I love waking up on a Saturday morning in my own bed, and since next week I won't be here, I am enjoying being home. It's raining and gray outside but my garden looks vibrant as it soaks in all the water coming from the skies. I've noticed more birds in my backyard and they warm my heart.
I made a decision that I want to make some changes in 2011 and I put it in motion yesterday. When I was asked at lunch where I see myself, my answer was helping people. My life usually just happens. When I hope for something too much, it usually does not materialize. I am hoping to clear my mind in Costa Rica. I need to clear all the thoughts and emotions clogging me right now.
Some high level thoughts for this year:
Be part of a community that unleashes my creativity and desire to make a difference in the world
Work at a company that values what I bring and compensates me with interesting work and an ability to retire early
Take more time off and explore the world
Go back to Africa
Spend more time with friends, wherever they are in the world
Get clairty on what's next
Write and share more
Going on a cooking retreat
Now, for some more wonderful coffee and a Netflix movie streaming on my new Apple TV ... of course, a foreign film ...
Where does our society's obsession come from when it comes to constantly using numbers to rate ourselves against others? I think it is ingrained into the education system and sticks with us all of our lives.
Does self worth really come from numbers? Wow, look at them: they have x thousand/million followers on Twitter, x friends on Facebook, x contacts on LinkedIn, etc. They are listed as the top X influencers in X. We are absolutely haunted by numbers as a way to measure self worth and it is so wrong.
It makes people feel worthy and worthless at the same time. And in my books, feelings of worthlessness are very sad indeed if measured by any benign statistic.
I am at a point of my life where I achieved much and my quest today is to really figure out what I want to do to make an impact with people - not as a statistic or "hero" but as an average human being wanting to make a difference. I used to think I can do it by writing and trying to reach out to people as a way to connect.
I still firmly believe that a sense of community is key and in our statistics driven society, we lose focus on what is truly important by constantly trying to stand up. And the irony is that the people who lead the numbers games create a false reality for those who don't: they are not much happier than the rest. They just can gloat about their external, superficial ranking.
What are you doing today to bring some joy into your life? How are you tapped into a community that supports who you are? What can we all do differently to get our slice of personal worth?
I tried to stay awake. I made it until 9 pm and slept until 11 pm. I have to make sure I go back to bed by midnight. Jet lag is just brutal.
I spent yesterday listening to employees and it was exhausting. So many simple issues that if anyone cared could be resolved. I will try to help but will write the book one day, with a friend, on the corporate machine. One guy yesterday really made me laugh when he compared his situation to the Flinstones. He actually made so many animal analogies ranging from donkeys to mammoths. The sad part was that it's not really funny. I wish I could say that someone apart from me cares. Enough about work.
What did inspire me was conversations I had about their dreams to improve conditions in Kenya. It was then that we got excited about what is possible. I am looking forward to meetings with people who can actually make things happen.
This was by far the most inspirational session I attended at this week's World Affairs Council.
Have you wondered what kind of organization you would get if you mixed the business savvy of a corporation with the passion and heart of a non-profit?John Wood, founder and executive chairman of Room to Read, a non-profit organization dedicated to helping children across the developing world break the cycle of poverty through the power of education. At age 35, John Wood left his high-paying job as Microsoft's Director of Business Development in China to create Room to Read. What started as a personal goal of delivering 3,000 books by yak to a remote Nepali village in 1999 has become an award-winning NGO providing educational resources to over 3 million children and establishing over 7,000 libraries in impoverished regions of Asia and Africa. Described as an organization that "combines the heart of Mother Theresa with the scalability of Starbucks," Wood joins the Council to share how he was able to develop Room to Read into one of the fastest-growing non-profits in history and how his unique business and non-profit approach guide his vision of educating some the world’s poorest children.
In the monastery of Sceta, Abbot Lucas gathered the brothers together for a sermon.
‘May you all be forgotten,’ he said.
‘But why?’ one of the brothers asked. ‘Does that mean that our example can never serve to help someone in need?’
‘In the days when everyone was just, no one paid any attention to people who behaved in an exemplary manner,’ replied the abbot.
” ‘Everyone did their best, never thinking that by behaving thus they were doing their duty by their brother. They loved their neighbour because they understood that this was part of life and they were merely obeying a law of nature.
“They shared their possessions in order not to accumulate more than they could carry, for journeys lasted a whole lifetime.
“They lived together in freedom, giving and receiving, making no demands on others and blaming no one.
