Deciding what to do next - How to design a career, business or education

Two article from Penelope Trunk's Brazen Careerist have been lingering in my drafts for some time. They were good articles, but I was not sure how to apply them to anything I was doing. My last post on design thinking and business got me to thinking about them again. This is still framing the question.

One article talked about how to decide what to do next. The focus is career-wise, which is Ms. Trunk's forte, but it can also be applied organizational-wise. The question is how to bridge and combine the two. Her example is Pastor Tony Morgan, chief strategy officer at NewSpring Church, whose blog mixes careers and church. In his book, Killing Cockroaches, he tells the story of when he was a city manager, and he was in the middle of running a meeting, and he heard a woman down the hall scream about a cockroach. So he got up from the meeting and killed the cockroach.

As Ms Trunk tells us, Really, all time management discussion is about this: How to know when to kill cockroaches and when not to. It's about why we spend time doing small, stupid stuff that is crawling around in front of us instead of the stuff that makes life meaningful. The dichotomy between wanting to make big-picture impacts on the world and being immersed in the more immediate issues bombarding us is a question for organizations and the individuals making up those organizations.What do we teach students about finding ways to make life meaningful, while still being able make it in the "real" world?

ALINA TUGEND wrote Shortcuts: Putting Yourself Out There on a Shelf to Buy in
YOUR MONEY back on March 28, 2009 in the New York Times. The article was about branding yourself in the job market. What caught my eye was Dan Schawbel, author of “Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success” (Kaplan, April 2009), advice that “Finding your niche is the key,” Which means:

Discover your passion and put it together with your expertise; create a “personal branding tool kit” (which may include a résumé, online profile, blog and portfolio of your work) that consistently reflects your brand; pitch your brand online and offline; and update and monitor any conversations about your brand.

At first glance this sounds in opposition to what was said in the last post, but not if we look at how to achieve this through his four-step process —

1. discover,


2. create,


3. communicate,


4. maintain.

All of which can be applied to hybrid thinking. The question is how do we teach this in classrooms? Ms Trunk points out that perhaps we should first consider changing how to lead in the new millennium.

Her reasons are that Generation Y has a lot of great traits, but classic, top-down leadership is not one of them. This is not a surprise: Because gen Y is the great teamwork generation. They did book reports in teams, they went to prom in teams, and they are notorious for quitting jobs in teams.

This should arguably make it easier to teach today's students the concepts of hybrid thinking and incorporate design thinking into students' career path.

Finally, I am including this TEDTalk (video) featuring Dan Pink on the surprising science of motivation which points out that our assumptions about motivation are also questionable. For the same basic reasons he raises in the last post Roger Martin says, What's Thwarting American Innovation is Too Much Science. Dan Pink says that the problem is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does. Is the same thing true of education?

Letting Serendipity Seek You

DAMON DARLIN wrote in the New York Times section Ping: Serendipity, Lost in the Digital Deluge. After reading the piece, I can only conclude that serendipity is within the traveler and not the pathway. There has been a great deal of serendipity during this endeavor and it has changed my own paradigms.

I also don't believe that Darlin has a firm grasp on what serendipity is in truth. Truth seems a better word than fact. Serendipity is magic without the magician, the third wish without the genie or even the wish. It is more than randomness and blind luck and in its best sense can not be calculated or anticipated.

Darlin gives UrbanSpoon, as one example which depends upon randomness to find a restaurant.

But a funny thing happens with frequent users of the app. They start relying on its search engine or the “Talk of the Town” feature, an algorithm that generates suggestions that uncannily echo local sentiment.

So most of us don't stick to the path less traveled most of the time. Here he is right, the algorithm becomes a high-tech crowdsourcing, substituting for the serendipity that customers are seeking. Trouble is that you cannot seek serendipity. You have to seek, not even necessarily seek, but be open to the unknown and let serendipity find you.

