Tuesday, April 21, 2015

The puzzle of friendship and love; The pain is worth it

No one travels
Along this way but I,
This autumn evening.
- Sydney Autumn Experience at Dusk

Get comfortable with being uncomfortable, because this is where the magic happens.  Trust increases with age, according to research, and we're getting older on a population basis, meaning that the older world we live in is also a more trusting world. 

“You can’t pile together enough good people to make a great one.”  The tendency is to like those who like us, to like those who offer us least harm, and to like those who benefit us. In that order probably The puzzle of friendship

Nothing beats a creative idea, and in a high-speed world Jugaad (in short, an innovative fix) hits pay dirt as a way to win. A few years ago I wrote the foreword for the book Jugaad Innovation, and was only too happy to recently endorse the follow-up, now out, Frugal Innovation: How to do more with less by Navi Radjou and Jaideep Prabhu.

Philosopher Daniel Dennett says the definition of happiness is to find something bigger than you are and dedicate the rest of your life to it.

Most people would agree that it’s pretty fantastic to experience something that takes your breath away – it makes you feel alive. Not only that, research has found that these moments of awe are good for our health. A University of California, Berkeley, study suggests that the feeling of awe we may experience during encounters with art, nature and spirituality has an anti-inflammatory effect, protecting the body from chronic disease.

Awe can also improve our relationship with time. A Stanford University study found that awe expands our perception of time by anchoring us in the present moment. People are therefore more likely to feel that they’re rich in time – and who doesn’t want that?

Vincent van Gogh once said that he’d rather die of passion than of boredom. He might have been referring to love for his work, but love in an emotional sense often brings both passion and heartbreak. Scientists think they’re close to uncovering a cure for love – but would we want it? Without it, we’d just have the moderated bit in the middle – boredom.  Lists of music of love and heartbreak



Bob Dylan, ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right’: “A bruised heart can turn the best of us into bitterly deluded fools… he gets in a spiteful parting shot – ‘you just kinda wasted my precious time’ – but he’s left arguing with himself. The object of his scorn is long gone.” 

I’ve said it before (or rather, I have quoted Tom Peters often). Fail Fast, Learn Fast, Fix Fast. A newly launched website, Recently Rejected pays homage to the creative process and the inevitability of rejection, shining a spotlight on unpublished, rejected or unfinished design work. 
Artist and art director Mario Hugo, creator of the site, is expectedly philosophical in an interview with Fast Company: “A lot of very interesting, artful creative stuff just isn’t right for the brief…the site is like the death rattle of an old file that would otherwise remain tucked in an older folder.”