I found the following statement in today's post - Fleshy Bloggers - on The TrueTalk Blog:

[W]e all spoke of making decisions that didn't make economic sense so that we could engage in the kind of meaning-making we crave.  That may not be "smart" but it's what many of us do, daily.

Why would anyone claim that this isn't smart? What on earth is stupid about being happy?

People say this kind of thing all the time, and I'm sure that's why Tom wrote that sentence the way he did. People talk about the "smart" thing to do. They say, "Be reasonable." But the person they're talking to is quite often being perfectly reasonable. They're just applying that reason toward different goals.

First of all, I'd like to thank all of you who have discovered this blog so far, with a very special thank you to those of you who have shared it with others.  Please keep visiting, and please keep spreading the word!

I'm getting close to a hundred hits a day now, which is a wonderful start, and I'd like to encourage you all to join in the dialog. Are the articles on this blog helpful to you? Do you have something to add? Are there other topics you'd like to discuss? Concerns you'd like to address? Do you have your own blog addressing similar issues? Different issues? I want to hear from you!

For me, one of the best reasons for choosing win-win scenarios over win-lose scenarios is that win-win thinking tends to connect people with each other. People in a win-win community support, encourage, and genuinely value each other, understanding that everyone has something unique to add. They also understand that the grand collection of these unique voices is far greater than the sum of those voices individually.

Win-Win Web is intended to be just that sort of community. I'd love to hear your voice. I'd love to see your comments here on this public forum where they can inform us all and add to the dialog. If you are uncomfortable sharing your thoughts publicly, I'd love to hear them by e-mail. A win-win community engages in active dialog with the conscious goal of contributing to the whole. Please join in!

Continuing in the vein of yesterday's posting, another win-win goal is the goal of learning new things. Learning is a fantastic win-win goal, because learning something always leads to the potential for sharing. The more you learn, the more you have to share with others.

Just a few weeks ago, I was visiting Virginia Beach for a local conference. While I was there, I decided to drop in at Freedom Surf, where I picked up a used longboard. (A Hobie Peter Pan Slug, for those who know about that sort of thing.) I've never been surfing before in my life, but I've always wanted to try it. When I told the salesman there my dilemma, he took me under his wing and told me everything I needed to know. (That was Jeromie, if you know the place. Really great guy. Greetings also to Jett - thanks for the directions - and to O.E. - thanks for holding onto my board for a while!)

How do you live a win-win life? It all comes down to your goals. Are they competitive or cooperative? Humans are complex beings with complex needs. But what are your core definitions of success for yourself? What do you strive for? What do you stand for?

Think about these core definitions of success. If you achieve that success, will it tend to harm anyone else? Or will it naturally contribute to the success of others?

One definition of success that I have recently added to my own list is to reach a higher level of physical fitness. I find that as I am getting older, my general level of fitness is becoming more important to me. Fitness is a great win-win goal because raising your own fitness level will never detract from anyone else's. In fact, it is likely to encourage others in achieving the same goal.

I started out in life as a proudly dedicated left-brain thinker. I thought romance novels were absurd. So much silliness - much ado about nothing. Later in life I learned to appreciate the simple value of a light-hearted story with a happy ending. Anything that can lighten even your darkest mood has tremendous value, including silliness. Especially silliness!

A new season of television is always fascinating to me. I'm not just interested in the entertainment. I also believe that it's a great way to check in with our culture's way of thinking. Culture is not a static thing. It grows and evolves along with the people who create it, and that includes the people who create television.

Ours is a world of win-lose thinking, and that never fails to show up on TV. This season has the usual line-up of good guys and bad guys, "reality" show-downs, and battles for supremacy. But there are a few twists worth noting.

Dwayne Melancon's Monday posting on the Genuine Curiosity blog mentions visualization as a key to success. While I'm all for visualization techniques, what if you're not an especially visual person?

Not to worry! Visualization doesn't have to be visual at all. We live in a world that emphasizes our sense of vision, so the term "visualization" is often used as a shorthand for the human potential of "manifestation." But you don't have to visualize your success to manifest it.

[A brief post highlighting an article written by Laurie Goering upon the death of her friend, Fakher Haider, who became--in her words--"my interpreter, my unlikely bodyguard, my dear friend and my chief source of insight into Iraqi society."]

Steve Pavlina continues an interesting discussion that began on Creating Passionate Users with his recent blog posting: Calming Someone Down. (I love the round-table nature of blogging.) At the end of his posting he writes:

So my personal block is actually wanting to calm someone down instead of just rolling my eyes at them for losing it. I think I’ll need to work on this more.

Lol, Steve. To bring people up to speed on the dialog, the issue at hand is a certain method of "helping" people to calm down by "matching and mirroring" their state and then slowly leading them back to a calmer frame of mind. The idea is that this is more effective than simply telling them to calm down, which really doesn't work (and which tends to upset people even more). I use the word "helping" in quotes for a reason. I'll get back to that.

The author of Slacker Manager recently posted an article expressing a concern about reward systems in the home. The concern is that a reward system for children could lead them from the "profit motive" into "greed." For me, this begs the question, "What is greed, exactly, and where does it come from?" I have spent a lot of time researching the concept of greed over the last decade or so, and I have become absolutely convinced that our basic concept of greed is entirely misinformed.

This week on "37 days," Patti Digh posted an article entitled "Fund your own revolution" about how easy it is to blame "Them" for the things that we don't like about the world. Patti suggests that "We give up our power to the very people who took it away from us in the first place."

