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.

Historical Note: On 19 February 2004, states of emergency were declared in Atlantic Canada after a prolonged blizzard, later named White Juan, dumped as much as 100 centimetres of snow. Many roads were impassable, blocked with snow drifts of up to 4 metres. On that same day, 17 years ago, I started this blog.

“If you give someone a fish they’ll eat for a day. But if you teach someone to conduct workshops on how hungry people can practice self-care then you dodge the question of why people are hungry while also cutting the fish budget and the savings can be passed on to the shareholders.” —@n_hold

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

“Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.” —Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic’s Notebook

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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.

“Yes. It’s really only since wireless networks got fast enough to stream pictures to portable devices that everything changed, & enabled each individual person to live twenty-four/ seven in their own personalized hallucination stream.” ―Neal Stephenson, Fall; Or, Dodge in Hell

We’re in a guerrilla information war and everyone is a participant.

Here are pertinent rules that apply to the current moment —

a) every single physical event, is won or lost online.

b) this is an asymmetric conflict.

c) you can’t participate if you can’t connect.
—@JohnRobb

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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.

“Word of the day is ‘sequaciousness’ (17th century): the blinkered, unreasoning, and slavish following of another, no matter where it leads.” —@suzie_dent

“As our circle of knowledge expands, so does the circumference of darkness surrounding it.” —Albert Einstein

“What we learned in 2020? That oil is worthless in a society without consumption. That healthcare has to be public because health is public. That 50% of jobs can be done from home while the other 50% deserve more than they’re being paid. That we live in a society, not an economy.” —@mhdksafa

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Here are some of the best of my fortnightly Friday’s Finds of 2020. Happy New Year 2021!

“Hope and fear cannot occupy the same space. Invite one to stay.” —Maya Angelou

“The first and final thing you have to do in this world is to last it and not be smashed by it.” —Ernest Hemingway

“To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.” —20 Lessons on Fighting Tyranny

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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 and these are the last ones for 2020, a year few of us will forget.

So shaken as we are, so wan with care,
Find we a time for frighted peace to pant,
And breathe short-winded accents of new broils
To be commenced in strands afar remote.
—Henry IV

“A friendly reminder: Your inability to understand science is not an argument against it.” —@Konfytbekkie

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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.

“If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you’re going to get selfish, ignorant leaders.” —George Carlin

The Lesson We Should Have Learned From 2020 — But Haven’t by @umairh

What is the thing the East had that the West didn’t — that made all the difference in fighting Covid, much more so than money and resources and so forth? Sociality. Social cohesion. Social bonds. Trust, relationships, ties. An economist might call that “social capital.” You can use that term if you want — I won’t, because, like I said, this lesson goes so, so deep that I want to take pains to really explain, and you can tell me if I succeed.

What the East was able to do was cooperate as societies to fight Covid. And it turned out that you couldn’t beat Covid without cooperation at the largest scale — the social scale. The scale of a city or town or block just wasn’t enough. And it was because it enjoys significantly higher levels of sociality that the East was able to — as we say in the West — “pull together” and beat off Covid.

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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.

“In the past every village had an idiot, and we could all deal with that. Now the internet is allowing idiots to connect and it is normalising idiocy.” —@snowded

“Most victims of suicide are men, Most people in jail are men, Most victims of violent crimes are men, Most victims of murder are men, Most victims of police killings are men; Most shamed for mental health is men.” —@birgitta

“One of the biggest differences I discovered: poor folks in Germany realise they are poor and mostly vote for parties advocating for poverty relief measures. Poor folks in the US see themselves as ‘temporarily not rich’ and vote for policies benefiting mostly the rich.” —@LyssasLounge

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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.

“No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written. He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.” —T.S. Eliot

“The first and final thing you have to do in this world is to last it and not be smashed by it.” —Ernest Hemingway

“To know what you’re going to draw, you have to begin drawing.” —Pablo Picasso

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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.

Top Influencers in knowledge management by @cronycle [Long list to curate your own feed on KM]

@DougBoneparth — “Learning how to sell provides more job security than most college educations.”

I used to tell people at Wired, “Don’t come into Wired to work; work at home. Come into Wired to be interrupted and have chance meetings.” —Kevin Kelly. HT @StewartBrand

If yer keeping track of pending job reductions announced over the past month or so:

Royal Dutch Shell: 9,000
Chevron: 6,750
Exxon Mobil: 14,000
Cenovus/Husky: 2,000
Suncor: 2,000
Marathon Petroleum: 2,050
Boeing: 31,000
HSBC: 35,000
Daimler: 30,000
Disney: 28,000
Cisco: 7,100
—@DPontefract

@DrFrankLipman — “There are a number of commonalities of long lived elders around the world, and these few stand out — 1) they live with a sense of purpose; 2) they give to others; 3) they have strong social networks that enable them to engage frequently with their communities, families and friends.”

@JPCastlin — “The importance of ensuring diversity of thought is far, far, far too often underestimated in strategy. This goes for teams, but also individuals. Strategists who only have one angle with which they view the world will inevitably end up believing it is flat.”

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