Tag Archives: Seth Godin

Jun17

bucket brigade

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Seth Godin shared this post about bucket brigades.  I liken it to a good crowdfunding campaign, like our current Indiegogo effort.

We are trying to fill the lake with $$ to create wonderful art.  It takes a lot of buckets, some big some small, to fill that pond.  Every drop helps.

Please help, please donate!

A good bucket brigade

We can get more done, if we care enough. And trust enough.

From the brilliant Cory Doctorow’s award-winning novella:

I love a good bucket brigade, but they’re surprisingly hard to find. A good bucket brigade is where you accept your load, rotate 180 degrees and walk until you reach the next person, load that person, do another volte-face, and walk until someone loads you. A good bucket brigade isn’t just passing things from person to person. It’s a dynamic system in which autonomous units bunch and debunch as is optimal given the load and the speed and energy levels of each participant. A good bucket brigade is a thing of beauty, something whose smooth coordination arises from a bunch of disjointed parts who don’t need to know anything about the system’s whole state in order to help optimize it.

In a good bucket brigade, the mere act of walking at the speed you feel comfortable with and carrying no more than you can safely lift and working at your own pace produces a perfectly balanced system in which the people faster than you can work faster, and the people slower than you can work slower. It is the opposite of an assembly line, where one person’s slowness is the whole line’s problem. A good bucket brigade allows everyone to contribute at their own pace, and the more contributors you get, the better it works.

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Apr5

pushing through

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I read three blogs pretty religiously:  Jon Katz, Maria Wulf, and Seth Godin.

Currently, I am reading Seth’s brilliant new eBook on education, Stop Stealing Dreams.  I am reading it in a non-linear, popcorn way – dropping into whatever jumps out at me from the index.  It is free.  Seth wants us to share it.  I am sharing it.

Since I am doing more teaching, his book is perfectly timed.   It is also perfectly aligned with my ideas about teaching, how we learn and improvisation as a crucial building block in education.  I was very excited to see “improv” in his list of courses he would like to see in schools.

Seth is brilliant.  Reading his posts is like riding, except that I am the horse.  Each post is like what we call in dressage “an aid:”  a touch of the leg here, a shift of the seat there, a half-halt that helps me to connect, direct and refresh my energy.   Each day I receive a subtle, insistent correction of direction, balance and perspective. Seth is what I call and uber-thinker, a true radical.  He lives pretty much outside of any box I can think of.  And he is inspirational.  The other day he wrote:

If your happiness is based on always getting a little more than you’ve got… then you’ve handed control over your happiness to the gatekeepers, built a system that doesn’t scale and prevented yourself from the brave work that leads to a quantum leap.

The industrial system (and the marketing regime) adore the mindset of ‘a little bit more, please’, because it furthers their power. A slightly higher paycheck, a slightly more famous college, an incrementally better car–it’s easy to be seduced by this safe, stepwise progress, and if marketers and bosses can make you feel dissatisfied at every step along the way, even better for them.

Their rules, their increments, and you are always on a treadmill, unhappy today, imagining that the answer lies just over the next hill…

All the data shows us that the people on that hill are just as frustrated as the people on your hill. It demonstrates that the people at that college are just as envious as the people at this college. The never ending cycle (no surprise) never ends.

An alternative is to be happy wherever you are, with whatever you’ve got, but always hungry for the thrill of creating art, of being missed if you’re gone and most of all, doing important work.

For several days I drove by these forsythia that had pushed themselves through the fence.  I liked the feeling of their boldness, their refusal to stay inside the lines, and the wild pattern of color and shadow they created.  That, I hope, is what I have taught my daughters.  And that is what I am learning (and teaching) now.

Jan20

don’t have back surgery

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Back pain

Yesterday a good friend of my daughter’s, a 20 year-old young man, had back surgery for ongoing back pain.  When he came out of the surgery, he was paralyzed on one side.  They went back in and when he came out the second time, he was paralyzed from the neck down.  Then he went into a coma.

A few weeks before that, the companion of a friend of ours became paralyzed because of complications from several old back surgeries.

When I had a bodywork practice, the most horrific cases I treated were always those of those who had  back surgery.  The worst pain, the most compromised movement.

Our friend, the osteopath Dr. Andy Goldman, says that if only people with back pain would see an osteopath first, often they could avoid the surgery. By the time they come to him after the surgery, it is usually too late.

The web genius Seth Godin wrote this post recently.  (I left in his other tips because they are excellent as well.)

  1. No stranger or unknown company will ever contact you by mail or by phone with an actual method for making money easily or in your spare time. And if the person or company contacting you asserts that they are someone you know, double check before taking action.
  2. Don’t have back surgery. See a physiatrist first, then exhaust all other options before wondering if you should have back surgery.  (I would suggest an osteopath first, based on my personal experience). 
  3. Borrow money to buy things that go up in value, but never to get something that decays over time.
  4. Placebos are underrated by almost everyone.
  5. It’s almost never necessary to use a semicolon.
  6. Seek out habits that help you overcome fear or inertia. Destroy those that do the opposite.
  7. Cognitive behavorial therapy is generally considered both the quickest and most effective form of addressing many common psychological problems.
  8. Backup your hard drive.
  9. Get a magnetic key hider, put a copy of your house key in it and hide it really well, unlabeled, two blocks from your house.
  10. A rice cooker will save you time and money and improve your diet, particularly if you come to like brown rice.
  11. Consider not eating wheat for an entire week. The results might surprise you.
  12. Taking your dog for a walk is usually better than whatever alternative use of your time you were considering.