Assumptions of Living - Good and Bad

One approach taken in the writing of this blog is finding different ideas on the Internet and see how they can be connected. Sometimes it is obvious, but other times there is just a sense of connection. I found two such sources of interest at TED.

The two TED talks were Why we think it's OK to cheat and steal (sometimes) - Dan Ariely (2009) and Celebrating work -- all kinds of work - Mike Rowe (2008).

Both speak to our tendency of holding assumptions of how moral we are ourselves , how we perceive others and how those others deal with life, both good and the bad. What helped make the connection was Mike Rowe's tying his observations of the everyday lives of working people to the Aristotelian theory of tragedy. Dan Ariely takes that idea from the level of the individual to the level of community reminding me of the words from Julius Caesar.

Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus, and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs and peep about
To find ourselves dishonourable graves.
Men at some time are masters of their fates:
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves...

Cassius
The Life and Death of Julies Caesar
ACT I.
SCENE II.

Miracle of Melancholia And Failure - It Can Lead To Optimism

The miracle of melancholia by Eric G. Wilson, in the LA Times, has been sitting in my Blogger drafts since February 17 2008.

We're a nation obsessed with being happy, but sometimes feeling bad can do you some good.

In April of 1819, right around the time that he began to suffer the first symptoms of tuberculosis -- the disease that had already killed his mother and his beloved brother, Tom -- the poet John Keats sat down and wrote, in a letter to his brother, George, the following question: "Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a Soul?"

Another somewhat similarly minded perspective was found in The Value of Failure

which was recommended by Small Business Trends small business expert Scott Shane back on February 4, 2008.

I don’t usually recommend business books to people because I am not a big fan of most of them. But I need to make an exception here. I want to urge people to read Bounce by Barry Moltz.

As someone who studies entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship for a living, I know that there is a big problem getting good information about the topic. Most start-ups fail, but people don’t like to talk about failure. So we have many more stories about start-up success than start-up failure, even though it should be the other way around.

(more…)

Keats shows us that this struggle with melancholia is nothing new. Eric G. Wilson shows us that what is new is its social stigma.

Implied in this inquiry is an idea that is not very popular these days -- at least not in the United States, which is characterized by an almost collective yearning for complete happiness. That idea is this: A person can only become a fully formed human being, as opposed to a mere mind, through suffering and sorrow. This notion would seem quite strange, possibly even deranged, in a country in which almost 85% of the population claims, according to the Pew Research Center, to be "very happy" or at least "happy."

He goes on to say:

Melancholia, far from error or defect, is an almost miraculous invitation to rise above the contented status quo and imagine untapped possibilities. We need sorrow, constant and robust, to make us human, alive, sensitive to the sweet rhythms of growth and decay, death and life.

I don't believe that Professor Wilson's words should be denied, but they are not in themselves complete enough. The reason that I so often use business links,such as Small Business Trends, is that they are a laboratory in reality, rather than in the academic or virtual world. What the business person experiments with has to work or he or she doesn't survive. Barry Moltz's Bounce is "stories" of facing and overcoming failure, of starting again. Melancholia has its lessons and its value but that should not keep us from engaging optimism.

A Few Thank You Posts

There are some thank yous that are due from this weblog for varying degrees of recognition by other bloggers or web 2.0 residents.

Social Citizen, written by Tera Wozniak of the great city of Grand Rapids, Michigan recognized me as

• A new social entrepreneurship blogger - Social Entrepreneurship a New Path for Many

Even more gratifying was being put in with some pretty respectable company. It is a definite intention of this weblog to continue down that path. The only hesitation is that social-entrepreneurship is not the only focus and I am likely getting more credit than I deserve. I do though, for myself, see all of what I am exploring tying together giving both rationale and optimism for action as change agents.

USpace left a kindly worded comment on the same post.

Another blogger, Senior Solutions included me in their blogroll. Written by Lee Balinas, his blog's "about me" tells us:

I have 30+ years in the caring profession. I have been a counselor, minister, insurance salesman, investment adviser and now radio talk show host. I have a weekly show called Lee's Senior Solutions. This show will examine and discuss ALL areas of our lives that will be affected by the AGE WAVE.

