO's I cannot help but here the words of Cluetrain bouncing across the screen...

In just a few more years, the current homogenized "voice" of business—the sound of mission statements and brochures—will seem as contrived and artificial as the language of the 18th century French court.

We need to get smarter.
The corporation is dying.

Technology has raised us as a generation with little ability to distinguish a colleague in China to a buddy down the hall. Why should it be any different in the boardroom? If my 3G cell phone is a faster route to global suppliers in Taiwan and world-class marketing in NYC, why am commuting 75 minutes through traffic each day to your fluorescent cubicle farm?

Funny how things change... my freshman year in college I remember a radical communist student speaker waxing at poetic at one of the local schools on how we would all one day become free agents in a global marketplace of products and services.

The only question in my mind is, "Why'd it take this long?"

Launch

Someone once told me that an airplane is off track 90% of the time it's in flight... yet it still lands exactly where it's supposed to. 

It's easy to look at other people's lives and assume great performance comes easy. It is a lot harder to see the real struggles we all encounter, to notice how we're all off track much of the time, and understand that it's the self-awareness and minor corrections along the way that help us find our way home.

Launch bold. 

Correct along the way.

You will get there.

Inno

Why is that innovation remains such a rare commodity? How do you reach a point, in any business, where status quo becomes defacto modus operandi?

Great talk by Kevin B. through our local young professionals group tonight. Lots to take away, but one thing in particular: how different the mindset of the successful entrepreneur is from the average cubicle monkey. Innovation has its own language. Its own perspective. You know it when you see it.

To overcome the kind of global challenges we now face, we need more of this. We need to see more eyes ignited with the fire of a fresh idea. We need to speak the language of ubiquitous entrepreneurship, of adding value to the every day. We need to produce more minds unencumbered by fear of making mistakes, of collaborating, of the unknown.

In such a perspective lie the seeds of true progress.

Ride

I just finished my first 50+ mile bike ride this weekend. I've done charity rides before, but the energy of volunteers here was incredible. Riding alongside a 20 year veteran of a ride like this is nothing short of humbling. Passion and dedication are terribly contagious qualities.

A favorite quote of mine by Polly Berends says,

Everything that happens to you is your teacher. The secret is to learn to sit at the feet of your own life and be taught by it.

You could say the same thing for every person you meet as well. People come in and out of our lives for reasons we may not yet understand. And there lies a magnificent mystery. So long as we understand meaning exists, what great adventures lie for us in unravelling it over time? When everyone's a teacher, the world is your classroom.

I have no idea what brought some 100+ riders and volunteers to a small elementary school in Portsmouth, NH, but it doesn't change how grateful I was to have been a part of such a great experience. Following in the footsteps (or tire tracks) of giants makes going an extra mile a given.

Be the Change

Three people were shot on my street last night.
Three more the night before on the other side of town.

Police are blaming it on gang violence.
Calling for a crack down on violence.
More police.
More guns.
More lockdown.

The response? We, the citizenry, pay greater taxes for someone else to run our neighborhoods for us. To maintain order. Educate our children. Keep the peace. Quarantine the bad. I strains me to think how far removed from our reality we have allowed ourselves to become.

Ghandi once said that,

The only devils in the world are those running in our own hearts. That is where the battle should be fought.

20 years ago a woman named Kitty Genovese gave us an example of how important each of can be in determining the outcome of our environment. How we cannot merely stand by and let less noble forces determine the fate of a city or a society. We are active agents in the system. Part and parcel of the problem... or solution. Stand up. Be counted.

It needn't ever take a bullet to get things started.

trade

consider
how easy it is to trade our
daylight for deadlines
sunsets for salaries
moonshine for monuments
to other people and places

remember
what matters
what + who
will remain
after you're gone

Seizure

A quote from one of my favorite books, Think and Grow Rich,

Life is a checkerboard and the player opposite you is time.

This past week a colleague and supervisor I greatly respected took a position within a different division. He found a passion and pursued it. It is a wonderful, earned opportunity. He tireless dedication to our team leaves behind an amazing foundation for us to build upon.

As I have thought about what changes will come as a result of his absence, I have come to think a lot about the finiteness of time. How little time we have, where we are, today. Jobs begin and end. Relationships form and dissolve. People are born and die.

Every. Single. Second.

It is incumbent upon us to seize our days, steal these moments, find our passion. We have only one life, one moment, one time.

37

Do you remember one sunny day biking home from Gosselin's Market on the far end of town? Stopped by a girl you went to school with -  Jackie was it? Do you remember this day brother? 

Do you remember refusing to lift a finger to this angry girl with a knife who wanted a fight? Do you remember your resolution: "I will not fight you." You would not touch the weapon she offered. She threatened me that day to get to you. Your calmness was infuriating. Do you remember protecting me from her? You wouldn't let her get close to me. One sunny summer day etched in the folds of my mind for all eternity. Your gift of empathy that completely disarmed her. Someone with nothing to lose rendered powerless inside of your insight and compassion for her condition. You diffused the situation just long enough for me to get on my bike and pedal off. 

Did you stay behind or were you right behind me all the way?

I ask myself the same question every day.  

Your courage and compassion will never fail as a beacon to me.

Thank you once again for all the strength you give me still. 

Happy birthday brother. 

1492

Anybody that said environment has no impact on inspiration never stepped outside their own backyard. There's only so many ways you can look through the same window thinking the landscape will change.

Find your Columbus.

Done: End Game

More GTD.

p69...

Many of us hold ourselves back from imaging a desired outcome unless someone can show us how to get there. Unfortunately, that's backward in terms of how our minds work to generate and recognize solutions and methods. One of the most powerful skills in the world of knowledge work, and one of the most important to hone and develop, is creating clear outcomes.

Truth.

Done: Once

1/2 way through D.Allen's Getting Things Done on the plane today. This is one ass-kicking read.

p22...

I try to make intuitive choices based on my options, instead of trying to think about what those options are. I need to have thought about all of that already and captured the results in a trusted way. I don't want to waste time thinking about things more than once... as soon as you have to things to do stored in your RAM, you've generated personal failure, because you can't do them both at the same time.

Superb.