But this does bring up the question of individuals finding new pathways and larger groups finding new pathways. As the TED Talk below shows - The group-think of social networks isn't good at delivering those magical moments of discovery.

James Surowiecki: The moment when social media became the news
James Surowiecki pinpoints the moment when social media became an equal player in the world of news-gathering: the 2005 tsunami, when YouTube video, blogs, IMs and txts carried the news -- and preserved moving personal stories from the tragedy. Watch this talk >>

James Surowiecki, the author of The Wisdom of Crowds, argues that people acting en masse, are smarter than we think with one important caveat.

But there's also a downside to this -- a kind of dark side, in fact --and that is that the more tightly linked we come to each other, the harder it is for each of us to remain independent.

One of the fundamental characteristics of a network is that once you are linked in the network, the network starts to shape your views and starts to shape your interactions with everybody else. That's one of the things that defines what a network is. A network is not just the product of its component parts.It is something more than that. It is, as Steven Johnson has talked about, an emergent phenomenon.

Related Posts:

• Collaboration Moving Masses Through Compassion
• Social Networking, Social Fragmenting, Or Social Hand-wringing
• Taking a Step Beyond - Personal efforts in meeting the Millennium Development Goals

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.

New Paradigms Crossing Paths Science and Religion

This journey was started to find new paradigms. The endeavor to find new paradigms has taken this blog through a number of different new pathways. Two, which are often seen as conflicting, but which both help us to define ourselves are science and religion. Both of the sources cited here are open-minded in their approach. The contrast is enlightening and some commonality can be found even from those who strongly espouse one view or the other.

Edward O. Wilson

Host Robert Wright talks with E.O. Wilson, a self-defined a materialist, a biological determinist, and a secular-humanist, about his thesis of sociobiology and how the idea that the human mind is shaped as much by genetic inheritance as it is by culture influenced his views intelligent design, free will, and how science and religion can potentially come together in order to save life on earth.

Karen Armstrong in Conversation with Alan Jones

Author of "The Bible: A Biography", Karen Armstrong and Rev. Alan Jones, the Dean of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco discuss Armstrong's latest book biblical criticism, biblical literalism, and the Golden Rule. Armstrong provides her interpretation of The Good Book and they also confront the New Atheists who have recently attacked the Abrahamic religions.

Finally, this TED talk featuring one of this years TED Prize winners. Jill Tarter: Astronomer and Director of the SETI Institute provides some new perspectives on our place in the universe.

Related Posts:

Jeff Sachs Writes, Tyler Cowen Asks, Wired Warns, Europe Ponders and E.O. Wilson Educates About Biodiversity

Challenging the next generation (and this one) to get serious - Tech guru Tim O'Reilly again points the way.

Tim O'Reilly is one of the main pillars of this blog's beginning. I am, admittedly, still on the periphery of the techno-world. Before starting this blog, the Firefox browser's bookmark button was about as adventurous as I got in the Web 2.0 world. I was also far more aware of Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, as a former psychology major, than I was of any technological revolutions going on the Internet.

However, when I decided to use the Internet to explore Paradigm Shifts, it was inevitable that Tim O'Reilly's - Open Source Paradigm Shift would be at the top of the pile. O'Reilly's ideas on processes and organizational relationships, though focused on computer technology, still appealed to my organizational psychology perspective. My interest in exploring what Web 2.0 offered in regards to tools for gathering, organizing, communicating and applying knowledge was enhanced. That started a process that led me to create Milestones for a New Millennium.

Now my quest has discovered dozens of different ways to be make positive contributions to the world using the Internet, as well as discovering numerous sources of interesting and educational material. Yet, I am still encouraged when I read today in the Los Angeles Times a story by Los Angeles Times Staff Writer Jessica Guynn that Tech guru Tim O'Reilly challenges next generation to get serious.

