The Friday Grab Bag (July 31)
Every Friday I offer up some great reading about Great Work from other people. I figure there’s so much great stuff – and so much rubbish – out on the internet, that you need to celebrate the gems. Here are three that caught my fancy this week.
1. Woulda coulda shoulda…
My friend Paul Williams of Idea Sandbox riffs on this topic, with a particularly brilliant illustration of just how… blunt a choice this is.
2. Merlin Mann on creativity
I’m an enormous fan of Merlin Mann’s work – I’ll be featuring him on the Great Work Interviews shortly. Here he’s speaking on creativity and raging against perfectionism. Perfect.
3. TED flies you to Saturn
TED.com continues to be a wonderful source of ideas, humour and inspiration. Here’s an inspiring talk about a largely unpublicized expedition to Saturn. Truly stretches your imagination.
Great Work Interview – Sir John Whitmore
Sir John Whitmore is one of the giants of the coaching profession. He started his career as a professional, and successful, car racing driver, after which he began working with Tim Gallwey, author of the Inner Game books. John established the field of coaching in the UK. He’s perhaps best known for his book Coaching for Performance, one of the very first coaching books that has sold over half a million copies in seventeen different languages and introduced the world to the “GROW model”.
John has been honoured with the President’s Award by the International Coach Federation and rated the number one business coach by the Independent newspaper in the UK. He remains a passionate advocate for coaching, not only as it supports individuals or corporations, but as a way to contribute to society. He is the Chairman of Performance Consultants International.
In this interview we talk about:
- How to help individual contributors see the bigger picture
- Trans-personal coaching and how it addresses the “crisis of meaning”
- The challenge of doing Great Work in an organization
- How the concepts of ‘high awareness and high responsibility’ can help you and those around you do more Great Work
Listen to the Great Work interview with Sir John here: http://www.findyourgreatwork.com/interviews/sir-john-whitmore/
What are you holding on to?
I’ve moved many times over the years. It’s marvelous. It’s a pain in the butt.
One of the ways it is useful is to help keep the flotsam and jetsam that comes into your life under control.
As you pull out yet another cardboard box, you pick up some item and ask: Is this really worth keeping?
That doesn’t stop you arriving in the new destination with several boxes of what turns out to be useless crap that you’ve somehow unaccountably packed anyway. But at least it’s fewer boxes.
Artist Jasper Joffe is going one step further, and selling everything he owns. He’s looking for a new freedom and getting rid of all the stuff around him is a bold way to do it.
I asked a similar question in the perennially popular The Eight Irresistible Principles of Fun: What’s weighing you down?
If you’re pursuing Great Work – and you are – you’ll find the barnacles on your hull are making it difficult to cut through the water. What do you need to get rid of?
Great Work Quote #40: “It is what people talk about when we are gone…”
“This freely chosen aspect of ourselves is what other people remember about us. How we handle life’s cascade of real choices within the larger cages of our birth and background is what makes us who we are. It is what people talk about when we are gone. Not the givens. But the choices we took.”
~ Kevin Kelly, The Technium and here
Anyone who reads this blog knows I’m a fan of Kevin Kelly.
Here’s his deft summation of the battle between Nature and Nurture – and the role of choice in all of that.
What are you choices? How are you choosing to do more Great Work?
