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Month: September 2009

Pithy comments from Social Media Convention, Oxford University, Session 1

Published September 18, 2009 by Jo Jordan

Social Media Convention, Oxford Institute, #oxsmc09

From weblogs to Twitter: how did we get where we are today and what are the main impacts to date?

Panelists:

Dave Sifry, Technorati @dsifry

Bill Thompson, BBC @billt

Bill Dutton, Oxford University @billdutton

Nigel Shadbolt, University of Southampton @nigel_shadbolt

Chair: Kathryn Corrick @kcorrick

Although the dates of the earliest ‘weblog’ are a matter of some debate, the majority of their growth in popularity has arisen over the past ten years. What are the most important milestones in that process of evolution, and what are the factors that have shaped the successes and limitations of social media? Why (if at all) should we expect them to have an inherently democratising or egalitarian effect? Each speaker will be asked to conclude by identifying the most significant ways in which they think that blogs and social media have had any social, political or economic impact.
Dave Sifry

1. Web as library vs web as conversation.  What are people saying about me? [Technical issues].

Question from chair: real-time search?

Search interfaces vs filter interfaces [*]

Bill Thompson.

2.  Social media is not yet taken-for-granted but what has changed is that “I am no longer in charge”.  Permission is no longer need.  The internet is a facilitating service.  A new literacy is developing.  Innovation is possible because we have removed the requirement to ask.  We are waiting for the last 5bn to join the 1bn online.

Bill Dutton

3.  Constant reinvention of the internet day-to-day but it has always been social.  Email is the core application: social and under your control. 98% of people online go their to use email.  2007 17% of Britons over the age of 14 used a social network.  49% today. 22% [?] have created a blog and younger people are the most likely to have done so.  Technology reconfigures how we communicate with people.  Reinforce existing social networks.  But we also meet new people.  35% of internet users have met someone on line that they haven’t met before and many have gone on to meet them in person.

20% of newly married couples met their spouse on line.

Social networks are competing with search engines for referrals.  [?4 sources : adverts, real, social network, search ?]

Nigel Shadbolt

4.  Thirty years ago, it was easy to have a sense of overview of the internet.  The web demonstrates the unreasonable effectiveness of data.  When we have scale, remarkable emergent things happen.

AI has become augmented intelligence.

Semantic web:  infrastructure that is document-centre to something that gets behind into the data.

Why can’t we anticipate this stuff?  Why are we disarmed by what emerges.  See “Websites”.  Cannot understand cause and direction.  Why did blogs take off?  Social interaction scale allows things to take off.  Self-publication has always been there but pings and trackbacks seem to underly take off of blogs.

Why are we mopping up descriptively rather than anticipating what is to come?

Social media have an exquisite balance between enough features and sufficient?  How is this designed?  Or is it simply, Darwinian “try and discard”?

Social media activity in China varies from here [? details].

How do large scale structures like Wikipedia become stable? And will they pay for increasing amounts of oversite?

Or do societal structures emerge anyway?  Does the web support extremism? Or do people get pushed into the most influential part of the space?  Battle for our attention.

Kathryn Corrick

5.  Web is social.  Got more exciting as it got cheaper.  Reinvention and continuity. Emerging and augmented intelligence.  Problems:  How do we find out what is interesting?  How do we find out what is interesting in China and Africa?

Questions

6.  BT (non-twitterer):  Chinese urls will be come available.  Do we need to learn Chinese?  Bill Thompson:  the internet will translate?  The real issue will be our cultural expectations about what is interesting and what we will pay for.

Nigel Shadbolt:  Massive areas of the internet not available to us.  Spanish network is different.  “Bido” the Chinese search engine searchs material that Google doesn’t cover and includes micro-blogging.  We have good translation because stats does a fairly good job of translating.  And how will we communicate with people who are illiterate.

Kathryn Corrick: I only get English results.  Dave Sifry: you need to ask for the languages you want.  Enormous corpus of data has [trumped] rules.  .  .  .  Liberating and dangerous at the same time.  Did WoW expect to create a virtual market in China and India?  Will we encourage open access to tis information?  Democratizing and centralizing.  Globalizing and encouraging xenophobia.  Will the Chinese start building their own protocols?  What will happen to the openness we take for granted.

