Joyful Jubilant Learning

The Learning Life of an Analog Guy in a New Digital World

Yes, I'm an analog guy. I'm old enough to remember pencils, 13 column paper spreadsheets and "10-keys".   When I was in college the "computer" we used to process our (quite) elementary COBALT programming was the size of a living room.

My first "laptop" was a 50-pound Compaq portable that had a 3-inch B&W screen, and didn't even have a hard drive (hard to fathom that 25 years later).

Given this history it wasn't hard to proclaim myself a "dork" when it comes to the current digital age.

In other words, I'm fascinated by it, and always want to learn more about it, but I'll always feel like I'm three steps behind.   A good analogy is learning a foreign language - if you do it when you are a child, it's much, much more easy to absorb and learn quickly.  If you try to do it as an adult, it doesn't "take" as well, and it takes much longer to get fluent. 

That's me and this digital thing.

Nonetheless, despite my "dorkness" I continue to dive into the digital pool, and have come to embrace its many benefits.   Here are a few of my favorites:

1. The Blackberry.  I'm addicted, but it keeps me sane (really).  I'm actually glad I didn't have one in my 20s.
2. Blogging.  Finally, a place to publish my unfiltered thoughts for the world to see immediately after I simply hit a "send" button. Wow.
3. Google. I'm an information junkie, and a supreme search engine like this one is right up my alley. I probably do at least 25-50 searches a day - the last one was to find out the lyrics to the America song "Daisy Jane" (I look up lyrics a lot!)
4. Twitter. (I'm http://twitter.com/starbucker)  This is my latest fascination.  Insta-blogging.  I think this is more addicting than the Blackberry.  And you have to put your thoughts in 140 characters or less - a very good exercise in brevity!
5. Wikipedia.  See #3.  I used to just love reading encyclopedias when I was a kid - now 1,000 volumes of facts are just milliseconds away!

Yes, this analog guy, despite his dorkness, is actually getting along quite well in this new world.

Imagine that!  :-)

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Terry Starbucker is an operations executive for a service company who lives in Connecticut, loves business trips to the Rocky Mountain west, is a founder of SOBCon, and posts his musings and observations about "the optimistic side of the daily grind" in Ramblings from a Glass Half Full. 

Seven Online Tools for Web-Based Learning - What are yours?

We're sure you have noticed: The way we learn from the web is changing every day.

Flickr Photo Credit.

At Kevin's Blog, Chief Learning Officer Kevin Eikenberry writes an article he says "is meant to help you use the Web in new ways; to help you learn more, and learn it faster; therefore moving you towards your goals more rapidly than ever" and offering some resources for each of these, he suggests that learners get on board with

1. Blogs
2. Social Networks
3. Wikis
4. The Audio/Visual Web, and
5. Google Alerts

Our choices can be overwhelming, and I like the way that Kevin has outlined 5 basic categories of tools ---if we were to rename the 5th one as "RSS aggregators and notifiers," Google Alerts being just one of the options. Kevin's distinction of an "audio/visual web" is not one I would have thought of, and he is so right!

In that vein, I would add two more:

6. Bookmarklets
Those browser tools which allow you to quickly bookmark your web-based finds for later tagging or referencing. The web is a virtual library, and you are the librarian! The one I use most is del.icio.us.

7. Lifestreaming
As my newest learning, this is something I am currently experimenting with at Tumblr. A sneak peek for you: Ho‘ohana Aloha. JJL Contributor Joanna Young was the one who got me intrigued with this, when she explained that to ‘lifestream’ is to "put all the streams from your writing, your photos, [your finds] and your networks together in one place." Joanna's Tumblr Log is called  The Short and Sweet of Confident Writing.

If you were to sit with a wide-eyed web newbie, placing a mouse in their hand as they sit in front of your computer, would you have a number 8 or 9 for this list in your orientation for them?

~ Rosa Say for Joyful Jubilant Learning
Mahalo Dean for the coffee!

Postscript: Before you answer, you might want to take a look at a short video on how our kids now learn, recently shared by JJLer April Groves at her blog My Beautiful Chaos.

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5 From the JJL Archives:

• More on Google Alerts: Thank you for teaching me (Google treasure maps).
• Facebook: Friend or Foe?
• Learning Best Practices on the Internet.
• This Web 2.0 Thing Explained (A video clip).

• BONUS! JJL Contributor Benjamin Bach had interviewed Kevin Eikenberry in our series, Jubilant Learners Speak Up! ~ A Remarkable Interview with Kevin Eikenberry. A snippet:

Let's Collaborate: A Learner's Conference Calendar for 2008

We see that Liz Strauss has officially opened the door to SOBCon08:

We’re putting the finishing touches on everything, we want you to be a part.

