Ideeahs

Over the last week I have been wondering about what we learn and how we make use of this knowledge in our lives.  Much of my thoughts have centred on whether our approach to education is in fact giving us the knowledge we need in our daily lives.  Are we really gaining knowledge?  Are we simply being told how to accomplish a given task?  Are we being educated on the possible conclusions or just the one conclusion of the lesson - the educator's conclusion?  In other words are we learning to come to our own conclusions?  Are we able to, with what we are being taught, to really make the material our own, to synthesize it and to assimilate it into a true understanding?  To take all of this data and understand.  To come up with our own way and our own conclusion.  Are we always being asked to conform?  Do we need conformity? I have had many such conversations at work over the last days and, coincidentally, I came across some TED Talks by Si...

This post is about attitude and how it makes all the difference in the world.   Specifically this is about the attitude we bring to our daily routines and is based on three different men I have come across during my daily commute and one whom I have never met.  Each one made or makes the day just a tad bit better than it was - and they do it so simply. One is a Montreal cop who I used to see regularly in the Griffintown area of the city.  The second is a parking attendant at the Bell Centre.  The third is a train conductor who used to work the line I ride to and from the city every day.  The last is a singer in a band.  They are all examples of how easy it is to build a short human connection with a stranger and make the world that much more united. In every case they manage to, during a few seconds of interaction with fellow citizens, make a connection and put a smile on someone's face - well mine at least. The cop's job, during the extremely busy co...

This is a quick memory about my childhood spurred on by the news of David Bowie's death. I spent a good part of my elementary school years in my cousin's basement bedroom playing chess and listening to his records.  He was (still is!) nine years older than I and those formative years opened my eyes.  He had hundreds of albums.  The Beatles, Jethro Tull, Led Zeppelin, Gentle Giant, Genesis, The Rolling Stones and so many other great artists and bands.  One of them was Bowie. Of the first ten album I ever bought two of them were Bowie's.  The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars was one I bought new at either Sam the Record Man on Ste-Catherine or Phantasmagoria on Parc near Sherbrooke.  Cellophane wrapped with a 3.99 of 4.99 written in black marker across the cover.  The second was Diamond Dogs - I bought that one used at Cheap Thrills (can't remember if that store was on Mountain, Stanley, or Drummond....one of those ...

We are in the midst of one of the most dreaded periods of the year in corporate life - end of year evaluations.  I have been reading more reports lately of companies dropping these reviews altogether and opting for continuous conversations and evaluations.  The last article I read was from The Economist World in 2016 .  It states that Deloitte had calculated it wasted 2 million hours a year evaluating its 65000 employees.  At a relatively cheap $100 an hour that is $200 million of wasted time and money.  Wow.   This huge number of hours may not take into account the stress, uncertainty, escalations, debates and resulting sick leave and reduced productivity that might arise from the process - one that definitely does not generate any real benefits to either managers or employees. I am thinking that this rigmarole that is followed by millions really has seen its day.  It may have been needed in the old days where managers never...

I just finished watching the first of a series of videos on a TED playlist entitled "Talks to watch when you don't know what to do with your life".  I have embedded the video below if you are interested in watching. Larry Smith makes a pretty straightforward and simple point.  One that is painfully obvious but one that seems so impossible to achieve, live by or even simply attempt to pursue given the constraints and constructs which we all inject into our lives as individuals and as a group.  We fear being embarrassed by pursuing it, we fear losing everything we have, we think of "buts" and "if onlys".  We therefore so rarely pursue it.  It....is our PASSION. In Avoiding the Blues I talk about the project being the monster.  The context is that when you are assigned to a project at work it can easily take over your every minute of every day for its duration unless you learn to manage your time and your effort.  It is so easy to los...

In my mind the next twelve months are critical for all organizations who were involved in the United Nations Conference on Climate Change (UNCCC) to show each other, and the world in general, that all the talk and negotiation which took place in Paris in December at the UNCCC were not a waste of time.  They have their work cut out. I have spent my twenty-eight years of employment working for massive global corporations and have experienced firsthand how talking and planning is cheap and easy.  We humans are great at having meetings and chatting about how wonderful things could be if we all just worked together with a common objective.  After all, we convince ourselves, we work for the same organization and so working towards a common goal just makes sense!  A conclusion so painfully obvious yet so hard to achieve.  After the talk we take the next step and have workshops where we gather in a common location to make good use use of colourful sticky notes, marker...

There is a certain hypocrisy to this post given the fact that I live in a suburb in a detached house that give us more personal space than most inhabitants of Earth.  In and of itself one could argue that I live a wasteful life beyond my needs.  Most of us in Canada do.  So talking about energy conservation while sitting in my home office seems, again, hypocritical.  Having said that, even in our suburban houses there is much that we could do to reduce our footprint. When we moved into our house in 2009 the previous owners left us their utility bills.  It has allowed me to make a comparison between the energy consumption of our family of four compared to the previous owners who were either four or five. Our average use of water, electricity and natural gas when compared to the previous owners compares as follows. Water 0.58 vs 1.13 m3 per day (51% of previous owners' usage) Electricity 12.78 vs 39.45 kWh per day (32%) Natural Gas 7.58 vs 10.125 m3 per da...

Hello again world.  So this is now the - gee I don't know - fourth year in a row where I have told myself I would start writing again?? When I was active on my two blogs and writing my first book I notice that, for me anyway, it required regular, daily work.  While ideas were always numerous writing required a daily  rhythm.  This meant that it took time and that I therefore had to give this hobby some time daily. It also required emotion, a connection and a reaction to what I was experiencing.  In other words not going through life like an unfeeling robot.  Rather to go through life wondering, listening, watching, smelling and feeling.  Soaking it up and then letting it out in words. So let's see whether I once again do these two things in 2016.  In the interim, have a look at my old posts ;-) Cheers. Let me know what you think about what you have just read. Please and thanks!