I spoke with my dad today. We talked about religion, life, and what it means to live in the moment. I told my dad, “you know, Dad, God doesn’t guarantee tomorrow.” My dad replied, “no He doesn’t. That’s why you have to earn your ticket today.”Wise words from a man who’s death looms on the horizon. Those words made me think about you. How are you and I earning our ticket for tomorrow? We don’t have to believe in a god to make that reflection meaningful. Tomorrow is not promised. The only thing we have, own, and control is the present.
You can be more creative by allowing yourself the space to be a fool. You need to create that space for yourself in the most serious manner possible. Key and Peele got it right.
Take the hit. Reflect for a moment - get your bearings. Get back up.Get back in.You and I weren’t made to sit around and be comfortable.
Effective musicians listen to many different types of music. The musicians I know and respect love all kinds of music. They listen to music that is similar and different from the music they play - a mosaic of influences. How might we become more like effective musicians? How might we listen to and absorb all kinds of ideas? How might we tolerate ideas that we outright reject on their face? You and I are not shaped in a vacuum, we are shaped by many colliding influences. If we are to keep growing, then we must keep ourselves open to the new and the different.
An effective musician plays their part, listens to others, and keeps the big picture in mind. You might think that these activities happen all at once; but they don’t.Effective musicians, like any effective professional, can only do one thing well at a time. Before they perform, they study the music. They ask what is this piece about, what’s my role in this, and what’s the goal. They imagine how others might perform their parts; they think about how they will support the others. They internalize the work before they action.Finally, a musician actions — they play. During performance, a musician will, like a submarine, surface to hear what’s going on. They make adjustments. They play.Great leaders are like great musicians.
I wrote a blog post about toilet paper 2 years ago. I wrote the post during the pandemic when toilet paper was in short supply. I was attempting to understand why we were so bent on hoarding toilet paper.
I thought that we hoard these tissues because of how they make us feel safe. Two years later, my views haven’t changed.
We do crazy things in the name of “feeling” safe.
I decided early on that I did not want to learn how to read music or play the music as it was written. I don’t like following rules. My teacher decided early on to teach me an important lesson, Learn what’s been written so that you know how you can change it.If we want to make change happen, we need to learn our history. Where have we come from? Have we been there before? How did it end before? How might we do it better this time around? Our most valuable lessons about life and innovation might come from the most unlikely of places. Thank you, Mrs. S.
When people think of Filipino food they frequently think of “adobo.” Adobo is not just one thing, it’s many. At it’s core, it’s anything marinated in an acid. On the other side of the world, in Central America, you’ll find similar dishes. I know a Costa Rican dish called “Chicharrones” that is pork marinated in sour orange juice and then cooked. Nearly identical to Filipino adobo.Cubans eat a pork dish called “masa de puerco” - deep fried pork shoulder that’s been… you guessed it, marinated in an acid. Did the Spanish bring adobo to the Philippines? Some historians contend that the Filipinos have been marinating meat in acid long before the Spanish arrived. That’s the point.You and I, and the others, are more in similar than we are not.
The people in your life deal in a currency of credibility. Do you know it?One person values your responsiveness, another values your attention, and someone else wants to see you in the trenches with them. No one person is the same.If you want to lead others, quickly learn and deal in their currency of credibility.
3 quotes.Robert Greene from The Laws of Human Nature, “the longer a group exists and the larger it grows, the more conservative it will become.”Thucydides, one of the first historians, writes in the History of the Peloponnesian War, “What made war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta.” John M. Barry, a more recent historian, writes in The Great Influenza, “Uncertainty follows distrust, fear follow uncertainty, and, under conditions such as these, terror follows fear.”1 HypothesisThe more defined a culture a group has, the more it will fear the unknown and disruptive nature of a competing a rising culture.1 QuestionWhat if we just learned to stay more nimble?