Archive for the ‘What is remarkable?’ Category
Living On One—100 Pennies Per Person Per Day
How can I personally understand poverty and wealth?
There is a fetching honesty to Living On One, the film from four documentarians out of the Claremont Colleges. These economics and film majors—all graduates within the year—set out to ask what it might look like to live on a dollar a day. “Living on a dollar a day” is one of those generalized statistics used to illustrate how a staggering number of people on our planet (over 1.2 billion?) live with so little.
The four friends set up shop (that is, a squalid camp) for a summer in a rural village in Guatemala and proceeded to shed pounds and acquire bug bites and diseases as they submitted to the economic rigor of making a life on the equivalent of 100 pennies per person per day.
Watching these friends sort out what to eat and how to eat it and how to cook it (firewood was a major draw on their 100 pennies) was a lesson in itself—especially when they realized that 1200 calories per person per day would not sustain them. They stepped over some invisible line the moment they bought their first bit of lard to cook in their daily ration of beans and rice—simply to get enough calories to keep lethargy partly at bay. They grew radishes, lusted after fresh fruit and longed for a chicken to nurture and then eat. The stories of the people who came to their aid and with whom they formed friendships are without question the most touching part of the film. All in all it’s an entertaining and affecting first-person account of trying to sort out the demands of poverty and wealth.
The honesty came in letting go of any pretense of actually being poor. They knew—and we the audience knew—they were choosing a particular limit. For a limited time. Resources were a phone call away, of course. But the thought experiment of trying to come to grips with a hand-to-mouth existence was compelling and begat practical lessons. The result was a kind of pragmatic knowledge that a textbook can never supply. I applaud their courage.
The Living On One bus stopped in Minneapolis a couple days ago. They played the film and took questions at the Bell Museum on the U of M campus, before a robust group of students and others. As they filmmakers took the stage I could see they were once again healthy people but also deeply affected by their experiment.
Their parting shot to the audience was to “Do something. Anything.” This final word was also an intrinsically honest call to action. The four friends had partnered with different micro-finance and poverty-fighting organizations, so they could and did recommend places to give cash toward the problem. But the big take-away was the struggle to personally understand this immense inequality.
That is a challenge that will stick with me.
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Shop Talk Creates Remarkable Moments
Does God show up in shop talk?
I wondered aloud what it would look like if God showed up at work. I thought it would not look like church but instead might resemble acts of excellent service, possibly offered anonymously. I argued such service might flow from a deeper dedication than winning points with the boss. I also speculated that if God showed up, He might bring with him a sense of the larger purpose to our work.
One medical device company I worked for the CEO would routinely travel with sales reps to visit physicians. When the CEO showed up, the tenor of the conversation changed. Suddenly it was not about just product benefits and features, but it was about the surgeon’s particular need with the kinds of patients she was seeing. Or what the cardiologist was noticing about how this technology helped his patients and where there could be improvements. The conversations broadened out beyond technology, and then broadened out beyond that particular physician to all surgeons or all cardiologists or all patients with this particular pathology.
Shop talk—the conversations we have with colleagues—can be a rich source of practical help. It can also be utterly engaging. It’s the details we notice and sharing the things that work (and noting those that don’t) and the funny stories of different personalities and their ways of approaching work. Shop talk is all about what we find remarkable, what we find stimulating or workable. Or amazing. Or meaningful. But shop talk can never be created by a computer—it is always about a human response to a shared situation.
It’s Monday, that day of the week when our work can feel particularly mundane or stale. Hearing our colleague explain why our shared work helps people can be refreshing. It can help reframe today’s tasks. Sometimes it takes great courage to explain to our jaded, cynical colleagues why we continue to move forward and why this work has meaning. My favorite leaders have shop-talked their way into answering the meaning question—and today I’m grateful for their acts of revelatory courage.
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Image credit: surrealmagicalism via 2headedsnake
Minnesota’s Outlaw Poetry Students
Did I mention Coursera is free?
I’m taking a Modern Poetry Class with Coursera. It’s free (which is stunningly amazing), offers no credit. I expect no credit—I’m not working toward a degree.
And with each close reading of Dickinson and Kerouac, each synapses that fires, I am violating state law.
The Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal reported Friday on a story from Salon that Coursera heard from my (uptight) state, to wit:
Notice for Minnesota Users
Coursera has been informed by the Minnesota Office of Higher Education that under Minnesota Statutes (136A.61 to 136A.71), a university cannot offer online courses to Minnesota residents unless the university has received authorization from the State of Minnesota to do so. If you are a resident of Minnesota, you agree that either (1) you will not take courses on Coursera, or (2) for each class that you take, the majority of work you do for the class will be done from outside the State of Minnesota.
To Summarize: my state won’t let me take a free course because I might lose money. Did I mention the course is free?
I am baffled. I think the roots of this odd quasi-enforcement have to do with Minnesotans wasting their time and money (and state funding) on for-profit schools that offer little chance of graduating. But here the fear has been applied in broad brush strokes, since there was no promise of credit or degrees. Minnesota’s one-size-fits-all solution does not fit. That needs revisiting.
But I’m OK. Because every time I read my readings and watch the lectures, I find myself back at UW Madison law library with the chain smokers and worried scribblers. Or back in Iowa next to the Des Moines River. Or back anywhere that isn’t Minnesota. Because Minnesota’s dream of enforcement is about that likely, and much less credible.
