If You Want to Achieve Greatness

William James, 1902

“Lives based on having are less free than lives based either on doing or being.”

Start Anywhere

From our friends over at The 99%, a great video to watch this weekend. Frans Johansson, author of the best-selling The Medici Effect, on pushing through failure and executing big ideas.

The key? Start anywhere.

Thanks, Steve

Great words from a great man:

“Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.”

Los 33: The Chilean Miners, One Year Later

It seems like just yesterday the world was riveted by the heroics and courage of the 33 Chilean miners trapped underground for over two months. One of our first posts on the site had to do with the drilling tactics used to get the men out: a perfect case study in lateral thinking. But what happened to the miners after the camera crews left? What happened after the late night television show appearances and the victory tour? We’ve been wondering about these questions quite a bit here. Shortly after the miners’ rescue, there were a couple of weeks in the Fishbird office where we were making plans to go down to Chile and rally Los 33 to do a free Fishbird session. Get their minds out of the mine and support them in creating a powerful vision for their future.

In the end, we didn’t go. It just didn’t seem like it was the right move. While we felt that Fishbird could help the miners, we also knew, deep down, that these men needed something else first. They needed time and space to decompress, to begin to understand what they went through. So we stayed home, our travel plans left on our computer desktops.

But we kept thinking about Los 33.

And now, there’s this from Al Jazeera: a brilliant correspondence on the struggle to cope.

“I think they should have received more psychological help after the trauma they experienced. They are still at a stage where they can’t sleep, they still have nightmares, some have anxiety attacks, depression … and even so, the insurance company gave almost all of them a clean bill of health,” says Carla Pena, a social worker who helped the miners’ families throughout their ordeal. Seven of the miners are still receiving psychological help, though many more say they, too, are not well.

The article goes on to describe the lavish attention the men first received, and how “sick” Chileans, and perhaps the world, is of hearing about them today.

Maybe it’s time for Fishbird now.

What Improv Comedy Can Teach You About Innovation

A couple of years ago, one of our Fishbird leaders spent the summer up in NYC with the Upright Citizens’ Brigade, a well-known improv group that now offers classes on everything from comedy writing to acting. Suffice to say, we heard our fair share of punchlines that year. But we also heard something interesting that’s stayed with us in Fishbird, and throughout our personal lives. The idea of saying yes. In order for improv to succeed, all participants must say yes to everything that comes out of another colleague’s mouth. You have to run with what you’re given and build upon it. For example, if you’re starting off a scene walking down a street, and one of your fellow actors says, “Aren’t you that famous chainsaw juggler?”, you’d kill the energy in the room by saying, “No, I’m not.”

This is a powerful lesson that can be applied to our everyday work.

Conversations are nothing more than movements of energy, positive and negative. When we’re trying to innovate, we’re just like an improv comedy group starting a story. Nothing’s been established. There are no boundaries. No stops. Everything is open game. We can only build our stories into something fun and exciting by allowing them to grow. Yes is integral in this. It pushes the positivity forward and creates new places for the story to go. The best improv actors in the game understand this concept.

And now so do you.

Please Enjoy: The Work of Ji Lee

2011/03 Ji Lee from CreativeMornings on Vimeo.

We’ve been following Ji for some time now, watching him move from creative work at Google to more creative work at Facebook. Here he gives an inspiring talk on making your personal projects public and your public projects personal. We know the running time is long, but bear with it. It’s so good. Lesson learned: share yourself more. People want to know you.