Just Be And You Are

Lately I’ve been twittering away my blog posts and interesting finds into small snippets via text, tweetie, the web and mostly tweetdeck. The latter app is great because it allows you to easily group people you follow into various lists and see their updates at once vertically and horizontally left to right.

While tweeting isn’t as evergreen as blogging, it’s useful in having a conversation with others in semi real-time. You’re more in touch with what people are doing and thinking about moment to moment. Some say it’s not representative of reality but my assumption is time is a commodity and you’re spending a portion of it tweeting so it must have some level of importance. In the sample of people I follow, I don’t see too many updates on what they had for lunch but rather hyperlinks to articles that pique my interest.

Twitter obviously has its place in both thinking and doing time for a lot of people. Though like most social media on the internet, it connects those already connected. Those with internet access, those who have time, those who accrue marketing and financial benefits from such an app. There’s definitely a set group of people who are also more likely to think Twitter is useful. It’s not the doctors slaving away all day in the OR, not the teachers in classrooms, not the construction workers fixing our highways.

I’m not sure how, like Facebook, it plays into our overall existence, but for now I’m enjoying the fact that it exists.

DailyOMs can be overly spiritual for some, yet they resonate a strong sense of philosophical sense that can actually be applied. The whole post is here, but it’s fun to excerpt the most provocative parts, starting with the first paragraph:

Sometimes we look at the actions of others and find it difficult to understand what motivates them. But we are all doing the best we can with the information we currently have. We have all been taught how to see the world from the examples of those around us and by our experiences. Keeping this in mind, we can accept the choices made by others while seeking ways to increase the world’s level of consciousness as a whole.

Looking back at the past, I sometimes want to reevaluate my decisions and then I realize that I was doing the best with the information I had. If I knew what I know now, I wouldn’t have made those decisions. It eliminates regret and helps me focus more on the path that got me to those decisions so I can better understand my past mind to help my future mind think smarter. Likewise, I think of others on their own paths and don’t view them as ahead or behind but in the right place to learn what they need to. Hence,

We can share our experiences and understanding with others not from a place of condescension but of connection.

There’s no better or worse, it’s all apples and oranges of a different variety. Approaching others this way leaves little room for judgment. At the same time, we can better acknowledge current status, restrictions, behaviors and culture if we agree that we’re coming in with a personal bias. Getting rid of our idiosyncrasies to say we’re equal makes us drones. Connecting on a premise of differences makes us one. I think of looking at a cloth through a microscope and seeing all the little connected strings pattern together and when someone pulls the cloth, they flex and move but don’t break.

I love the way it ends:

Every thought we have and action we take becomes part of the collective energy of the planet…

…Remember the next time you witness an action of another that they are of the same earth as you but simply on a different conscious level at this point in their life. Find compassion, bless them, and move along your day in grace.

John Robb’s links alone would suffice in connecting you to the myriad future world. Here’s a recent link to predictions for the decade ahead by Kazys Varnelis. Reading it in entirety is worthwhile but draining. I left feeling potentially optimistic and assuredly pessimistic. Lots of “ifs”. Here are the highlights:

China will start slowing. The United States, EU, the Mideast and East Asia will all make up a low growth block, a slowly decaying imperium. India, together with parts of Africa and South America, will be on the rise. To be clear: the very worst thing that could happen is that we would see otherwise.

I disagree on most counts here. China’s manufacturing of inelastic goods is too entrenched for it to slow. East Asia is lower growth post-recession but they are also more recession-proof due to their “immateriality” (as mentioned in the post) and service good production. India and Africa are too rife with corruption and dependent on non-resident financial funding to thrive on their own. The reverse brain drain is helping them out, but for how long?

A greater divide will open up between three classes. At the top, the super-rich will continue controlling national policies and will have the luxury of living in late Roman splendor. A new “upper middle” class will emerge among those who were lucky enough to accumulate some serious cash during the glory days. Below that will come the masses, impossibly in debt from credit cards, college educations, medical bills and nursing home bills for their parents but unable to find jobs that can do anything to pull them out of the mire.

