Shortening the distance between “I’m going to start working” and “I’m working.”

Last month, I set myself a 30 day challenge to write every day on this blog. The idea stemmed from the thought that 30-days was enough time to build a habit, so if I stuck by writing a post everyday, I would make a life-long habit out of it.


If you were an ardent follower, you will know that 'work' got the better of me and I did not write a post every single day. What I did do though was score the internet for material to write about and bookmarked it away.


Today was no different, I was about to blog about something when  I saw an interesting tweet….that led me to a clever article about Occupy Wall Street,  one thing led to another and soon I was lost deep down a rabbit hole. Wait a minute, what was I really planning to do again?

The truth is that there is REAL work that we need to do, and then there is all the fuss that we do as a part of starting this 'real' work. This happens a lot in sports. If you ever go to yoga class,  watch how much hair-fixing and water drinking happens at the exact moment the instructor calls out a challenging pose.

It feels minor, but think about all the wasted motion ( the fidgeting, drinking water, lying down, tying my hair)  I was doing for the 45 minutes of stretching– energy spent, speed reduced, extra steps taken for absolutely no reason other than that I’d built up a bad habit.

This isn’t just about not getting distracted by social media and your inbox (though those are particularly dangerous because they pretend to be work).  It’s about shortening the distance between “I’m going to start working” and “I’m working.”

We have a strategic plan...

It's been a while since I last posted. My apologies. Work has been insanely busy, with too many projects needing to be finished at the same time. 

For those of you who do not know, I work at a start-up at the Australian National University. My lovely, eccentric, crazy team of 5 make up ANU Edge - the universities 'knowledge services' arm. What that really means is we convert 'soft' (things like developing a new methodology to do roadmapping, identifying leadership etc) research into a service that we then provide to NGO's, SME's and Government. 

The group like most start-ups,  started off with a strategic plan, a budget etc...but what we have come to learn in the past few months is that  - our strategic plan is stagnant and our work dynamic. Whilst our strategic plan aimed to project what things would be like in 5 years time, what we have realised in the 6 months that we have been functioning, is that we seem to be miles ahead than what we projected. Whilst this is never a bad thing, we've realised that our strategic plan desperately needed an upgrade.

Thats when I saw this poster and thought how apt it was for us.

Coming to think of it, I think it apt for every small business out there.

Steve Jobs on Creativity

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things.

The reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people. Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.” – Steve Jobs, Wired, February, 1995

(via this fantastic Brain Pickings post)

Mind Without fear

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;

Where knowledge is free;

Where the world has not been broken upinto fragments by narrow domestic walls;

Where words come out from the depth of truth;

Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;

Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;

Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action---

Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

                                                                     - Rabindranath Tagore

Todays post is inspired by this poem. The poem was written by Rabindranath Tagore a famous Indian poet that won the nobel prize for his poetry. Although this poem was written in the early 1930's, it never ceases to inspire me. As individuals passionate about entrepreneurship and innovation we strive to stay on a constant creative ebb. The truth is with every ebb there is a trough and for some of us, when we reach those troughs we tend to get stuck, frustrated and judge ourselves to hard on not being able to reach the next creative ebb. 

The thing is, this frustration blinds us to the real cause of these troughs - dead habit. The habit could be procrastination, could be not following up on a task, could be giving up to easily, could be getting distracted by the small things and not focussing on the big picture. It could be a million different things but it is only when we choose to let habit take over and let reason take a back seat - that we slip into these troughs.

So lets take cue from the poem, lets not let our habits hold us back, let us strive towards perfection, let us strive towards being free, creative, inspiring individuals.

Create to learn a bit more about yourself

You may not be a Picasso or Mozart but you don’t have to be. Just create to create. Create to remind yourself you’re still alive. Make stuff to inspire others to make something too. Create to learn a bit more about yourself.”

Thank you Frederick Terral, the creative visionary behind design studio Right Brain Terrain for being todays inspiration.

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results

I recently heard a colleague complain about a friend who was suffering from the "Red Queen Effect". Puzzled and curious I asked him what exactly this red queen effect was??!!

He explained that the “Red Queen Effect” refers to the Lewis Carroll (1872) story “Alice Through the Looking Glass” where the Red Queen runs hard but never gets anywhere because the surrounding landscape is also moving. In fact in Tim Burton's version of Alice in wonderland, the Red Queen tells Alice, “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place”.


I wonder how many of us are behaving like the red queen in our daily lives? How many of us complain about our relationships, yet don't do anything to change the outcome? How many complain about our jobs, but never act differently? How many crib about current problems, but refuse to find solutions?


Time for a change?! I definitely think so...

Draw using your eyes!

Just came across the EyeWriter project. It is an ongoing collaborative research effort to empower people, who are suffering from ALS (Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis ), with creative technologies. It is a low-cost eye-tracking apparatus & custom software that allows graffiti writers and artists with paralysis resulting from Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis to draw using only their eyes.


Now that's innovative!

The value of work

Made me think...