Nollind Whachell

The song Fixing My Brain by Brad Sucks has a great chorus within it.

I’m thinking about fixing my brain
but I’m afraid I won’t feel the same.

When I heard it for the first time, it immediately reminded me of my own personal struggles in maintaining my beliefs and identity as a person. You see every day we are bombarded by so many external influences and distractions, something that Doris Lessing wrote about in her book entitled Prisons We Choose To Live Inside. It is these external influences that tempt and taunt us into believing we should take certain directions in our lives, when in fact we are often being lead astray like sailors drawn to a sirens call.

It is these temptations and taunts that will lead you into believing that there is something “wrong” with you and in purchasing something or pursuing a path, your life will be whole and perfect again. In reality, there is nothing wrong with you and you don’t need “fixing”. Instead it is these external influences and environments created around you that are actually the problem. The Tribes Learning Communities approach to schooling, that I discovered a while back, realized this same very thing.

My deep conviction after a lifetime of work in education, youth development and systems change is that rather than focusing on “fixing kids” we need to fix the environments that impact their lives every day. Six or more hours in school each day in a strong and caring community culture are enough to help children discover a love of learning, self and social responsibility for their lives.

Therefore don’t feel like you need fixing to fit into an environment. Because if you do, you might not like who you are afterwards. Instead seek environments that naturally accept you for who you are, letting your uniqueness flourish within it.

I just had to laugh when I read the following on the Taoti Web Design & Marketing site because what they said is so true.

Estimates are very much a “what you put into them is what you get out of them”. The more detail and thoroughness of your input in the form below, the more information we have on which to base meaningful information and pricing. We’ve given you the ability to answer freely but please use that space! If you don’t provide sufficient detail in this form, we’ll have no way of knowing what you want, and as all our work is custom, we can’t price it if we don’t know what IT is. Remember, this isn’t a sandwich you’re asking for! Websites are complex structures, so we need sufficient information to really help you.

Of course this raises the question, do people want their websites to be like sandwiches? For example, should it be like Quizno’s Subs, where you can only choose from three size types and a limited selection of ingredients? With this approach, developers can then say the following when asked for a quote with no details of the project, “Sure the small website sandwich is $500, the medium is $1000, and the super footlong website is $2000”.

“Ok, that’ll be $500 for your small website sandwich sir.”
“But I only wanted two of the five ingredients?”
“Sorry sir, those are our prices. Do you still want the sandwich?”
“Hmmm, well I guess…”

Kathy Sierra from Creating Passionate Users says don’t ask employees to be passionate about the company!

People ask me, “How can I get our employees to be passionate about the company?” Wrong question. Passion for our employer, manager, current job? Irrelevant. Passion for our profession and the kind of work we do? Crucial. If I own company FOO, I don’t need employees with a passion for FOO. I want those with a passion for the work they’re doing. The company should behave just like a good user interface — support people in doing what they’re trying to do, and stay the hell out of their way. Applying the employer-as-UI model, the best company is one in which the employees are so engaged in their work that the company fades into the background.

So very true and probably the best metaphor I’ve heard to date on what a company and it’s management should be. I remember even saying something similar to my boss at a web firm in town a while back. “Just get out of our way and we’ll take you farther and faster than you ever dreamed possible.” Instead, however, most companies make their employee’s work extremely frustrating by impeding or hindering them and thus easily crushing any passion that might be welling up inside of them.

Why is it that when people hand me something in a bag that I purchased and I say I don’t need a bag (after earlier informing them of this when making my purchase), they look at me like I’m an alien from another planet? I swear the look on their face is like “You mean I have to open the bag, take your stuff out, and fold up the bag so it can be re-used later?” After emptying the bag, you can tell they almost want to throw the bag in the garbage instead of folding it up but I usually stand there long enough to ensure that they do fold it up and put it away.

It’s sad that we live in a such a disposable culture. As I said before, each person locally changes the world globally. It may seem like an insignificant action you’re doing but collectively with many people doing it, it does make a difference, for better or worse.

