Feeling foreign

When I came back from Australia to Brazil after just 16 months overseas, various people asked: Why?

The easy answer was “I intend to build my life close to my family and close friends”. Although that is partly true, there was another feeling I could never express clearly, a sensation that I would never totally understand the context and fit in another culture.

Today, as part of my preparation for a 3-week backpacking trip through Chile, Bolivia and Peru, I was reading Isabel Allende’s “My invented country”. She is Chilean but has been living in the US for many years now. At some point, I found the description I could never articulate as well:

“I understand the language, but I lack the keys. When we meet our friends, I can’t really participate of the conversations, because I don’t know much about what had happened and about the people they are referring to, I had not watched the same movies when I was young, had not danced to Elvis’ epileptic guitar, had not smoked marihuana nor had I protested against the Vietnam war. How can I not be a foreigner if I don’t feel any fascination for Clinton’s sexual scandal? […] Baseball is another mystery for me; I can’t understand so much passion towards a group of fat people expecting a ball that never comes.”

Interviewing Jacqueline Novogratz

Jacqueline Novogratz began her career as an international banker but soon, aspiring to change the world, joined a nonprofit women’s microfinance group that dispatched her to Africa.

Currently, she is the CEO of Acumen Fund, a nonprofit venture capital firm she founded in 2001 to invest in sustainable businesses that bring health care, safe water, alternative energy, and housing to the developing world’s low-income people.

She is at the moment launching the book The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World.

On an interview for the McKinsey Quarterly, she said:

"The next ten years are about developing talent, developing the stories that inspire and influence a generation, that we could do things differently in the world and that we don't need just to be sitting within the market place or just within traditional philanthropy or charity, but that there's real room for reinventing an economy that is global but is also more imaginative, creative and most importantly inclusive."

Eat, Pray, Love

I recently finished reading the book Eat, Pray, Love, by Elizabeth Gilbert, strongly recommended by my friend Zoe.

The book talks about the author's personal search for pleasure, god, love and balance, through a 1 year trip to Italy, India and Indonesia, following her divorce and a crushing depression.

There are 2 short dialogues between Liz (bold) and an Indonesian medicine man I'd like to share, are they show that paradoxes can make a lot of sense.

"Ketut, why is life all crazy like this?

"Bhuta ia, dewa ia. Man is a demon, man is a god. Both true."

"So what can we do about the craziness of the world?"

"Nothing. This is nature of world. This is destiny. Worry about your craziness only - make you in peace."

=========================================================

"What's it like in hell?"

"Same like heaven."

"Then how can you tell the difference?"

"Because of how you go. Heaven, you go up, through seven happy places. Hell, you go down, through seven sad places. This is why it better for you to go up."

"You mean, you might as well send your life going upward, through the happy places, since heaven and hell - the destinations - are the same thing anyway?"

"Same-same. Same in the end, so better be happy on journey."

"So, if heaven is love, then hell is…"

"Love, too."

I would love to read your comments!

Diffusion of Innovations

Have you ever felt your organisation doesn't see some obvious trends?

Do you think changes take a lot longer than they could / should?


Everett M. Rogers, pioneer of Diffusion of Innovations theory, author of the second-most-cited book in the social sciences, concluded in 1962:

adopters of any new innovation or idea can be categorized as

innovators - 2.5%
early adopters - 13.5%
early majority - 34%
late majority - 34%
laggards - 16%


Good news is: by the time you conquer 1/3 of the early majority it's virtually impossible to stop the wave of change.

Choices

I'm currently reading Walden, by Henry Thoreau, and that makes me reflect a lot about choices we make in life.

Thoreau says "A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone" and says he learned the walker is the fastest traveler. Whereas a working man works the whole day and pays the train to arrive somewhere else the next day, the walker walks the path, saves the ticket money and gains the experience.

On that same line, I watched a TV show last weekend called Troca de Família (Family Swap), at Record channel, where the Mum of a rich family swaps places with the Mum of a poor family for a week. The kids of the poor family were simple and fearless and the Dad took the new Mum for a boat trip, as he was friends with the boat owner. At some point he declared: "while other people work endlessly to make money to enjoy life, I enjoy life like a millionaire without stressing about the money".

I think these stories reaffirm that we always have a choice, and working long hours is one of them. If at some the activity becomes meaningless, it's much better to leave, enjoy the richness of possessing little and "live the life we have imagined".

Design problem

"All the ants on the planet, taken together, have a biomass greater than that of humans. Ants have been incredibly industrious for millions of years. Yet their productiveness nourishes plants, animals, and soil. Human industry has been in full swing for little over a century, yet it has brought about a decline in almost every ecosystem on the planet. Nature doesn't have a design problem. People do."

Extracted from Cradle to Cradle: remaking the way we make things, by William McDonough and Michael Braungart

Let my People go Surfing

I've started to read the book Let my People go Surfing, written by Yvon Chouinard. Yvon is a climber, surfer, kayaker, skier and the founder of Patagonia, a company created to provide gear for nature related sports, which has been maintaining a few interesting principles since its foundation in the 70s:

- work has to be enjoyable on a daily basis
- one dresses as it pleases him/her
- colleagues are all friends
- everybody should have flextime to surf the waves when they are good, of ski the powder after a big storm, or stay home and take care of a sick child - the distinction between work, play and family should be blurred
- be aware of one's impact and reduce the environmental damage

This is how Yvon starts its book.

"I've been a businessman for almost fifty years. It's as difficult for me to say those words as it is for someone to admit being an alcoholic or a lawyer. I've never respected the profession. It's business that has to take the majority of the blame for being the enemy of nature, for destroying native cultures, for taking from the poor and giving to the rich, and for poisoning the earth with the effluent from its factories.