“That is why their deeds were never spoken of and that is why they left no stories. If only we could achieve the same thing now: to make goodness such an ordinary thing that there would be no need to praise those who practise it.”
Lynne Twist recently gave a keynote
address based on her best selling book – The Soul of Money. Lynne
described how when we call people rich, we collapse who they are with their
financial circumstances. We are whole, complete people despite what we have in
material possessions.
Why is money
an obsession? Why do we worry, fret and spend time worrying about it? We live in
a culture that is a money culture and a consumer culture. Lynne quoted Buddha
from 2,000 years ago as saying “The source of all suffering is a lie”. She
reiterated that the suffering we all feel is intensified in a bed of lies in our
money culture.
The Big
Lies
We invented
money approximately 4,500 years ago as a way of exchanging goods and resources
with one another – as a way of sharing our gifts. If you were a cobbler who
needed a pig, you’d need to find a farmer who needed his shoes repaired. The
invention of money made the exchange of goods and services more
accessible.
We now use
money to divide and separate. We assigned its value and meaning and now are at
the affect of it. We have assigned a psychological power to money – it has
become the be all and end all – the unquestioned answer to almost
anything.
We’ve
forgotten that WE hold the power – money is a tool and we have made it something
more important than that. We have made it more important than the natural
world.
The Great Lie of
Scarcity
We have
created an unconscious body of assumptions of the way of looking at life. It’s
not what we see, it’s what we’re looking through. We have created three toxic
myths
1. There’s Not
Enough
We have
mantras such as there’s not enough money, market share, time, love… Most
conversations are about what we don’t have enough of. We start thinking “I am
not enough” and the second part is that there is not enough to go around.
Someone somewhere is going to be left out. Our job is to accumulate as much as
we can to be as far away as possible from someone being left
out.
2. More is
Better
We have an
ongoing, unconscious assumption that more is better. The fastest growing
industry in the US is the offsite storage business. It’s become a statement of
who we are that we have homeless people without shelter yet we spend money to
house the “stuff” that won’t fit into the bigger homes we buy because we have so
much stuff in them already.
The need to
want more is not escaped by having more. It just makes you want more and becomes
a never ending story. This leads to a feeling of lacking versus a place of
satisfaction.
3. That’s Just the
Way It Is
This is the
worst lie that keeps everything in place. We develop a source of resignation,
people giving up, can’t possibly turn this around, no way to change
it.
Where are you caught
in the toxic myths?
Money has
turned us into consumers – a word that means she who takes, depletes, dominates
or destroys.
Who we
really are is citizens – we stand for or take responsibility for our well being
of our selves, our community, our state and our nation. We need to reclaim
ourselves as citizens and let go of treating ourselves as
consumers.
The Radical
Surprising Truth
Lynne was a
student of Buckminster
Fuller, a brilliant scientist man who many feel was ahead of his time
(invented electric car in 1949 for example) and he made a statement about trust
that liberated Lynne from a condition of scarcity.
In 1976, he
stated that humanity had recently passed a critical threshold that we will never
turn back from. We as a human community of ingenuity and innovation are doing so
much more with so much less. We are clearly moving into a world for everyone,
everywhere to have a healthy and productive life. This will be true now, in the
future, and forever more. A world where there’s enough for everyone everywhere
to make it at no one else’s expense. We have moved from scarcity to sufficiency
to enough.
He stated
that it will take about 50 years for this to come to fruition (from 1976)
because all institutions of humankind are routed in you OR me
relationships.
Hearing him
speak changed Lynne’s life forever as she now saw everything differently. She
saw incredible bounty everywhere.
“Sufficiency” and “enough” are distinct from
“abundance”. Excess turns to waste. At the heart of it is a principle invented
by Lynne:
The Context
of Sufficiency - If you let go of trying to get what you want, it frees up
energy to turn to and nourish what you already have, which then expands and
gives you what you need. What you appreciate, appreciates.
The window
to prosperity is through the portal of enough/sufficiency which then expands
into abundance.
Lynne then
recommended the website www.gratefulness.org – gratitude has 2 branches –
gratefulness and thanksgiving.
Gratefulness
is where the bowl of life is so full but not overflowing and thankfulness is
where you want to give, share and contribute what you have. It is a way of being
that has nothing to do with the amount of anything.
She then
asked the participants to turn to each other and share for 3 minutes what each
of us was grateful for in our lives. A very powerful exercise that shows that
what we are most grateful for has little to do with material things in
life.
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