What I’ve Learned So Far

Simple concept: There are settings in which we are most comfortable, in which we are most ourselves. These settings could be physical, psychological, emotional, social. The point is, there are spaces where you feel most at ease and most able to do your own thing. Seek out these settings.

It’s not about taking it too easy on yourself. I like sitting in a diner or an ice cream parlor, satisfying my appetites, but I know that those settings aren’t where I will get my best work done. Find the place where you can really put your back into your work, without worrying about feeling out-of-place. When you find the setting where your passion flourishes (cf. my earlier post about the overlap of passion, money, and ability), you’ll do much better work.

The other day I said I would talk more about the climate guide from The New Scientist. But you know what, in the spirit of de-cluttering, it’s become clear to me that I don’t have much to say about it beyond the fact that it seems quite interesting. So you might want to check it out. Or not, depending on whether it would be clutter for you, too.

A thesis: We can commit ourselves to writing (yes, even blog writing) as a way of commiting ourselves to beneficial change, for ourselves and for the world.

And now for a ramble: I’m thinking of this in part because of the exchange of comments from yesterday’s item about Joss Whedon, which is already shaping my behavior. Most of my blog reading tends toward the ephemeral, but Whedon’s post now has me actively taking dead aim at the patriarchy. I’m not going to take it down by myself, but I’ll have plenty of help.

Also leading me to think of this: the piles of papers, books, and notebooks surrounding my laptop on my desk, which, as you may recall, has been a persistent problem for me. Now that I’m reading back through my blog archive, I’m struck again by the insights in the piece on “The WHY of clutter” I linked to here. This one, in particular, hits home:

• “This is what is most likely holding you back: you don’t know what you want.”

So, a thank you to my past blog-writing self for digging up something I needed to hear. The most important ideas come back around to us again and again. Just last night I enountered the same idea in the ChangeThis manifesto of Tim Ferriss:

The Low-Information Diet

Ferriss is the author of The 4-Hour Workweek, in which he discusses the transformation of his own life from overwork to abundant living. His blog is definitely worth reading, and I’m looking forward to reading his book as well. One of the most trenchant points he makes in “The Low-Information Diet” is this:

“If you don’t define your goals clearly, everything seems important and requires action. If you define your goals clearly, especially your single most critical goal, almost all things are of little or no importance and few things require action.”

So at least on this one tiny point, the process of blogging is shoving my nose down into a big, steaming hunk of reality. I’m changing my ways, at least slightly, even as I’m typing this. Focusing on goals automatically aids clarity in our lives. Focusing on goals makes it far easier to eliminate distractions. While I’ve been writing this, I’ve been sweeping through my browser bookmarks and my RSS feed reader to get rid of a lot of things that clutter my mind unnecessarily. Hold on a sec . . .

. . . Okay, I think I just dumped about a dozen feeds from my reader. I’ll come back to it again later today and make another cull. Every time I cut something out of my life — prune something back — I find that I have more room for my ideas and my own best impulses to come out. Of course, my lesser impulses have a way of creeping back in, over and over, which is why I once again have such a stack of clutter on my desk.

So, dear readers, if you’ve followed this ramble all this way, let me just lay my cards on the table and tell you about the big change I’m after in my behavior, and by extension in my career: I intend to be an influential writer of books. Well, I also want to be wise, beloved, and well-paid writer of books — and sexy, too, while we’re at it. Mind you, I’m in no rush, and anyway it will be a while before the advances and royalties start rolling in. Meanwhile (and that meanwhile could stretch into years), the jobs I have now are rewarding, each in its own way, and some of those jobs even have finished books as their express goals.

So, there’s a behavior change for you: Owning up to what’s most important to me. Maybe that shred of public clarity will help my writing here and help my writing of books. (And if you’re in a sharing mood, advice, encouragement, and any other comments on the path to influential writerdom will be much appreciated.)

So now let’s see how this clarity helps me get these damn piles of paper off my desk . . .

I like Richard Branson.  (And I can’t wait to read the New Yorker profile Tom links to — should be perfect for my plane ride on Wednesday.)

I’m a casual fan of Whedon’s work (Buffy, Firefly, etc.), but my wife and several of her friends are Whedon mavens.  As much as I admire his work — which is plenty — this is the best thing he’s ever written, in my book.

Let’s Watch A Girl Get Beaten to Death

(Hat tip to Adrienne Martini).

This week the Wall Street Journal ran an interesting interview with George David, the highly regarded chief executive of United Technologies Corporation. David is one of the all-stars of the corporate world: in the fifteen years that he’s run UTC, the company’s value has grown tenfold. Today its offerings include everything from Pratt & Whitney aircraft engines to Otis elevators.

