Month: May 2018

Instead of worrying about whether someone will steal your ideas, focus on making ideas worth stealing.

Share your best work, your best insights, freely and generously.

Give credit to everyone around you.

True, authentic generosity won’t go unnoticed forever.

Besides, ideas are cheap. They aren’t worth anything until someone decides to take action.

Act as if the decisions you make today impact the world tomorrow.

Act as if you were a writer or a poet or an expert in your field.

Act as if you had the next seven seconds to decide how to make things better.

How would this posture change the way you made difficult decisions?

Climate Change. The evidence is clear, our atmosphere has cancer resulting in the rise and fall of temperatures and precipitation, droughts and heat waves, ice caps melting, seal levels rising, etc. But first, we have to find a way to reverse the narrative on Climate Change. There are still too many skeptics and too much doubt surrounding the issue. Crony capitalism has played a significant role in this—the people were duped. This is the worst example of short-term profit grabbing in exchange for long-term prosperity. The economic damage, human cost will continue to rise over the century before it gets better. It is time to look in the mirror (looking at you ExxonMobil).

Wealth inequality. The middle class is fading. The world’s eight richest have as much wealth as the bottom half. The rich are getting richer, the poor are staying the same, eliminating the middle class. The same middle class wage in the 1960’s is not paying for the same lifestyle today. It is estimated that by 2030, the top 1% will own 2/3 of the world’s wealth.

From production to consumption. In the 1950’s, people didn’t spend more than they had putting marketers in a pinch. How could they get Americans to spend more money? In comes the Credit Card. The paradox: We buy a car to get to work and we work to pay for a car…around and around we go. In 2016, banks spent over 17 billion dollars in their marketing. We have never seen a product so heavily marketed.

Opium epidemic. One in seven Americans are struggling with some sort of addiction. Only 10% are receiving treatment of any sorts. The economic impact of drug and alcohol misuse and addiction amounts to $442 billion each year.

Pornography. The heroin addict can attend rehab, move out-of-town, start a new life and can mostly stay away from areas where temptations are too great. This is totally different from someone addicted to pornography, where temptation is always one click away. It is difficult to build a life without the internet. It is embedded in our culture.

There are plenty of problems waiting to be solved. We can’t do it alone but maybe we can do it together.

It starts with people like us asking questions like this:

How do we help someone rehabilitate from a life of crime?

What can we do to help generations of families break the cycle of poverty?

Where can I go to help others receive essential resources?

How do we change a culture that doesn’t know how to?

Fight for whatever it is you’re called to do.

On the street I live on, the city decided to tear down over two dozen, beautiful, 80 year old oak trees.

The reason?

Roots were destroying the sidewalk.

What a waste.

Shortcuts are a fast solution to an urgent problem. The problem with shortcuts is that they lead to more shortcuts.

Small, seemingly inconsequential decisions and cost cutting measures don’t look all that bad at first until the Band-Aids begin to peel.

It doesn’t exist.

There are no maps, no step-by-step set of instructions that can help you live the life you deserve.

Instead, follow a compass.

One that points in the direction of what you fear the most.

Oxygen doesn’t seem all that valuable until you can no longer breathe.

And clean water doesn’t seem that important until you can’t find a source.

We take things for granted–all the time.

We think if something is ubiquitous it must not be that important, until it’s scarce again.

(Or worse, we forget that not everyone is born with the same access to essential resources.)

Marketers have done an incredible job to blur these lines, to create urgency.

The industrial world has made stuff cheap. We no longer live in a world of scarce everyday commodities.

What’s scarce in our post-industrial world is leading, leaping, initiating, solving interesting problem, standing up, standing out…

What we need is more people with more guts to make things happen.

A year? A month? A week? A day? An hour?

“I don’t have any good ideas.”

Well, do you have any bad ideas?

In order to have good ideas, you have to start with bad ideas. Lots and lots of bad ideas. Eventually, some good ones will surface.

The problem is, we think an idea has to be perfect in order to present it–that every ‘what if’ scenario needs to be played out.

Ideas don’t start perfect, they become more perfect with input, feedback, testing, measuring and implementing.

Here is the good news: ideas are cheap. Cheaper than ever before. You can have a 3D print, a website, a mock-up done in a couple hours.

Plant seeds and watch which ones will grow. Develop a posture of asking What if?

Forget about perfect ideas. Perfect is the barrier that separates us from deterioration to creativity.

In the Navy, it is tradition for a new captain to walk the deck for several weeks before making any significant changes.

You learn the names of everyone on the crew, examine the ship, understand the daily routines…

Acting as if we know better than everyone else–without making any attempts to walk in someone else’s shoes–does little to enroll the people around us.

It is highly unlikely you will make great change happen on your own. Instead, go together.

Make time to make observations.

Alex Meade is an artist, not a painter.

Painters put paint on a canvas. Often with great detail.

Artist, on the other hand, use emotional labor to make a connection.

The first time Alex painted a human being was when she graduated from college.

She didn’t have any formal training. She didn’t spend years copying the pictures of other greats. She didn’t even use a canvas.

Instead, she took a chance. With one foot out the door for Capitol Hill, she changed her plans:

She followed the work, not knowing what was going to happen next.

Could Alex bring joy and meaning to her live and those around her behind a desk in government work?

Perhaps. But I suspect we would have never heard of her if she did. I don’t think her impact would have been as wide-spread.

Now, her contributions inspire us to challenge the status-quo.

Anyone could have decided to put paint on a human, it was right there all along. But no one had. And she did what only she could.

180 degree turns are not easy. Sometimes the opportunity presented isn’t the path we intended.

It takes guts to turn around, to admit we were wrong, to venture into the unknown…can you?

[The field for becoming a professional painter (or an office manager or a coder…) is shrinking. The good news is that the world is in short supply of artists–those who are willing to bridge the gap of how things are and what could be.]

Deviating from a fixed course isn’t easy but it’s better than spending too much time calling mediocrity greatness.

Change is an inevitable force. In nature, only the ones that choose to evolve will be the ones that survive. We also see it in our economy and culture.

The music industry changed. Almost overnight, music became free. And while the record companies were busy insisting the world stay the same, they marched into a slow death. Same could be said about Blockbuster and Toys “R” Us.

You can’t pretend forever. Delaying difficult decisions don’t make them go away.

[Click here if you would like to throw your money away to save Toys “R” Us. I guess it’s easier to ask for someone else to open up their wallet then it is to have the executive team open up theirs. The biggest toy store in the world is gone and it isn’t coming back. Unfortunately, it is working people that will pay the price. Change is hard. Closing doors is even harder.]