Though being recognized by a blog titled Senior Solutions could put a wrench in my attempts to masquerade as a Generation Jones with Generation X tendencies, covering up my Baby Boomer roots. I am likely going to have to resolve to learn CSS or something.

Mah Saito of the Diigo Community at Diigo HQ bookmarked by post My Pathways to New Paradigms: learning more about diigo. Now they may in fact bookmark everything anybody writes about Diigo, but the recognition is still appreciated. More important, it points to a great deal more to learn.

People are still visiting LaDosisDiaria mobuzz.tv to see here comes another bubble. The latest one being yesterday, keeping my 15 seconds of international fame alive awhile longer. I received a number of hits from Hispanic countries due to being linked to the mobuzz.tv site. One of the greatest pleasures of this weblog was seeing the international reach. Quoting myself from a past post:

It is as if one threw a message in a bottle into the cyber-sea and received answers from all over the world. The level of connection on the web is truly amazing.

Guy Kawasaki 's The Art Of The Start Can Apply To Paradigm Pathways As Well

Although Guy Kawasaki is well-known in the web 2.0 world, my introduction to him has been more gradual. The first introduction to him and his work being through blog.guykawasaki.com in the So Money (of any currency) Can Buy Happiness post. Then through the ChangeThis site in the Optimism Is Not For Wimps post.

Guy Kawasaki's contribution is ChangeThis :: The Art of the Start

A former Apple Fellow and entrepreneur extraordinaire, Guy talks about up-starting a start-up. A sneak preview from his upcoming book, "The Art of the Start." Guy encourages entrepreneurs to make meaning, make mantra, and get going. According to Kawasaki, some examples of making 'meaning' are: make the world a better place, increase the quality of life, right a terrible wrong, and prevent the end of something good. Plus, his brilliant FAQ's (frequently avoided questions) will answer almost all your fears about starting a new business.

All of which are goals that this weblog can support. More recently, the topic of discussion in an The Entrepreneurial Mind post was again Guy Kawasaki

Guy offered many pearls of wisdom, but one of the best that I had not heard from him before was this:

"An old Chinese proverb says this: 'If you wait by the river eventually the body of your enemy will float by.'"

Dr. Cornwall sees this as advising us that,

Too many entrepreneurs are impatient and impulsive. They lock themselves into a cat and mouse game with competitors. In doing so, they become too clever by half. Put your energy into your employees and your customers.

Good things take time. It takes time to build a successful business and it takes time to build wealth. Take the high road, work hard, stick to your vision, make your customers your evangelists, and all those competitors you are obsessing about will take care of themselves.

It probably best though to let Guy Kawasaki do the talking himself which he does in this Art of the Start video.

diigo tags: advice, business, entrepreneurship, learning, management

Even In A Digital World It Takes Real Heart To Make Change

This post links and quotes from two stories that appeared in the Los Angeles Times. The rationale behind combining these two stories into one post is to express the view again that despite all of the interconnection made available by the web 2.0 technological revolution it still takes the dedication of individuals to make a difference.

The ability to inspire is a far greater power than the ability to merely communicate data. There have been a number of posts on Myanmar or Burma to use the original prior to the renaming by the military dictatorship. Those previous posts convey both wavering optimism and skeptical concern regarding the impact of the Internet on global issues of this type. These days, in regards to the power of the Internet, I am leaning more to the optimistic but without moral leadership such as that of Nyanissara those hopes could be hollow.

A digitally enhanced Myanmar opposition - Los Angeles Times

• There seemed little chance of getting organized until more than 2,000 protesters, arrested and jammed into crowded jail cells, met one another and overcame their distrust. Now, most of them are on the streets again, carefully building a network for what they call a new revolution.
  
  Their digital tools are e-mail and text messages, which are more powerful than a megaphone, and cellphone cameras that are so common that thousands of people are potential journalists.
  
  Monk's words stir the spirit of Myanmar's resistance - Los Angeles Times
  
  * The stern-faced Nyanissara, a 70-year-old monk in owlish glasses and a maroon robe, is able to stare down generals with chests full of medals by stepping carefully through the minefield that makes free speech lethal here.
  
  Shielding himself with allegory, he crisscrosses the country giving lectures that draw on history and legend to remind people that rotten regimes have fallen before. As the generals try to crush the last remnants of resistance, he is cautiously keeping the fire alive.
  
