Friday’s Finds

Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“We have art so that we shall not die of reality.” —Friedrich Nietzsche, via @AnthonyMartinFaria

@dsearls — “Future epitaph: ‘I used to be talent. Now I’m just content’.”

@MelissaPierce — “This quote from the movie ‘The Two Popes’ is pretty much everything: ‘Truth may be vital, but without love, it is unbearable.’ Would that I take this gem to heart for even a third of my interactions.”

@malia_adil — “These days on Social Media, everybody is engaged either hosting, boasting, or posting. Wonder, who is listening?”

@JasonFried — “Remember, remote work is not office work remotely. It’s a different way to work. Mostly asynchronous, long stretches of uninterrupted time, fewer meetings (meetings are a last resort), and fewer hours with more impact per hour.”

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

@qcroll — “The century of the speaker is over: Once, we did everything for the speaker’s convenience, gathering in one place. Now, we do everything for the community, because speakers, sponsors, and the audience trust us to gather the best people.”

@bhargreaves — “Everyone crowing about a permanent remote future where they live in Boise but earn their current NYC/SF salaries is gonna be real pissed when they discover they’ll live in Boise but earn Manila/Bucharest salaries.”

@yaneerbaryam — “Bureaucracies exist in order to say no. They wouldn’t be needed if they said yes. So the people who rise to the top, and the culture, are an automatic ‘We don’t do that’.”

@delphina777 — “propaganda does not need to be persuasive, only pervasive — its secondary purpose is to convince — its primary purpose is to exhaust”

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Every fortnight — now known as a decade — I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence, it is to act with yesterday’s logic.” —Peter Drucker

But in our knowledge economy, says Drucker, “if you haven’t learned how to learn, you’ll have a hard time. Knowing how to learn is partly curiosity. But it’s also a discipline.”

@mathemagenic — “When experts open up and become part of sense-making networks, their expertise travels to become part of informed choices of non-experts. It’s a better option than pushing packaged solutions via authority lines assuming that people are not able to understand complex matters.”

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Every fortnight — now known as a decade — I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

The Fourth Doctor — “The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common: they don’t alter their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit their views, which can be uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that needs altering.” via @GarethLPower

@alexia — “If you are the smartest person in the Zoom, then you are in the wrong Zoom.”

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Every fortnight — now known as a decade — I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“In times of crisis, people reach for meaning. Meaning is strength. Our survival may depend on our seeking and finding it.” —Viktor Frankl, via @nuri_numinous

@JoyceCarolOates — “is anyone else experiencing a distortion of time? each day feels monumental & tomorrow seems totally unpredictable; one week ago feels like one month; the future feels foreshortened, like a blank wall just a few inches away. past crises, like raging wildfires, near-forgotten.”

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Every fortnight — and what a fortnight it has been! — I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

6 March — “You’re not going to see public health, let alone pandemic preparedness, at the top of the priority list for this White House.” —The Long Now Foundation

7 March — “It’s interesting seeing all the universities that disparaged distance education as not proper suddenly being converted to the benefits of online education.” —@mweller

9 March — “Shoutout to all the Zoom engineers keeping the servers up and running as usage skyrockets for personal and business communicationss — can’t imagine what would happen if they had an outage, let’s hope we never find out.” —@CallMeVlad

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“The public has a distorted view of science because children are taught in school that science is a collection of firmly established truths. In fact, science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries.” —Freeman Dyson 1923-2020

@RonEdmondson — “One Critical Leadership Error: Assuming what you’re hearing is all that’s being said.”

@curtisogden — “Perhaps too starkly put, but we might consider the difference between “networking” and “network weaving” as the difference between thinking of others for our own sake and thinking of others for their sake or the sake of the larger whole.”

@rhappe — “Communities are, at their core, the way people have always come together to learn. They provide the space, relationships, collisions, and trust necessary to create shared meaning, to iterate on emergent ideas, and to norm new patterns and behaviors.”

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“Humanity’s problem today is that we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology.” —E. O. Wilson, via @Kpaxs

@snowded — “In complexity … you define a direction of travel, not a goal, because if you start on a journey you will discover things you didn’t know you could discover which have high utility, if you have an explicit goal you may miss the very things that you need to discover.”  via @sys_innovation

@UNHumanRights — “Social Media is the new public square to which all Human Rights apply, including freedom of expression, privacy, access to information, transparency, equality. We need to make it a safe space for all.”

@suzie_dent  — “English has an ancient law: in words like ‘chit chat’, ‘zigzag’, and ‘seesaw’, we always put the part with an i (as in ‘pit’) or e (as in ‘be’) first. We instinctively know this rule of ‘ablaut reduplication’. You can’t have a pair of flop flips or jamjims, or play pong ping.”

@dpontefract — “Over the past 5 years I’ve interviewed 500+ senior leaders. CEOs, CIOs, COOs, VPs, SVPs, EVPs, Deans, Directors, Provosts, CHROs … The top workplace issue is busyness. They are stressed, overburdened and in too many meetings. No time to coach. They are just trying to survive.”

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“Skepticism: the mark and even the pose of the educated mind.” —John Dewey

“A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It’s where the rich use public transportation.” —@EnriquePenalosa

“We rarely appreciate all that our enemies do for us. They test us and make us stronger. They exploit our flaws, motivating us to correct them. They show us what we do not wish to become. So many memorable lessons. What fine teachers our enemies are.” —@TheStoicEmporer

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“There are no cheap tickets to mastery. You have to work at it, whether that means rigorously analysing a system or rigorously casting off your own paradigms and throwing yourself into the humility of not knowing” —Donella Meadows

“Any method that starts by asking you to imagine an ideal future is deeply suspect from a complexity perspective. Far too likely to give an excuse to avoid the reality of the present.” —@snowded

“As Socrates showed us, there exist few quicker ways to make enemies than to ask the right questions of those vested in the wrong answers.” —@MattPirkowski

“If everyone did their best, 95% of problems would remain.” —W. Edwards Deming

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