Valuable insights and inspiration from Jerry White (Survivor Corps)

Start your day off right with this excellent Q&A on Guy Kawasaki’s blog titled “The Art of Survival: an Interview with Jerry White“. My favorite snippets, laid bare:

“We humans have an uncanny ability to reframe our thoughts and choose to find meaning in our scars. Thousands of survivors we have interviewed talk about growing stronger after a catastrophe. But they made healthy choices along the way; it was no accident that they rediscovered joy after debilitating loss.

…. It takes a village to survive emergencies, with help from the private sector, social sector and public sector. No single government agency or sector can do it all. We need our neighbors and civil society to come through for us. It is always a mistake to wait passively for bureaucracies and government agencies to “save” us.

OK, let’s take a breather… my copy/paste function is getting a work-out this morning!

Should we subsidize culture?

One of our goals here at IBC is to explore the role of culture in our lives, as a vehicle for elevating consciousness and positive change, but also as a business opportunity for culturally-minded entrepreneurs.

I recently posed a string of questions here about culture to kick off the exploration and have some Q&As in store which will hopefully shed some light on the matter…

In the meantime, in response to my culture pop quiz posted a few days back, one of IBC’s more intrepid readers has volunteered the following:

“Personally, I think government should play a part in supporting “culture” but they also need to allocate sufficient funds to this and appoint the right people in those positions. The last I heard, the U.S. govt continued to decrease funding in the arts & humanities (which was already a pitiful amount compared to Europe), and increased military spending instead. Very sad.”

What does everyone else think??

Zooming into culture

How do we define “culture”?

What role does culture play in our society?

How do we value culture? Is there such a thing as “good culture” and “bad culture”? Who decides?

What is the connection between culture and consciousness?

Should government support the creation and dissemination of culture, or should culture be left to market forces?

What are the business opportunities in culture?

Between the usual bits’n bobs, these are some of the questions I hope to explore here over the coming months…

Would love to hear of any relevant books/resources on the subject.

Water, water, everywhere

It’s been said that “water is the oil of the 21st century”.

Around the world, and in many parts of the US, water supplies are running dangerously low.

And the problem’s getting worse: supplies of clean water are shrinking, while demand keeps going up as the world population mushrooms (9 billion by 2050, up from 6 billion today) and as emerging economies industrialize (manufacturing-based economies are water hogs).

H2O, in case you forgot (easy to do in the US, where water is free), is a finite resource.

Feel the drought coming?

Remember, we said “oil of the 21st century”, meaning wars WILL be fought over the stuff (this is already happening in Africa).

Think about that for a second… people are/will soon be killing each other for what we drink, bathe and water our lawns with.

What’s the solution?

IBC recommends: Culture + Travel magazine

Last week, coming off a quiet and cold Easter in Vermont, we hit the art fairs in New York. While the main Armory show left us feeling flat, things picked up Pulse and Volta, two satellite fairs teeming with indie spirit.

Upon leaving Volta, a friend handed us a magazine called Culture + Travel, “in case you need some subway reading material”. Another magazine we’ve never heard of, we thought. (There’s so much content out there.)

But the title and cover photo caught our attention. So we started flipping through C+T (our acronym) on Sunday and were immediately impressed by the quality of writing and photography.

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…

Hints of a new worldview

Hello loyal readers. Just back from an extended long weekend vacation by the ocean. I didn’t catch any stripers, but I read a lot.

(Oddly, the traffic on the blog went up while I was on holiday… I think it has something to do with the post called Off-Kilter Skivvies, which gets lots of random traffic from the search engines).

Anyway, back to the reading bit. I’ll spare you dull book reviews, but here’s an inspiring excerpt from Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche, Intimations of a New World View, via Paul Hawken’s Blessed Unrest:

“It is perhaps not too much to say that, in the first decade of the new millennium, humanity has entered into a condition that is in some sense more globally united and interconnected, more sensitized to the experiences and suffering of others, in certain respects more spiritually awakened, more conscious of alternative future possibilities and ideals, more capable of collective healing and compassion, and, aided by technological advances in communication media, more able to think, feel, and respond together in a spiritually evolved manner to the world’s swiftly changing realities than has ever before been possible.”