Questions

7.  ?? : Facebook compresses the space for first names.  Bill Dutton: Net English – unintended consequences.  Multiple identities.  Nicknames.

Bill Thompson:   Having one name is a relatively recent phenomenon.  Imperfections in the tools create serendipty.  Ideas are not linked because they are similar but becuase of deeper conceptual matching.

Nigel Shadbolt:  Structure and typology.  Condensed areas with weak links between.  Unanticipated arrivals in other places.

Dave Sifry: .  . . we don’t like to be challenged.  How easy or difficult is it to get attention to a  meaningful conversation? How can someone with quality ideas become heard without going through money and capital?

KathrynCorrick:  Doesn’t fragmentation make it difficult?

Dave Sifry:  Not sure that is a problem.  The larger issue is trust.  No singular person to [referencing Walter Cronkite].  Don’t have the same level of massive singular change – is that a bad thing.  We will find out from our friends.

Kathryn Corrick: e.g., Iran, difficult to verify.

William Dutton:  Remind everyone that TV/newspapers/mass media still exists.  More flexibility.  Institutional networks.  Individuals – news platforms on line.  Another independent source of accountability.  Not replacing mass media yet.

Bill Thompson:  Not sure I agree.  Something happening underneath.  Trust grows and is broken quickly.  Mass media challenged, checked and undermined.  Indefensible practices.  Is corrosive rather than additive?

Question

??  Can we anticipate stuff better – raise quality of thinking.  Is concept broad enough?  Ppl don’t use tools like ping back etc.  Contemporary social phenomenon of self-expression.  I tweet therefore I am. IS this @Nico_Macdonald.  I find people who agree with what I say [I find people who can explain what I am interested in!] .  Politics is driving the web not the technology.  Is webscience broad enough in its engagement with societ?

Nigel Shadbolt:  Exteme nich opinion get marginalized.  Conversation about intentions drives people to consensual . . . Not a union of everything but more than an intersection – key areas that acccount for what we see.  Small differences in technology influence social interaction and can be invisible to ordinary user.

William Dutton:  Continuity and change.  A few years ago a few experts . . .  internt more central across all sectors and users reinventing the web as dramatically as computer scientists.  Cannot understand the internet except interdisciplinarily ..”{?]

Question

@inkuna Free at point of use.  Does panel think #So.ME revolution spinning into public policy?  e.g. US health care debate.  Is free-at-point-of use (F) becoming the model?

KC: wonder whether anything

Dave Sifry: How related to US healthcare debate?  . . ..  Ah ……..I see!  Never really thought about it in those terms.  Gut . . . not really.  . . . Someone has got to pay . .  for sustainable business that lives beyond you.  In media around for a long time . . . tradeoffs . . . get users then figure out how to monetize . .  . interesting . .

Bill Thompson:  I destroyed the newspaper industry.  I am sorry.  It was a mistake.   . . Guardian  . . . 15 years  later paywalls are futile.  One more nail in the coffin.  If payments had been required earlier, it might have been different.  Businesses changing so fast maybe only investors are concerned.

William Dutton:  If you charge by use on internet, invisible. BBC online doing well. Advertising doing well – distribution of revenue is the issue.

Question

Brian Kelly:   71 people using #oxsmc09.  The bankchannel is no longer private because on screen in front of us.  We know we are successul if we get spam – e.g., taxis asking us if we want a taxi at end.  Are we seeing commercialization of social media?

Kathryn Corrick:  Until technology gets ubiquitous, it doens’t get interesting.

Question

Shane ?:

KC: Brave new world.

Nigel Shadbolt:  Ecology of applications, information types and needs – much richer shape than used to –  typical with [enriching] technologies.  .  Surprising ways that twitter is being appropriated.

Issue is trust -trust in media, content, services “someon not inspecting our packets”[?]

KC?

William Dutton: People who use internet trust it more than authorities.  Trust is based on experience.  More educated more skeptical but trust dependent on experience.

