Biophilia

“Most people think that when you take on a big, impossible goal with a team, that you immediately set yourself up for failure. That history will show that every time such a goal is marked in the sky, and a team is assembled, that failure is the common outcome. I, for one, have seen the contrary. That the more aspirational goal you set as a leader, the more likely that it gets done. Because the quality of the goal, determines who will join your team. And it is often the best people in the world that want to take on the most difficult challenges of our times.”

http://creativeleadership.com/2013/02/02/screen-shot-2013-02-02-at-10-50-09-am-png/

What a person imagines he hears, and what the speaker has really implied, may be poles apart. Try to feel the thoughts behind the confusion of men’s verbiage.

“If you just sit and observe, you will see how restless your mind is. If you try to calm it, it only makes it worse, but over time it does calm, and when it does, there’s room to hear more subtle things—that’s when your intuition starts to blossom and you start to see things more clearly and be in the present more. Your mind just slows down, and you see a tremendous expanse in the moment. You see so much more than you could see before. It’s a discipline, you have to practice it.”

知人者智，自知者明。勝人者有力，自勝者強。知足者富。強行者有志。不失其所者久。死而不亡者壽

To understand others is to be intelligent,
To understand yourself is to be enlightened.
To conquer others is to be forceful,
To conquer yourself is to be strong.
To know how to have enough is to be rich.
To powerfully enact is to have your will.
To not lose your place is to last long.
To die but not perish is to have longevity.

During the past year, I’ve figured out a few decent techniques to encourage people to give you a critique. This is something I still struggle with so I’d appreciate your ideas as well. A few things that seem to work for me:

ASK FOR JUST ONE THING

If you ask people to tell you ‘anything’ or ‘everything’ that you could improve upon, they’ll usually stumble about and not give you anything useful. But, ask them for the ‘one thing’ you could improve on and they’ll at least wrack their brain to come up with a single criticism. This is much better than getting nothing.

ASK PEOPLE WHO KNOW YOU WELL

The best post-presentation critiques I’ve received have come from a long-time coworker and my father. People who’ve been on the other end of your own stinging criticisms are much more comfortable throwing some back at you. This is great! My dad’s a really nice guy, but he’s both heard me carp at him more than a few times and he’s a seasoned university lecturer. He was kind but blunt with several pieces of good advice.

ASK DRUNK PEOPLE

Seriously. After a workshop at Future of Web Apps in Miami last year, I asked the attendees to give me some honest feedback and got a tepid response. But… that night, a couple of the guys were pretty drunk and (standing a little too close for comfort and with potent whiskey breath) gave me a healthy dose of totally unvarnished advice. That advice, which was to show more examples and to cover less material but in more depth, was fantastic.

ASK GROUPS OF PEOPLE

This seemed counterintuitive to me. I assumed that if you cornered an individual that you could get good one-on-one advice. But, if you can coax just one person in a small group to give you a single piece of advice, the rest sometimes sense blood in the water and will join in too — yay! Once the ice is broken and people see that you actually didn’t rip the critiquer’s head off, it’s much easier for the other people to add their own comments.

BE PERSISTENT

People are eager to please. Heck, that’s why they’re being too nice to you in the first place. If you seem genuinely disappointed that no one is offering you criticism, people sometimes throw you a bone to please you. Like in the previous point, once you’ve broken the ice…

http://www.deltatangobravo.com/page1

dbreunig:

• Water, 1400
• Land, 1840
• Gold, 1850
• Wire, 1880
• Air, 1900
• Celluloid, 1920
• Plastic, 1950
• Space, 1960
• Silicon, 1980
• Networks, 1990
• Data, 2000

(via feltron)