One of the delightful surprises of my career has been mentors. I’m grateful that people have reached out and taken an interest in me. If life lessons only came through our own mistakes we would be miserable. Having a mentor to listen, give suggestions, and encourage based on their life experience is priceless. Mentoring is a brain to pick, an ear to listen, and a push in the right direction.
John W. Gardner was an activist and author who served in the Johnson administration as Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare. During his term he helped launch medicare. He also presided over the launch of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting which would later help form PBS and NPR. This speech was delivered to McKinsey & Company in Phoenix, Arizona on November 10, 1990. This transcript was originally published on PBS.org Speech Transcript I’m going to talk about “Self-Renewal.
With all the negative in the world, it’s important to remember that there is much good too. My family took a day trip today which provided lots of time to discuss things going on in the world. Coronavirus, politics, locusts, the economy, and our kids’ grades. There were some grim moments! Towards the end of our trip we visited the office of one of our local government leaders. His office manager was so kind.
I have a pen that is great to write with when the cap is on the back. Take the cap off, however, and the balance is off. Writing with it is a chore because it doesn’t feel right. I want my pen to write when I tell it to, and an unbalanced pen doesn’t do that very well. Life can get out of balance too. Sometimes imbalance happens to us, and sometimes we do it to ourselves.
Life is funny. It’s also hard. It’s not fair and it has a way of exploiting your weaknesses. For all that, you should be optimistic about the future and joyful in your journey. You are lucky to be around in a time when diseases are largely under control, you’ll likely never go to bed hungry more than a few times in a row, and you carry around a smartphone that has what seems like the entire world inside it.
One of the most amazing things about the internet is hyperlinks. You’re reading something, see a link, click it, and suddenly you’re able to read something new that you didn’t know even existed. It’s like magic. It can also be terrible, yes. Point taken. But I’m frequently amazed at the things I discover when I’m reading a great article and click one of the links in it. One of the problems I sometimes run into is gated content.
In late December 2018 I decided it was time to start keeping a journal. 400 days later I’m a bit surprised at how quickly the time has gone by. This habit has become an important part of who I am and has some interesting side effects. Here are a few thoughts on journaling and how it can help us in the work we do each day. A Place for “Hot Letters” The internet has largely made cowards out of us.
Listening to music with musicians is interesting. Most musicians I know think of listening to music as an activity you do exclusively; not while reading a book, not while looking at your phone, or while working on email. The music deserves full attention while it’s playing. You learn and gain from the music by listening attentively and deeply. This isn’t to say that musicians don’t like background music. They do, but they also have the annoying habit of actually listening to the background music much more than normal people do.
We all know we need it, but it’s so easy to have a bad relationship with sleep. We’ve all decided to stay up late or get up early. Life is hectic and sometimes it feels like sleep is the easiest block of time to compromise with. Don’t do it! If you have the Calm app there’s an excellent session by LeBron James called “The Power of Sleep” in the Train Your Mind course.
I have a notebook I write all of my first drafts in. When it comes out words seem to flow better. I have a lamp on my desk that I turn on when it’s time for writing or serious reading. When the lamp turns on I feel like my brain snaps to attention. There’s no magic in the notebook or the lamp. The magic is in the ritual they are a part of.