SAN FRANCISCO - ; Silicon Valley insiders call it the O'Reilly Radar: Tim O'Reilly's uncanny ability to spot a technology revolution before it happens. But lately the entrepreneur, investor and book publisher has been busier trying to incite the next one.

The entrepreneur, investor and book publisher urges young entrepreneurs and engineers to stop making silly software and start making a real difference in the world.

What I appreciated in the article was Tim O'Reilly's perspective ... that Silicon Valley has strayed from the passion and idealism that fuel innovation to instead follow what he calls the "mad pursuit of the buck with stupider and stupider ideas."

Flush with money and opportunity following the post-dot-com resurgence, he says, some entrepreneurs have cocooned in a "reality bubble," insulated from poverty, disease, global warming and other problems that are gripping the planet. He argues that they should follow the model of some of the world's most successful technology companies, including Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp., which sprang from their founders' efforts to "work on stuff that matters."

Visit latimes.com

Finding Strength In Vulnerability

Our Vulnerability Is Our Strength via NPR Series: This I Believe on 6/8/08

It isn't enough to be what our society has dubbed as successful. What we really need are others around us engaging, nurturing, listening and willing to sacrifice their time and agendas. I don't care if you're the CEO of a multibillion-dollar company or a single mother with five kids. Nobody is completely self-sufficient and so, in that way, we are all helpless. We're helpless unto each other.

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.

OK, It's A Brain Exercise

OK, it's a brain exercise. I have at times in the past looked for a rationale as to why I keep this weblog up. It is, I am beginning to realize, a circular question. Why and how are fundamental and motivating questions for me, having a healthy dose of curiosity and this weblog is a means of satisfying that curiosity. So my latest rationale is that it serves as my form of intellectual aerobics class.

Actually, blogging provides cross-training activities which grow over time. First there is reading articles on science, economics, and the world of web 2.0 in an endeavor to self-educate myself. Each pathway of discovery taken provides other pathways in a seemingly never ending expansion. Then as my own means of intellectual weight training I decided that dealing with one idea at a time was not enough. Consequently, I try to combine two or more ideas in each post and end up with some new pathways.

Next is learning all of the new Web 2.0 equipment like weight machines. This is where I have been the worst slacker, having dabbled but not nearing the potential. My latest sojourn in web 2.0 experimentation was my Squidoo Creative-Destruction page. Truth is that now it is just a grab bag of links and needs to be modified to communicate a specific perspective. That is often true of data found on the web it seems. All too often this weblog focused on the end-user aspects and remains lazy about learning the basics of what makes all of this possible.

Finally there is a ever growing desire to communicate and connect. That aspect has seen improvement. That was not a goal at the beginning, and I am still not seeking to rack up a thousand contacts to claim world-wide popularity. I do though have intellectually like-minded contacts across the globe. That again creates more pathways. This is where my own personal paradigms have seen transformation, like the transformed 98 pound weakling at the beach, I have had new worlds open up to me. The "writing" aspect of blogging is becoming increasingly important. This particular post has had a number of corrections and re-writes. A few posts have had unexpected results like being put on the international stage with International Web Star Is 15 Seconds Of Fame Off And On or being featured in an Answers.com inquiry at Coming Up With The Answer(.com) But Still Looking For The Questions.

Lately, I have been going over my past posts to see what I have learned. This weblog has had me thinking about economics, creative-destruction, fair use, collective-intelligence and other many-to-many/one social interactions and entropy to name some. The trouble is that there are so many pathways to take, not to mention those that were passed by. Two come to mind that seemed to have a good deal of untapped, at least by me, potential - PopTech and NITLE. Some others have been added to the del.icio.us, diigo and StumbleUpon social tagging systems.

Now I find myself with so many potential pathways for inquiry and contemplation that it is beginning to be a bit overwhelming. So my plan is just to grab on to something and putting it through the paces.

The Next Move Post Career

Work has a tendency to define the flow of our days. There will still be a day though when it is time to find other pursuits. So some time needs to be devoted every now and then to think about the future. The following website professes to offer a possible pathway for Baby Boomers.

