Hello!

“Products based on sharing are disrupting traditional industries”

I probably have this phrase written in one way or another on about 90 different pieces of paper that are littering my life right now. But there is something valuable to writing things down over and over and over again.

I chuckle a little when I see that I was writing the same thing in 2007…. and feel really good when I realize that what I am doing right now is exactly what I have been writing about all along. It’s maybe what both Liz and Paul would call “a consistent approach to a persistent idea” Heh.

Why money should be more like my dogs.

I am wondering how our economic worlds would be different we took care of our money in the same ways that we take care of our pets.

We would have a much longer term relationship with our money. We wouldn’t be so hasty to let go of it and we would be very deliberate about where we got our money from. If we took care of our money in the same way we took care of our pets, we wouldn’t leave it locked up at the bank. It would stay at our homes, sit next to us as we watched tv and sleep in our beds.

If we treated our money like we treated our pets, we would have much better ways of nourishing it, feeding it and helping it to grow; and it would have a physical response when we neglected it. There would be more than one way to grow and exercise our money, and these ways would be different depending on the size and type of money we owned.

In this kind of world, our money would have personality rather than be an impersonal object that belongs to us one day and our local grocer the next. We, of course, would still have rules that help manage and control our money, but they wouldn’t be so complex. Instead, the rules that govern our money would have definite purpose that was communicated succinctly and clearly.

This could go on, obviously. But on a final note, if my money was more like my dogs it would, at the very least, be loyal and something I looked forward to seeing and interacting with at the end of each day.

Hopefully my research this next week will help me find better ways to design our interactions with money…

Today I have been thinking about people

i’m not sure what it is, but I really truly believe that it’s not about what, but who. All this talk about programming and OS and i-gadgets have left me wanting for something a bit more personal. Something that connects people in real ways. Tangible ways. That leaves space for learning, for discovery and for surprise. I know I might be in the minority when I say that I can’t get that from an iphone app. (Nor do I really want to) I get that through the connections I make with people - doing what they do, where they do it. There is something really valuable about that. I hope that these next months and years i can find ways to engage people by connecting them with other people rather than just connecting them with technology. I’m not sure how that’s done. But I want to find out.

(Originally published on October 13, 2010)

Storytelling

I think a lot about storytelling. about context. about how context affects the stories we tell. i wonder how our lives, how our businesses and interactions would change if we put more effort into telling really interesting stories.. Or, if nothing else, created stories out of things we don’t find very interesting. Would we be more eager to learn? Would we retain more information? Would we find more meaning from our experiences and environments? I tend to think.. YES.