So much of this is self-created. The party of the 1990s and 2000s (again, credit goes to the author) and even the “progressive” consumer spending of the baby boomers has brought us to this point. Many went into debt willingly expecting a positive ROI in the end, unaware of the champagne glass tower their investments were built on. While trust in financial structures is all but gone, the mental shift from consumption to value still hasn’t occurred, primarily due to the “upper middle” class continuing with business as usual.

Some cities are simply doomed, but if we’re lucky, some leaders will turn to intelligent ways of dealing with this condition. To me, the idea of building the world’s largest urban farm in Detroit sounds smart. Look for some of these cities—Buffalo maybe?—to follow Berlin’s path and become some of the most interesting places to live in the country…

…These cities will not see real estate values increase greatly. The new classes populating them will not be rich, but rather will turn to a of new DIY bohemianism, cultivating gardens, joining with neighbors communally and building vibrant cultural scenes.

What struck me was the mention of Buffalo, where I lived for the past few years. Cost of living is certainly an attraction and if you’re not into global arbitrage, it’s a great option on the national scale (same language, same culture, no need to adopt/adapt). With dilapidated storefronts ready to be revamped, a large elderly AND student population and shoestring entrepreneurship on the rise, there’s a lot of promise. Fresh blood needs to pour in waves though because of the conservative, revisionist mentality that still holds these kinds of cities back.

The divisions in politics will grow. By the end of the decade, the polarization within countries will drive toward hyper-localism. Nonpartisan commissions will study the devolution of power to local governments in areas of education, individual rights (abortion will be illegal in many states, guns in many others), the environment, and so on. In many states gay rights will become accepted, in others, homosexuality may become illegal again.

Hyper-localism is happening right now in “green” communities, spa-like baby-boomer villages, and open-source networks (think small; journalism to blogosphere for example). In Gladwell terms, it’s 10-15 years away from achieving critical mass, and when it “tips”, the trending will drive away those who began it to either accumulate wealth quickly and estrange themselves from the crowds or go back to creating mini oligopoly-like systems of government to hold onto power. Early adoption will become a skill.

As Varnelis iterates several times cautiously, this is a fun exercise blogs like to get into. It does shape bias mindsets of readers to a certain degree so being involved signals the belief that your voice is your vote. The U.S., being beat up so often based on Rome-downfall analogies, trumps Rome on the spectrum of freedom of speech. The internet only enhances that freedom. Take a bath in information and you don’t know what you’ll come out with. Join the fun.

Before the experiences we go through turn into memories, they become stories first. At the most basic level, we’re all storytellers. Some say it’s a lost art, but on paper that isn’t true. Look at movies, books, magazines, video games and now the unlimited amount of online content published daily. The common thread is sharing our moments with each other through a medium that helps us connect with like-minded people.

The act of telling a story though may be endangered. Growing up, I remember being captivated by storytellers at local fairs. Their presentation skills were exquisite. They knew how to hold an audience, build gut-wrenching suspense, and show you what they wanted you to see. Their medium was imagination.

Regaining this art now I believe happens through conversation. A mental shift is required first. You have to start seeing life’s events as future stories. Being stuck in a traffic jam can be annoying and worse still if you’re running out of gas. But there’s a developing story here and thinking of it this way may take the edge off and allow you to look at it as something that will soon pass.

Our frustrations with life stem not from reality but from our perspective of it. If every moment/experience/event is a story to tell later, we can converse – speak and listen – on life as it happens.

The power of words. Word choice is important. So is inflection of tone upon specific words. And most important is avoiding the distractions in speech that take away from your message, such as “um” and “uh”. Any practiced presenter will echo these observations.

Now transfer this to daily speech and think about the effect words, speech, and tone of voice can have. On your environment and the people around you. Take the word, “fear”, for example. We used to use it to communicate an emotion to another person. The emotion and the word have become so closely linked now that the word itself can produce a slight bit of that emotion. Listen carefully to the words optimistic people use and you’ll hear more positive words than negative. Their speech not only provides a circular benefit to them but also to others just by being around them more. The opposite is true for pessimistic people.

One of the easiest ways to get out of a sour mood is to start thinking about and using positive words (smiling is #1 though). Positivity is in fact contagious. Your word choice will give off a positive vibe that will be returned back to you from others. And the cycle will continue.

The first step to behavioral change is always personal experimentation.