Encore: Work That Matters in the Second Half of Life Diigo Annotated

diigo tags: encore, work, career, 50Aspire

Baby boomers are inventing a new stage of work. As their numbers swell, they are transforming work itself – and creating a society that works better for everyone.

So there is a pathway, but how do we move to it from the one we are on? Penelope Trunk, the Brazen Careerist offers Steps to figuring out your next career move.

For me, it is post career move, but I can still find some applicable points within her post with some revisions.

1. Eliminate stuff: Cross off your list opera singer, Chicago Cubs Owner - If it hasn't happened by now it is not going to. That leaves fun but even if it probably will never pay well it doesn't matter: working in local government - been there, done that, working in a nonprofit - has possibilities, being a travel writer - or maybe a blogger, but it would have to be far different from this one to make money.

2. Look at what’s left: risk-taker then entrepreneurship, not a risk-taker then corporate life, third option not-as-much-to-risk then maybe change-agent or social-entrepreneur.

3. Just because you love something doesn’t mean you need to get paid for it. Especially if you are retired.

4. Be honest about what you love. If you’re not making time to do it regularly unpaid, then you probably don’t love it. Well, there is eating and paying the mortgage and right now its the best job I can find that fits all of my parameters.

5. Admit if you lack a clear passion. OK, I lack clear passion or at least hot passion. I am a slow-simmer-the-spaghetti-sauce-all-day type.

6. Get busy. Doing anything. The best way to find yourself is to start doing things. When it comes to ourselves, we find by doing, not philosophizing. This weblog is a small start.

diigo tags: careerist

Choosing the next company you work for: Leverage research about how Gen Y is parenting via Brazen Careerist by Penelope Trunk from 3/28/08

The odds are working a post-career job will mean working with a different generation at the helm.

One of the hardest parts of managing your career is getting clear on what's most important to you in the work you do. And it's ironic that the true-but-clichéd exclamation from new parents – "the kids force me to see what is really important in my life" — comes after we have navigated a big chunk of our careers.

Your generation is never a perfect mirror of you, but it's usually fairly accurate. Otherwise people wouldn't continue to pay for the research, right? Well no, they can pay because they like what they hear. Like so many others, I claim to be the exception.

Parenting styles reveal one's true values, so reading this research is like giving yourself a jump-start on self-knowledge that usually comes after you've slogged through your twenties. Based on research about values that guide new millennium parenting, here are three things to seek out in new millennium work.

1. Look for good flow of information Generation Y sees information as a personal differentiator, as employees, having access to premium information in their field, and being able to share it in a productive way, is very important to feeling fulfilled.

I am not one of those Baby Boomers who think good advice comes only with age.

I have had my fill with offices that use "hierarchy as a way to make people feel useful and important."

2. Make sure you can customize your environment. In the workplace, customization is a must in order to feel like you are being recognized for your authentic self by co-workers

You won't feel like you are making an authentic connection with your workplace if the workplace does not make an effort to address what is different about you.

3. Surround yourself with people who have faith in the future. Gen Y deals with the uncertainty of the future by living more in the present.

In the workplace, these values play out in the quest for lifelong learning.

Make each day one where you learn and have fun because putting that off for some maybe-payoff (like making partner at a law firm, or getting a fat paycheck) will make you feel like you're not being true to yourself. This is all the more true when your "someday" days are now behind you.

Learning To Be A More Social Conversationalist (And Blog-Tagger)

I have to figure it can't hurt to try to become more socially rounded (though spending time blogging could argue against how good are my intentions) in today's world and since Penelope Trunk seems to be a voice of today in 21st century networking it makes sense to take heed of her advice.

This also allows me to test out the diigo blogging tool with which I have been experimenting. I can't completely put aside this weblog's geek-factor. This post includes summaries of a couple of her posts on this subject (the social one).

