Carbon Map
How To Move When You Don’t Know Where to Go
I am a fervent advocate of the "Act/Reflect" cycle of career and professional development. And I know that failure to deal with both sides of this equation is one of your surest routes to stuck. Yesterday I stumbled across this article on the Harvard Business Review Blog on what to do when you don’t know what to do. Boy, did it resonate!
- Start with desire.
- Take a smart step as quickly as you can toward your goal.
- Reflect and build on what you have learned from taking that step.
- Repeat.
Career change is all about dealing with career uncertainty. We know we want something different, but we aren’t sure what is going to happen if we pursue it. The future is a scary thing and standing still feels safer than moving if we aren’t sure what will happen next.
Here’s one thing I know for sure about standing still though. You don’t actually get anywhere when you do that. If life is a journey (and I think it is), then standing still is the best way for you to miss what your life has to offer. At the end, all you’ll be able to say is that you stood your ground.
By Michelle Martin, March 30, 2012
Powered by Wordpress - From the Net2 Blog
"As someone who just launched their first WordPress website, I’ll just come out and say this without hesitation. WordPress is impressive! If you are looking to do-it-yourself (DIY) and build a small business website, an online portfolio of your work, a blog dedicated to your dog or just trying to impress family and friends with your web talent, you need not look much further." [From Net2 Blog]
Part of building a thriving world is in identifying a useful technology like WordPress and training millions of people to use it. That will spread new knowledge both widely and deeply into the conmmunity. Any community will progress as quickly or as slowly as the ability of most of us to LEARN. The transfer of knowledge, the learning of new skills, paid or unpaid is the way of a thriving community will develop.
We learn by what we do. Take a tool like WordPress and do something with it.
Employment - Betting on the little guy
Unemployment in the EU is making many politicians sit up straight. The jobless rate rose to a seasonally-adjusted 10.7 percent in January – up seven-tenths from the same month last year. As expected, EU leaders have made job creation one of their biggest priorities. The big question is how to stimulate employment in a diversified economy. Brussels believes it has the answer in small and medium-sized enterprises.
March 27, 2012
The Hidden World of Modern Slavery
Here’s a startling statistic. According to a 2010 article in the Harvard Gazette, an estimated 12 million people around the world are enslaved in one form or another. To put that in perspective, that number totals the entire metropolitan area of Los Angeles. Out of those, over 1.3 million are engaged in prostitution within the world’s sex trade. A recent feature on CNN estimated that almost 1 in 7 people in the West African country of Mauritania live their lives in slavery. In fact, Mauritania didn’t even make slavery illegal till 2007.
10 min video part of a promotion.
28 March, 2012
Sovereignty of the people or democracy for the few?
Democratic government denotes a system in which the decision about leadership is in the hands of the people. Random House’s English dictionary defines democracy as
... a form of government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised directly by them or by their elected agents under a free electoral system.
What we mean by the concept of justice is less obvious, and may vary significantly depending upon the context in which the term is used. However, when discussing just societies, we basically mean what’s known in political science as “distributive justice.” A just society ensures that its people are free from oppression; that all citizens have equal access to available resources, the same basic rights, and that no person without due cause may be excluded from that which these rights guarantee.
Therefore, justice and democracy presuppose one another in a fundamental way: a society in which the ultimate power can be said to be vested in the people, cannot lack the basic equality which guarantees every human being the same rights, the same influence and the same opportunities.
March 29, 2012
Spain’s Unbearable Pain
Another week, another bout of social unrest in a Euro peripheral nation, if the fourth largest econony in the area (Spain) can even be called that. Yesterday’s action saw more than a million people take to the streets in protest, while several million actually participated in the 24-hour general strike (about 77% of union workers), resulting in 176 arrests and a 104 injuries. It is estimated that 91% of all large business employees took part in the strike and/or occupied the streets. The Spanish politicians, of course, tried to downplay the rate of participation and claimed victory because the strike wasn’t as bad as the last big one in 2010, but those claims merely reveal how their desperation is taking on a ridiculously childish quality at this point.
MARCH 30, 2012
Words matter: a politician tells the truth
"The land we call our home, the land owned by this sweet funny brave people is being transformed, as is the rest of the planet. And yes, since the late eighties I have been an unapologetic believer in the grim reality that human activity is changing the earth’s climate." [Australian Senator, Bob Carr]
Words matter in politics. And the absence of words matters. As the scientific evidence for climate change continues to mount and consolidate we should expect clarion calls from political leaders. They owe it to us. I grew up during World War II and even as a child I was aware of the way the words of Churchill matched the enormity of the conflict with fascism. The challenge of climate change is different, but of no less moment. Bob Carr’s bluntness is to be applauded.