We need to make time for our own stories

Stories are important, right?

Yes, they are; we, as humans, crave/need them for meaning and context.

A while back, you might have heard a story now and again around the campfire… odds are that it was a good story, and that you remembered it, and re-told it to keep it alive.

Today, countless stories come in over the transom every second… new brands, e-mails, RSS, TV, random people on the street.

We so desperately want to hear them, at least the good ones, craving that meaning and context again, so we try to process it all.

But we cannot. Even if we read for 24 hours straight, we would catch about .0000001% of the day’s dump (I heard yesterday that 150,000 blogs are created each day).

So, of course, it’s absurd to even try.

By all means, we should be on the lookout for good storytellers, but we should limit your intake and make time - lots of time - to create our own stories, with friends, family, co-workers…

Career tips from Dan Pink (and some other folks)

There’s a lot of media buzz around Dan Pink’s new book, ‘The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need‘, a career advice book, presented manga-style.

The author must be in cahoots with Garr Reynolds, from Presentation Zen (one of the blogs I follow), because Mr. Reynolds is promoting the book via a 184-page summary (!) on slideshare.

Here’s the copy from the money slide, summing up the book’s advice (my elaborations in parens.):

1. There is no plan (except your own)
2. Think strengths not weaknesses
3. It’s not about you; it’s about adding value (help people or solve a problem)

Poem | Find your legs

I see wonderful, talented people with noble dreams…

But this hard city, with all its machinations, reduces them.

To heaps of false strategies and crumbling assumptions.

To motions, mimicry and broken confidence.

To ambition, with not one thing to stand on.

Find your legs, find your legs, I say!

And feel again what it feels like to walk, alone,

Into a city that is yours.

Anon.

Photo credit: moi.

Do you have a [well-defined] worldview?

As we pack up for Amsterdam, here’s what’s running through our minds:

Do we have a worldview? [yes]

What is it? [needs fleshing out - move to top of "to do" list]

Is it rigid or flexible and evolving? [the latter, we hope]

And how is it shaping what we do with our lives? [????]

We think these are questions worth asking… more from the land of Vermeer.

But the $15 Croque Monsieur tastes so good!

Spring arrived today in New York, unofficially.

To celebrate, we shut down the computers early and rode down the Hudson, watching the half-naked joggers jog along. Then, a left on Clarkson, a right on Greenwich and another left onto Spring, coasting through a buzzing Soho and beyond, as we’ve done a thousand times before.

It was especially glassy on the streets today (post-weekend) and by Clinton we had a flat. Getting a flat is always a deflating experience (it happens every month or so), at least initially. But a flat in the LES in NYC on the first unofficial day of spring is something to savor, let us tell you that with authority!

After asking a few locals for the nearest bike shop (too far from home for a D-I-Y fix), we stumbled on Bike Works NYC (106 Ridge Street) & this little hive of a bike shop put us back in business in no time…