How to be more interesting to other people » Brazen Careerist by Penelope Trunk Diigo Annotated

But I did learn some lessons from my visual art mentors, and one really cool thing someone taught me is that the color I choose is most interesting where it intersects with another color. Just knowing the right color to use is not the clever, interesting thing. Rather, interesting is when I am unsure what the two colors will do when they interact. (Here’s a great set of paintings that illustrate this idea.)

The same is true for writing. The interesting part of writing is not the part of the piece where you know exactly where it’s going. The interesting part is when you get to an unplanned moment in a paragraph and you surprise yourself by what you write next. It’s the moment of uncertainty, when you have to look inside yourself to keep going, and pull out something you didn’t know you had before.

A while back I wrote about Moira Gunn, and how she is good at interviewing people because she can find what’s interesting about them. She interviews scientists, and she is a pro at finding the quirky, unexpected moment within the topic of their science.

How to start a quality conversation with someone you don’t know » Brazen Careerist by Penelope Trunk Diigo Annotated tags: career, psychology

The way that Gunn gets such fun and interesting interviews out of her subjects is by not having a preconception of what they’ll be talking about. She wants to find that spot where they are engaged and knowledgeable, because anyone on any topic will be interesting if they have that. She says the key is to be open to where the other person wants to go, and to listen.

It’s Gunn’s job to figure out a way to connect with these scientists and part of the fun of the interviews is hearing her do that, because it’s what we have to do all the time when we make small talk. Yes, the scientists are extremely smart, but Gunn says the hard part is to get them to the point where they are talking about something comprehensible.

Balancing Life Along The Path

It has been over 10 days since I made a post in this weblog. Not that I have been ignoring it. There has been a whole lot of tinkering and re-designing going on. One important change was to add the word "My" so the title is now "My Pathways to New Paradigms". This is my learning path. Some elements that seemed of minimum use have been removed from this ongoing web 2.0 experiment. Some new elements have been added . There are now diigo tags below, in addition to the del.icio.us and technorati tags. There are both diigo and del.icio.us bookmarks at the left-hand column. There is also a new Stumble Upon button below that.

It is Stumble Upon that has taken up most of my attention in the last week. The idea behind Stumble Upon is that you find websites that you like and that you review them for others to discover. My Stumble account has about 22 pages of weblinks and 19 so far have been reviewed. It has been an interesting process because it meant revisiting each one again which resulted in finding additional information and new discoveries. Furthermore, because of my interest in creating a comprehensively interrelated and interactive body of knowledge for myself, I linked each website back to the weblog posts which discussed it. I do find the insights of others interesting and have been befriended by a couple of fellow stumblers who provided some great links. The newest one is the xkcd comics further down below. Stumble Upon though is still not as popular as del.icio.us, based on the number of people who have saved a particular website under each system. It also cannot search for websites by the words in a title as del.icio.us can. Lastly, there does not seem to be anyway to combine tagging terms as there is with del.icio.us.

I have also joined a few groups: Emergent Systems, Complexity, and Digital Physics. Again, this is my learning site where I get to choose what I want to learn.

The most important thing I learned from the last 10 days is that my feed statistics don't change that much. The average number of subscribers was 14 and the average reach was 3 which is par for the course. More inline with the philosophy of this weblog, there have been 132 clicks to 37 items that have been made available on the web. One weblog post was Stumbling Through the Crowd On a Path To Wisdom. The Intuit Future of Small Business Report website also got 6 clicks. The MIT weblink Explorations in Language Learnability Using Probabilistic Grammars and Child-directed Speech got 4 clicks. To be honest, the max over the last week is 6 clicks for any one item, but it is still cool that besides having a platform for learning new things somebody else also had enough interest to find and click the same item. If one person finds something interesting fine, if 128 people do even better, but it is not going to be the focus of this weblog. Maybe someday I will attempt a weblog that endeavors to maximize readership. In the meantime, I have found far more to learn about than I have time to write about and every now and then I do spend time living my dayjob real world life.

