Dick Richards over at On Genius recently posted an article entitled Subjects, Objects and Victims. In the article, he talks about recognizing our responsibility for our own emotions. For the most part, I agree. We are responsible for our own emotions. But what I find interesting - and profoundly important - is exactly how we can use that responsibility to take control of our emotional life.

Note to self: remember to start Christmas shopping early next year! Try to remember what it is like to enter into the public arena on any weekend in December, and remember therefore to avoid the experience at any and all costs. Also remember that your family is growing and Christmas shopping is not the simple affair it once was. Two or three weeks just isn't going to cut it any more.

Proposed implementation plan for Christmas Shopping 2006:

November 1 - Make Christmas List of Friends & Relatives
Halloween is over. Move on. Also, skip Thanksgiving - there's no time. If travel is possible, visit Mom & Dad for turkey and stuffing. Mom makes a far better Thanksgiving dinner than I would anyway. If travel is impossible, forget the turkey. Eat at Waffle House.

Recognizing your life's mission is not always easy. I can't tell you how many times I have heard people say, "I know I was born on this earth with a specific purpose. I just don't know what it is!" If you have yet to discover your own life's purpose, I'm going to give you a hint: it's a lot broader than you probably realize.

I've been thinking long and hard about this Scavenger Hunt entry from Dwayne Melancon under the "unusual landscape" category. I absolutely love this photograph so I have been determined to use it in the blog, but I haven't quite figured out how to connect it to the philosophy of mutualistic symbiosis. Nonetheless, I have a standing promise to the win-win web readers to create a post out of every scavenger hunt contribution, and as I am particularly fond of this image, I am even more determined to step up to the challenge. So here we go: motorcycles, fruit stands, and mutualistic symbiosis, coming right up...

What strikes me most about this photograph is the contrast of the brightly colored fruit, the flames of the motorcycle, and the red tail light against the gray of the wall, the sidewalk, and the asphalt. The colors pop out of the image to grab one's attention, and it would be easy to allow the conscious mind to stop there in its observation. But pay attention for a few moments to that gray background, and you'll realize that there's a lot going on behind the scene.

Between work and a brand new bicycle (save gas—use leg power!) I’ve been away from my blog for several days. I’ve been checking my blog-related e-mail, of course, but there hasn’t been much chatter lately. I fired up my HP this morning only to discover that I had received nothing but junk mail for the third day in a row. The good news is I wasn’t missing much while I was out pedaling around town. The bad news is there wasn’t much at the office to come back to.

I’ve come to expect most business activity to grind to a near halt around the holidays, so I wasn’t especially surprised at the stark November downturn. What’s interesting to me is the level of disappointment I’ve come to associate with an empty in-box. I love receiving mail. It’s that touch of personal correspondence with far away friends or with people I’ve never even met. It’s a few strands of connection every morning with the not-so-virtual world-wide web of humanity. That is, of course, until it stops coming.

Could Martin Luther King, Jr. have achieved the goals of the civil rights movement all by himself? Could Walt Disney have created the Disney empire without anyone else's help? Heck, even Lance Armstrong has a road crew. Take a wider view, and it's worth remembering that none of us could survive in the modern world without a heck of a lot of help. Our entire way of life is a system of profoundly interdependent specialization.

I did not plant or grow or harvest one thing that I ate yesterday. I did not mine or farm or otherwise produce any of the raw materials that make up every tangible thing I own. I did not invent or develop or fabricate even one component part of my computer, my television, my refrigerator, my car, or my central heating and air conditioning system. I did not design or craft or finish even one stick of my furniture. I did not build my home with my own hands.

From this perspective, what has any of us ever accomplished alone? Where would we be without the talents of several billion strangers?

So you have a big dream, and you’re not sure how to manifest it into reality. If you read “Castles in the air,” then you know the first step is to keep your eyes on your dream and keep that inspiration flowing. One great way to do this is to create an Inspiration Board.

Designate a place in your workspace for a bulletin board (or an equivalent like a white board or a magnetic board), and use it to post drawings, photographs, sketches, notes, and anything else that will remind you of your dream and keep you inspired in pursuing it. If your dream is to become a Major League baseball player, for example, then you might pin up a photograph like this one, created by Anne Ritchie and contributed to the Win-Win Web Scavenger Hunt.

