Last week, I mentioned an article called The Making of the Corporate Athlete (originally published in 2001 in the Harvard Business Review). If you haven't read it, you should -- it's a short read. Long story short: successful athletes take a "whole body" approach to optimizing their performance, and other kinds of professionals could benefit from doing the same -- in other words, willpower and brainpower alone are not enough. One idea that stuck with me is the importance of rituals as a training activity. In each case study, the authors, who are acting as consultants (or therapists) for corporate clients, make a point of establishing "positive rituals" to help train their clients out of old, unhealthy habits, and turn them into corporate (and personal) superstars. According to the diagram below, rituals are the hand-holds for ascending the "High Performance Pyramid".
I particularly like the idea that rituals create an explicit opportunity for recharging:
Our own work has demonstrated that effective energy management has two key components. The first is the rhythmic movement between energy expenditure (stress) and energy renewal (recovery), which we term “oscillation.” In the living laboratory of sports, we learned that the real enemy of high performance is not stress, which, paradoxical as it may seem, is actually the stimulus for growth. Rather, the problem is the absence of disciplined, intermittent recovery. Chronic stress without recovery depletes energy reserves, leads to burnout and breakdown, and ultimately undermines performance. Rituals that promote oscillation – rhythmic stress and recovery – are the second component of high performance. Repeated regularly, these highly precise, consciously developed routines become automatic over time.
and that they are an important technique for stepping off the daily grind treadmill:
The inclination for busy executives is to live in a perpetual state of triage, doing whatever seems most immediately pressing while losing sight of any bigger picture. Rituals that give people the opportunity to pause and look inside include meditation, journal writing, prayer, and service to others. Each of these activities can also serve as a source of recovery - a way to break the linearity of relentless goal-oriented activity.
This makes a lot of sense to me, and I've started to apply it to my own life. For instance, blogging here helps me clear my head and recharge, but it's hard for me to find time or space to do it during the regular day-to-day (plus, that's what Tumblr is for). But I've found that firing up ScribeFire first thing on the mornings when I Amtrak it from Boston to NYC works - so that's what I'm trying to do now each week. Another example: Theo and I have been doing swim lessons together every Saturday morning for the past few months, and that time has quickly become my favorite part of the week. Thinking about it a bit, I realized that, besides the fact that he and I are spending dedicated time together, there's something particularly comforting and recharging about that time being blocked off from the rest of the week -- no email, no phones, etc -- and the fact that it is the same time and day somehow adds to that recharging ability. And then of course there is my hero-blogger Fred Wilson, whose pattern of writing is entirely ritual-oriented (1 blog post per day, ~3 tumbls a day, weekly series, etc.). I am clearly inspired by the way Fred writes and you can see that reflected in how my own online presence is set up (and probably even in how I write). At a certain point, rituals can become traditions, which take on a different kind of long-term social value. For example, my father in law has been having lunch with his friend Bob every Saturday for the last 40 years (maybe longer). As long as my wife can remember, her dad slipped out for an hour every Saturday. He also recently told me that his father took him out for breakfast every Sunday when he was a kid. There is something really powerful about the connections that these ritual/traditions create. It can be hard to keep them in place, but I suppose that's what makes them so meaningful if you can. So, at risk of caving to my own OCD tendencies and immediately hyper ritualizing my entire life, I will say that I see the value in integrating these ideas. On a personal level, and also on a company / team level. For instance, at OpenPlans, for the past year or so I have been super focused on external issues -- raising money, developing business, making partnerships, etc. -- to the point where now that those investments are paying off, I really want to refocus on making sure our internal operations are healthy. To some extent, I think that means working to institute some positive rituals into our work week (without digressing into
