Humility is the new smart
“You are not your idea, and if you identify too closely with your ideas, you will take offense when they are challenged.”
All posts tagged: Recommended Readings
History is a teacher
Joanne B. Freeman writes that slavery, and its future in America, was the key issue that led to bullying, fighting, and total breakdown of civil discourse in Congress prior to the Civil War.
The Founding Father we’d do well to find once again
Thomas Paine and Roger Williams are the two founding fathers whose work is most often forgotten yet remains among the most consequential today. My belief was strengthened upon reading Craig Nelson’s excellent 2006 biography, Thomas Paine: Enlightenment, Revolution, and the Birth of Modern Nations. Paine, born in England and truly a citizen of the Enlightenment world, wrote three of the bestsellers of the eighteenth century, topped only by the Bible. His Common Sense has long been recognized as a key work in changing the hearts and minds of the people of the United Colonies into citizens of what Paine was the first to characterize as the United States. Similarly, his Rights of Man helped shape the French Revolution and — although it would take more than a century — inspire constitutional reform in Great Britain and foreshadow Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. The Age of Reason, a forceful call against organized religion, finds Paine sticking to his Enlightenment and deist values even at the expense of his public reputation. Paine’s mind was clearly a force of …
Cynicism vs. hope
Cynics. We’ve all encountered them. They make pronouncements with great certainty and take pride in not appearing foolish. Those who disagree with them are instantly branded, in the eyes of the cynic, as naïve. Thankfully, there are ways to combat cynicism. Over the holidays I finished reading author Rebecca Solnit’s most recent book, Call Them by Their True Names: American Crises (and Essays). Solnit includes an essay—Naive Cynicism—that flips the idea of cynicism and naivete on its head. “Naïve cynics shoot down possibilities, including the possibility of exploring the full complexity of any situation. They take aim at the less cynical, so that cynicism becomes a defensive posture and an avoidance of dissent. They recruit through brutality. If you set purity and perfection as your goals, you have an almost foolproof system according to which everything will necessarily fall short. . . . Cynics are often disappointed idealists and upholders of unrealistic standards. They are uncomfortable with victories, because victories are almost always temporary, incomplete, and compromised.” Change and progress require hard work, and cynics …
My 2018 year-end reading list
As 2018 draws to a close, I’m sharing this list of the books I read over the past twelve months. Since returning from sabbatical early in 2016, I committed to reading more, and to seek out a wider range of works beyond my normal histories and biographies. Here are the treasures I found on my reading shelf this past year. Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders. I began the year with a work of fiction. In this at times perplexing yet ultimately satisfying novel, Saunders builds off the fact that in February 1862, just a year into the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln’s 11-year-old son Willie dies of typhoid fever. It is known from contemporary accounts that the President went several evenings to stay in the crypt with his son’s body in Georgetown’s Oak Hill Cemetery. Saunders takes that bit of knowledge and turns it into a rich story populated with dozens of spirits who reside in the Bardo, which is the Tibetan Buddhist name for a transition period between death and rebirth. Tears …
Measure What We Value
We measure a great deal in the modern office environment, and the nonprofit world is no different. Finding the right measurement to capture what is truly important, however, takes time and thought. Profit for a business is easy to track, but in the mission-driven world of nonprofits the right outcomes can be hard to quantify. I was thinking of this while wrapping up James Williams’ Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy. In looking for ways to set boundaries for attention-grabbing technology, Williams turns to measurement as one key. He begins by noting, that “Our goal in advancing measurement should be to measure what we value, rather than valuing what we already measure.” How do we, both as individuals and as staff members of a large organization, do this work? How do we measure what we value? Williams has a suggestion on the organizational or corporate scale: measure the mission. If we “operationalize in metrics the company’s mission statement or purpose for existing, which is something nearly every company has …
Boundaries
Technology companies see “sleep” as a competitor. They are not looking out for your best interest.
Perseverance and passion
MacArthur genius grant recipient Angela Duckworth has the perfect response to those who once told her, “You know, you’re no genius.”
Would you rather be the ornithologist or the bird?
The human brain is wired for story. We process our world in narrative, we talk in narrative and—most important for leadership—people recall and retain information more effectively when it’s presented in the form of a story, not bullet points.
What a Wonderful Washington Weekend!
It is a great weekend to live in Washington… Stanley Cup Celebrations Continue — From bars in Arlington to today’s game at National Park to the Georgetown Waterfront, the Stanley Cup Champion Washington Capitals are having a great time celebrating the franchise’s first Stanley Cup championship with the hometown fans. While I was across the country when they clinched on Thursday evening, I could hear the city explode from Phoenix. We’re ALL CAPS here in D.C. It was an especially satisfying run, given 1) that they weren’t expected to go very deep due to losses of players to the expansion draft, and 2) that they got through a couple of perennial stumbling blocks: John (Torts) Tortorella of the Columbus Blue Jackets and—most significantly—the Pittsburgh Penguins. Too bad Martin St. Louis—who was always a playoff pest—no longer plays for Tampa Bay. If you want another thrill, watch the highlights from the cup-clinching game. Pride 2018 Celebration — Thousands have descended on DC this weekend for the annual Pride celebration. Andrew almost always makes it to Pride, but because of …
MORE TO COME... 