The Prose and Poetry of Change

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The principal prose skill is finding your own voice. It is discovering how to be present in the experience of listening. It is listening deeply and experiencing just as deeply. There are prose elements to leading and living.

But similarly, there are poetry elements. Poetry is what illuminates your life. Poetry is what fills the small silences. Poetry is what brings you to meaning. Poetry is what touches the small fibers of who you are.

If you live a life of pure prose, you will live a linear and an effective but not an illuminus life. But if you can some how merge poetry and prose, you have the potential as a person and as a professional to be remarkable.

Roger Fransecky

The Self and beyond

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We must help the individual to discover how commitments may be made without surrendering individuality. We must help him to understand and resist any impulse he may have to flee the responsibility of individual choice by mindless submission to a Cause or Movement.

In short, he must recognize the hazard of having no commitments beyond the self and the hazard of commitments that imperil the self.

John Gardner, Self-Renewal

The Willingness to be Misunderstood

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Invention requires a long-term willingness to be misunderstood. You do something that you genuinely believe in, that you have conviction about, but for a long period of time, well-meaning people may criticize that effort … if you really have conviction that they’re not right, you need to have that long-term willingness to be misunderstood. It’s a key part of invention.

Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder

Method over Goals

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Little by little, preoccupation with method, technique and procedure gains a subtle dominance over the whole process of goal seeking. How it is done becomes more important than whether it is done. Means triumph over ends. Form triumphs over spirit.

Method is enthroned. Men become prisoners of their procedures, and organizations that were designed to achieve some goal become obstacles in the path to that goal.

A concern for “how to do it” is healthy and necessary. The fact that it often leads to an empty worship of method is just one of the dangers with which we have to live. Every human activity, no matter how ennobling or constructive or healthy, involves hazards. The flower of competence carries the seeds of rigidity just as the flower of virtue carries the seeds of complacency. “There is a road to hell,” said John Bunyan, “even from the gates of heaven.”

John Gardner, Self-Renewal

Paradigm Shifts

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Steven Covey offers a moving example in Seven Habits of Highly Effective People as to how context can change our outlook. Covey was riding the subway when a man and his children boarded the car. The kids were loud and rowdy, throwing things and disturbing everyone in the car. The man seemed oblivious.

It was very disturbing and yet the man sitting next to me did nothing. It was difficult not to feel irritated. I could not believe that he could be so insensitive as to let children run wild like that do nothing about it, taking no responsibility at all. So finally, with what I felt was unusual patience and restraint, I turned to him and said, “Sir, your children are really disturbing a lot of people. I wonder if you couldn’t control them a little more?

The man lifted his gaze and said softly, “Oh, you’re right. I guess I should do something about it. We just came from the hospital where their mother died. I don't know what to think and I guess they don’t know how to handle it either."

Can you imagine what I felt at that moment? My paradigm shifted. Suddenly I saw things differently, and because I saw things differently, I thought differently, I felt differently. My irritation vanished. I didn’t have to worry about controlling my attitude or my behavior; my heart was filled with the man’s pain. Feelings of sympathy and compassion flowed freely.

While this change of perspective could be momentary, it doesn't have to be. We are continually faced with decisions about how we will approach life's circumstances.

Remember that piece of music you heard that suddenly lifted your spirit and changed your whole outlook in the middle of the day? Do you remember that pleasant smell that took you back in time to fond memories? Remember when you exited a movie theater seeing an exhilarating film, inspired to change the world? Imagine putting your feet to those sentiments.

If change is possible, that puts the responsibility on our shoulders to make it happen. It's a thought that's downright scary—and motivating.

Stephen Goforth

Getting the Big Picture

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Without some grasp of the meaning of their relationship to the whole, it is not easy for individuals to retain a vivid sense of their own capacity to act as individuals, a sure sense of their own dignity and an awareness of their roles and responsibilities. They tend to accept the spectator role and to sink into passivity.

John Gardner, Self-Renewal

Inconvenient Conclusions

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Conspiracy theories may be deployed as a rhetorical tool to escape inconvenient conclusions. People selectively appeal to a conspiracy among scientists to explain away a scientific consensus when their political ideology compels them to do so—but not when the scientific consensus is of no relevance to their politics.

Stephan Lewandowsky & John Cook, The Conspiracy Theory Handbook