Last month, I attended the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council's annual unconference. My favorite session, by far, was Bill Warner's "Building a Startup from the Heart". I found Bill's approach to be inspiring, and immediately went home to incorporate his ideas into some OpenPlans materials that I'd been working on (e.g., a new page on our website describing our transportation business -- you can now see Bill's "beliefs / people / intentions" pattern loosely reflected). I won't try to reiterate Bill's big ideas, because that has been done (here is a good overview, and here's a video of Bill's Ted X talk). Both are worth a read / watch. Since then, one takeaway has really stuck with me: the idea of speaking from the heart. A fairly large part of my job is talking & writing about what we do; to funders, clients, partners, students, the press, etc. I believe in our mission, and think that we have done and continue to do good work. At this point, I can speak pretty easily about it, and do my best to weave our complex mission and activities into a (reasonably) cohesive story. But I realized that I don't always speak from the heart as much as I should or could. It's hard to describe, but it's a difference you can feel -- when I think of speaking from the heart, I feel the focus moving from my head down to my belly. To the place where you just know the things you're talking about, and why they're important. You aren't nervous or worried about getting it right. To use Bill's language, speaking from the heart brings you back to feeling the connection your people, your beliefs, and your intentions (the feeling reminds me of the notion of the Ideal Performance State, as described in The Making of the Corporate Athlete which is also worth a read). When I think back on the times when I haven't been happy with how I've performed in a speaking gig, I can usually trace it back to being too much in my head and not enough in my heart/belly. For instance, in September we announced Civic Commons at the Gov 2.0 Summit. I did a small part of of the announcement, which went fine, but I didn't consider it an A+ performance (and got endless shit from Clay Johnson about it). According to my wife, who watched the video (I didn't), it was a B; not completely embarrassing, but not particularly great either. Fine. Afterward, I realized that I had gotten too far into the weeds -- was too much in my head and not enough in my heart. Tired, uninspired. If I were to do it over, I would have focused on the core ideas about why we believed the project was important and why we were part of it. Speaking from the heart gives you energy and confidence. It gets you back to the real reason why you're involved and why you care. It's powerful and easy at the same time. It's an idea that I will keep with me.
Last night, I attended an event at Harvard about the Knight News Challenge, put on by Hacks/Hackers Boston and the Knight Foundation. The room was full of people who are interested in applying for the News Challenge grant program. I was there to talk about our Knight project, OpenBlock, specifically, and about open source and the News Challenge more generally. During the cocktail hour, I got to talking to the ever-present Jenny 8. Lee -- Jenny is former NYT reporter, News Challenge reviewer, and one of the main organizers of Hacks/Hackers (not to mention the owner of one of the best personal urls I've seen: j8.ly). For those that don't know it, Hacks/Hackers is a fast growing meetup group that is working to bridge the gap between Hacks (journalists) and Hackers (hackers). I believe Hacks/Hackers now has chapters in 10 cities. I remarked on how well Hacks/Hackers seemed to be doing; not only are they spawning chapters at a quick pace, they are also putting on all sorts of cool events -- from the open-source-a-thon a few weeks ago in NYC, to a series of "Great Urban Hacks" in NYC and SF, to the Hyper-local hackathon that we're co-sponsoring w/ OpenBlock at MIT later this month. What is so cool about Hacks/Hackers is that it is growing open-source style. New communities come online at the will of the participants in those communities, with the loose support of Hacks/Hackers central. It is an open source initiative - a template is being drawn by the earlier cities, and the model is being replicated and adapted elsewhere. For example, Hacks/Hackers NYC's Chrys Wu spent 45 minutes on the phone with us yesterday giving us tips for the OpenBlock hackathon. There are other organizations and initiatives that are growing in similar ways - through the combination of a good idea, an open format, and enthusiastic participants. Jenny called this "The DIY Empire," which is kind of an awesome way to put it [update: Jenny informs me that Molly Crabapple is the one who coined the term]. I really do see it as a movement. Here are some of my favorite examples:
The biggest and most established is certainly the BarCamp movement. Not much to say about that that hasn't already been said.
CityCamp is a BarCamp vertical focusing on city tech and gov 2.0. CityCamp's main organizer, Kevin Curry, refers to CityCamp as an "open source brand" and is putting significant organizing work into taking it World-wide.
Another great one is the Awesome Foundation - a micro-foundation that funds "forwarding the interest of awesome in the universe" by pooling $100 contributions from a group of 10 trustees to make $1000 monthly grants. (I regret not jumping at the chance to become trustee of Awesome NYC earlier this year)
And lastly, there's DIYcity, which brought together communities of civic hackers working on projects across multiple cities. While that hasn't sustained the same amount of long-term traction as the others, it is clearly the same model, and had a lot of interest early on.
Of course there are others that I'm not thinking about right now, but these four get the basic idea across. One of the most impressive things about these DIY initiatives is how little they cost and how fast they move -- Hacks/Hackers, BarCamp, CityCamp, and Awesome are all growing at a furious rate and at an amazingly low cost. There is something magical there about the combination of a loose federation backed by a strong core idea and local shoe leather.
