The feels!
Month: January 2021
Friendships at work
I’m grateful that I have colleagues who care enough to notice that I’m not my usual self. A short text this evening from one helped put my mind back at ease. I’m really blessed with the friendships I have at work.
Thanks Rod 🙂
I didn’t know.
Three little words.
A valid excuse.
Or a possibility to grow into.
I didn’t know…
I cared enough to set that right.
And now I know!
PS: this started off because I didn’t know both Joe Biden & Amanda Gorman have a speech impediment. To get up on stage in front of people is hard for most, but to do it when you have a speech impediment, & still nail it, is inspiring.
[Music]: Catherine Ashcroft & Maurice Dickson (Mochara)
Thanks to my friend Michael who shared this with me. Uilleann pipes are a mean set of pipes in the hands of someone who’s put in the work!
To Read:
I seek out book recommendations -and don’t have a good system of keeping on top of them yet. At least here I can find them 🙂
[Link]: Controlling your destiny
Venture capitalist Fred Wilson has been blogging since September 2003. He feels strongly about doing it on his own blog, rather than on platforms that make the writing & sharing “convenient”. I concur.
they are controlled by someone else. You can get kicked off. And when you get kicked off, you lose all of your followers, all of your content. Gone.
I’m not down for that.
[Link]: Libraries, in the US, are going fine-free
This is awesome – and particularly so for the benefits it has to society at large.
fines are as much a social justice issue as a simple economic one. Library use fosters reading, and reading and literacy leads to better health outcomes. It’s a win-win for the whole community.
[Quote of the Day]: On Useful Redundancy
Sometimes, we assume that the person we’re engaging with knows exactly what we mean and want to express. But that assumption is often wrong, and a little redundancy can go a long way. – Seth Godin
Read the post here
Sunday Markets Inspiration
I took my young friends & my kids to a Sunday market yesterday.
I had been talking the night before about unit costs & contribution margins in our daily finance basics lessons, & thought rather than merely explain the arithmetic behind it, I could find someone – perhaps someone selling coffee – to show them a practical view of what it all meant. Oh, by the way, they’d also taken up my challenge to earn $100 by selling something, & before the end of January – that is, in less than a week. It’s an unimaginable number when you don’t know how to do it.
It was a ridiculously hot summer’s day. The mercury had already hit 38C by 930 am when we got there. We walked around a fair bit, observing the enterprising folks at the markets selling their wares. People have time to talk at these markets, not merely nod at each other. Conversations can go in wonderful directions but that’s a story for another day.
We stopped at a pop-up cane juice shop. There were three young people
busy working, one at the counter, the other churning out cane juice, while the third was doing everything else necessary. We placed our order, & while we waited, we got talking. It turned out to be an illuminating conversation: this was their side hustle, a way to keep their creative juices – pun intended – flowing. They were both professionals, having “good day jobs” and investing their time building their business over the weekend. When they found out the reason we were asking them all those questions, they were genuinely interested: they gave my young friends some great ideas, urging them to try their hand out at doing something entrepreneurial well before they found their “day jobs”. When we got to their home, by the time the parents had done cooking lunch, the kids had estimated the “unit costs” & “contribution margins” of the juice venture pretty quickly.
Before the day’s end, my young friends had listed a few of their wares on Facebook Marketplace – “we have almost fixed costs, & very low variable costs, so we can definitely earn our target, maybe even more!!” Their excitement is palpable. Whether they reach their $100 goal before the end of January doesn’t matter. That they can see how this might work, that they can use their wits to create & offer value matters an incredible lot.
Inspiration can come from anywhere, even at a Sunday market.
Oh, & the lime infused cane juice was heavenly!
[Quote] Loving your job
A little over ten years ago, my father had an accident and it put him into a coma that lasted a month. He was intubated, and put in a ward where they parked people who were in various stages of vegetativeness. I spent a lot of time there, reading to him, watching out for him, and I got to know various people on staff in the hospital. I had thought these were some of the worst jobs in the world, but I got an impression that it was quite the opposite, so I checked it out, and they all said they loved their jobs. I had plenty of time to think, and I realized that in many jobs, esp the ones I have done, the way you help people can be kind of abstract, hard to visualize. But people who care for others as their job, see the result of their work every day, all the time.