Perspectives

Daily Reads:

More podcast listening today – Dr Marianne Roux on Leadership Fit for the Future of Work on a podcast I’ve just started to listen called Phronesis. I’m not sure how to feel/think about this yet, but there’s an episode with Dr. Margaret Wheatley that I’m keen to listen to.

Matt Abrahams on Lenny’s podcast on "How To Speak More Confidently and Persuasively"

QOTD:

I am only one, But still I am one.
I cannot do everything, But still I can do something;
And because I cannot do everything,
I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.
-Edward Everett Hale, author (3 Apr 1822-1909)

Music:

Willie Nelson: It Gets Easier

Daily Reads:

I’ve just finished listening to James Altucher in conversation with Gladys McGarey on "Discovering Life, Love, and Laughter". Dr. McGarey is 103 years old, and this was refreshing on so many levels, not least of which was the perspective of someone who’s lived a long life.

The other podcast that I have listened to today was Hidden Brain’s special tribute to the wonderful Daniel Kahneman who passed away on 27 March 2024.

QOTD:

Make no judgments where you have no compassion.
-Anne McCaffrey, writer

Music:

Steve Goodman, concert at the Capitol Theater, 1976

Daily Reads:

Helmets have always been a good idea 😃

John Donohue – the first three minutes of this talk at Greenbelt send shivers up my spine

Tracy Kidder features a young man from Burundi – "Strength in what remains". Here is Deo doing a Talk at Google

Tallis Scholars – Allegri: Miserere

Ewan McIntosh Stop thinking about what you want and start thinking about "Who you are now, and where do you want to be"

QOTD:

[!quote] Howard Zinn, Historian
“To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. Human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.

What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives.

If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places — and there are so many — where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.

And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”

Music:

Tallis Scholars perform the Allegri: Miserere. Divine!
Backstory, from a comment on the video: _this composition was banned from being published and that choral groups passed the score to the next group to perform. Mozart, when an early teenager, heard a performance within the Sistine Chapel. He went back to his lodging and wrote it down from memory, all 12+ minutes for all singers!! He went back to another performance in the Sistine later that week and found, "no adjustments needed"!! This major church in Rome was built based on a dream by an early pope who had a dream that an angel spoke "Build a church where it will snow tomorrow".! Well this was early August in Rome where snow is unknown in August!! Well it did and this church was built in the late 400’s AD!! _

Daily Reads:

Ray Suarez: It’s a long way down a sobering read about ageism in the workplace.

Ed Brenegar: When the Right Answer is the Wrong One

🧈 Seriously – there’s an emoji for butter!

Sketchplanations: Vitamins and painkillers

Driving opportunities for women in Bogota, pun intended

Bob Ewing’s tribute to Daniel Kahnemann

Charles Duhigg in conversation with McKinsey on supercommunicators

Jurgen Geuter Smashing Frames: Like Deja-vu but worse

QOTD:

"Figure out what you’re good at without trying, then try."
-Isabel, author

Daily Reads:

Richard Merrick strikes again! This time tackling something that I’m working with directly – the GROW model

_But what if we looked at it backwards; what if we used the W.O.R.G model instead this morning?
Will -What is it that the quiet voice, which has not and will not give up on you no matter how many times you ignore it, is asking of you this morning? What might you contribute in your astonishingly brief time here? What is it that your spirit, your soul, or other embodiment of choice is calling out for?
Options—What could you do today that will move you in the direction that voice is asking of you? What if there were no rules, and your coach lent you their officially issued magic wand to remove impediments to exercising your abilities and talent?
Reality – Back to the real world. What are the constraints that are stopping you? How many of them are real, and how many are just convenient? How might you harness them? Which are you going to take on?
Goal—OK. Now, let’s talk about your goal—not the “performance monkey” one, the one that matters to you, not to HR, your line manager, or your shareholders. I can guarantee that pursuing that goal will be inefficient, hard, time-consuming, and one hundred per cent human.
And it will matter.

Ness Labs: We got Ikigai all wrong
Instead of pursuing a grand life purpose, optimize for wanting to wake up in the morning. Live a life of curiosity and connection. Trust that success will be a byproduct of the meaning you find in daily experiences.

Carlota Perez: A long delayed golden age (from June 2022) makes the case as to why it’s taken so long for the "installation period" for ICT last so long, unlike previous revolutions.

Who knew tying shoelaces could be fun? The Double Helix Lacing Tutorial by Prof Shoelace

[!quote] Ideas
Ideas rot if you don’t do something with them. Don’t hoard them. Blog them or otherwise tell people.
-Ed Dumbill

[!quote] What Matters..
What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.
-Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Interconnected: Who will build new search engines for new personal AI agents? A scary promising new world awaits.

Ewan McIntosh: Avoid launching your next big idea. At all costs. When you know who you’re talking to, their needs and desires, it suddenly becomes quite simple to communicate clearly with them.