Bill Thompson:  Dream some more dreams.

Dave Sifry:  Clay Shirky – it is not social media if you can’t spam it.

Before: high signal to noise ratio.  The openness of a hashtag # is that it invites spam.

SEO – how to get traffic – have more interesting material.

Is it OK for a taxi cab to enter the twitter stream.  What are acceptable social mores?

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Oxford Social Media Convention

Published September 17, 2009 by Jo Jordan

Oxford Internet Institute is hosting Social Media Convention 2009 later today:  Assessing the evolution, impact and potential of social media.

It is rather interesting when a conversational medium is subjected to academic scrutiny :  the ‘about’ treatment.

I hope to be going over to the meeting at Said Business School and to post brief summaries of the talks as they happen (from 10:30 GMT onwards).

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Reality is broken. Games are great. What do you dislike about games?

Published September 17, 2009 by Jo Jordan

Game designers are better at psychology than psychologists

Jane McGonigal, games designer extraordinaire, has long pointed out that games are better designed than most jobs.   I agree with her, but oddly I still prefer work.

Nonetheless, agreeing that games designers make better use of work psychology than psychologists do, I’ve been deliberately playing games from beginning to end.

Orientation that gives control back to the audience

Getting into games, the autonomy dimension of Ryan & Deci’s ARC model is clear.  We need to be be able to see what to do at glance. We shouldn’t need elaborate instructions or encouragement.

Something for the audience to get their teeth into

I am stepping through the levels quite doggedly.  That should be the competence dimension of Ryan & Dec’s model.  In truth, games are quite fun while I am figuring out the rules – or when I think I can push myself to a new level.  But they also get boring quickly.  Dogged is the feeling I have!

A way for us to play together

I think I don’t use the social aspects of games sufficiently. Social or relationships, is the third component of Ryan & Deci’s ARC model.

I am probably not very sociable because my motives for playing games aren’t social.  But, equally, I probably get bored quickly because I am not being sociable.

Bringing our own rules to the game

What has interested me more has been the way my preconceptions affect my game play

In a game in which I played the role of explorer in Africa, it took me a long while to realize that I could deliberately kill people and even longer to do it.

In Mafia Wars running on Facebook, I am yet to start a fight. I am yet to invest in armor.  I only do jobs against an anonymous enemy.  When someone attacks me, I just clean up and take out some more insurance.

In Farmeville, I would like to share my tractor.

Does social mean more than sending gifts and energy bonuses? Are our ‘identities’ and ‘values’ also important to us?

Sometimes it is useful to have our values challenged.  Sometimes it is useful to see that we impose rules that other people don’t care about.

Then we have a choice.  Do we want to play by those rules?  Maybe we do.

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Do your customers love the way your professionals work with each other?

Published September 16, 2009 by Jo Jordan

The play, the actors, an ensemble, the essence, the audience

Today, I heard James Roose-Evans describe how he directs a play.

And I thought about leading groups of professionals when each brings their own expertise.

It is so different from working with people who hope to fill our shoes one day.  We have such inadequate language to describe how something magical and intangible but definitely palpable and recognizable comes out of our interaction and is so pleasing to our customers.

What do you think?

“I love working with actors. What is exciting, at the first day of rehearsal, when you have a whole group of actors from different backgrounds and different expectations and techniques and the director’s task is to weave them all into an ensemble in order to convey the essence of the play and share it with the audience. It is a very exciting journey that a director makes with the actors.”

Transcribed from BBC Radio 4, Wednesday 16 September, 2009.

“James Roose-Evans founded Hampstead Theatre 50 years ago. He has written 17 books, including the bestselling Inner Journey: Outer Journey and Experimental Theatre and has directed many plays, including the award-winning 84 Charing Cross Road. He is a non-stipendiary Anglican priest, founded the Bleddfa Centre for Creative Spirit and continues to lead meditation classes. His autobiography, Opening Doors and Windows: A Memoir in Four Acts is pubished [sic] by The History Press.