In writing the story of our lives, we sometimes believe that we need a strong purpose to make our lives meaningful before we can go on with it. In reality, we only need to be willing to take the next step. For in moving forward, we open ourselves up to the opportunity for purpose and meaning to flow into our lives.

I just noticed that Derek Powazek has updated his site. Not sure when he actually made the change but I definitely like the concept because it’s something similar to what I wanted to do in the past as well. That is create more of an awareness site versus a typical blogging site.

As Derek notes in the description on his now one page site, he “is too busy to maintain a site anymore”. This is an excellent reason why you’d want to build an awareness site versus a blogging site. You basically don’t have the time to invest in blogging, yet you still want to let people know what you’re currently doing. In effect, you’re just relaying small little bits of changing information or the situational awareness of your life (although Derek expands upon this by relaying some of his notable achievements in his past as well).

For example, for the site that I was going to build, the home page was going to relay a variety of things about me, such as where I currently lived, what I did for work, who I worked for, and maybe the current project I was working on. In addition, it would relay more basic things like what I was currently listening to, watching, and reading. Basically you could add any type of information that you wanted people to be able to track (since each item would have an RSS feed for it or be a part of one larger collective feed if you wanted to track everything I did).

Now of course the interesting thing is that each of these things relayed on the home page would be clickable as a link. Thus you could click where I lived (Vancouver) to read more about my personal perspective of Vancouver. Not only that though, you could then click back and see all of the other various places I’ve lived in the past as well. The same would apply to what I was reading. You click the current book I’m reading to see my opinion of it but then you could see all of the previous books I’ve read as well. If you didn’t have the time to review the book though, the clickable link for the book could just be a direct link to Amazon.com instead.

So where’d I’d get this idea from? The seed for it was actually planted in my head a while back when I watched Dick Hardt’s presentation about Identity 2.0 at OSCON 2005. I found it very interesting that he relayed who he was by relaying what he was reading, where he worked, and so forth which when collectively put together, helped to define who he was as a person. Thus I realized if you could recreate this on a website somehow, you could create a simple summary of a person’s identity in the same way and in turn help relay to others what you’re currently engaged with at the time as well.

I have to totally agree with Rance Crain of Advertising Age when he states the biggest problem with ads today.

Somehow, somewhere, marketers have gotten completely off the track. They lurch from outlandish to patriotic (it’s your duty to buy from us). What they don’t do is give us any good reasons to buy their products.

Is that because there aren’t any?

It’s one of the main reasons why I don’t watch very much television anymore. I can’t stand the negative emptiness of ads today that pitch pointless products with endless hype that treat me like I’m some mindless idiot whose life will be saved when I buy their product. Get real…and then let’s talk.

It only takes a single pebble to start an avalanche of change. Therefore, if you want to change the world around you, don’t think you have to change millions of people’s lives overnight. A simple smile to a single person is all it takes.

It appears that María Adriana Arzola González, a retail owner in Monterrey, Mexico, has already paid back her Kiva loan that I assisted with last year. This means I can now turn around and reuse these repaid funds to help someone else now. Looking over some of the recent people in need of entrepreneurial aid, I’ve decided to help out Elsira Izaguirre, a grocery store owner in Choluteca, Honduras, who needs a small loan to help expand her inventory.

If you’re interested in helping out people around the world in an innovative way, definitely check out Kiva.org for more details. 

I find it quite funny how some blog authors pose a question in their posts but when their readers respond to their question, the author doesn’t respond at all in turn (not even once). I mean are you just trying to build an audience or do you actually want to create a community? If you want a community, engage them!

BTW I think one of the best blogs I’ve ever participated in that truly engaged me to the point of feeling like I was a community member of it was The Gaming Chair back in 2005 because the authors of the site truly engaged their community members in deep discussion and made them feel valued for their contributions. A particular post relating to Girls in Gaming by Maggie is a perfect example of this and you’ll even note the other site authors themselves being heavily engaged in the discussion, even before other community members joined in.