My life's work is to be a good steward of my time, talents, and resources, develop transformative relationships, nurture good work that advances the greater good, and encourage others to do the same.
Given the state of the world and the dynamics of the economy, it’s more crucial than ever that everyone figures out appropriate roles and good contributions to society.
In order to advance the greater good, I believe we must stay awake, have an open mind and a good heart, and organize ourselves.
When you discover your life’s work and continue to learn about it, you will see your life’s work has integrity because it is shaped by your values and visions. Ask yourself: Who am I? What was I born to do?
Your life’s work is an opportunity to do what you love and what seems natural. What are your natural talents and abilities?
By working from your natural flow, it encourages you to pursue excellence, to strive to be your best, to live into your greatest potential. What is your potential?
Your life’s work provides opportunities for good stewardship, for serving the greater good. What is your greatest contribution to others? What gifts do you want to share?
What’s keeping you from your true vocation, your calling? How do you get from where you are to where you want to be? What steps could you take to overcome any obstacles, remove barriers, and get beyond where you are now? Should you…
• Reorganize your time?
• Build empowering relationships or the right connections?
• Obtain more education or different training?
• Carve out more reflection and visioning time?
• Have true, meaningful, and intimate conversations?
• Improve your communication skills?
• Develop a greater understanding of culture, society, history, trends, markets, the world’s diversity, or the planet’s resources?
• Cultivate greater intellectual agility?
So what needs to happen to be successful in your life’s work?
You know you must develop the know-how to do what you want to do. Learn what works in your chosen field or career.
Success and progress, however you define them, require commitment and dedication.
You must believe opportunity is abundant. You need to learn to see opportunities, and to create them as well.
Create good goals. Goals are focused intentions, seeds of change. Goals help us clarify what we want in our lives. Goals should help us stretch. Goals should be about you, not others. To encourage action, results, progress, and impact, goals should be as specific as possible. Create good goals and then put the hard work in to achieve them.
As Gandhi said, "We must be the change we wish to see in the world."
Friday, February 20, 2009
Saturday, December 20, 2008
Exercises for Personal Development
EXERCISE your MIND
Stay awake and aware. Be curious. Question why things are the way they are. Ask why.
Imagine how your world could be improved and what role you can play in making it happen. Develop a vision for how your home, family, work, and community can be. Bring people around the vision and work together to develop the goals and strategies to get there.
Part of living life to the fullest is aligning your purpose in life with your vocation so that you are doing everyday what you are called to do. That's freedom. Work towards living your dreams. Feeling connected to our dreams, our family's needs, and to our community gives us a strong foundation to build our strength.
Be a lifelong learner. Reflect. Learn. Forgive. Renew. Organize. Adapt.
EXERCISE your HEART
Develop closer relationships with family, friends, and other folks in your life. Care for one another and support each other. Let's help each other develop into the best we can be. Let's nurture good hearts, share goodwill, and conduct good works.
EXERCISE your SPIRIT
Keep the faith. Have courage. When the going gets tough, make a way out of no way. Act on your sense of fairness, justice, and the greater good. Help others do the same.
Find some balance in your life.
Remember "I am because we are." We are all connected. We cannot be ourselves without community, our health, and our beliefs. We are caught up in the well being of others.
Life is abundant. Share the abundance. Be a good steward.
And don't forget, Yes We Can.
Stay awake and aware. Be curious. Question why things are the way they are. Ask why.
Imagine how your world could be improved and what role you can play in making it happen. Develop a vision for how your home, family, work, and community can be. Bring people around the vision and work together to develop the goals and strategies to get there.
Part of living life to the fullest is aligning your purpose in life with your vocation so that you are doing everyday what you are called to do. That's freedom. Work towards living your dreams. Feeling connected to our dreams, our family's needs, and to our community gives us a strong foundation to build our strength.
Be a lifelong learner. Reflect. Learn. Forgive. Renew. Organize. Adapt.
EXERCISE your HEART
Develop closer relationships with family, friends, and other folks in your life. Care for one another and support each other. Let's help each other develop into the best we can be. Let's nurture good hearts, share goodwill, and conduct good works.
EXERCISE your SPIRIT
Keep the faith. Have courage. When the going gets tough, make a way out of no way. Act on your sense of fairness, justice, and the greater good. Help others do the same.
Find some balance in your life.
Remember "I am because we are." We are all connected. We cannot be ourselves without community, our health, and our beliefs. We are caught up in the well being of others.
Life is abundant. Share the abundance. Be a good steward.
And don't forget, Yes We Can.
Sunday, July 06, 2008
Barack Obama's Call to Service
Take the time to watch the video of Barack Obama's Call to Service speech. This speech provides a great insight into his values and insight. I think this speech will be a reference point for many in the future. While you're exploring, review the overview of his public service agenda and other issues in his campaign.
Friday, July 04, 2008
The New Patriotism
by Richard Stengel from Time, Thursday, Jun. 26, 2008
Patriotism has always been the most abstract of American virtues--which may be why we fight so ferociously over the symbols that help us define it. Too often those symbols--flags, anthems, slogans--which are meant to unite us, end up dividing us.
To many people, the meaning of patriotism is simple: love of country. But love of a country that is dedicated to a proposition, not a king or a religion--a nation that is based on ideas, not blood--has always created a different kind of citizen. American patriotism expresses itself most truly in actions, not words. Our patriotism shapes our responsibilities as citizens, how we navigate in the world and, ultimately, what it means to be an American.
There is nothing more important than those ideals, and we are in the midst of a historic presidential race that will help redefine them for the 21st century. There have always been twin strains of patriotism in our history, two different definitions of American exceptionalism: a sense that our greatness is based on our provenance and what we have achieved, and a belief that our greatness lies in our promise and how we attempt to live up to our ideals.