The new fear factor. Really?

What do you think of this?

“As scandals across religious, government, and corporate institutions began the erosion of trust in the 1990s, the explosion of widespread technology in a post 9/11 world continues to heighten tension in our fear-based society. As a result, consumers are attempting to take ever-greater control of their environment, property, time and safety.

… As a result of mounting external factors, including growing concerns about food safety, climate change and a reliance on fossil fuels, consumers appear to be ’shutting down’. Our research indicates that while consumers are driven by their desire for control, they often relate that they feel their lives are simply out of control.

This has translated into a consumer desire to control things within their grasp. For example, the pursuit of safer foods and beverages, organic and environmentally-friendly products, local farms and familiarity with the source of products used is an attempt to reassure ourselves that we have some control over our safety and destiny.

Manufacturers and retailers have the opportunity to build market share by clearly understanding the emotional need for control borne out of The New Fear Factor.”

It’s an excerpt from Natural Marketing Institute’s weekly email blast.

On my first read, it all seemed plausible… But on a second pass, I got stuck in a few places:

1. Do we really live in “fear-based society”? I think that gives too much credit to Madison Avenue and CNN. People are smarter and more optimistic than that. (Or maybe I’m the optimist)
   
2. Does technology really “heighten tension”? Maybe for some. For others, technology (e.g. the web!) offers the promise of more knowledge and control, not less.
3. Are consumers really “shutting down”? Again, maybe some. Many others are opening up, taking a stand on their values and seeking out new experiences in pursuit of self-actualization.
4. Are we really trying to “reassure ourselves that we have some control over our safety and destiny” when we choose organic and local products? Maybe. We might also be making healthier, more informed choices about what we eat.

I find myself challenging “marketing speak” much more than I used to - right or wrong, I think it’s a healthy habit.

Freedom’s obligation

The headlines bombard us daily, but the wars and despots seem so far away.

Imagine what it would be like to live in a place with no sense of liberty, hope or opportunity?

Here’s a fitting excerpt on the subject (the virtue of freedom) from Vargas Llosa’s book, ‘The Feast of the Goat’:

“It must be nice. Your cup of coffee or glass of rum must taste better, the smoke of your cigar, a swim in the ocean on a hot day, the movie you see on Saturday, the merengue on the radio, everything must leave a more pleasurable sensation in your body and spirit when you had what Trujillo [a brutal Dominican dictator from the 40s & 50s] had taken away from Dominicans 31 years ago: free will.”

It’s too easy to take the simple pleasures we have for granted…

So let’s not get too complacent and squander the opportunity to do more than just make and consume stuff!

Keep the kids free to imagine

There’s been a lot of press lately about how American kids stack up vs. their Asian counterparts, notably little Chinese and Indian tykes.

This is partly a reflection of our paranoia that America is receding, losing its primacy in an increasingly global economy. How will our kids compete?

This subject obviously goes way beyond a post in IBC, but I will begin to tag issues related to kids (education, health, well-being, etc) relevant to the BoL.

In this vein, a recent article in the WSJ by Peggy Noonan, We’re Scaring Our Children to Death, caught my attention. In it, she observes:

“We are not giving the children of our country a stable platform. We are instead giving them a soul-shaking sense that life is unsafe, incoherent, full of random dread.”

She has a point.

Leading with your values

Some people choose to play life safe, never venturing far from home. Others choose - or have to - put themselves in harm’s way to try and “make it happen”, whatever “it” might be.

If you belong to the latter group, odds are you’re going to create friction as you strive for success. It’s hard (and inadvisable) to try to please everyone, all the time.

And achieving stuff obviously means taking quick and sometimes tough decisions: successful people tend not to dwell on things any longer than they have to.