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Have a 4-Hour Workweek just like Tim Ferris

Published September 16, 2009 by Jo Jordan

This post is a little presumptuous.   I have never met Tim Ferris, but like most people who spend a lot of time with computers, I have read his blog and watched some of his talks.   I want a 4-Hour Workweek too!

So what does Tim Ferris do?

As a trouper in first year lecture halls, you must forgive my penchant for turning everything into a 3 part list.

These are my thoughts.

1.   Tim’s sells “action art”

Tim decides to learn the tango, and wins the world championships.   He wants to gain muscle and he is The Incredible Hulk in weeks.  He learns to swim as an adult and is winning races in no time.

Whatever Tim does is breath-takingly audacious and gob-smackingly successful.

2.   Tim doesn’t just make art.  He packages it for sale through his blog & public speaking.

His big sale, of course, is his book, The 4-Hour Workweek.

3.  Tim also does his own marketing and he is his own agent

Tim has an active blog. He watches his numbers. And he manages the office for the “Tim Ferris” enterprise.

What Tim doesn’t do – is his own accountancy or his back-office operations.  He outsources the clerical work of his business to offshore firms offering clerical services.

What is Tim’s business model ?

1.  Tim centres his business on what he loves to do, what he does well, and on what we love him to do.

2.  Tim takes his work directly to the marketplace.

3.  Tim took the initiative to create a business structure around himself and does a fair share of the skilled and expensive management work himself.

What can you and I copy?

  • Do what we love, do what we do well and do what the world loves us to do.
  • Finish the task and go out to meet our audience.
  • Take the initiative and create and run the business we need to support the work we want to do.

Are you in a hurry?

Oh, we usually are!

So much so, we scamper over the first question.  Then we freeze in fright as soon as we think of selling our work for money.  And we never get round to thinking about business processes, let alone take charge of them.

Can I persuade you to spend 10 minutes trying?

Grab your favouite beverage, a pen and an old envelope!

1.  Of all things you do, what brings you that sense of deep pleasure of a job you know you do so well? Write down three things in 30 seconds!

2.  Done that? Now turn the envelope over and draw your value chain. On the left, put the raw material that you work with, draw a line across the page, and jot down all things you need to turn that raw material into whatever it is you make.

You can make a fish bone diagram with fish bones coming into a spine. My fish bones included headings like “access”, “willing people” “time”, “credibility” – all the deal breakers if I don’t get them right.

3.  Now you have your fish. On the tail at the left is your raw material. You probably have five or so bones coming in from either side. And the head to the right is the finished work.

Let’s finish off.

Draw some more lines (3 to 5) parallel to your fish’s spine. Label each line with things that need to happen for you get the resources you need.

It is quite likely that each of these represents a learning curve for you.  Which one’s can you get help with, and which one’s will you take responsibility for?

Do a quick cross-check that you have covered all the functions.

CEO: You

Operations: The work you love

Marketing: How you build connections

Sales: How you close deals

Buying: The source of critical physical resources and knowledge

Technical: Any equipment and technical skills you need

Accounting: Keeping count and keeping the taxman happy

HR: You

One more business model for a 4-Hour Workweek done-and-dusted!

Does this work for you? Did it take you closer to an action plan?

Do you feel you could surround yourself with the business you love?

Can you list what you need to learn to do and cheerfully put your learning goals in order?

Can you identify what you need to learn and throw the questions at Google?

I hope so. I made progress once I could get myself to pick up the envelope and the pen.

Apologies, Tim. I don’t know how much I’ve distorted your business but this is what I learned from you. So thanks.

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How much lifestyle are you earning?

Published September 16, 2009 by Jo Jordan

I am about to depress you.  So grab a cup of coffee, or your favorite beverage, and put your feet up.  And put your arithmetic head on.  I am about to turn numbers upside down and talking some shocking truths about how hard you have worked for that cup of coffee and how much you have to be paid to earn a lifestyle of luxury.

Or to be mischeivious, how much we have been paying some very well paid people for having lunch and going to sleep.

Thought Experiment 1: You are worth $1 or GBP1 or Euro1 per second. Count 1 potato, 2 potato, 3 potato. Click, click, click.  Count it out like a metronome. Click, click, click.