One of the things that struck me in David’s comments was his insistence on the importance of energy efficiency and conservation.

I think the solution to the energy problem is actually not alternative energy. To me, the solution immediately is conservation by greater efficiency. Too much in the mind of the public is this idea that conservation means deprivation. You’ve got to be cold at night, shut off the lights, stuff like that. That’s simply not true. The bottom line is that energy is wasted in the world to a phenomenal extent. There’s enormous energy savings potential in the conservation agenda where you do it by efficiency. In our own internal operations, we dropped the energy consumption at UTC by 19% over a decade at the same time the company doubled its size. All of America can drop its energy consumption by 20% in a decade easily. We’re now working with the World Business Council for Sustainable Development to come up with a building that uses zero net energy.

This is music to my ears, especially considering its source. For myself, I think that the solution to our energy problems must include alternative sources of energy, but I also welcome mass adoption of David’s view on the current level of waste in our human operations. The truth is, an abundance of cheap energy over the past century, while enabling huge strides in technology, global travel, and trade, has also instilled an ethic of waste in many of us. It has become incredibly easy and cheap — relative to the prior course of human history — to make more things, to ship them quickly, and then to whisk away the leavings. It has been incredibly easy to leave the lights on, and to build in pockets of waste in our systems, simply out of habit, or for want of better forethought. It has become normal to waste. Indeed, we have come to see it as our birthright, at least judging by the way that we cling to some of our old, wasteful habits. We stamp our feet and insist that we must be able to have our cake and eat it, too, because, because . . . well, we’ve just got to.

George David isn’t buying it. He sounds like he wants a revolution in efficiency.

[Mr. David:] You can’t walk through life with a trained eye and not see the opportunities for productivity. Every time you sit in traffic, that’s a productivity loss. Every time you go to the doctor and fill out a bunch of forms and he refers you to somebody else and you fill out the same forms all over again, that’s a loss of productivity. Whenever you wait for something, that’s waste. I believe you can have 10 times more. I really do.

WSJ: Ten times more of what?

Mr. David: Everything. Everything. Just look at the differences in personal productivity between people, educated versus not educated. Or people in good, really productive labor environments, versus people who are kind of struggling because they’re in disorganized or ineffective companies.

A large number of people have been deprived by opportunity, by education, by life’s circumstance, and they end up having less than fully productive lives. It’s not only bad for them as individuals, it’s also very bad for the society because it’s all lost work.

The whole interview is well worth reading. Now that I’ve read it, I’m thinking of all the areas of my own life — whether it’s sitting in traffic or watching the paper recycling pile up in the garage — where a changed approach could radically lower the amount of waste, and lost productivity, that I see as normal.

A ways back I blogged about wanting an Xtracycle. Given the rising cost of gas — which is leading many consumer-commuters to do a lot less driving — and given my own desire to put my methods where my mouth is in terms of climate change, I’m getting serious about it now.

Sure, I already have a bike, and just last week I used it to commute to work for the first time in a few months. Come to think of it, maybe I should save my money, start bicycle commuting seriously again, and then spring for the Xtracycle. Step one: fix the flat on my current bike.

Oh, and in the spirit of Xtracycle, dig this about the Big Boda load-carrying bicycle, featured in the Design for the Other 90% project. (A hat tip to Those Responsible . . .)

Oh, and speaking of climate change, dig this handy “Guide for the Perplexed” from New Scientist, which debunks many of the myths around climate change. More on that anon.

Guy Kawasaki has posted a great short interview with Richard Stearns, who leads the charity group World Vision.

Ten (or so) Questions with Richard Stearns

The most compelling bit, to me, was this:

To really change the world, values must change. Consider the civil rights movement. Racial discrimination was once openly accepted in the United States. Today it is unacceptable to our mainstream culture. Very few of us are civil rights activists, but we let our values speak in our work places, our schools and to our elected officials.

Today, we live in a world that tolerates extreme poverty much like racism was tolerated fifty-plus years ago. We can all become people determined to do something to change the world. We can speak up, we can volunteer and we can give. Ending extreme poverty will take money, political and moral will, and a shift in our value system. When enough ordinary people embrace these issues, things will begin to change.

Serious food for thought — and grist for action.

When I was in junior high school, Westmark had a profound effect on me, and I read and re-read the Prydain Chronicles with glee.  What was most impressive to me about Lloyd Alexander was how he just kept writing; just a few months ago I read a new story of his in my daughter’s Cricket magazine.

Thanks to Kris for putting me onto this page about Alexander at The Horn Book.

Like hundreds of new species found in the deep ocean near Antarctica.

The Guardian has details here.