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Ralph Waldo Emerson, History:

“Every revolution was first a thought in one man’s mind, and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era.”

What is your revolution? When will you give …

From Henry David Thoreau’s journal:

“Find out as soon as possible what are the best things in your composition and then shape the rest to fit them. The former will be the midrib and veins of the leaf.

There …

Here’s an unsolved riddle: How do we get the minds of widely dispersed, brilliant people to focus on critical problems/opportunities? How do we synchronize greatness?

Dave Pollard brought this up a few days ago. He writes:

“… we don’t need …

I’ve been working, since the canoe trip this summer, to refine a few of the most important pieces I’ve written about on this site. These ideas are important to me as I seek to understand both my way forward and …

I don’t want to make a big show out of that canoe trip. It really was just six days paddling around a lake. But it was also a window to a part of me that lay nearly forgotten.

There are …

Time away brings introspection.

Long hours in a canoe give lots of room for thought.

While I sort through those ideas – here is a compilation of favourite ideas from the past. It’s a series of posts about purpose, perfection, …

Retro post #91

Great find by Johnnie Moore, John Kay’s article on Obliquity is excellent. Kay writes that goals are often best achieved when pursued indirectly – this is the idea of obliquity.

Like Johnnie it reminds me of …

Spent the weekend with a good friend.
Both of us love words. Somewhere on
one of our hikes we started rolling
through favourite quotes. He pops
out with this: “True artists never
look like artists.” It’s something his
Dad said …

Look across all “great” achievements and imagine what it was like to be on the verge of those things. Imagine the youthful, burning passion from which that accomplishment was borne.

Look across the spectrum of actions and decisions and sacrifices …

Retro post: Revised based on “Look!” from November 30, 2004.

John Oliver (past President of DowElanco Canada Inc., a joint venture between Dow Chemical and Eli Lillys), once told me what he looks at when considering novel products. …

Bahauddin, the father of Rumi:

When I deeply know my senses, I feel in them the way to God and the purpose of living:

Look at this surprising flower
which cannot be seen, and yet
its fragrance cannot be

I’m a sucker for a good story.

Just bought number 945, the smallest odd abundant number.

Smallest … odd … abundant … number. Hilarious. Brilliant.

Thanks to Seth Godin for the link.

Site Search Tags: perfect+for+purpose, …

specious — spe·cious (spÄ“’shÉ™s) — an adjective meaning having the ring of truth or plausibility but actually fallacious; deceptively attractive or superficially correct but actually worthless

“The distinction between children and adults, while probably useful for some purposes, is at

[posted January 16, 2006]

Below is the purpose I had for sift when I started this experiment.

I’m still all in on those ideas but I think the purpose is quickly evolving away from purely entrepreneurs and purely business. Just …

I love conferences.

There’s no better example of how dedicated we are to ignoring everyone else. Conferences are even better than meetings because we actually pay to be there. We pay for speakers to come just so we can ignore …

Whilst lolling despondently on the sofa: “When will I start doing the things I am great at? I keep doing things that help me be greater.”

Good friend in from old places: “Maybe guys like you just keep growing and …

While I haven’t been posting at all, I have kept up on my reading. This post by Dave Pollard is worth noting.

Dave has an incredible capacity for synthesis and generating copious insights across a wide range of areas. The …

I just spent three weeks in Alberta with my wife’s family. While we were there her grandmother passed away. At and after the funeral we spent a lot of time marveling at the impact of that little lady’s life.

Invariably, …

This is the last of three street-level bits of advice on pitch giving. Previously covered are 10 points for outlining your pitch and the first 10 seconds of the 60 second pitch. The three mistakes discussed today are just …

Forsaking the metaphysical (1,2,3), today we get into the tangibles of a 60-second pitch. For this I leaned heavily on the advice of Bill Joss and an article in Fast Company called Perfecting Your …

In Presence: Human purpose and the field of the future, Peter Senge and others asked leading scientists and business and social entrepreneurs, “What question lies at the heart of your work?”

Jumps out out at you eh?

Makes you …

Cluetrain Manifesto, David Weinburger:

“We don’t need more information. We don’t need better information. We don’t need automatically filtered and summarized information. We need understanding. We desperately want to understand what’s going on in our business, in our

Great find by Johnnie Moore, John Kay’s article on Obliquity is excellent. Kay writes that goals are often best achieved when pursued indirectly – this is the idea of obliquity.

Like Johnnie it reminds me of a sports metaphor.…

Christopher Alexander just finished publishing a galloping 2,000 plus page treatise on design and living structures. There’s a small interview with him here.

Take away message: Uniqueness balances repetition.

Alexander talks about a tree full of leaves that is …

Related to tribal business:

In the 21 September 2004 edition of Reveries, Tim Manners describes little global giants. He quotes Barnaby Feder from the New York Times,

“Big companies are good at identifying the intellectual property that is needed

At least two things are true of me. One, I love coffee. Two, I’m a fiddler. Not the musical kind, the annoying kind. Always jigging around, tapping, rattling, bouncing, swaying – annoying.

Being a big fan of experiments, I started …

A few weeks ago I wrote about the tension between firm size and firm mobility. As the story narrowed in to the conclusion, I mentioned my concern that the sift experiment might become a bit busy. sift might turn into …

The current state of Russia’s scientific community is a brilliant study of the power of purpose driven (or lack of) enterprise. In the 2 September 2004 issue of Nature they’ve included a brief glimpse into the Russian Academy of Science. …