Yet business can produce food, cure disease, control population, employ people, and generally enrich our lives. And it can do these things and make a profit without losing its soul."

Blessed Unrest

After seeing a super cool video on the internet (embedded in the end of this post), I decided to read a book called Blessed Unrest, by Paul Hawken. The book talks about the huge decentralised, democratic, global movement going on at the moment, led by more than 1 million organisations fighting for social justice and the environment, and what it represents in the context we're living in.

Below you can read the passage which inspired the title of the book. Enjoy it!

"There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable it is nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. [...] There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than others."

Martha Graham to Agnes DeMille at Dance to the Piper

Guns, Germs and Steel

I recently read a book by Jared Diamond called Guns, Germs and Steel. It intends to explain the world we live today through the humankind’s history in the last 13.000 years. Although it’s quite environmentally deterministic, there are some things that might deserve our attention:

- Colonies ended up being dominated because of the technologically advanced guns and fatal diseases carried by the Europeans, consequences of the centralised power and animals’ domestication respectively, as well as large population. All this factors, however, were only possible because of agriculture, which permitted work specialisation;

- In the evolution of human gathering from band to tribe to chiefdom to state (always growing bigger, more centralised and more complex), important problems we have nowadays, especially wealth concentration, hyper exploration of natural resources, violence and lack of “humanity feeling”, all started in the chiefdom phase, 7,500 years ago. Then, population gathering achieved thousands, decisions making was centralised and people didn’t know everybody else anymore (if a New Guinean happened to encounter an unfamiliar New Guinean while both were away from their villages, the two engaged in a long discussion of their relatives, in an attempt to establish some relationship and hence some reason why the two should not try to kill each other). If the population size of evolution is controlled, is nowadays complexity actually inverting the centralisation aspect

- Why would an elite gain popular support while maintaining a more comfortable life than commoners? Kleptocrats have resourted to a mixture of four solutions:
1. Disarm the population and arm the elite
2. Make the masses happy by distributing much of the tribute received in popular ways
3. Use the monopoly of force to maintain public order, curb violence and therefore promote happiness
4. Construct an ideology or religion justifying kleptocracy

- Early government centralisation (221 B.C.) helped China to lead numerous technology advancement, amongst which sit gunpowder, the wheel, a writing system and the ship industry. On the other hand, due to political disputed in the 15th century, many advancements – notably the naval industry – were discontinued. In that case, centralisation was pretty bad. So the lesson seems to be a little bit of everything in moderation, i.e. government to organise consensual big projects, but not to stop the entrepreneurial endeavours of inventors and adventurous.

I haven’t yet organised many other thoughts in my mind...

Tipping pont

Have you ever thought why some good ideas become big successes while others as good just don’t happen? Have you ever wondered why some trends just abruptly increase or decrease as some point, without a clear drastic change in the factors influencing it?

It’s more or less the following: there are 50 people with a disease that lasts 1 day. They get in touch with 50 people every day and the contagiousness rate is 2%. This means there are going to be 50 sick people every day. If they start having contact with less people, the number of people infected will slowly decrease. However, if in winter people start having contact with 51 other people in average (just 1 more person), there are going to be 61 people infected (and counting) in 10 days. Epidemic has started!

A book called Tipping Point by Malcolm Grandwell tries to bring some insights about the patterns of such tipping points: who is involved? How do the ideas spread? What’s the underlying context?

One of the interesting examples is the decreasing criminality rates of New York in the 90s, following a continuous increase of the previous 3 decades. According to Grandwell, the drop was due to the application of the Broken Window theory, which says that if you’ve got a house with a broken window and don’t repair it, soon you’re going to have another broken window, people will think the house is abandoned, other things are going to be destroyed and rapidly you’re going to have just ruins of what was a house. In practice, this means that murders and rapes in New York were fought through combating small well being infractions, such as graffiti, not payments of public transport fares, peeing in streets, leaving trash in inappropriate areas and so on.

To say the least, it was very interesting…

Presence, by Peter Senge

I recently started reading a book that is seriously one of the most amazing I've read. Especially because it's connects so well with my moment: integrating sustainability, learning organisations, community impact, spirituality and a search for some sort of way out.

Some quotations about the book:

If you form and hold your intent strongly enough, it becomes true.
Srikumar

Never doubt that a small group of committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.
Margared Mead

If you know what's right, you don't need to make decisions. If you know what's right, it's just for you, and you do it.
Ackerman

Do you think you can take over
the universe and improve upon it?
You cannot improve it.
In the pursuit of learning, every day something is acquired.
In the pursuit of Tao, every day something is dropped.
Less and less is done
Until non-action is achieved.
Tao abides in non-action,
Yet nothing is left undone.
Lao Tzu

And my favorites:

Our capacity for democracy grows from our connection with nature. As we lose that connection, isolation, fear, and the need to control grow - and democracy inevitably deteriorates.

When people who are actually creating a system start to see themselves as the source of their problems, they invariably discover a new capacity to create results they truly desire.
Peter Senge

Long lasting sunrise

Do you know the book “The Little Prince”, by Saint Exupery? In the book, Saint Exupery imagines himself in the middle of the Sahara desert, after his small plane broke down. There, he meets the Little Prince, who comes from a very small planet, and they have a number of meaningful conversations about life and love.

All this introduction is to say that I remembered quite a lot of the book recently. That’s because in his planet the Little Prince just needed to carry his chair some steps away to be able to see a sunrise at any time, for how long he wished.

Coming from Buenos Aires to Sydney, I had the longest sunrise of my life – I can precise how long it was, but it was massive! Our flight route passed quite close to the South Pole, so you can imagine. Beautiful!