Each click is a dollar coming in.  Not a lot, is it?   Barely pays for the coffee you are drinking, the sofa you are sitting on, your broadband connection.

Actually, it is is $30 million a year.

I put it on a graph for you. You might want to check my arithmetic again. I’ve done the calculation several times but I am getting old and I’ve begun to make mistakes with numbers.

Compare with $1 per sec

Thought Experiment 2: Over the shock? Well, lets count 30 seconds. 30 potatoes – wow, that takes a long time.

Wait – patiently. $1 arrives.

Count another 30 seconds, another $1 arrives.   $2 dollars per minute.

Coffee is beginning to seem really expensive.

How much is that? $15 million, of course.

No, $1 million a year.

You have to divide by 30 not 2. You are now earning 1/30 of the person earning $1 every second or $30m a year.  Shock?  That long wait is $1m a year.

Compare with $1 per 30 secs

And look again.  The person earning $1 per minute, every 60 potatoes, is earning half what you are earning (500K).

Thought Experiment 3: Now imagine earning $1 every 15 minutes.  I am not going to ask you to count to 900 potatoes.  It will feel an age.  Certainly long enough to linger over your coffee and check your mail.  $1 by the time you have finished.  That’s all.

That 35K a year.  A respectable salary in England.

Compare with $1 per 15 mins

Thought Experiment 4:  And now imagine $1 per hour.  What do you do with $1?  Buy a packet of crisps?  That’s less than 9K a year.

Compare with $1 per Hr

Thought Experiment 5: And finally let’s look at the minimum wage.  75c an hour.  Around $6500 a year.  Green line at the top. Less than a litre of milk.  Half a loaf of bread.

Still it is better than $1 day which is the green line second from the bottom.

The red line underneath that is $1 per month.

Compare with 75c per hr

Seeing the other picture?

You are probably feeling a little muddled.  Good.  It’s good to turn numbers upside-down and inside-out and get another perspective.  So what have I done, here?

  • I’ve reminded you that employers quote wages by the hour because accountants use that number to do their costing.  This number doesn’t concern you.  What concerns you is the total per year (after taxes) and either the amount per second or the time it takes you to earn $1 – which is what I’ve shown you.  That’s the lifestyle you’ve earned.  Total after taxes divided by (365 days x 24 hours x 60 minutes x 60 seconds).  At a dollar per second that comes to over 30m a year.
  • I’ve shown you how the gap between pay rates gets very big, very fast.   The way pay rates are quoted encourages us to make mistakes.  $1 per 30 seconds and we think half-a-minute and think we have half-the-lifestyle, when actually, we have 1/60 the lifestyle, or 1/60 the lifestyle, or 1/360 the lifestyle.

Forget about costs to your employer.  Let them run their own business.

You should be concentrating on the lifestyle you earn.

Ask: What do I earn per second because I am alive every second of the day not just the time I spend making money for other people.

Every second of the day.

Now tell me what you earn per second and how you intend to drive that up!

P.S.  If you want to play with the numbers or the graph, it is on Chartle.

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WANTED: Advice of someone who has made friends with their alarm clock

Published September 15, 2009 by Jo Jordan

A typical digital 12-hour alarm clock showing ...
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Is there anyone out there who is recovering from a bad relationship with their alarm clock?

I don’t sleep through them.  I don’t hit the snooze button over and over again.

But if I have set an alarm clock .  .  .

  • I cannot go to sleep
  • I wake up during the night
  • I wake up before the alarm clock.

I do so hate been rudely awoken.

Does anyone have any tips for trusting alarm clocks?

Winter is coming and how does one know the time at this latitude without one?

P.S. I grew up in the tropics.  The sun came up predictably between 05:30 and 06:30 all year round.  It was no problem to be up and at work by 07:00.   I really don’t know how to do this!

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Do you make any of these mistakes of job design and sabotage your organization?

Published September 14, 2009 by Jo Jordan

Classical ideal feedback model. The feedback i...
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I’ve just been reading a post from an ambulance driver (woops, they don’t like that title).

It is a privilege, because I might not otherwise have the chance to observe the nuances of their job, and even if I did, to learn the same might take hours of interviews and hours of rewriting.