Conservatives and liberals have been arguing about these two strains for years, and that debate has become the pivot of our politics. Republicans have contended that they are the true legatees of the nation's heritage and attack Democrats for being ashamed of America. Democrats in turn depict Republicans as chest-thumping nationalists who prevent America from living up to its ideals. Both of these are caricatures.
In Barack Obama, the first African-American presidential nominee, the mixed-race child of a single mother, we have a candidate whose perspective on--and experience of--America are different from those of any other nominee in history. In John McCain, we have the son and grandson of admirals who suffered grievously for his country and has spent his life as a public servant. To say that one of these represents the American Dream and the other does not is to set up a false choice. As they show in their own words on the following pages, both men embody the great traditions of American patriotism.
What we need going forward is third-way patriotism, a new patriotism that blends the faith of our fathers with, as Lincoln said, the unfinished work remaining before us. That new patriotism, as Eric Liu and Nick Hanauer write in The True Patriot, means "appreciating not only what is great about our country but also what it takes to create and sustain greatness." That formulation is what this campaign should be about: defining America's course in the 21st century. The candidates may have different views on what makes us proud to be Americans, but they share a belief in a modern American exceptionalism: that America has a greatness of purpose that no other nation does, and that for all our achievement, our greatest tasks remain before us.
Patriotism has always been the most abstract of American virtues--which may be why we fight so ferociously over the symbols that help us define it. Too often those symbols--flags, anthems, slogans--which are meant to unite us, end up dividing us.
To many people, the meaning of patriotism is simple: love of country. But love of a country that is dedicated to a proposition, not a king or a religion--a nation that is based on ideas, not blood--has always created a different kind of citizen. American patriotism expresses itself most truly in actions, not words. Our patriotism shapes our responsibilities as citizens, how we navigate in the world and, ultimately, what it means to be an American.
There is nothing more important than those ideals, and we are in the midst of a historic presidential race that will help redefine them for the 21st century. There have always been twin strains of patriotism in our history, two different definitions of American exceptionalism: a sense that our greatness is based on our provenance and what we have achieved, and a belief that our greatness lies in our promise and how we attempt to live up to our ideals.
Conservatives and liberals have been arguing about these two strains for years, and that debate has become the pivot of our politics. Republicans have contended that they are the true legatees of the nation's heritage and attack Democrats for being ashamed of America. Democrats in turn depict Republicans as chest-thumping nationalists who prevent America from living up to its ideals. Both of these are caricatures.
In Barack Obama, the first African-American presidential nominee, the mixed-race child of a single mother, we have a candidate whose perspective on--and experience of--America are different from those of any other nominee in history. In John McCain, we have the son and grandson of admirals who suffered grievously for his country and has spent his life as a public servant. To say that one of these represents the American Dream and the other does not is to set up a false choice. As they show in their own words on the following pages, both men embody the great traditions of American patriotism.
What we need going forward is third-way patriotism, a new patriotism that blends the faith of our fathers with, as Lincoln said, the unfinished work remaining before us. That new patriotism, as Eric Liu and Nick Hanauer write in The True Patriot, means "appreciating not only what is great about our country but also what it takes to create and sustain greatness." That formulation is what this campaign should be about: defining America's course in the 21st century. The candidates may have different views on what makes us proud to be Americans, but they share a belief in a modern American exceptionalism: that America has a greatness of purpose that no other nation does, and that for all our achievement, our greatest tasks remain before us.
Monday, June 30, 2008
Nation Building at Home
Thomas Friedman has another editorial along his nation building in America theme with Anxious in America. Here are a couple of excerpts, "Up to now, the economic crisis we’ve been in has been largely a credit crisis in the capital markets, while consumer spending has kept reasonably steady, as have manufacturing and exports. But with banks still reluctant to lend even to healthy businesses, fuel and food prices soaring and home prices declining, this is starting to affect consumers, shrinking their wallets and crimping spending. Unemployment is already creeping up and manufacturing creeping down." He continues, "I continue to be appalled at the gap between what is clearly going to be the next great global industry — renewable energy and clean power — and the inability of Congress and the administration to put in place the bold policies we need to ensure that America leads that industry." I agree. It ties back to a previous essay on the Power of Green as the new red, white, and blue. By the way, you can listen to the audio of him addressing the NC Emerging Issues Forum back in February 2008 here.
Sunday, June 01, 2008
Majora Carter: Greening the ghetto
In an emotionally charged talk, MacArthur-winning activist Majora Carter details her fight for environmental justice in the South Bronx -- and shows how minority neighborhoods suffer from flawed urban policy. Watch the video and then check out what they're doing at Sustainable South Bronx.
America the Great
Read Thomas Friedman's Op-ed Who Will Tell the People? about nation-building here at home. Get involved and help America be all it can be. There's a role for everyone to play. So as Beat poet Gary Snyder says, "Find your place on the planet. Dig in, and take responsibility from there." And to quote June Jordan, Sweet Honey in the Rock, Barack Obama, and the oral history of the Hopi Nation, "We are the ones we've been waiting for."
Snapshot of an Indigenous Struggle
Read and listen to this report from NPR's Julie McCarthy on Brazilian Tribes Fighting a Dam. This story has replayed itself in different ways all over the globe over the centuries. The people's struggle against "progress".
Sunday, May 18, 2008
Tim Tyson
Read the Raleigh News & Observer's profile of Tim Tyson, one of North Carolina's public intellectuals, and author of Blood Done Sign My Name.
The Power of Green
Read The Power of Green by Thomas Friedman to examine how America can strengthen the world and be a good steward by leading in alternative energy and environmentalism.
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