The Universe Is Conspiring to Help Us Or At Least Kevin Kelly Is

The Universe Is Conspiring to Help Us via NPR Series: This I Believe
Whether hitchhiking to work or bicycling across the country, Wired magazine founder Kevin Kelly always found strangers willing to help him. Kelly believes that to be a good giver, you must also know how to receive.

Kottke.org by jason@kottke.org had a piece on Kevin Kelly has written a thoughtful post about how to...

Kevin Kelly has written a thoughtful post about how to make money in a world where the rules are:

• When copies are super abundant, they become worthless.
• When copies are super abundant, stuff which can't be copied becomes scarce and valuable.
  

He then lists eight reasons why people pay money for things that could be free, one of which is immediacy:

Sooner or later you can find a free copy of whatever you want, but getting a copy delivered to your inbox the moment it is released -- or even better, produced -- by its creators is a generative asset. Many people go to movie theaters to see films on the opening night, where they will pay a hefty price to see a film that later will be available for free, or almost free, via rental or download. Hardcover books command a premium for their immediacy, disguised as a harder cover. First in line often commands an extra price for the same good.

The Good Experience Blog also gives us Two new Kevin Kelly pointers

• The Bottom is Not Enough, on the challenges of bottom-up design

• Subterranean Tutoring, on being a geek dad trying to raise geek kids.

See also:

• Kevin Kelly's must-read article on what's "better than free"

• All mentions of Kevin Kelly recently (there have been many)

By my own standards I should be adding more to this post than just rehashing what others have already done. The truth though is despite knowing, "the bearded guy on the bike who wrote the Whole Earth Catalog", I really did not appreciate the work of Kevin Kelly. So I am letting those with far more experience in this Web 2.0 environment educated me. This post provides other avenues for studying some of the issues that this weblog has been considering.

Even researching Kevin Kelly provides some further insights into the Web 2.0 world. Searching for Kevin Kelly in del.icio.us brings up a number of hits. Interestingly though there are numerous hits for Cool Tools, each separate because they were assigned a different set of tags. Some of the tags linked to more specific selections with only 25 people sharing the tag set and other have 2,237 people sharing the tag set. Searching for Cool Tools on del.icio.us goes beyond Keven Kelly's Cool Tools.
Searching for Kevin Kelly on Stumble Upon brought up less hits than I would have guessed. It did however list Cool Tools under related sites, though again the designation goes beyond Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools.
[There use to be a paragraph here that said Jason Kottke and Mark Hurst use the target _blank code. That was wrong. It didn't have anything really to do with this post and since this weblog is designed for my web explorations I will still be using target blank because I like it, but it was still wrong.]
Below is my first direct introduction to Kevin Kelly from TED.

Stumbling on Sadness? Searching For Meaning?

TEDBlog had a post on Stumbling on sadness?

Many TEDTalks explore themes of happiness -- Stumbling on Happiness' Daniel Gilbert, Mattheiu Ricard (who's been called the Happiest Man on Earth), happy designer Stefan Sagmeister, and many more ...

Now a recent story in Newsweek rounds up the latest on happiness' opposite: sadness. It's an interesting gloss on the growing happiness industry -- and what the story calls "the backlash against the happiness rat race."

Stumbling on sadness is perhaps the TED Blog's stab at a minor alliteration, but having recently started using Stumble Upon, the social tagging system, I decided to see what they offered regarding happiness and sadness.

My own Stumbling sites on happiness are limited though this is more a matter of not tagging properly. Here are other Stumbling sites on happiness. I don't have any of my own, but here are some Stumbling sites on sadness.

This weblog has had a number of posts in the past dealing with the question of happiness.

