Imagine discovering not only that the universe is absolutely full of dust, but also that there is more of the universe than was previously thought, all of it hidden behind that very dust.
Just by changing the wavelength of the light you’re using to see by.
HT to Hayley Gomez and The Life Scientific for ths one.
When you buy off the shelf, you’re buying from someone who’s producing for people who do what everyone else does, the way everyone else does it. That’s what ‘mass-market’ means.
This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t buy off the shelf. Just that when you do, you should be clear that whatever you’re buying really does serve what you do, the way that you do it.
Otherwise you’ll end up having to act like everyone else.
A shame when there are other options available.
Of course your business doesn’t just impact the people immediately involved in it.
It also impacts Earth, therefore other inhabitants too. Possibly in ways you can’t currently see.
You may not be responsible for the entirety of the impact, but perhaps you contribute.
Just as, by outsourcing my accounting to an accountant, I don’t employ someone directly, but contribute to the employment of the people who work for my accountant, so, by using a laptop and mobile for my work, I contribute to the pollution and oppression created by a lithium mine.
The point is to be aware. Then to ramp up the positives and minimise the negatives.
That might mean changing how you do business, or even what you do, to play your part in creating a safe and just space for humanity here on our planet:
One thing’s for certain, you won’t be short of work.
Discipline makes Daring possible.
“Entropy: Spontaneous increase in disorder of a carefully arranged system. An irreversible process, except with the input of energy.”
The energy needed to prevent entropy in your carefully arranged business system doesn’t have to only come from you.
In fact it’s better if it doesn’t.
That way a useful level of emergence is possible.
Discipline makes Daring possible.
If what everyone really wants is something like this:
Then your impact on people is about how much you help or hinder them in their quest to achieve it.
Do you enable people to earn enough to rise above meeting basic needs? Do you free their time to focus on finding and following their purpose? Do you help them to master skills and capabilities that will increase their agency and autonomy? Do you help them connect to a community that values them?
How could you measure these things?
A good place to start might be to look at what changes when it works. What are the symptoms of that change? How few of them could you measure to tell you the effect your business has had?
Of course you’ll want to measure these things for your clients.
Remember to measure them for your team and yourself too. You’re all involved.
The final component of feedback that matters for your business, is the impact it makes. On your clients, your team, your family, your friends, your community and your planet.
Impact is probably also the hardest kind of feedback to measure.
That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try.
What ripples is your business pebble responsible for?
An atlas helps you to see further than your immediate surroundings.
It puts you in context.
Actually, it puts you into multiple contexts, showing you how the small space you currently occupy is connected to others, by geography, geology, ecology and of course politics.
We tend to think of AI as something disembodied and impersonal. In reality, it’s very far from either.
This book puts AI into multiple contexts that get beyond and behind the current hypes.
So you can see further.
‘Atlas of AI’ by Kate Jackson
Well worth a read.
The idea of ikigai is a practical tool for helping yourself to fit in with the world as it is:
Eugenio Hansen, OFS, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>,
What if the diagram looked like this instead:
Finding happiness would be much easier, if we didn’t have to work for a living.
Maybe what the world really needs is a change of system.
Discipline makes Daring possible.
“Creative action, one might say, is at any level encompassed within a larger system of actions in which it becomes socially meaningful – that is in which it takes on social value.
All creative action is to some degree revolutionary; but to be revolutionary to any significant degree, it must change that larger structure within which it is embedded.
At which point one can no longer imagine one is simply working on objects, but must recognise that one is also working on people.” David Graeber
In other words, the ‘perfect employee’ is made by how you choose to employ them.
Yesterday I learned two things from the same street in Soho.
The first was that when you try and force yourself into the box that society/the system has made for you, you may very well die.
The second was that when you design your own box, then connect it with those of other like-hearted people, you become a node, enabling yourself and everyone around you to be so much more than society/the system expects.
It might just be me, but it feels like the nodes are winning, in spite of everything the system/society is throwing at them.