Apr 10
Intuition is not a single way of knowing – it’s our ability to hold space for uncertainty and our willingness to trust the many ways we’ve developed knowledge and insight, including instant, experience, faith, and reason.
– Brené Brown, from The Gifts of Imperfection
Mastery requires endurance. Mastery, a word we don’t use often, is not the equivalent of what we might consider its cognate— perfectionism— an inhuman aim motivated by a concern with how others view us. Mastery is also not the same as success— an event-based victory based on a peak point, a punctuated moment in time. Mastery is not merely a commitment to a goal, but to a curved-line, constant pursuit.
– Sarah Lewis, from The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery
You cannot be really first-rate at your work if your work is all you are.
– Anna Quindalen, from A Short Guide to a Happy Life
How many times do you get a blinding insight out of your own head? You get to blinding insight when you listen to somebody and take that little snippet of logic or data or whatever, merge it with something that is in your head and—whammo— out comes a new interesting thought. That is where the out-of-the-box ideas come from, and you systematically prevent yourself from getting there by being dismissive of users, dismissive of clients, dismissive of colleagues who don’t agree with you.
The kernel of somebody who doesn’t agree with you is either different data, or different logic; I think you get out-of-the-boxness by getting outside your own head and understanding this different data or logic, not by digging deeper in your own head for something that just isn’t there.
– Roger Martin, from Design Thinking and How It Will Change Management Education
When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone, and of good cheer – say, traveling in a carriage, or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep: it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence and how they come, I know not; nor can I force them.
Simplicity can be a choice, a feeling, or a guiding light. You can tell pretty quickly when you’re in a place that believes in it and when you’re in a place that doesn’t.
Simplicity has its own kryptonite in the equal and opposite force of Complexity.
– Ken Segall in Insanely Simple, p. 7 and 8
Jul 13
This past weekend I visited the Kaufman Museum’s exhibit: In the Fields of Time. On a card, tucked into an experience station, I discovered a card with Dr. Emil Haury’s rules for his anthropology courses.
Several of these rules resonated with me. Patricia Crown included these in Remembrance of Emil Haury. She writes, “He repeated these rules in every course he taught and he lived them.” I share them here, hoping that some of them will speak to my readers as they have to me:
From: Crown, P. L. (1993.) “Remembrance of Emil Haury,” Kiva, 59(2):261-65.
Which rule connects with you? Do you have a story to illustrate a rule?
May 11
Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist
but the ability to start over.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
Friesen Group 