I am from north of the upside-down river; from the Gray-Nicholls double-scoop, BMX bikes and Paddle Pops.

I am from the brick veneer at the top of the court, where kids, big and small, play together and laugh. The smell of fresh cut grass lingers until late in the day.

I am from the eucalypt and spitfire sawfly; the bottle-brush and River Red Gum woodlands.

I am from The Cooks and The Twynhams. George, Floss and Bert, the grandparents I call by name — uncomplicated folk; stubborn and often sharp-tongued yet loving, generous and kind. 

I am from the long road trips of happy wanderers and taking the mickey and having a laugh.

From loaves of milk and skies setting sky-blue pink.

I am from the church of sport; we worship our idols on Saturday and try to emulate their feats on Sunday, and dream of one day wearing a baggy green.

I am from the forests once inhabited by Robin and his band of merry men. From pork pies, sloppy peas and yorkshire puddings.

From grandparents who survived the blitz, one who claims the part in his hair was created by Hiawatha’s tomahawk. From parents who left everything behind to start anew. 

I am from fond memories not seen or heard often, yet kept close to our hearts. Relatives now passed live vicariously through me — and my kids. I often catch a fleeting glimpse.

The famous Scott McCloud — who I’ve talked about before — created the comics adaptation. This is so awesome! I just love it.

Go see for yourself.

In a podcast interview with Elliott Masie, Dan Pink gives a great example that shows it is quite natural and makes perfect sense: When you come home from work and are asked “… how was your day?”, do you get out a series of power points? No. You narrate!

This time last week I attended a breakfast seminar run by my local (Banyule) Council. The keynote speaker Jason Clark, is the founder of Minds at Work, who–according to the promo–are a commercial collective of professional thinkers hell bent on changing the world!

An engaging, entertaining and interesting talk, Jason focused on how to harness and encourage creativity in the workplace, and used audience participation to facilitate and lead the discussion. Personally, I would have liked him to spend more time talking, introducing concepts and discussing his experience, whilst spending less time on the group activities. However, I would recommend that if you get the chance to attend one of his seminars that you take it, even if it is just to get out of routine for a day.

You never know, you just might learn something!

Helping was much more difficult than anticipated because, whilst I was able to come up with many great concepts and ideas; I found myself acting like it was MY assignment. My role in this excercise was to assist Madelyn to come up with her own ideas and thoughts and provide her with some direction, not to add my own ideas.

During this experience, I was reminded of an article that I read recently, which discusses the temptation to impose one’s own ideas on other people in the persuit of adding value and the effect that this has on the committment and ownership of ideas.

Therein lies the fallacy of added value: Whatever is gained in the form of a better idea may be lost six times over in the employee’s diminished enthusiasm for the concept.

So–upon reflection–I learned a couple of valuable lessons:

1. Be careful how you ‘encourage’
2. It’s better to “teach someonehow to fish” rather than to “feed them the fish”.

This is probably a lot harder to put into pracice than it sounds. So, do you let other people be winners?

At the risk of sounding rude … what a load of rationalist crap. For better or worse, the jobs environment of yester year–where there was some notion of stability, structure and security–is gone. And this is not a recent phenomena. It went a long time a go.

What we need to do as individuals is to respond creatively and decisively and take advantage of the situation rather than becoming a victim of it. We need to free ourselves of the master-slave mentality and forge our own path. As quoted here before … “security only comes from controlling your own destiny.”

“If you’re a Scanner, you are a very special kind of thinker. Unlike those people who seem to find and be satisfied with one area of interest, you’re genetically wired to be interested in many things.”

I am too.

I’m a big fan of mindmapping and I wholeheartedly recommend this method — I use it all the time — not only as a tool to beat writers block, but as a way of structuring ideas. I usually start with a notepad and some colored pens, which I carry in my laptop bag. I have mind mapping software too, but find that the creative process works best for me without it to start off with. I often re-create them in the software later for posterity.

Mindmapping is also a great way to ‘draft’ stuff before you commit to writing it. I’ve got a number of ‘draft’ blog posts as mindmaps, which I’ve yet to commit to. But importantly, my initial thoughts and ideas are captured for when I find the time to craft them.

Hugh Macleod, as usual–in his profound wisdom–is right on the mark with his latest post about the Global Microbrand …

There are thousands of reasons why people write blogs. But it seems to me the biggest reason that drives the bloggers I read the most is, we’re all looking for our own personal global microbrand. That is the prize. That is the ticket off the treadmill. And I don’t think it’s a bad one to aim for.

Hugh has an uncanny knack of putting into words and articulating things that I often think about but find difficult to express. Thanks Hugh — inspirational!!

Last week, all the guys from work went away for the day for a ‘planning’ session. I’ve done this with success in the past and thought it would be a good idea. It’s always good to conduct these type of planning sessions ‘off-site’ and away from the daily distractions (phones, email etc). A number of people are often sceptical about the benefits of conducting these types of sessions, but in my experience, as long as people come prepared to be open and frank and that discussions are inclusive, they can be an invaluable tool for getting people pulling in the same direction. In that regard, our session from last week was great … and we also managed to head out for dinner and to catch a round of mini-golf. I haven’t laughed so hard for a LONG time. It was like school camp! All good for the spirit.

Hugh Macloed writes …

I love this marketing model. Talk to bloggers. Make it easy for them to try the wine. If they like it, the idea-virus is unleashed. And if they hate it, that’s good too.

Why? Because nobody kills a bad idea faster than a blogger. So if Stormhoek dies, it’ll die quickly. And the Stormhoek folk can move on to other things, as opposed to spending the next five years blindly trying to market a dumb product that nobody really wants.

What Hugh describes in this post is the essence of how entrepreneurs plan for success! Individuals who seek entrepreneurial opportunities generate lots of ideas and quickly discard those that have low potential. They screen opportunities quickly and weed out unpromising ventures so that they can be free to concentrate on those ideas with merit (refinement). This is why blogging / the internet is such a powerful vehicle for innovation — it provides a broad forum for screening and refinement of ideas.

This is inciteful …

[Seth Godin]

The only thing you can bet on is change. Find the cow and milk it. Almost all organizations spend their time and energy looking for security and stability. This is nonsense. The only security you have is in your personal brand and the projects you’ve done so far.

This also applies to each and every one of us as indivuals, not just to organisations. Go forth and milk young farmers!

Have you ever noticed that we tend to overlook simplicity in problem solving?

Point in case:

I’ve spent the last couple of days (and nights), configuring the new PowerBook and transferring data from my work laptop etc. Now, whilst I don’t consider myself a techie, I am comfortable and more than capable of finding my way around a computer. With that said, last night, I tried to hook up my machine to the internet via my cable service. I spent over an hour trying different network settings, restarting the machine, modem, etc. without any success.

Reluctantly giving into the urge to call for technical support, I rang my ISP. They tried for 10-15 minutes to troubleshoot and concluded that I needed to speak with Apple. After and hour or more on the phone to Apple Technical Support (who were fantastic), going through all sorts of options (many which I’d already tried), the product specialist advised that it was the ISP settings not recognising the new Hardware ID. Another call to the ISP with this information resulted in … “have you tried cycling the cable model?”. “No” I replied, “I hadn’t tried that, and no-one has suggested that during my 2 hours on the phone!”.

Well, to cut a long story short, I cycled the modem and it worked straight away. Something so trivial and easy, yet I’d gone down the path of thinking the ’solution’ was to start hacking the ‘pref’ files from the Unix command line.

Let’s never forget the K.I.S.S (Keep It Simple Stupid) principle, no matter how competent we think we are.