Creativity

The Change of the Moment

/ Jeff Hora / 3 Comments
mindfulness 1.0

mindfulness 1.0 (Photo credit: Mrs Janet R)

Like it or not, most of the passing moments bring something a bit different than what I am expecting.  That’s really just a fact, an observation. Whatever I plan, even in the midst of doing something that I feel like I have complete control over (like writing this post…), moments seem to move in a slightly different way than I thought they might.  Most of the time the changes are so small, so quantum-sized that they are virtually unnoticeable. That doesn’t change the fact of their existence.  What does change is my perception and acceptance of them.

The Shower of Inspiration

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water stream from shower in close-up, showing ...

water stream from shower in close-up, showing droplets (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I read an interesting interview in the New York Times last weekend with Brian Halligan, CEO and Founder of Hubspot. While a fairly standard interview for the Business section, I was caught by something he said about himself….he told the interviewer that he is “a huge nap guy.” By this, he says that he has found that when he comes up with good ideas, they tend to happen when he is either falling into or coming out of a nap. With the goal of thinking more and working less, he is working to engineer more opportunities like this (yes, naps…) into his life, and is encouraging others to do so as well.

I think that’s cool. The awareness to know when you have moments of inspiration is something few people have. Also, I could use a nap most of the time….

This got me thinking along several lines.

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The Tyranny of the Post

/ Jeff Hora / 2 Comments
They say that any blog post really needs a point to deserve existence.  While conceding that there is an inordinate amount of pointless content out there, I agree.  However, even if I feel that I have a point, a story, a well-

Writing With Left Hand

Writing With Left Hand (Photo credit: indi.ca)

formed argument or discussion, you may feel differently.  Well, OK….whatever.

It has been too long since I’ve published anything here, and I have been progressively encouraged and shamed by a couple of sources: Steven Pressfield whose books “Do The Work”  and “The War of Art” continue to bug me, but in a good way, and the husband of a good friend of mine Steve Wiggins, who is a blogging machine and seems able to publish daily, regardless of ANYTHING (he can be found at http://sawiggins.wordpress.com/ and I can’t recommend his work more that this – he makes me think).
My work for the past 10 months has been all-consuming and very satisfying, including the usual road bumps along the way and the over-arching ambiguity that is part of the workplace in today’s world.  I’m not fond of uncertainty, but I AM beginning to come to grips with it. There will be more about the continuing journey through ambiguity.
I guess the point of this post is I’m not dead yet and I still have a viewpoint from within that you may find of interest.  There will be more.
Related articles

First Thoughts in a New Community

/ Jeff Hora / 2 Comments
2012_09_17 Community Management IMG_0841

2012_09_17 Community Management IMG_0841 (Photo credit: joelogon)

OK, so I’m stepping away from the fire hose for a moment. I’m today wrapping up, if that even makes sense when you’re on the road, week #5 in my new gig as Senior Community Manager at SDL. Collecting and prioritizing my thoughts and experiences will likely take some time, if only because so many of them do not categorize very simply.

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Social Media and Being a Professional

/ Jeff Hora / Leave a comment
Illustration by John Tenniel of the Red Queen ...

Illustration by John Tenniel of the Red Queen lecturing Alice for Lewis Carroll’s “Through The Looking Glass” (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I have been in a number of conversations lately where my colleagues and friends are grappling with staying on top of their game, so to speak, both online and in the office.  Not only are we coping with the well-known information overload, but we have the desire to improve, deepen and expand our skills, knowledge and expertise.  Each of us is evolving a methodology to accomplish this, but it changes a lot and, with so much change, it can be difficult to feel like you’re really progressing.  It feels so much like the Red Queen‘s comment in Lewis Carroll‘s Through The Looking-Glass : “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”

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MOOCs and Measurement

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Lees hier hoe je een MOOC kunt opzetten! Massi...

Lees hier hoe je een MOOC kunt opzetten! Massive Open Online Courses deel 1 door Inge de Waard http://t.co/RbLAijLd @Ignatia (Photo credit: Trendmatcher)

I’ve noted a sea change in education and learning about which there has been quite a bit of virtual ink spilled.  The phenomenon known as a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) has been added to the education lexicon, much to the joy of futurists, learners everywhere, and to the consternation of a number of university and college administrators.  Like most things, I can see the light and the dark, along with the difficult.

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Coming up for air

/ Jeff Hora / 1 Comment
Korg M3 Music Workstation Sampler

Image via Wikipedia

It’s true…..this space has been as dead as a bag of hammers for a couple of months. I’ve switched companies and jobs, and that has made for a very exciting and immersive few weeks.

I’ve switched jobs before.  I worked for my previous employer for 14 years and had a number of positions, each a challenge and none of them easy.  Learning the ropes, discovering who were the go-to people on the team, what were the local processes for getting things done and re-jiggering my goals and deliverables for the new gig always took a bit of time, but the corporate culture was basically the same (there were actually some differences between business groups, but I learned early on that was the norm for my company).  I didn’t have to learn a new repository of information, a new information discovery tree or deal with a new way of thinking about what we did, as a company.

THAT has changed.

Boy Howdy….

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Short and…….sweet?

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Readers own scan of the PD document

Image via Wikipedia

When I sit down to write, my first instinct is to spend time noodling on a topic I might have captured previously or something that I’m confronting or working through right now. I feel that somehow whatever I could come up with in a stream-of-consciousness sessions might resemble a walk through an unsightly neighborhood and not have much coherence. I need to give myself a break and realize that there is more coherence to following a path of thought than I give credit to the desire to write.

This is just such a post.

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Short and…….sweet?

/ Jeff Hora / 2 Comments
Readers own scan of the PD document

Image via Wikipedia

When I sit down to write, my first instinct is to spend time noodling on a topic I might have captured previously or something that I’m confronting or working through right now. I feel that somehow whatever I could come up with in a stream-of-consciousness sessions might resemble a walk through an unsightly neighborhood and not have much coherence. I need to give myself a break and realize that there is more coherence to following a path of thought than I give credit to the desire to write.

This is just such a post.

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Fail and Win

/ Jeff Hora / 3 Comments
Wattenberg chess visualization 050421

Image via Wikipedia

I have been thinking about a post by Tac Anderson on his NewCommBiz blog about making mistakes, crisis-based decision making and how we learn.  It specifically got me thinking about organizations that learn and those that don’t really, or at least not very well (or easily).

Things move terribly fast in today’s marketplace and the halls of business. We blame it on the Internet, on the 24-hour news cycle, on our growing propensity for being “always on and connected” and on “everyone else.”  There have been countless barrels of ink spilled on the importance of failure for learning, both as individuals and organizations.  Even just thinking about how you learn personally will confront you with the first attempt at doing something, assessing how well that went, tweaking, trying again, etc.

So why do we not get it?  I’m not saying we drive for failure (although that seems to be the direction of some I’ve noticed….), but, short of life-and-death, why do we not accept that failing is at least as important as not failing?

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