Sharing: A Mid-course Correction
I love to talk story and prefer oral communication to written. I feel more comfort with shaping a story based on seeing someone in front of me that I can adapt the tale to. I like to think it also has to do what I picked up from living in South America for years and speaking primarily in Spanish. But in any case, the pandemic has distinguished the dinner party, cast away conferences, and negated networking events in person. I’m growing as a result of necessity and changing the way I communicate.
This is well overdue. I find it easy to constantly be “doing” and have gotten out of the habit of sharing about what I’m doing so others can learn and follow, if they desire. But much of my “doing” involves garnering lessons from others through searching the wealth of information online. So it’s time I made time to share my journey, in the hopes that it will inform, inspire or entertain those who may be aligned with the lessons learned on an urban sustainable lifestyle journey.
One of my heroes is Ray Anderson, a “radical industrialist” and founder of Interface, a carpet company that revolutionized the entire industry by focusing on eliminating waste and investing in sustainability. Like me, he was from Georgia, was struck by the writings of Paul Hawken and Daniel Quinn, and aimed to innovate with a sustainability lens. In his book, Mid-course Correction, one insight that struck was how he framed influence as the most important impact he can have. Whereas his company’s negative impacts would asymptotically approach zero, with dramatic changes at first but creeping towards zero over an extended time, his influence could grow exponentially. And he was amazingly successful in this.
Ray influenced me in my journey as an entrepreneur. He shared his challenges in the social element of sustainability when I met with him back in 2000. I took his inspirations and ran with it and shared widely in my experience building the consulting company Innovation for People. But in the years since, I have been lax in my sharing. So I am doubling down on the importance of sharing, of raising awareness of great insights, and of building connections among those on a journey aligned in values and intention.
If this makes sense or sounds interesting to you…let me hear from you! This is my first ever Medium post. I’ll be going right from this into the next set of stories, which roughly will cover lifestyle choices, challenges and learnings in building:
* Self-reliance
* Resilience
I hope to share solutions, howtos, and highlights in challenges to cleaner, greener, funner living. Topics will include: food, energy (though I will try to carve off work-specific things on my writings on the Blue Planet Energy site), water, STEM maker art stuff, and community. And of course, happy to take suggestions and requests. Until soon!