Man at Bar: The acid test is whether you take any pleasure in responding to the question "What do you do?" I can't bear it.

--Metropolitan

Meaningful ... vacations.

Man, Fast Company is chock-full of great stuff. Here's a link to an article on do-gooder vacations:

http://www.fastcompany.com/articles/2007/03/volunteer-vacations-for-professionals.html?partner=rss

happy 4th!

"Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing."

--Benjamin Franklin

Fast cities

Fast Company writes about fast cities -- those "cauldrons of creativity where the most important ideas and the organizations of tomorrow are centered. They attract the best and brightest. They are great places to work and live."

Fast cities have:

1. Opportunity.

2. Innovation.

3. Energy. This is my favorite. Here's an excerpt from the article:

"Finally, Fast Cities have energy, that ethereal thing that happens when creative people collect in one place. The indicators can seem obscure: number of ethnic restaurants, or the ratio of live-music lovers to cable-TV subscribers. But they point to environments where fresh thinking stimulates action and, by the way, attracts new talent in a virtuous cycle of creativity."

Energy makes a city alive with possibilities, opportunities -- fueling creativity.


http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/117/features-fast-cities-intro.html?partner=rss

Who am I and why am I writing this?

I am a twentysomething just a few years out of school and looking to create a career that pays the bills AND means something to me. Not sure yet where I'm going, but I hope that keeping the blog will help me get there.

Some valued abilities in a globalized world.

From Russ Robert's Econtalk podcast interview with Dan Pink, contributing editor at Wired:

1. Design. "The MFA is the new MBA." Well, not quite yet, but maybe someday.

2. Story. Commercials tell entertaining stories to sell products. Narrative can be used as a teaching tool.

3. Symphony. Coordinating different skills and areas of knowledge; having multiple skill sets, and overlapping them.

4. Empathy. Emotional knowledge.

5. Play. A vital component of creativity.

6. Meaning. See the big picture.

These abilities are hard to automate (and outsource). They exist at the intersection of business and art. According to Pink, the most valuable worker can combine literacy and numeracy, creativity and business sense.

These abilities, to me, are a huuuuge part of meaningful work. Nice that they're also the wave of the future economy.

First entry.

"What work I have done I have done because it has been play. If it had been work I shouldn't have done it. Who was it who said, 'Blessed is the man who has found his work'? Whoever it was he had the right idea in his mind. Mark you, he says his work--not somebody else's work. The work that is really a man's own work is play and not work at all. Cursed is the man who has found some other man's work and cannot lose it. When we talk about the great workers of the world we really mean the great players of the world. The fellows who groan and sweat under the weary load of toil that they bear never can hope to do anything great. How can they when their souls are in a ferment of revolt against the employment of their hands and brains? The product of slavery, intellectual or physical, can never be great."

--Mark Twain