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Addendum: It looks like my state found a finer brush to paint our laws: http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/10/19/minnesota_coursera_ban_state_won_t_crack_down_on_free_online_courses_after.html
Encounters with Silence
Where does insight come from?
Only knowledge gained through experience, the fruit of living and suffering, fills the heart with the wisdom of love, instead of crushing it with the disappointment of boredom and final oblivion. It is not the results of our own speculation, but the golden harvest of what we have lived through and suffered through, that has power to enrich the heart and nourish the spirit.
–Karl Rahner, Encounters with Silence (Westminster, Maryland: Newman Press, 1965. 30)
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Image Credit: Via 2headedsnake
Dedication to Craft: Jiro Dreams of Sushi
There’s hardly a more fitting reminder of dedication to craft than the 2011 David Gelb documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi. The film follow’s 85-year old Jiro in his daily routine of preparing sushi. From buying fresh tuna and squid at the market every morning to massaging the octopus (that’s right for 45 minutes) to talking with the rice vendor who refuses to sell rice to someone just because they ask for it. One of Jiro’s biggest fans is a local food writer who we follow into the restaurant again and again as he articulates the surprise that happens with every meal.
Jiro’s shop (“Sukiyabashi Jiro”) is extremely clean but modest. Located in a Tokyo subway station, it has only ten seats and serves only sushi. Jiro sets up two rounds of meals a day: lunch and dinner—which sounds like he serves 20 people a day. And yet sushi lovers from around the world reserve up to a year in advance (if my memory serves). Jiro is the only sushi chef to receive a three-star Michelin Guide.
The film is a meditation on craft, just as the copy says. Beautifully filmed with long shots of Tokyo life and the chefs’ concentration on their craft, including a mesmerizing classical soundtrack. The film is primarily about Jiro’s compulsion to learn all there is to know about making sushi. But along the way he influences his sons and seems to have changed the way sushi is prepared. In the end, both Mrs. Kirkistan and I felt we wanted to put heart and soul into our respective crafts.
For copywriters and writers, the parallels are clear. Several times in the film, Jiro says he is happiest when he is making sushi. Even at 85 years old, he continues to make a mark and continues to be mesmerized. In fact, there seems to be a push-pull between his work and the rest of his life. Craft is almost the reason he gets up. But it also is his main worry. Hearing what craft looks like from his sons’ perspective and the up and coming chefs that move through the restaurant.
Thanks to Scott Berkun for the recommendation.
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The Moving Horizon of Engagement: The New Yorker’s Nathan Heller on TED
How to Boil Down Levinas?
help find a way
A recent issue of The New Yorker includes an excellent article on TED talks. On his way to explaining why the talks are so popular, Nathan Heller stumbles onto the differences between our rituals of learning in college and how college is set up to support those rituals, and compares that with the kind of learning people need outside of college—the kind that keeps expanding rather than narrowing. Along the way he mentions in an offhand way how Levinas does not lend himself to a quick recap. One must do much preliminary work to begin to understand Levinas. Philosophy, especially phenomenology and theology are useful backgrounds to begin to understand Levinas. But only as a beginning.
The author of Conversation is an Engine is well familiar with this. As he tries to explain Levinas from time to time, blank stares and hasty retreats to other subjects are typical reactions. The French philosopher and apologist for The Other is famously obscure. And fascinating. But obscure.
Heller’s offhand remark reminds me that the bigger challenges ahead of us as communicators have to do with how we let people in on the details that engage us. Over at Big Picture Leadership there was a discussion recently about what it means to witness. That discussion reminded me of an ongoing conversation a few of us have had about what makes something remarkable, as in, making me remark out loud to another person because it was that important to me. In both cases there has to be an intensely personal connection for it to bubble up through our conscious mind and cross our lips.
If we are intent on rhetoric that draws others in (and I believe it is a most excellent thing to be a passionate booster for what we love and understand), than we are constantly providing low-hanging fruit for newcomers to grab and taste so they too will become enamored by the taste and want more. This is the horizon of engagement. That horizon is growing shorter and getting closer with every Google Search.
More sophisticated discussions will always have their place among practitioners and experts. But we’re quickly moving to the point where we each need to have a ready answer about our work, or firm, and what we believe.
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Image Credit: Martin Morazzo via thisisnthappiness
What Makes Something Remarkable?
Old Volkswagen Station Wagons never die.
In several classes at Northwestern College we’ve talked about what makes something remarkable, as in, “Hey, let me tell you about this thing I saw….” The Heath brothers tried to parse out the secret of remarkable in Made to Stick, and did a good job noting six principles that make something sticky. But in our Social Media Marketing and now in Freelance Copywriting classes, we’re noting “remarkable” is less science and more art.
Was this ad remarkable in 1966 when DDB’s Marvin Honig wrote it for Volkswagen? Maybe. It is remarkable now because of the nostalgic, iconic bus—just look at the shape of that thing! But for me it is the story telegraphed from inside the bus and at the center of the image: the small businessman waiting to sell you some chili. The copy plays out the story benefit by benefit. Sure—you know you are being sold, but you’re willing to walk right into the story for the 26 seconds it takes to read the copy.
The ad is remarkable in retrospect because of the place this vehicle took in American culture. The story is in the ad, and the story in the ad played out in real life. Surely “remarkable” has something to do with reflecting real life. That’s where things get sticky.
Read the copy here.
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Via copyranter
conversation is an engine 