All in Personal Codes
Great songs can have multiple lives. When they come into our lives the first time, they are fully formed. The melody, the chords, the lyrics, the production. They cast themselves - cement themselves - in our collective consciousness, more often than not, affixing themselves to a particular point in time, a feeling, an emotion.
Letting go. It’s a hard thing to do when you feel you’ve been wronged. When you feel that you’ve given your best to someone but it hasn’t been reciprocated, or even recognized. When the trust you’ve placed in a colleague hasn’t been returned or even acknowledged.
Around the turn of the year, Dave Chappelle and John Mayer (an interesting combination) played a series of shows at the Hollywood Palladium. As part of the event experience, they required their audience to put their cellphones in a special bag that could only be unlocked by a special tool located outside the performance venue.
The first concert I ever saw was David Bowie, during his Serious Moonlight Tour, on December 8th, 1983. Three plus decades may have accentuated some of the colors in my mind, but as I recall it, it's still one of the greatest shows I ever saw.
Talib Kweli Greene wrote an article recently on Medium called In Defense of Ms. Hill. The article is, as the title suggests, about Lauryn Hill, who first rose to fame with The Fugees, and specifically about what rights and expectations we can have of her as as an artist.
One of the cool features of Facebook is On This Day, where it shows you memories of what you posted on a specific date in prior years. I came across this one from Kevin Smith that I shared last year:
It’s New Years Day and many of us, myself included, will sit down and ruminate over the year ahead. What we want for ourselves, what are our plans, what are our goals. And, in doing so, many of us will plan for the difficulties and sacrifices these goals will require.
I once worked with someone who believed that success in business meant you had to be, in his words, "a cold, heartless bastard".In his world view, vulnerability and emotion were liabilities. You had to maintain a distance with your employees, enforcing a visible, tangible hierarchy, because they had to know who was boss.
I have a hard time accepting that being a sore loser is a bad thing. I mean, if I believe in what I'm doing, if I've put my heart and soul into it, if I've given it everything I have, am I simply supposed to accept the result and calmly walk away? Isn't it natural for me to react with emotion? With anger?
The point of protest is to create discomfort. The point of pushing our boundaries is to break things, and, yes, to break through. The point of being different is to provoke an alternate reaction.
These discomforts, breakthroughs, reactions have a purpose. They are to topple the old order, to change our minds, to drive change.
Yesterday, a buddy of mine shared a couple of remarkable phrases he found on Reddit:"At some point in your childhood, you and your friends went outside to play together for the last time, and none of you knew it."
Or:
As parents, we always strive to do the best for our kids - to give them the comfort, the opportunities and the means that we never had. It's the natural progression of things - to always want more for our kids than what we had when we were children.
"You have to have a lot of passion for what you're doing...because it's so hard, that if you don't, any rational person would give up...the ones that were successful, loved what they did, so they could persevere...and the ones that didn't love it, quit, because they're sane!"
It was the late 1800's and James McNeill Whistler (the man behind the painting "Whistler's Mother"), was at a party with Oscar Wilde (considered to be one of the great wits of the nineteenth century). Apparently, Wilde also had the reputation of appropriating clever expressions spoken by others.
There's a whole new world out there where everything that we took for granted over the last 10, 20, 30 years is now being democratized. Access to money, technology, infrastructure, is a non-issue. You just need a good idea. And the balls to go do it.
For-Profit Organizations should, by definition, make money. But in order to make money consistently and for the long term, all such organizations should have a defining raison d'être. Not simply who we are and what we do, but what do we stand for?
When we enter into a negotiation (in particular, a B2B deal), our usual (and natural) goal is to push for the very best deal possible. We analyze our situation, detail our requirements, assess the competition and evaluate alternative options that meet (or come close to meeting) our needs.
It's a crazy idea, one that's quite difficult, if not impossible, to implement. (And, many might argue, not desirable, either.) But like a lot of Tom Peters' ideas, it's provocative.
There are a number of writers and thinkers I look to on a regular basis for ideas, inspiration and insight, and Seth Godin is one of them. For many years, now, he has upended my view of what is important, what we should value and what we should focus on. It was his writing that got me started with my own blog.