Last week, I mentioned an article called The Making of the Corporate Athlete (originally published in 2001 in the Harvard Business Review). If you haven't read it, you should -- it's a short read. Long story short: successful athletes take a "whole body" approach to optimizing their performance, and other kinds of professionals could benefit from doing the same -- in other words, willpower and brainpower alone are not enough. One idea that stuck with me is the importance of rituals as a training activity. In each case study, the authors, who are acting as consultants (or therapists) for corporate clients, make a point of establishing "positive rituals" to help train their clients out of old, unhealthy habits, and turn them into corporate (and personal) superstars. According to the diagram below, rituals are the hand-holds for ascending the "High Performance Pyramid".
I particularly like the idea that rituals create an explicit opportunity for recharging:
Our own work has demonstrated that effective energy management has two key components. The first is the rhythmic movement between energy expenditure (stress) and energy renewal (recovery), which we term “oscillation.” In the living laboratory of sports, we learned that the real enemy of high performance is not stress, which, paradoxical as it may seem, is actually the stimulus for growth. Rather, the problem is the absence of disciplined, intermittent recovery. Chronic stress without recovery depletes energy reserves, leads to burnout and breakdown, and ultimately undermines performance. Rituals that promote oscillation – rhythmic stress and recovery – are the second component of high performance. Repeated regularly, these highly precise, consciously developed routines become automatic over time.
and that they are an important technique for stepping off the daily grind treadmill:
The inclination for busy executives is to live in a perpetual state of triage, doing whatever seems most immediately pressing while losing sight of any bigger picture. Rituals that give people the opportunity to pause and look inside include meditation, journal writing, prayer, and service to others. Each of these activities can also serve as a source of recovery - a way to break the linearity of relentless goal-oriented activity.
This makes a lot of sense to me, and I've started to apply it to my own life. For instance, blogging here helps me clear my head and recharge, but it's hard for me to find time or space to do it during the regular day-to-day (plus, that's what Tumblr is for). But I've found that firing up ScribeFire first thing on the mornings when I Amtrak it from Boston to NYC works - so that's what I'm trying to do now each week. Another example: Theo and I have been doing swim lessons together every Saturday morning for the past few months, and that time has quickly become my favorite part of the week. Thinking about it a bit, I realized that, besides the fact that he and I are spending dedicated time together, there's something particularly comforting and recharging about that time being blocked off from the rest of the week -- no email, no phones, etc -- and the fact that it is the same time and day somehow adds to that recharging ability. And then of course there is my hero-blogger Fred Wilson, whose pattern of writing is entirely ritual-oriented (1 blog post per day, ~3 tumbls a day, weekly series, etc.). I am clearly inspired by the way Fred writes and you can see that reflected in how my own online presence is set up (and probably even in how I write). At a certain point, rituals can become traditions, which take on a different kind of long-term social value. For example, my father in law has been having lunch with his friend Bob every Saturday for the last 40 years (maybe longer). As long as my wife can remember, her dad slipped out for an hour every Saturday. He also recently told me that his father took him out for breakfast every Sunday when he was a kid. There is something really powerful about the connections that these ritual/traditions create. It can be hard to keep them in place, but I suppose that's what makes them so meaningful if you can. So, at risk of caving to my own OCD tendencies and immediately hyper ritualizing my entire life, I will say that I see the value in integrating these ideas. On a personal level, and also on a company / team level. For instance, at OpenPlans, for the past year or so I have been super focused on external issues -- raising money, developing business, making partnerships, etc. -- to the point where now that those investments are paying off, I really want to refocus on making sure our internal operations are healthy. To some extent, I think that means working to institute some positive rituals into our work week (without digressing into