Excellence = Joy In Work

The secret of joy in work is contained in one word - excellence. To know how to do something well is to enjoy it. Pearl S. Buck, 06/26/1892 - 03/06/1973 US author, Pulitzer- and Nobel Prize Laureate

How To "Create" A Job You're Not Qualified For - Yet

Penelope Trunk on 1/29/08 through her Brazen Careerist blog discusses "How to get a job you're not qualified for"

Her post is not really targeted to the "Getting tired of their own rat race but not ready for a rocking chair" crowd. However, as she points out, getting hired even when you're not qualified is one of the most important skills to have if you want to keep your work life interesting, which applies to your post-career work as well. I have never focused on wealth accumulation, (though I am making sure my retirement finances are optimized) but now I can focus more on making sure my learning curve doesn't go flat-line, and making sure a post career work life is not only not really boring but of some benefit as well.

So here are her three ways to get hired when you're not qualified for the job, but rearranged in my particular order.

1. Take responsibility for your own education.

2. Create a project from a different arena that interests you.

3. Just apply.

Currently, I am at step 1 and creating this weblog is part of that endeavor, both as an educational means and end. The 3 part process of getting a job your not qualified for, also fits in nicely with the Four-Step Process offered by Sam Davidson of CoolPeopleCare. Again, I am currently I am at step one - One: Dream while learning the ropes.

• That dream develops a passion.
  
• The passion develops a plan.
  
• The plan determines the action.
  
• The action helps us to dream better.

I also believe that it means Defining who you are for yourself before defining or re-defining yourself for others. This is also different for those undertaking their odyssey years at the earlier stages of life and those taking them at the later stages (Jason and the argonauts would be a better metaphor for the early stages of life explorations.) At this point, I am not at all sure where this could end up. I see examples which point to new directions that suggest possibilities that could manifest into something 5 or more years from now, but at this point in the journey I am just going to enjoy discovering new things.

Keeping Busy

It is not enough to be busy; so are the ants. The question is: what are we busy about?"

Henry David Thoreau
author and naturalist

Truth In Kindness Wisdom In Happiness

"The truest greatness lies in being kind, the truest wisdom in a happy mind."

--Ella Wheeler Wilcox,

Curious And Curiouser Layer By Layer

Curious via Seth's Blog offered the following on 1/21/08

Nic created the video below--the subtitles and edits are his. The bad cold is mine. I hope you like it (the video, not the cold).

Also from Seth's Blog Layering on 1/22/08

Here's what we used to do:
Create ---> Edit ---> Launch

Here's what happens now:
Create ---> Launch ---> Edit ---> Launch ---> repeat

Someone asked me which post on this blog represented the turning point of its growth. The 'breakthrough' post. It turns out that there wasn't one. Instead, there were 2,500 posts, one after the other, each building (and I was learning from each) as we went. And thus the challenge. We live in a layered world now. Those that plan and plan and then launch are always going to be at a disadvantage to the layerers.

The Entrepreneurial Mind on 1/17/08 also has a perspective on whether To Plan, Or Not to Plan.

I don't believe that this is in opposition to what Seth Godin had said, just said differently from a different perspective. Dr. Campbell also expresses the idea that plans are not the holy grail of entrepreneurship and when he writes that he will have to adjust my plan each step along the way, I think of Seth Godin's layering.

We set business plans up on a pedestal as if it is the holy grail of entrepreneurship. Just look at BusinessWeek.com's most recent special issue on entrepreneurship -- it is all about business planning.

It is as if we are telling aspiring entrepreneurs that once they unlock the secrets of the business plan, the world of entrepreneurial wealth will come pouring out at them. Sorry, but this is just not true.

On the other hand, there is now a debate raging as to whether we should even teach entrepreneurs about business plans.

All of this -- and I mean both sides of this debate -- is missing the point.

So why do we teach about business plans? It is because they are a way to help organize what can be a complex and overwhelming array of issues. It is because it forces us to integrate our marketing plans, or operating plans and our financial plans into one, coherent story.