I think that to a certain extent this is absolutely true. Patti's point, at least the way I read her article, is that we can't afford to wait for "Them" to make the changes we are waiting for, and I couldn't agree more. This is also what I believe Mahatma Gandhi meant when he said that we must be the changes we want to see in the world.

On the other hand, to say that we give up our power to those who took it away also raises the question, "Who are 'They'?" Who took "Our" power away, and what makes "Us" so different from "Them"?

Two days ago, Chris Bailey posted an article entitled "Exploring Our Unapproachable Rooms" on the Alchemy of Soulful Work.  In that article, he wrote:

Our challenge: In our minds are many rooms that remain unexplored. What would happen if we just opened the door? What would happen if we take a step inside? What's the worst that could possibly happen? Better yet, how might our lives be improved by taking the chance of inhabiting our darkest places for a little while? Once we choose not to fear those places, we cannot get lost.

A "hidden room" is created whenever we agree (whether consciously or unconsciously) to the idea that there is something we do not want to be.  Sadly, we live in a world with a lot of these definitions.  We don't want to be losers, of course.  More specifically, we don't want to be lazy or stupid or ugly or disrespected or disloyal or unreliable... The list goes on and on. They become the things we are afraid of being, and of course we don't want to dwell on them.

In this month's issue of This Green Life, author Sheryl Einsenberg begins:

Like most Americans, I live my life outside of nature. It's not that I never get outdoors. I take one or two walks a day through neighborhood gardens and parks. But beautiful as many of these places are, they aren't nature. They are human environments with nature in them -- a strange inversion of the natural order.

That's certainly how it feels, isn't it?  For nature lovers, human environments simply can't compare to the natural world.  For those who have lived their whole lives in cities, the natural world can seem almost like an alien environment - unfamiliar and potentially hostile. Why does nature feel so different from our own backyards?

When I'm looking for new article ideas, I like to surf the web, searching various blogs for real people with real concerns.  For every person who is courageous enough to put a problem out there, there are thousands of other people dealing with the same issue.  Today I found the following posting on CareerNiche of TapestryDesigns.net:

I love to write. I write well. But trying to convince anybody to purchase something I made is worse than a visit to a doctor for me. I have the worst time talking about the good points of anything related to me (sad, but true). Not that this is an unusual problem for people, but it can really be a business-stopper.

No, it is not an unusual problem, and yes, it can be a real business-stopper. Worse, people who are having trouble selling themselves can find themselves adding concerns over their own feelings to the original problem. People tend to see this kind of trouble as an indication of insecurity or timidity, and people who don't like to sell their own work end up worrying that this may be a sign of some deep personality flaw.  Well, not to worry.  Chances are good that the problem isn't in your personality.  It's in your perspective.

In the aftermath of Katrina, Eric McNulty writes: "What is the duty of a company to its employees at a time of massive disruption such as this? Do responsibility to shareholders and desire to help workers come into conflict -- or will companies that do the most for employees now reap greater dividends than those who play it tight?"  (Worthwhile Magazine: "What Should Great Companies Do?")

It is a common business and legal practice to ask questions such as this in terms of “duty” and “constituents,” the constituents in this case being employees and shareholders. This is how we are taught to think about almost all business issues. But as soon as we frame the question in this way, we have limited the answers we can give. We have already chosen to see the problem as one of conflicting interests. From here we must choose to serve one interest or the other, or try to “compromise” between them, or try to “balance” them against each other.

What I call the "comparison game" seems to be in the air lately.  I posted an article about the comparison game as it relates to our inclination to help each other (Lessons from Katrina) just this past weekend, and I later discovered that Curt Rosengren had posted an article on the same day on his blog - The Occupational Adventure - about what the comparison game does to our self-esteem.  So my mind has been on the subject lately.  And since I'm all about win-win games and mutually supportive frameworks, I've been thinking specifically about how the comparison game actually locks us away from our own highest potential, and how it keeps us from connecting into the highest potential in others.

The real problem with the comparison game is that it's just so limiting. When we compare ourselves to others - or others to ourselves - we are essentially breaking our highest potential down into dull, component parts, and then we're scrutinizing those "parts" for "problems" or "weaknesses."  We do this in order to compare ourselves to each other because there is no meaningful way to compare whole human beings against each other.

In the aftermath of Katrina, thousands of people have been left in dire need. Those who survived the disaster have suffered tremendous losses. Many have lost friends and loved ones. Others have been separated from their entire families. Still others are grateful for the fact that their families have remained intact, but they fear for their futures, having lost their homes along with all of their worldly possessions.

The good news is that relief efforts are underway. Individuals, families, nonprofit organizations and for-profit businesses across the country are providing assistance in the form of food, water, clothing, shelter and emotional support. The stories are pouring in, each more heartwarming than the next, but with each new story I hear people ask the same question: "Why is it that we seem to need a crisis to really come together like this? Why can't we be this good to each other all the time?"

The human race is a race of seekers. The drive to seek - to learn, to discover, to accomplish - is built into our most basic neurological structure. It is a part of the very genetic code that makes us who we are.

The desires to seek such basics as food, water, warmth, sex, and companionship are ancient desires, found deep within our primitive brains. But when these are satisfied, the human neocortex - the thinking brain - harnesses the seeking instinct into more complex desires, such as the desire for social status, the desire for wealth, the desire for self-expression, the desire for new horizons. What we seek may define us as individuals more than any other aspect of our personalities.

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