Last month, I attended the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council's annual unconference. My favorite session, by far, was Bill Warner's "Building a Startup from the Heart". I found Bill's approach to be inspiring, and immediately went home to incorporate his ideas into some OpenPlans materials that I'd been working on (e.g., a new page on our website describing our transportation business -- you can now see Bill's "beliefs / people / intentions" pattern loosely reflected). I won't try to reiterate Bill's big ideas, because that has been done (here is a good overview, and here's a video of Bill's Ted X talk). Both are worth a read / watch. Since then, one takeaway has really stuck with me: the idea of speaking from the heart. A fairly large part of my job is talking & writing about what we do; to funders, clients, partners, students, the press, etc. I believe in our mission, and think that we have done and continue to do good work. At this point, I can speak pretty easily about it, and do my best to weave our complex mission and activities into a (reasonably) cohesive story. But I realized that I don't always speak from the heart as much as I should or could. It's hard to describe, but it's a difference you can feel -- when I think of speaking from the heart, I feel the focus moving from my head down to my belly. To the place where you just know the things you're talking about, and why they're important. You aren't nervous or worried about getting it right. To use Bill's language, speaking from the heart brings you back to feeling the connection your people, your beliefs, and your intentions (the feeling reminds me of the notion of the Ideal Performance State, as described in The Making of the Corporate Athlete which is also worth a read). When I think back on the times when I haven't been happy with how I've performed in a speaking gig, I can usually trace it back to being too much in my head and not enough in my heart/belly. For instance, in September we announced Civic Commons at the Gov 2.0 Summit. I did a small part of of the announcement, which went fine, but I didn't consider it an A+ performance (and got endless shit from Clay Johnson about it). According to my wife, who watched the video (I didn't), it was a B; not completely embarrassing, but not particularly great either. Fine. Afterward, I realized that I had gotten too far into the weeds -- was too much in my head and not enough in my heart. Tired, uninspired. If I were to do it over, I would have focused on the core ideas about why we believed the project was important and why we were part of it. Speaking from the heart gives you energy and confidence. It gets you back to the real reason why you're involved and why you care. It's powerful and easy at the same time. It's an idea that I will keep with me.
Last night, I attended an event at Harvard about the Knight News Challenge, put on by Hacks/Hackers Boston and the Knight Foundation. The room was full of people who are interested in applying for the News Challenge grant program. I was there to talk about our Knight project, OpenBlock, specifically, and about open source and the News Challenge more generally. During the cocktail hour, I got to talking to the ever-present Jenny 8. Lee -- Jenny is former NYT reporter, News Challenge reviewer, and one of the main organizers of Hacks/Hackers (not to mention the owner of one of the best personal urls I've seen: j8.ly). For those that don't know it, Hacks/Hackers is a fast growing meetup group that is working to bridge the gap between Hacks (journalists) and Hackers (hackers). I believe Hacks/Hackers now has chapters in 10 cities. I remarked on how well Hacks/Hackers seemed to be doing; not only are they spawning chapters at a quick pace, they are also putting on all sorts of cool events -- from the open-source-a-thon a few weeks ago in NYC, to a series of "Great Urban Hacks" in NYC and SF, to the Hyper-local hackathon that we're co-sponsoring w/ OpenBlock at MIT later this month. What is so cool about Hacks/Hackers is that it is growing open-source style. New communities come online at the will of the participants in those communities, with the loose support of Hacks/Hackers central. It is an open source initiative - a template is being drawn by the earlier cities, and the model is being replicated and adapted elsewhere. For example, Hacks/Hackers NYC's Chrys Wu spent 45 minutes on the phone with us yesterday giving us tips for the OpenBlock hackathon. There are other organizations and initiatives that are growing in similar ways - through the combination of a good idea, an open format, and enthusiastic participants. Jenny called this "The DIY Empire," which is kind of an awesome way to put it [update: Jenny informs me that Molly Crabapple is the one who coined the term]. I really do see it as a movement. Here are some of my favorite examples:
The biggest and most established is certainly the BarCamp movement. Not much to say about that that hasn't already been said.
CityCamp is a BarCamp vertical focusing on city tech and gov 2.0. CityCamp's main organizer, Kevin Curry, refers to CityCamp as an "open source brand" and is putting significant organizing work into taking it World-wide.
Another great one is the Awesome Foundation - a micro-foundation that funds "forwarding the interest of awesome in the universe" by pooling $100 contributions from a group of 10 trustees to make $1000 monthly grants. (I regret not jumping at the chance to become trustee of Awesome NYC earlier this year)
And lastly, there's DIYcity, which brought together communities of civic hackers working on projects across multiple cities. While that hasn't sustained the same amount of long-term traction as the others, it is clearly the same model, and had a lot of interest early on.
Of course there are others that I'm not thinking about right now, but these four get the basic idea across. One of the most impressive things about these DIY initiatives is how little they cost and how fast they move -- Hacks/Hackers, BarCamp, CityCamp, and Awesome are all growing at a furious rate and at an amazingly low cost. There is something magical there about the combination of a loose federation backed by a strong core idea and local shoe leather.
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