I read an article titled Mid-Course correction - toward a sustainable enterprise the other night. It was written by Ray Anderson, the founder of a Interface which is a company that many regard as the pioneer of environmentally sustainable enterprise. No surprise that the main premise of the article was how and why companies should go green.

But as I read it, widely applicable truths and adages seemed to pop up everywhere even though the article was written for a completely different purpose.

As I read, I noticed how many times the same lessons I was reading now were repeated in history, across industries, in my personal life.

Some clips:

Doesn’t the market govern?
Yes, but does the market’s price cover the cost? Well, let’s see. Who has
paid for the military power that has been projected into the Middle East to
protect the oil at its source? Why, you have, in your taxes. And who is paying
for the damage done by storms, tornadoes, and hurricanes that result from
global warming? Why you are, of course, in your insurance premiums. And
who will pay for the losses in Florida and the cost of the flooded, abandoned
streets of Boston, New York, New Orleans and London someday in
the distant future? Future generations, your progeny, that’s who. (Bill
McDonough, former Dean of the School of Architecture at the University
of Virginia, and a leading proponent of ‘green’ architectural design for
many years, calls this ‘intergenerational tyranny’, the worst form of remote
tyranny, a kind of taxation without representation across the generations,
levied by us on those yet unborn.) And who pays for the diseases caused by
the toxic emissions all around us? Guess! Do you see how the revered
market system of the first industrial revolution allows companies like
mine to shift those costs to others, to externalize those costs, even to future
generations?

Positive, negative, whatever it is.  Things always come back full circle and that is beyond our control.  Whether we see it or not, our actions will affect us, people elsewhere, or the conditions of the future.  A proactive stance needs to be taken now because the repercussions of our actions will not disappear into thin air.

Someone has said, ‘A computer, now that’s mundane; but a tree, that’s
technology!’.

People will always have different interpretations of the same thing.  A dissenting view is not wrong.  During a talk the other night, Ken Lyotier, founder of United We Can said “The key is not to change people, but your perspective on them.”  I think that’s something a lot of us can work towards.

To complement and reinforce these new technologies, we will continue to
sensitize and engage all 5000 of our people in a common purpose, right
down to the factory floor and right out there face to face with our customers,
to do the thousands and thousands of little things – the environmentally
sensitive things, energy saved here, pollution avoided there – that
collectively are just as important as the five big technologies of the future:
solar energy, closed loop recycling, zero waste, harmless emissions, and
resource-efficient transportation.

Tax, the environment, unread Facebook notifications, my  messy room…They were all created through the collective power of many many little actions just adding up or building up over time. By that I mean the culmination of incidents that were actively carried out or the culmination of neglected actions. If we can harness this power in a good way, anything is possible.

If anything, this one artice just shows that advice, guidance, and direction can be found everywhere if we open our eyes to it.

So I fell into a summer rut.

Too many things to do + sunshine + going abroad + sickness and lack of mindspace/sleep = me neglecting far too many things in my life.

On the plus side, I learned one very important lesson and one amazing tip.

Lesson # 1: Lack of time is not a valid excuse for anything. You can always make time if you want to.

Tip # 1: Anything that you can get off your checklist within the next two minutes should be done right now.

So here is my two minute post.

I’d like to think this also signifies the end of my rut.

My friend told me that if I was planning on disappearing for a month, I should have given some warning. For that I’m sorry!

Blog posts take some time for me. It usually requires a day of daydreaming, followed by a string of drafts and deletes. And for those of you who know me well, I’ve immersed myself in a pretty packed summer schedule that has cut my daydream time tremendously.

Small updates while I’m here. My busy schedule this summer has really forced me to pack myself into short spans of free time. Which naturally means I’ve tried to be as much of a misfit as possible. Some new memories made:

- accidentally attended a hippie convention
- jumped off a bridge (and bounced back)
- made it onto 4 roofs in one night (watched a peaceful moon-set on one and got attacked by seagulls on another)
- been filmed in a ..film? and been mistaken for an auto commercial girl
- made banana kitkat pancakes
- explored down a (non-sewage) manhole only to have someone seal me in
- hijacked a canoe at midnight and rowed under the Granville bridge

Don’t wait till you’re 50 to start on your bucket list. It’s way more fun this way

I had a discussion with a good friend the other day about how we’re growing up in a generation without a core.

Where being friends to all but friends to none is becoming the norm.

Where we try so hard to accomplish everything that we accomplish nothing.

They say change happens when you push the boundaries and that the only place for change is at the edges. That is more than true.

But it’s just as important to pause.

Breathe.

Take a good look at where we started and where we’re going.

Are we staying true, genuine, grounded?

Take a moment to write down the 5 people and the 5 things or activities in your life that matter the most. Can you name 5 of each? Are you giving them the time, energy and love that they deserve?

If the answer is no, change something.

Because meaningful growth can’t be sustained without roots.

Suddenly I realized that I had become immersed in a world where quite often how you look than is more important that how you think . Where your net worth is more relevant than your self worth. Where success is measured by what you have not what you have to give.

It’s time to rewind the tracks.

Today is the start of a movement.

Young people have always been at the forefront of every major movement for social change.

In the moment you reach out to care for somebody, you’re tapping into the ultimate grace that we possess.

We are each capable of becoming a light for another person.

What an amazing gift.

On May 3. 2009, Paul Hawken made an unforgettable commencement address to the class of 2009 at the University of Portland.

So beautiful. It’s long so took the bits that moved me most and copied it below but I would highly highly encourage you to take a moment and read the whole speech here because I don’t think the bits I took can justify it.

