I was told the most beautiful story by Rachael, my new right hand gal at work, today. We were sitting in the sun and sharing stories, as we’ve just moved into our new offices and the place is still a bit of a construction zone. No access to servers. No access to the Net. So we chat.
We’ve spent the morning in the company of champions. Our GM is off to compete in some triathlons in the States and the guys he trains with are Olympic and Commonwealth athletes. Peter Robertson shared his theory on winning with heart (Health. Enjoyment. Attitude. Recovery. Training.) and one of his health tips is to make sure you get enough sun. Australians have taken the sun smart message a little too seriously and there is a bit of a country wide phenomenon of Vitamin D deficiency.
The new building has loads of natural light and the sun carves in and paints the room with reminders of our environment all day. I am absolutely dependant on the sun to shine myself I have to agree how important solar power is. We both remark on the smiles we see across the space even though the place is in chaos. There’s a new energy in the team.
We discuss how ‘from little things big things grow’ and how such a small practice like 15 minutes of meditation a day can so significantly change your life. Rachel tells me of a heart meditation “the inner smile”. This practice reminds her that we can open ourselves, open our hearts to happiness, embrace the warmth around us and shine light into the world.
Heart. Sunlight. Energy. Smiles. Openness.
I’m feeling very grateful. It feels like an auspicious start to a new place.
In the past 20 years, Melbourne has been transformed into a creative, vibrant and liveable city. In the next 20 years, Melbourne will become a more economically, socially, environmentally and culturally sustainable city through the help of a new long-term strategy – Future Melbourne.
Future Melbourne is a bold vision for the city’s future that will affect everybody who visits, lives, invests and works in the municipality. It is due for completion in September 2008 and will replace the City of Melbourne’s existing ‘City Plan 2010’. The six aims of the strategy are to make Melbourne a city for people, a prosperous city, an eco city, a knowledge city, a bold and inspirational city and a connected city.
From the many public forums, proposals, submissions and online discussions with the community during the past year, Council now has a draft plan which is open for community consultation from Saturday, 17 May until Saturday, 14 June 2008.
In what is believed to be a world-first on this scale for local government, the draft is also now available as a wiki so that the community can comment, discuss and directly edit the Future Melbourne draft plan.
I’m reading Stumbling on Happiness at the moment and it’s introducing me to some great ideas, and prompting journeys where I’m meeting new people. I’m loving Jane McGonigal who says in this presentation that ‘happiness is the new capital”. Check out her Year In Review for more o-my-gosh ‘helping to forge the new future’ type out takes.
She has a new mission statement in her work as a game designer — the goal of using new scientific research on well-being to develop technological systems that actually improve quality of life. If you need a quick crash course in well-being research, she recommends two places: All of the great field-building positive psychology work done by Martin Seligman at U Penn, and the work by Allister McGregor and other to look at well-being in developing countries at the ESRC Research Group.
She taps in to the cognitive surplus and the connectivity that can be built into games to generate some inspiring experiences:
So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.
And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, “Where do they find the time?” when they’re looking at things like Wikipedia don’t understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that’s finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.
It’s more than the energy and enthusiasm, the divergence and convergence of strategy, the caffeine, the late nights and the whole process of vividly imagining an idea into being.
I love it because it give you permission to be bold.
The Kaiser tells the wonderful story of what happens when a creative team (top chefs- Gorden Ramsey style) tackled a problem regardless:
They didn’t seek a compromise. They didn’t pander to their client. They weren’t chasing the money. They knew what was right and they just bloody well got on and did it. And the results proved that they were right. The resident cook said they were right, the customers were over the moon, hell even the management (to use British PR speak) were “delighted”.
As Bill S would say “boldness be my friend”. Have it as your compass. Both your team and your clients will benefit. Genius, Power and Magic….bring it on:
Moderation is a fatal thing; nothing succeeds like excess. ~Oscar Wilde
Worth an explore…it’s a bit of collaborative performance art. Dares for cash. Digitally documented contemplation. All of this with a bit of whimsy thrown in…
Kinda like this:
If you give me $250 I will buy you a PO Box in New York for a whole year. I will mail you the key. Throughout the year I will mail letters and things to the PO Box. I am hoping that you don’t live in New York, and that where ever you are in the world you will know that there is a small PO Box in New York amassing with little things for you. You will come to New York before the year is up and collect the little pile. Since PO Boxes are small, it will be a small collection, so I will only mail things when I feel there is something special to send.
Nigel Maister has a PO Box at Cooper Station in New York until 2/28/09
Jessica Shade has a PO Box at Grand Central Station in New York until 2/28/09
Bernice McDonnell has a PO Box at the Knickerbocker Station until (they didn’t give me an expiration date - I assume one year from 3-14-0
Marloes Lasker has a PO Box at the Knickerbocker Station until (they didn’t give me an expiration date - I assume one year from 3-14-0
Just teriffic! 10 Steps to Building Your Personal Brand via blogging, using nationally-recognized fashion blog Omiru: Style for All (www.omiru.com) as a case study. Omiru has been featured by the Wall Street Journal, Lucky Magazine, and Real Simple Magazine.
Interesting people. A theatre of ideas. An evening of interestingness.
Six months after our first event, the Interesting South team have found more fascinating people and have asked them to speak about something they care about. We want to replicate the experience of clicking from one really good blog to another, ranging across sciences, arts, music, jokes and whatever.
You’ll be happy to know we picked the Belvoir Theatre as we’re striving to keep the kind of atmosphere we had in November. Something intimate enough that you can see the whites of the speakers’ eyes so it feels more like a chat than a lecture, but with comfier seats.
This time we’ll feed and water you. All ticket proceeds are invested into the night.
We into reducing paper so we’re going to try send you a mobile bar code with will serve as your ticket. This will be sent 2-3 days after your purchase. If you don’t receive it, we’ll have your name on our door list.
to participate.