  
  

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A Hopeful Idea Hopelessly Mired?

One of the ongoing stories in the web 2.0 world that this weblog has kept an eye on is Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop per Child program. Most of that though has been outside the main parameters of this weblog. The Fast Company article One Laptop Per Child: Failure is not an Option is listed under Paradigm Pathways Web 2.0 Pathways. All About Yves - Fuseproject - One LapTop per Child - Masters of a Design can be found under the del.icio.us tagging system. Back in October of last year Cognitive Daily had the following post Is the "$100 laptop" headed for a flop? by Dave Munger which had a response from me.

Now OLPC is back in the news.

Intel Breaks Up with OLPC | Epicenter from Wired.com

After close to a year of trading insults Intel finally joined Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child Initiative last July. The move came as a surprise to many, not only because of the bad blood between the chipmaker and the nonprofit, but also because Intel was, and is, working on a similar project called The World Ahead. Yet with Intel officially joining the OLPC board and offering to supply CPUs for the next iteration of the nonprofit's low-cost laptops, it appeared the beef between the two parties over who was going to save the world with low-cost, easily deployed computers seemed to be over.

More from the New York Times TECHNOLOGY | January 5, 2008
Intel Quits Effort to Get Computers to Children
Intel and the One Laptop Per Child group had a rocky relationship from the start in their short-lived effort to get inexpensive laptops into the hands of the world's poorest children.

No Child Left Offline - Nicholas Negroponte - OLPC - Intel
The Fast Interview: MIT Professor Nicholas Negroponte on Intel's "dishonesty" and the long, tough road to the $100 laptop.

One of three looks at the One Laptop Per Child program. This program has had an up and down track record since its inception. . Yet the 'optimism' of the social-entrepreneur set never seems to diminish. Is it realistic? More importantly if it is not and this program is hitting a dead-end, what went wrong? Is there anything actually wrong or is it that in today's instant gratification media not having a quickly completed success is seen as the same thing as a failure?

I am providing additional websites for background information in an online Ask.com MyStuff folder OLPC.

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Optimism Is Not For Wimps

Often when writing a series of these blog posts a certain word or concept keeps coming up even though the posts are on different subjects. The latest word to keeps crossing my computer screen is optimism. Looking over some older posts found Larry Brilliant who argued for optimism.

I have found another source of optimism via gapingvoid. I enjoy the gapingvoid cartoons featured on this webblog, but have to label its creator Hugh MacLeod the world's most optimistic curmudgeon. Personally, as a philosophy, I think it works.

It was gapingvoid that gave me Creativity Original and So-So and led me to ChangeThis: The link is to the most talked about of their manifestos. Below is taken from the about page. Again that word - optimism

"Are you an optimist?

Sometimes it seems as though our disagreements—over everything from politics to business to the designated hitter rule—are more serious and more divisive than ever before.

People are making emotional, knee-jerk decisions, then standing by them, sometimes fighting to the death to defend their position.

And yet, we’re optimists.

People call the team at Change This optimists because we don’t believe it has to be this way. We don’t believe humans evolved to be so bad at making decisions, so poor at changing our minds, so violent in arguing our point of view. We’re well aware of how split our country and our world have become, but we don’t think the current state of affairs is built into our very nature."

Why be Optimistic? Why Not!

Why be optimistic? Larry Brilliant at Skoll World Forum, on TED.com via TED | TEDBlog by on 11/26/07

As was said in the last post much of the information on the web is repeated but that is in part because many of the individuals providing the new information have multiple venues, for example Larry Brilliant. This is worth repeating as this brings up the concepts of innovation and even more importantly optimism.

Recorded at the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship, Oxford, UK: 2006 TED Prize winner and Google.org director Larry Brilliant uses a clip from an old Frank Capra movie to show that we've known about global warming for 50 years -- yet in half a century, we've done almost nothing to solve it. He explores this and other megatrends that could inspire pessimism. But, he says, there is a more powerful case for optimism. (Recorded March 2007 in Oxford, UK. Duration: 21:01.)

The Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship in Oxford, UK, is an annual gathering of innovators from all over the world who are creating positive change across critical issue areas.

If this doesn't load use one of the links above to get to the TED site.