But here goes:

“When I was invited to give this speech, I was asked if I could give a simple short talk that was “direct, naked, taut, honest, passionate, lean, shivering, startling, and graceful.” Boy, no pressure there. But let’s begin with the startling part.

Don’t be put off by people who know what is not possible. Do what needs to be done, and check to see if it was impossible only after you are done.

Inspiration is not garnered from the litanies of what may befall us; it resides in humanity’s willingness to restore, redress, reform, rebuild, recover, reimagine, and reconsider.

We have tens of thousands of abandoned homes without people and tens of thousands of abandoned people without homes. We have failed bankers advising failed regulators on how to save failed assets. Think about this: we are the only species on this planet without full employment. Brilliant. We have an economy that tells us that it is cheaper to destroy earth in real time than to renew, restore, and sustain it. You can print money to bail out a bank but you can’t print life to bail out a planet. At present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it gross domestic product. We can just as easily have an economy that is based on healing the future instead of stealing it. We can either create assets for the future or take the assets of the future. One is called restoration and the other exploitation. And whenever we exploit the earth we exploit people and cause untold suffering.

Working for the earth is not a way to get rich, it is a way to be rich. The first living cell came into being nearly 40 million centuries ago, and its direct descendants are in all of our bloodstreams. Literally you are breathing molecules this very second that were inhaled by Moses, Mother Teresa, and Bono. We are vastly interconnected. Our fates are inseparable. We are here because the dream of every cell is to become two cells. In each of you are one quadrillion cells, 90 percent of which are not human cells. Your body is a community. In a millisecond, our body has undergone ten times more processes than there are stars in the universe exactly what Charles Darwin foretold when he said science would discover that each living creature was a “little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars of heaven.”

What I want you to imagine is that collectively humanity is evincing a deep innate wisdom in coming together to heal the wounds and insults of the past. Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked what we would do if the stars only came out once every thousand years. No one would sleep that night, of course. The world would become religious overnight. We would be ecstatic, delirious, made rapturous by the glory of God. Instead the stars come out every night, and we watch television. This extraordinary time when we are globally aware of each other and the multiple dangers that threaten civilization has never happened, not in a thousand years, not in ten thousand years. Each of us is as complex and beautiful as all the stars in the universe. We have done great things and we have gone way off course in terms of honoring creation.

You are graduating to the most amazing, challenging, stupefying challenge ever bequested to any generation. The generations before you failed. They didn’t stay up all night. They got distracted and lost sight of the fact that life is a miracle every moment of your existence. Nature beckons you to be on her side. You couldn’t ask for a better boss. The most unrealistic person in the world is the cynic, not the dreamer. Hopefulness only makes sense when it doesn’t make sense to be hopeful. This is your century. Take it and run as if your life depends on it.“

This post was sparked by NJ who again, never fails to inspire.

In her latest post she took a piece of advice from Muhammad Yunus who said this:

When you don’t know where to start…

Start small. Do what you can with something you care about so deeply that you simply can’t not do it. Stay focused, close to the ground, rooted in everyday reality. Trust your instincts and your eyes: do what needs doing any way you can, whether the experts agree or not. Put practice ahead of theory and results ahead of conventional wisdom. If it works, keep doing it. If it doesn’t work, change what you’re doing until you find something that does work.

Start small, start with whatever is close at hand, start with something you care deeply about. But start.

But small has the power to tilt things both ways. The baby steps we take now will compound in ways we never expect because so much of the future is past our line of sight.

A few examples.

In 2004, 1.4 million petitioners who signed for the recall of Hugo Chávez were punished by having their names released to the public. The resulting misallocation of workers across jobs has ended up costing Venezuela up to 3% of its GDP. (article)

Right now, decades after the one child policy was implemented in China in 1979, the Chinese extended family, with its network of brothers-in-law and sisters-in-law, uncles and aunties, brothers and sisters ranked by age, cousins always underfoot, is on its way to extinction. An institution that was a societal bedrock for millennia has been shattered. (article)

Did anyone see these repercussions coming?

We shouldn’t underestimate the power of the small. Find what you’re passionate about and yes, start small and start now. But make sure it’s genuine, because every step we take now will impact us down the line.

Before taking your baby step, think forward and imagine it compounded a hundred times. If you like that impact it makes, then please, keep going!

The future would be an beautiful place if everyone’s small steps moved towards a genuinely positive end point.

A few interesting articles I read today here and here.

The first point is that pyramid schemes are still very much alive.  Call it what you want, (they call it “network marketing” here) but the same idea holds in that if you wanted to, you could probably be making a cut of some company’s profits by selling to your friends and acquaintances.

The second article makes it clear that social media is changing the game.  With current and developing social media tools, you will have the ability to maintain relationships with an increasingly wider audience.

Marketing stats will tell you that the power of recommendation is stronger than most channels. So companies (or even you) are realizing that the easy thing to do is convince you to market their product or organization within your online network.

There’s a driving factor in network marketing.

Trust.

Try to quantify that before using your networks for the next profitable opportunity that comes along.

“Dear God, I didn’t think orange went with purple, until I saw the sunset you made on Tuesday.  That was cool.”

This was taken from a Sara - a little girl writing letters to God.

Thinking like an adult isn’t always the best way to approach things.

There’s something amazing about how kids process information.  They take in what they see and appreciate it as something new rather than automatically assimiating it with things they already know.

The outcome?  Love for the simplicity of everything around you, attention to details missed, and an immensely creative outlook.

(I wish this video didn’t end in an ad but..)

Maybe it’s time to backtrack and re-learn a few skills we once had.

There are so many emotions immersed in this video.

It’s amazing when the cruelty around us gets a slap in the face sometimes.

Study everyone’s expressions to try and catch the moment they’re humbled.

Susan Boyle on Britain\’s Got Talent