MakingBetter

Skills and Strategies to Engage, Change and Grow Others

This Week in MakingBetter (27 January, 2014)

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Things to Think About

Your Moment of Zen

Harper Reed, former CTO of Obama for America with Steve Brown, a yo-yo master credited with inventing freehand yo-yo play, and Fred Kahl, Creative Director at Funny Garbage all exchanging notes on different yo-yo tricks in a passing conversation in the eclectic un-conference known as ORDcamp this last weekend
Harper Reed, former CTO of Obama for America with Steve Brown, a yo-yo master credited with inventing freehand yo-yo play, and Fred Kahl, Creative Director at Funny Garbage all exchanging notes on different yo-yo tricks in a passing conversation in the eclectic un-conference known as ORDcamp this last weekend, at which I learned how to solder electronics thanks to some ad hoc apprenticeship to the wise Mitch Altman

Links

  • There is an incredibly fun and cheeky chart… of movie quotes… as charts. http://bit.ly/1aBwCbW

  • Jono Bacon, author of the O’Reilly-published bible to community management “The Art of Community” (which is as open-source as the Ubuntu community he manages) had a brilliant and spot-on blog post this week about being accountable for the things we blog about — and how people skirt that accountability when they post stuff and delete it and/or delete comments that are frustrating (but valid). “I have a simple suggestion for those of you who run blogs: either switch your comments off entirely or always leave them on, but don’t turn them off when you don’t like the reaction from your readers. Polite and respectful debate helps us grow as human beings, helps us evolve our ideas and perspectives, and makes us better people. Let history be our record, not our edited version of history.”  http://bit.ly/1brAOWf

  • Thomas Frank of Salon had a scathing criticism of TED talks among other forms in the “media of creativity.” In this article, Frank asserts that you are not creative until the establishment says you are, which only reinforces a circular conservatism of the “creative class.” There’s a lot here and shots are fired at Steven B. Johnson, Richard Florida and even Csikszentmihalyi. Some good lines in this piece, but this stands out as something Megan and I come to terms with on every project we’ve taken: “for all its reverential talk about the rebel and the box breaker, society had no interest in new ideas at all unless they reinforced favorite theories or could be monetized in some obvious way. The method of every triumphant intellectual movement had been to quash dissent and cordon off truly inventive voices.” As I’ve said often, “Actually doing something will often get your hand slapped. It’s best to wear padded gloves.” http://bit.ly/1n4Hi5J

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