So we are lucky to have this blog.  It also teaches lessons for the general practice of job design – which it did today.

Briefly, feedback is a key idea in job design. Yet, it gets forgotten for procedures and targets.

This is what is critical.  For every task anyone does, they must get feedback on how well they have done before they begin that task again.

Experts often get feedback as they move from one part of a large task to another.  That’s what makes them expert.  The ability to detect feedback that will mean nothing to anyone else.

But at some point a task is handed over to someone else. When and how do they get feedback on how well their work fitted into the next process down the line?

If they don’t get feedback, what sense are the supposed to make of their work?   What sense will they make of their work?  And what of evidence-based practice, if the people doing the work do not get ‘knowledge of results’ before they start the same task again?

This is the story

The ambulance man and his colleague raced a severely dehydrated child to hospital rather than attempt to re-hydrate the child themselves. They drop off the child, but hear nothing more about what happened next.

There appears to be no mechanism to tell them if their decision was correct and whether equally trained people would have made the same decision.

The blog post talks about the decision points in the job.  It is worth reading in the original for the pattern of thinking that is typical in skilled people.  We are constantly on the look out for this thinking to inform our understanding of the information that experts use and need.   And indeed, who is an expert and who is not.

You will also see the confusion and overload that’s caused by not getting feedback quickly.

So what can the organization do to provide adequate feedback?

I don’t know what the NHS does. I’ve never worked with the NHS in a professional capacity and I don’t know any work psychologist who has.

What I would expect to be happening is a regular psychological audit of each and every job to look out for situations like this.

We want to know that in each and every situation, a skilled and experienced worker is able to set a goal, lay out a plan, and obtain feedback before they begin that task again.

Why might that feedback not be available?

1.  The task is handed over, and for some reason, the feedback loop is not in place.  It might have gone AWOL (in which case alert the line managers and check that they put it back).   It might never have existed (in which case which psychologist slipped up).  The job might have drifted (in which case re-analyse it and adjust the feedback system).

2.  There is one other scenario that is more tricky.  Managers have been known to hijack feedback because making people wait for information makes them feel powerful (and sometimes allows them to distort what is said).   An organization has to come down on such practices like the proverbial ‘ton of bricks.’   Withholding information causes stress and overload, delays learning, and potentially causes accidents, which in an organization, like the NHS, may lead to loss of life.   If managers are intercepting feedback, that has to be reversed.   In a hierarchical organization, usually we have one meeting with the manager concerned, and if that does not produce immediate redress, we have an urgent meeting with his or her manager.

Who guards the guards, so to speak?

The system does not stop with psychologists keeping jobs properly balanced.    The file on the job (not the person – the job) should have the internal auditor’s signature on it confirming they have checked that the psychological audits are taking place and are being conducted properly.

And there should be another file with copies of the report that the internal auditors routinely send to the Chief Psychologist to report on the quality of the psychological audits.

A lot of work?

Organizations are a lot of work.  That’s why we have to consider whether we want one at all.  But once we have one, we have to run them properly and ‘prevent rather than cure’.  Good systems reduce crises, problems and accidents.

I don’t know what the NHS does exactly but as the largest employer in the world, I imagine they have sophisticated management systems in place.  Feedback failures are one of the many things that ‘staff managers’ count, monitor and resolve.

Does anyone know how the NHS, or other large British employers, manage their feedback systems?

For further reading on the 3 tier system of

  • Doing
  • Directing
  • Reviewing

.

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3 secrets about goal clarity that I didn’t know I knew

Published September 14, 2009 by Jo Jordan

Front-loading washer machine.
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I’ll be the last person so say that setting goals is easy – my life over the last 10 years has been as tumultuous as the life of a sock in a half-empty washing machine.

When we have to take a major turn in life – when we leave school, when we change career midstream, when we move countries – it is easy to feel utterly disoriented.

But it is undeniable that the day we stop dithering, the day we stop saying “I could do this, or I could do that”, when the humming and hawing ends, we lurch forward, taking ourselves, most of all, by surprise.