Benedict Evans: The Problem of AI Ethics, and laws about AI

I’d never heard of nor read this story by Kurt Vonnegut: Harrison Beregeron

It’s been a while since I’ve shared anything as worth reading. It’s simply because I’ve not read anything, let alone anything worth sharing. My 120 day series of projects are going, well, well 😊

I probably should share some of the fun stories from my bus driving experiment – like the time I had a busload of kindergarten students believe they were being kidnapped, or getting myself stuck in a roundabout with no room to move in a 12.5m box. There’s a long list of now-fun-but-not-when-I-went-through-the-experience stories I will need to compile in due course, but not just yet.

The last couple of days though I’ve gotten back to my NetNewsWire reader, and started to read/skim through posts that caught my attention. Here’s a small smattering of them, in no particular order.

Daily Reads:

Chuck Carroll: When People Asked If I Was ‘Okay’ on the slow and deliberate process of giving up his social media accounts.

Seth Godin has an idea about how AI ought to answer questions that it is not confident in the answer with "I’m not sure, do you want me to guess?"

Some journalists/writers take angles to covering a story that takes your breath away. This one byJimmy Breslin on a gravedigger is one such.

QOTD:

Daily Reads:

An article I came during the Lifeline training I’m currently also doing. Strengths based intervention

QOTD:

A hungry man is not a free man.
– Adlai Stevenson II

Music:

This morning as I was driving over the Harbour Bridge, Gordon Lightfoot’s Early Morning Rain was playing in my head, while the early morning rain poured down. This is a beautiful version by Foxes & Fossils.

Daily Reads:

18 hour days don’t leave much room for reading. Today was my second week driving buses, and today I made 4 trips over the Sydney Harbour Bridge with two of them with a full load of passengers. I’ll come back to regular reading & sharing in a little while, but until then, here are two that I managed to sneak in today

Carl Barenburg on the value of digital relationship in contrast with physical interactions.

Tracy Durnell: The Patriarchy Embedded in Techno-Think

QOTD:

Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough.
– Franklin D. Roosevelt

There has been no music in the last few days either, which sucks. I’ll be fixing that tomorrow.

Daily Reads:

Absolutely no chance to read in the last couple of days. I’ve been learning how to drive a monster 17 tonne machine, also known as a bus, capable of carrying up to 90 other humans. I’ve learnt to navigate through the wide and insanely narrow streets of Sydney suburbs without destroying life, property or my sanity. It’s an intensely physical job, with response times in the microseconds, as opposed to the at least minutes what I’ve been accustomed to over the last few years. Feedback is instant – either a honk from a fellow road user, a destroyed rear-view mirror, or a damaged bus. The instructors are hard, and the men and women doing this driving are interesting characters on their own.

It’s a project I wanted to do for a while – learn to drive a bus. I’ve got my heavy vehicle license a couple of weeks ago. I’m eligible to drive a variety of heavy vehicles that have a single axle at the back. And as a self-inflicted capstone to this project before deciding to do this part-time, I’ll be driving a bus over the Sydney Harbour Bridge with potentially 90 people on board. I’ve never driven a car through Sydney CBD, so beginning this service from the heart of the city as my first episode driving is both exhilarating, and nerve-wracking. I do have a mentor beside me for the next few weeks until i’m comfortable driving on my own. The days will be at least 15 hours long, given the long commute I have to do to get to the bus depot, with a 4 hour break in between shifts. The wages are near poverty level, and the stories of the people who are on the same cohort as me have been eye-opening. I’ve made a couple of good mates already, and am amazed at the optimism despite the hard, blue-collar work that is bus driving. Huge respect to the craftsmen and craftswomen that are bus drivers, after what I’ve experience in just the last 48 hours.

QOTD:

To bear up under loss, to fight the bitterness of defeat and the weakness of grief, to be victor over anger, to smile when tears are close, to resist evil men and base instincts, to hate hate and to love love, to go on when it would seem good to die, to seek ever after the glory and the dream, to look up with unquenchable faith in something evermore about to be, that is what any man can do, and so be great.
– Zane Grey, author

Music:

The thing I missed the most in the last couple of days? Music, whether making it or listening to it. You can’t listen to music while driving a bus, or use a mobile phone. A great sacrifice to make indeed!
50 Baroque Pieces

Daily Reads:

Psychology Today: How to Decode Emotions from a Text Message. I assumed everyone knows this, but the Lifeline digital crisis volunteer training I’m going through challenges that assumption.

QOTD:

It is my belief that the writer, the free-lance author, should be and must be a critic of the society in which he lives. It is easy enough, and always profitable, to rail away at national enemies beyond the sea, at foreign powers beyond our borders who question the prevailing order. But the moral duty of the free writer is to begin his work at home; to be a critic of his own community, his own country, his own culture. If the writer is unwilling to fill this part, then the writer should abandon pretense and find another line of work: become a shoe repairman, a brain surgeon, a janitor, a cowboy, a nuclear physicist, a bus driver.
– Edward Abbey, naturalist and author

Damn it, why do I see references to bus drivers everywhere lately?  😅

Music:

Mark Knopfler: Ahead of the Game, released a day or so ago.
And I can’t tell you one thing new
About playing for the door
Some of my dreams back there too
With the sawdust on the floor
We’re worn out and weary, all of us
But we know why we came
Banged up and battered like this old bus
Staying just ahead of the game
Ahead of the game