Yes there’s been a bit of a hiatus since the last one.
This week’s (month’s??) 12 links:
- Strategies for Learning from Failure, on Harvard Business Review in “organisational culture”. Behind a paywall now.
- Dead link which was for “the 5 pillars of highly effective public speaking” on Start-up Club. I love public speaking and I’m always interested in getting better at it.
- “Place your flag. Build your nation.” A link to an episode of the Finely Crafted podcast, interviewing Sarah Bray (Sarah Avenir now) whose work I really really like. Unfortunately it’s only available on limited and inaccessible platforms.
- The very excellent Seeds of Change page which has links to training, facilitation, advice and resources. A great resource towards which to point groups and organisations campaigning for social and ecological justice (including local and national campaigning networks, community groups, co-ops and charities) – with guides in all formats (written, audio, video and podcast).
- The Conscious Leadership Group page – a global consultancy working on leadership development and coaching. I don’t remember why I saved this.
- Embercombe, an eco retreat centre in Devon. Good to know it exists, it looks beautiful. It has a programme of retreat and events on the website.
- Robert Rauschenberg’s photography statement, a handwritten draft from January 1981. (See picture below.) It reads:
“My preoccupation with photography in the beginning (1949) was first supported by a personal conflict between shyness + curiosity. The camera functioned as a social shield.
In 1981 I think of the camera as my permission to walk into every shadow or watch while any light changes. Mine is the need to be where it will always never be the same again; a kind of archeaology in time only, forcing one to see what ever the light or the darkness touches, and care. My concern is to move at a speed within which to act.
Photography is the most direct communication in nonviolent contacts.”
Tag: photography - “7 Things I Can Control for a Happier, Healthier Life“, a topline listicle that I can’t remember saving.
- Dead link to “10 Everyday Habits To Make You A Calmer Person” on Mind Body Green, which I can;t remember saving either.
- Dead link for “Three little words” on the Happy Simple blog.
- “Decelerate to Accelerate” on the Stanford social Innovation Review, a piece about burnout in social entrepreneurs. Reading it with a jaded eye and noticing its privileged and extractive capitalism and colonialism vibe (“yay let’s go to an island resort in Bali to recover”), even though there is a point about burnout that is valid. Unfortunately the medium is spoiling the message for me.
- “Unprepared” on Seth Godin’s blog, 2nd January 2015. A lovely piece that I’m re-posting in full, and which OF COURSE connects for me to complicated (where unpreparedness is bad) and complex (where unpreparedness is the dance we need to embrace).
“Is there anything worse we can say about you and your work? “You are unprepared.”
But the word “unprepared” means two things, not just one. There is the unprepared of the quiz at school, of forgetting your lines, of showing up to a gunfight with a knife… this is the unprepared of the industrial world, the unprepared of being an industrial cog in an industrial system, a cog that is out-of-whack, disconnected and poorly maintained.
What about the other kind, though?
We are unprepared to do something for the first time, always.
We are unprepared to create a new kind of beauty, to connect with another human in a way that we’ve never connected before.
We are unprepared for our first bestseller, or for a massive failure unlike any we’ve ever seen before. We are unprepared to fall in love, and to be loved.
We are unprepared for the reaction when we surprise and delight someone, and unprepared, we must be unprepared, for the next breakthrough.
We’ve been so terrified into the importance of preparation, it’s spilled over into that other realm, the realm of life where we have no choice but to be unprepared.
If you demand that everything that happens be something you are adequately prepared for, I wonder if you’ve chosen never to leap in ways that we need you to leap. Once we embrace this chasm, then for the things for which we can never be prepared, we are of course, always prepared.”
Tag: complexity
My time to read: 30 mins
Photography statement on the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation website.