The trick to writing a comic strip is to cultivate a mental playfulness – a natural curiosity and eagerness to learn. If I keep my eyes open and follow my interests, sooner or later the effort yields questions, thoughts, and ideas – unexpected paths into new territory. Like Calvin, I just head out into the yard in search of weirdness, and with the right attitude, I make discoveries.
– Bill Watterson, creator of Calvin And Hobbes
Category: Quotes
Lots and lots of great quotes
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To be prepared against surprise is to be trained. To be prepared for surprise is to be educated.
– James Carse in Finite and Infinite Games
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So, I’m saying, “This I believe: I believe there is no God.”
Having taken that step, it informs every moment of my life. I’m not greedy. I have love, blue skies, rainbows and Hallmark cards, and that has to be enough. It has to be enough, but it’s everything in the world and everything in the world is plenty for me. It seems just rude to beg the invisible for more. Just the love of my family that raised me and the family I’m raising now is enough that I don’t need heaven. I won the huge genetic lottery and I get joy every day.
Believing there’s no God means I can’t really be forgiven except by kindness and faulty memories. That’s good; it makes me want to be more thoughtful. I have to try to treat people right the first time around.
– Penn Jillette
This I believe too. Read the rest of it here.
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Renaissance play
An excerpt from Get Back In Th Box, Douglas Rushkoff’s new book:
In a renaissance society driven by the need to forge connections, play is the ultimate system for social currency. It’s a way to try on new roles without committing to them for life. It’s a way to test strategies of engagement without being defined by them forever. It’s a way to rise above the seemingly high stakes of almost any situation and see it as the game it probably is. It’s a way to make one’s enterprise a form of social currency from the beginning, and to guarantee a collaborative, playful, and altogether more productive path toward continual innovation.
And this play begins at work….
I’m getting that book. Now.
And speaking of play: Researchers have identified at least 317 games that dolphins play:
When Stan Kuczaj and Lauren Highfill were snorkeling among some rough-toothed dolphins off the coast of Honduras last year, they saw an intriguing game among the animals.
Two adults and a youngster were passing a plastic bag back and forth, as in a game of catch, the two researchers wrote in the October issue of the research journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences.
A pantropical spotted dolphin (Stenella attenuata) skips on its tail over the water. No one knows why dolphins do this, but some scientists say it could be for fun. When the adults passed it to the youth, they did so more carefully than to each other, releasing it just in front of the youth?s mouth, as if to make it easier to catch.
After years of studying dolphins at play, Kuczaj and his colleagues have reached some surprising conclusions: dolphin games show remarkable cooperation and creativity. Dolphins seem to deliberately make their games difficult, possibly in order to learn from them. And such pastimes may play a key role in the development of culture and in evolution?both among dolphins and other species, including humans.
Both of these links come via Boingboing.
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Love, forgiveness, people often view as part of religion. But this is a mistake. These are true humanity, had at birth by all, while religion comes much later and is part of culture. They are different. Religious faith, utilized properly, strengthens these human values. Those who claim to be religious, but are without these values, are not truly religious.
– Dalai Lama
Via Pharyngula, an excellent blog mostly about evolution.
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Leadership darwinism
In the case where a board can’t figure out to depose self-obsessed, autocratic and power-hungry managers, we’ll probably se in the future that these leaders will in principle be deposed by their own employees, who will leave for better workplaces with better leaders and leadership values, that create a better space for the employees’ personal goals and life visions to unfold.
This will leave the managers who use hierarchical leadership, control systems and autocratic leadership values without significant access to getting employees. Ie. a leadership with no followers, which is both pathetic and useless.
– Alfred Josefsen, CEO of IrmaRight on, Alfred – you tell’em :o)
There will be two kinds of darwinism operating against bad managers:
1) Employee selection: Employees will leave bad managers behind and gravitate towards better leaders.
2) Marketplace selection: Companies with autocratic old-school management are less efficient, and will loose market share to better-run organizations. In the end they’ll die out altogether.If I had stock in a company, and wanted to make money out of those stocks, I’d ask the board of directors two questions:
1) What are you doing to make the people in the organization happy?
2) How are you training leaders to make themselves and others happy? -
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Each individual should work for himself. People will not sacrifice themselves for the company. They come to work at the company to enjoy themselves.
– Soichiro Honda, founder of (surprise) HondaVia Metacool via Mike Wagner.
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THE ETERNAL TWINS
Taking fun
as simply fun
and earnestness
in earnest
shows how thoroughly
thou none
of the two
discernest.
-Piet Hein -
Design and paradox
Another person I met at the WorldBlu Forum is Ralf Beuker of Design Management. He spoke on design thinking and on the value of embracing paradox. This is a recurring theme on my blog – here are a few examples:
The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.
– Niels BohrThe test of a first class mind is the ability to hold two opposing views in the head at the same time and still retain the ability to function.
– F. Scott FitzgeraldChange that is deeply effective and positive presents a paradoxical challenge. On the one hand, there needs to be an appreciation and acceptance of how things are in the here and now. On the other hand, there needs to be an active intention to make things better. Nothing needs to change, and everything can improve. This is the way to avoid the two extremist traps of activist’s frustration or pessimistic complacency.
– Patch AdamsEmbracing paradox is crucial. Too much thinking these days (especially in business) aims to reduce and simplify a worldview to the point where decision making becomes easy – and that’s just not the way the world works :o)
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Increasingly, people seem to view complexity as sophistication, which is baffling – the incomprehensible should cause suspicion rather than admiration.
– Niklaus Wirth
