Accountability: : the quality or state of being accountable especially : an obligation or willingness to accept responsibility or to account for one’s actions So, yeah, that first one’s lame because it references a definition with at least 7 meanings. The especially part gets pretty close, though. How do you feel about accountability? Personally, I’m a huge fan. In fact, I will go so far as to say one of my main complaints about the world is that people…
Remember that time when everything seemed perfectly clear? Yeah, me neither. But once in awhile things DO seem clear. And it feels good. There’s no doubt (Episode 28) and things just make sense. Though these moments are fleeting, I think we can learn to maximize the amount of clarity we see in our lives. And by clarity I mean more the ABSENCE of stuff rather than the PRESENCE of something. Clarity, to me, is really…
Many KEW episodes and posts refer to things I learned in the past that maybe don’t help us any more, are outdated, or were simply wrong to begin with. From thinking Competition actually regulates our markets (Episode 6), wondering how Old Beliefs (Episode 9) hold us back, to the idea that we all feel different, but that actually makes us the same (Episode 21). Under all of this there is a theme of having to…
To some, this is a ridiculous question steeped in pointless naval gazing. To others, it’s a comedic take on people who ask the ‘big questions’. To others this is a reasonable assessment of what we want to understand. To me, it’s all three at the same time. And maybe that’s the point. And like most rhetorical questions, I don’t really want to KNOW if I really know what I think I know. Rather, I’m curious…
I’m using the Forest for the Trees metaphor to suggest that humans have become exceptionally myopic. The only reason I know what myopic means is because after defending my Master’s Thesis a professor proclaimed that I was very myopic – meaning I had a terribly narrow view of the question I had asked and answered. I thought I was being pretty broad and was a bit hurt by his statement, but I also understood his…
I love the ‘forest for the trees’ metaphor because it describes a fundamental facet of human nature. Most of the time we tend to be myopic, only seeing what is right in front of us. For whatever reasons, our species is great at believing what our eyes see. Our ‘field of view’ seems to be ‘all there is’. I don’t know about you, but I tend to think of ‘myself’, my ‘self’, the ‘real me’,…
For years I was stuck trying to THINK my way into changing my behaviors, beliefs, habits, actions. Not that I was all that bad or needed massive changes, but there were things I wanted to be different. I would get anxious a lot. I would get defensive sometimes. I would say no to social invitations. I would be afraid to try some new things. You know, just some things I wanted to change. So, I…
When I was a teenager I realized I would be working for the rest of my life. This hit me like a ton of bricks. This realization LITERALLY left me feeling like I had fallen out of a tree and couldn’t catch my breath. Though I’d experienced physical pain by this point in my life, fully coming to understand that I was going to have to spend a significant part of my life doing things…
In this Episode I want to take a minute and acknowledge a few things. First, that not everyone has the luxury of pondering the Are vs. Should Problem. In even bringing it up I am letting my white privilege show. I grew up with enough food, enough safety, enough clean water, and enough love to meet my basic human needs. As a result I have LUXURY time to gaze at my naval and ask questions…
Twenty years of training and working as an Ecologist and Evolutionary Biologist means I see everything as a system of interacting parts. I really can’t see the trees for the forest. When I look at a part, I see the system to which it belongs. It’s a curse. An example is when I worked for a state environmental agency. I absolutely needed my manager to explain to me how my position fit in to the…