Big dreams can be a long time in the making, so make sure your Inspiration Board is easy to change. Staring at the same inspiration over and over for months on end can become somewhat less than inspiring, especially if things aren’t moving along as quickly as you’d like. Move the board around as often as you need to in order to hold on to that feeling of enthusiasm.

A good friend of mine recently introduced me to a quote that became an instant favorite: “If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost. That is where they should be. Now put the foundation under them.” – Henry David Thoreau

I love this quote because so many of our dreams look like this in our minds,

while their physical reality still looks like…

Yesterday morning, if you had asked me, I would have told you that there was no way for pedestrians to cross local highway 74 in my neighborhood, unless of course you consider sprinting at top speed through a major intersection without the benefit of a crosswalk to be a valid option. Yesterday afternoon, however, I discovered a golf cart tunnel that traverses highway 74 just one block north of my home. It just goes to show you: we don’t always know what we don’t know.

Thought is a lot like light. The two phenomena are linked even in the way we talk about them. People can have "bright" ideas. To exchange bright ideas is to "shed light on a subject." But perhaps the most profound connection between thought and light is the state of "coherence." It reminds me of an SAT question: COHERENT LIGHT is to LASER, as COHERENT THOUGHT is to...?

I don't have an answer. We don't yet have a word that fits in the blank, but we should.

Anyone who's seen a rainbow knows something about light: that it comes in different wavelengths. The colors of the rainbow are just the wavelengths we can see. The spectrum expands outward in both directions into the realm of the "invisible," but even in the visible spectrum, we don't usually experience light as a panorama of different wavelengths. It takes something special, like mist or a well-cut gem, to show us the true nature of light. Usually it just comes at us all at once in a jumbled mess of "brightness."

Does your corporate attorney make you feel like this?

Rosa Say posted a great article on Talking Story recently that highlights the ever-growing fear of litigation in the work place. I posted a comment to that article, but as an MBA/JD who has lived both sides of this problem, I felt the need to weigh in with a more detailed analysis of the underlying issue. In short: law is taught as the theory of worst-case scenarios rather than the practice of best-case scenarios.

Ok, so what does that mean? Basically, law students are taught to worry. They read case after case of appalling tragedy, neglect, ignorance, incompetence, and downright cruelty. Over and over again they are shown the very worst that can happen, presented without any reference to the vast majority of reasonable human beings who happen to find themselves in conflict from time to time and yet somehow manage to resolve their differences without ever once resorting to fraud, kidnapping, violence, bloodshed, or even calling their attorney.

Win-Win Web is hosting a scavenger hunt, in win-win style!

(Get the photo? Because vultures are scavengers? Ha! Hey, if you can't crack yourself up, who can?)

Now that Win-Win Web has its new look, I need some photos to spruce up my postings. That's where you come in! Instead of doing all the photo finding myself, I'm inviting the Win-Win Web community to make a game out of it. Here's how it works: you find the photos, and I'll create posts to go with those photos. No matter how outlandish the image, I'll come up with a win-win message to match it. Put my creativity to the test! That's half the fun!

A passionate vision sets in place a collaborative approach to work, not just within the organization, but also in the organization's attitude toward the outside world.  (See yesterday's article on the cooperative workplace.) A passionate vision will never focus on the competition. Instead, it will define the company on its own terms.

Human beings are a clannish bunch. Look around you. Our tribes are everywhere. They are the tables of the high school cafeteria, the fraternities of the college campus, the divisions of the corporate organizational chart. Honestly people, can't we all just get along?

Apparently not. Or at least, not without a lot of encouragement.

Once when I was volunteering for a certain non-profit organization, I was assigned the dull but critical task of summarizing all feedback received from the general public. This feedback was funneled through the marketing department, and every month it was my responsibility to generate a report regarding the nature of these comments. In my first month on the job, I discovered that sometimes letters from members came in through the public channel, so of course I offered to run them over to the development office. Instead, the marketing manager told me to throw them away.

The comment from Kris on Friday's posting (thank you, Kris!) got me thinking over the weekend about predictability. I think we like the idea of predictability because it allows us to switch our minds over to "autopilot." New situations are expected to repeat old situations and can therefore be approached in old, familiar ways. (It makes me think of that song: "I'll be seeing you in all the old, familiar places...")

The problem is that the very idea of predictability is itself an old, familiar (mechanistic) approach to the world that does not in fact stand up against more recent knowledge about the universe.

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.

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!)

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!

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.