Growing your own food is the highest form of meditation.
[Soak cardboard in water for fifteen minutes, wrap around a glass jar, and remove just before dry. Use as a plant pot and place in soil to prevent root interference.]
Individual initiative, corporate inertia and good bad advice
Good luck finding books that somberly advise corporations on how to encourage a dangerous reliance on unsupervised individual inspiration.
A company needs to be able to treat its employees as interchangeable and expendable, both individually and collectively. It needs to be able to periodically layoff 17% of its workforce to cut its margin overhead by 1% and temporarily boost its stock price by 5%, without having to endure existential upheaval to its ongoing business processes. It needs to be able to double and redouble recklessly in size for the same dubious market reasons, without those people all piling up in the lobby where their chaos is visible from the street.
The key to these flexibilities, as we have understood at least since Henry Ford, is to formalize the operational roles so that their function in the overall system is symbolic and anonymous. As long as people are just units inserted into well-defined slots, the machinery doesn’t need to care who they are.
The secret truth of business advice is that it’s mostly about how to grimly extract residual value from the luck you already had, and the unearned love you were already unguardedly given, because there’s really no method for making more of it.
what happens in the conversations I have with the ppl I’m coaching
[I offer: space away from the rat-race to reflect, breathe more deeply, move deliberately; a good bullshit detector; place to practice, prepare, or role-play tough future conversations; help to find the right amount of stretch in your development goal without overdoing to short circuit progress; encouragement if you need someone telling you to quit your job.]
[Improve your interpersonal dynamics by seeing the relationship as something that can be co-designed in process rather than ‘agreed upon’.]
[My formal training is in engineering and agriculture. I coach because people ask me, not because I’m certified.]
[Smaller organizations might not be able to afford leadership coaching from professionals but can afford peer-to-pear from like-minded companions.]
[Welcome:
- Does everyone feel invited to participate?
- Does the space guarantee users a safe experience?
- Does the space encourage the humanization of others?
- Can people express themselves without compromising their identity and data?
Connect:
- Does the space cultivate a sense of belonging?
- Does the space encourage fruitful connections between groups that aren’t naturally alike?
- Does the space strengthen emotional, structural, and participative ties to geographically local communities?
- Does the space make it possible for people to be heard by those in positions of power?
Understand:
- Does the space allow for shared concerns to be raised for broad attention by society at large?
- Is the information being elevated and shared reliable, factual, and true?
- Does the space build civic competence and encourage democratic participation?
- Does the space promote thoughtful conversation and room for respectful disagreements?
Act:
- Does this space boost a community’s resilience in the face of significant stress or adversity?
- Does this space facilitate our ability to participate in each others’ lives and shape society?]
Paul’s notes on how JSON-LD works
[The JSON-LD data model is a graph with documents as nodes and properties as edges to other nodes or ‘values’.]
[
@vocabmaps a default prefix to keys not mapped explicitly in@context].
[
@contextprovides only definitions to map your keys, it’s not a type.@typeis a type, and can be defined with a URL or a term from@context.
[
@id’s value is a reference to another object or node.]