So how do we get from confusion to this state of goal clarity?

Shame – bad news – by hard work.

But take heart from my story of setting goals which dovetails oddly with positive psychology.

A long time ago, in my university lecturing days, in more stable and optimistic times, I was asked by a major multinational, whom you all make profitable on a regular basis, to be on a panel interviewing students for scholarships.

The company executive, who chaired the panel, asked every applicant the same question: what are the three things that you want out of life?

After the 10th candidate or so, I answered the question for myself:

  • I like to achieve.
  • I like to belong to something bigger than myself.
  • I like to have some comfort and style but I will sacrifice this for the other two.

So, I was somewhat amazed, some twenty years later, when my life had taken on the semblance of a sock in a half-empty washing machine, to learn that this is the scaffolding Martin Seligman suggests for positive psychology.

  • An engaged life.
  • A meaningful life.
  • A pleasurable life.

Seligman seems to think that most people waste too much time pursuing a surfeit of pleasure. I am not sure we do. I am not sure we spend most of our time pursuing pleasure, or do it very well.   But that is another story.

When we need to shrug off goal confusion and achieve goal clarity

It’s best to cut our goals down to 3, or at most 5, because that is all we can remember without looking up a list.

This three-fold schema is a good starting point.

  • The order of importance will be yours – there are 6 possible orders.
  • The weighting you give to each ‘life’ will vary – whether you go stark raving mad without it, or you would give it up for the others.
  • And the content will vary.

I’ve had to do some hard work rethinking what I want out of life in entirely new circumstances.

  • The order changed for me.  Meaning went up to No 1.  Pleasure went up to No 2.  And Engagement came in at No 3.
  • The weighting changed for each too. Order and weighting are intertwined a little.
  • The content changed slightly.  More on finding your content another day.

Achieving goal clarity for yourself

If you find yourself ‘humming and hawing’ and don’t have that sense of forward movement that comes of goal clarity, begin here.

  • What do you think about the three types of life?

And help me out a little:  Is it possible to think about these three lives beginning from the abstract principle?

That would be helpful for me to know, as I already thought that way before I heard the abstract principles.

More another day – probably on Wednesday!

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The antidote to exhaustion is wholeheartedness

Published September 13, 2009 by Jo Jordan

This strange expression has been made popular by poet, David Whyte, who heard it first from a monk, counselling him during a bad bout of professional burnout.

It seems cruel, doesn’t it, to be told to put some elbow-grease into it, at a time we are so tired, we literally can’t think straight?

How does wholeheartedness cure exhaustion?

We feel exhausted, we become exhausted, when we pursue conflicted goals.  We become like the mouse in a maze with cheese to the left and cheese to the right. Deary me – which way to go?   It is the dithering that is exhausting.  Or being greedy and trying to get both lots of cheese at the same time.

We feel relaxed and at ease when we make up our minds about what we want to do

We have a heap of expressions for the sensation of getting moving.

  • We cross the Rubicon (from which there was no turning back as Ceasar and his troops marched on Rome).
  • The universe conspires to help us (Who said that?   It means that suddenly it is easy to do what seemed hard only moments ago.  And that people seem to go out of their way to help you.)
  • Our path opens up as we take the first step (Paulo Coelho tweeting on Saturday).  The path only becomes possible when we are totally committed to moving forward. Totally committed – with no reservations.

Clarity of goals generates energy – moving toward a goal multiplies energy

Action becomes so easy and so natural. ‘Getting things done’ is not the issue – it is never the issue.

Setting goals is the issue. Making up our minds is the hard part.

Do you know what you want?

Until we can distill our goals to a set that our smallish inefficient memories can remember (3 and at the most 5), we dither, and we wear ourselves out.

But is what you want, right?

You do know, I hope, that we become impossible when we pursue goals.  The dithering mouse turns into a juggernaut trampling over everyone and everything.

We must make sure that our goals are the right goals.

More this evening . . .

Postscript: Tuesday 15 September 2009

@paulocoelho: Cloning Confucius: a bird sings because he has a song, not because he has an answer

Do have a look at the rhyme added by Whappen in the comments.

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