But I still plan. I just know that I will have to adjust my plan each step along the way as I begin to implement it as I start and grow my business.

The Entrepreneurial Mind also tells us that Growth is Never a Smooth Curve

The truth is that growth is a messy thing. It never follows a smooth path. The real curves that signify growth are jagged. Growth is lumpy, not smooth.

Growth requires us to make leaps of faith as we commit to significant new overhead, including more space, more equipment and more staff.

And in today's dynamic economy, a growing business is like the shark -- it has to keep moving forward, or it will drown.

The commitment to growth requires careful thought and careful planning. Never grow simply on faith and hope. Grow with a careful plan that tells you what challenges your decision to grow will create.

Is this in disagreement with what was said above? I don't believe so. This goes back to Seth Godin's point about maintaining curiosity, because curiosity is to my mind the pre-commitment to immerse our selves in a chosen field to learn all we can and endeavor to make it better. This post only touches lightly upon Dr. Campbell's ideas. His full post better expresses the balance that entrepreneurs need to achieve.

The Chance To Move Forward

The Chance to Move Forward From NPR This I Believe Listen Now [5 min 12 sec]
by Maria Mayo Robbins

As a student of religion, I read and write about people and texts that desperately seek cosmic order in a world of chaos. Coincidence threatens the divine order of creation and must be explained. For myself, I believe that chance creates order in the world. We can't choreograph life events, but we can clasp the hands of those who appear in our paths and see where they lead us. So many chance encounters have moved me forward, offering me direction and a sense of purpose — if I was willing to follow.

Re-Define For Yourself Before Re-Defining For Others

It took some time but I am finally getting around to make a few comments on the insights from Penelope Trunk of Brazen Careerist, and David Brooks of the New York Times from my Define Who You Are For Yourself Before Defining For Others post.

Starting with Mr. Brooks and his article the The Odyssey Years, I have to point out that the hero of Homer's Odyssey is Odysseus aka Ulysses was an older family man who held a senior management position and ust finished a successful career in a foreign market where he was particularly noted for his mētis, or "cunning intelligence", especially in terms of market penetration. His detour back home was a result of bad market conditions and public relations issues with the firm of Mt. Olympus Inc. He is not Generation X or Y, Jones at best. Of course my perspective is slanted as I would be far more interested in the other new category Mr. Brooks raises active retirement.

As far as Ms. Trunk goes, I am in basic agreement with what she said and have been. What I found more interesting was a later post by her.

Baby boomers are being forced out, in a non-disruptive way

And this is the exact same way that generation Y is telling baby boomers to get out of their way at work. Gen Y plays by the rules, meets expectations, and in the same step, pulls the rug out from under the people with power. How? By refusing to pay dues, by customizing their own career paths instead of lusting after a promotion, and by job hopping when learning curves get flat.

When USA Today wrote “Gen Y has already made its mark” the story was about entrepreneurship - Gen Y is ambitious, driven, and success-oriented, and since hierarchical structures of corporate life allow for so little mobility, young people are turning to entrepreneurship and are starting businesses at a blistering rate not seen among young people earlier.

This is not exactly the Civil Rights movement or grunge music. But Gen Y doesn’t need to rebel because, as I wrote in Time magazine, young people are already in the driver’s seat at the workplace. They can work within the established lines of business to get what they want, but they get it faster than we expect.

All of what she writes above and to what it links to actually sounds pretty good to me. So is it possible to make it work for me. Her latest post as of this writing gives me some guideposts.

Do you think you’re a strategist? You’re probably wrong.

I am not going to say I am a strategist but I did take the test and came out INTJ. My B.A. was in psychology with an emphasis on research cognition and memory so that fits. That and the fact that I am getting into this Web 2.0 stuff also seems to fit.

I once chided Mr. Brooks in this weblog for being in the "I for one welcome our new alien masters" club. Maybe I need to ask where to sign up for membership.