Becoming
What are we becoming?
July 26, 2016
Photo: Cold Springs Bridge south of Ketchum
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‘Every day, we change. We move (slowly) toward the person we’ll end up being.
Not just us, but our organizations. Our political systems. Our culture.
Every day we make the hard decisions that build a culture, an organization, a life.
Since yesterday, since last week, since you were twelve, have you been making deposits or withdrawals from the circles of supporters around you?
People don’t become selfish, hateful and afraid all at once. They do it gradually.
When we see the dystopian worlds depicted in movies and books [politics], are we closer to those outcomes than a generation ago? Do we find ourselves taking actions that make our conversations more considered, our arguments more informed, our engagements more civil? Or precisely the opposite, because it’s easier?
When your great-grandfather arrives by time machine, what will you show him? What have you built, what are you building? When your great-grandchildren remember the choices we made, at a moment when we actually had a choice, what will they remember?
We are always becoming, and we can always make the choice to start becoming something else, if we care.’
-Seth Godin
Messy is the way.
June 25, 2016
Thank you, Kerri Kelly.
‘I used to see a butterfly in my mind’s eye every time I heard the word transformation, but life has schooled me. Transformation isn’t a butterfly. It’s the thing before you get to be pretty bug flying away. It’s huddling in the dark cocoon and then pushing your way out. It’s the messy work of making sense of your fortunes and misfortunes, desires and doubts, hang-ups and sorrows, actions and accidents, mistakes and successes, so you can go on and become the person you must next become.’
Are you interesting?
October 30, 2015Seth Godin.
‘More interesting than you realize.
An interesting person is interesting to us because she combines two things: Truth and surprise.
The truth: Not necessarily a law of physics, not necessarily a measurable truth in nature, but merely the truth of experience. “I believe this,” or “I see that.”
And surprise. Note that surprise is always local. Surprising to me, the audience. That’s one reason that it’s said that interesting people are interested—they are empathetic enough to realize about what might be surprising to the person in the room, and they care enough to deliver on that insight.
Everyone is capable of telling the truth. And everyone has been surprising at least once.
Which means that being an interesting person is a choice. We can choose to show up, to care enough to contribute our humanity to the next interaction.
It’s a choice, but a difficult one, because being interesting feels risky. People are afraid to be interesting, not unable to be interesting.
You’re not born uninteresting. But it’s entirely possible you’ve persuaded yourself to be so frightened of the consequences that you no longer have the passion, the generosity or the guts to be interesting any longer.
Without a doubt, we need your interesting.’