The hyperlink is amazing. It’s pay-it-forward in action. It reduces the six degrees of separation. It connects us to people and ideas we may never have heard of simply because we stumbled upon a site.

It also contributes to trends and groupthink. Hyperlinks sometimes remind me of the buzz and gossip of the overvalued blue chips that ultimately bubbled out at the start of the century. The value of what you’re being linked is your own judgment call, but so often we empower the person that’s linking us with that judgment. Take it to the extreme. If Al Gore – as opposed to Joe Schmo – recommended a green company, you’d check it out. Al Gore certainly has the credentials, but is he becoming outdated? Maybe his personal branding campaign has started outweighing his community service message? Your call.

Too often we allow others to make judgment calls for us. The blogosphere is ruled by professional marketers and those that already have celebrity value (think Ashton Kutcher vying for 1,000,000 followers on twitter). It’s not a collusive atmosphere, but there’s a “club” mentality emerging with friends linking to friends. I still click on hyperlinks, but just like I look for conflicts of interest and financial disclosures when reading scholarly articles, I evaluate the information trail of the link itself. It’s really easy to do with any generic rss aggregator (i.e. google reader).

Why bother? Because when you open your mouth to talk about the cool thing you read or saw on the net, you’re voicing your support of it. You become a representative. Your word-of-mouth sponsorship is as much a hyperlink as the digital url hiding behind the attractive text. The value of the link is up to you.

Hierarchy is directly correlated to intimidation. The higher you go up the ladder, the more imposing the person becomes in our minds. We end up equating the position and the person. It’s a powerful effect. Even after meeting with a person and getting a consistently negative vibe, we play it down because that’s the president of so-and-so. The fear – like the title itself – is man-made. The only meaning it has is the value you give it.

When you call up Verizon or Apple, you expect great service. When you meet with the CEO of a company or a high-level politician, you expect professionalism. When you go to Bolo or Tribeca Grill, you expect amazing food. Certain brand names, like certain titles, convey a quality proposition that we grow to expect. All of which is upheld by each and every person that works for that company or embodies that role.

It really hits you when you get bad customer service from a company you expect more from or meet with an asshole corporate executive (tell him/her to check out Bob Sutton’s blog).

You realize that it’s the person, not the position that deserves your respect.

John Robb does a fantastic job discussing bandh dynamics in this post. Bandh means “closed” in Hindi and in this case is used to describe various close-outs that occured in India over the last few weeks. In Punjab, it was a clear case of an “eye-for-an-eye”. The events go like this:

1984

2009

I was in India for the Punjab Bandh and it was a ghost town that day. I still went out to run a few errands and a couple of shopkeepers were open to take advantage of th situation. At tremendous risk though, since the bandh initiators could have easily called them out and made trouble for the long run. The scary thing was my parents were driving in that day from New Delhi (which suffered its own bandh a week later) and buses, trains, roadways and such were the first to be blocked off by the boycotters. They got lucky and ended up cruising the empty streets, shaving an hour off their trip.

Robb describes the impact the best:

In short, it is pure global guerrilla. For example:

It exacts “taxes” on local businesses and individuals.

It promotes and participates in a thriving black market (which is made even more important due to suppression of “legitimate activity”).

It can rent the Bandh to politicians and businessmen for their own purposes. Competitive Bandhs from labor and politicians (aka non-violent strikes), are disrupted and can often turn violent when the Naxalites enforce their monopoly.

The last point – especially in essentially corrupt political environments such as in the East – is the scariest. Politicians renting out the black market and disguising it as a mercenary force gives little control to a “democratic” populace. When everyone agrees the wrong thing is OK, change management is nothing but showmanship.

Leadership for me is about the simple living of our own truth and then manifesting it through an external work that can share it with others.

That’s from Zainab Salbi in this video in an online series called “On Leadership” at The Washington Post.

Realization – an awakening to what needs to be done and how you can do it – is key to being this kind of leader. Very few get there. I’m glad she did.

1. True empathy is hard to find.

2. Empathy in Action: An Experiment in Gratitude

3. What would happen if everyone was required to spend up to 10% of their salary out of pocket on healthcare before insurance kicks in?

4. This American Life: An hour explaining the American health care system.

5. Is this why Republicans can’t support health care reform?