Part seminar, part conference, part deep networking event, SOBCon08 is even more about YOU! We’re bringing back what you valued last year, and we’re adding more depth, more coverage, more opportunities. Take a look inside.

Deciding which conferences we will aim to attend in the coming year is a part of year-end reflections for many of us. The first step is knowing what your options are, and so we thought we'd ask the experts where lifelong learning is concerned ~ YOU! ~ our Ho'ohana Community of joyful learners.

Photo Credit.

Let's put together a list:

Give us your suggestions in the comments, with dates, locations and links if you know them ~ what conferences do YOU plan to learn at in 2008? If you would, tell us why, and what you anticipate learning there. You may find that there will be other JJLers eager to keep you company once they know you will be there!

~ Rosa Say for Joyful Jubilant Learning

Two Things It's NOT Easy to be Grateful For - But I have learned to be!

  Inspired by Rosa's Mahalo November theme of Appreciation, Gratitude and Thankfulness, I offer this contribution. I was going to write about 5 things I'm grateful for, but it got too long and too deep. I had to stop before I wrote a whole book!  Once again, Rosa, and the wonderful group of writers here at JJL have inspired and encouraged me to write more personally than I ever have.

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At this point in my life I have so many wonderful things to be grateful for -- My wonderful husband, comfortable home, loyal friends, work that I love, good health, and my 3 precious cats. These are the EASY things to appreciate.  But to get where I am today, I had to get through some really tough experiences. These are the things that are not only difficult to be grateful for, they were difficult to forgive.  It would have been easy to become bitter about them, and even now they are difficult to write about, but I'm stepping out of my comfort zone in hopes of inspiring you to think about how grateful you might be for the difficult challenges you have faced or may be facing.  Not that you would have wished for them to happen, but that you can find the positive learning in them.  So here are a couple of really difficult things I've learned to be grateful for because of how they shaped me into who I am today.

1. PAINFUL RELATIONSHIPS

Before I met my husband at the age of 40, I was engaged to be married 5 times! Most of these engagements ended because I caught them cheating on me. One I ended because of physical violence as well as cheating. Another I ended because of emotional abuse and cheating. One ended because he realized that he did not want to be married to someone who had a more advanced education or made more money than he did!

These were extremely painful experiences, but each time I somehow found the strength to forgive, learn what I had to learn about human nature, and move on.  I can't say I learned to "trust". It was more like I decided to accept the risk that bad things might happen again.  But, each time, I learned more about what NOT to put up with in a relationship.  I learned not to fall so easily for the "charming" guys.

Ultimately, I learned the best lesson of all, how to appreciate a man who had integrity, kindness, and loyalty - even if he wasn't the "suave" kind of guy I was used to.  I wasn't initially attracted to my husband because he was quiet, a little shy, and nervous around me. But we became friends and as I got to really know him, I found the most caring, loyal and kindhearted man I've ever known. He is an engineer and so secure in his own intelligence, that he actually loves that I'm as smart as he is and can beat him at Scrabble. With him, I have learned what it's like to truly "trust" and have faith in another human being. It was such a new experience for me. 

So yes, it was worth learning to forgive and even become grateful for all the painful relationships I've had.  Now, I can really appreciate the value of a "nice guy".  To make sure we don't forget how lucky we are, we make it a ritual to wake up and go to sleep every day expressing how grateful we are for each other, our home and all of our blessings. 

2.  PAINFUL CHILDHOOD EXPERIENCES

Painful may be an understatement for what I went through as the oldest of 5 kids growing up in the tough Boston suburb of Brockton, Mass.  My father was an alchoholic who regularly got physically violent with my mother, brothers and sister.  I'm so grateful that when I was about 8, he finally disappeared and never came back to harm us again.  My mother was a substance abuser who regularly took out her anger and frustration on my brothers and sister. I won't even get into the problems we had with the husbands and boyfriends she brought into our lives after my father finally left us alone. Most of my childhood was spent trying to make sense out of the chaos and trying to keep my brothers and sister safe. 

When I lived with my mother, we had to move so often it made my head spin. Eventually, I was in a foster home for a while when I was 13. I ultimately ran away when I was 14 and vowed never to live with my mother again.  For a while, I lived with my best friend's family and then I became a live-in nanny for a single mom who believed in my potential and was more of a mom to me than my own mother had ever been. Without getting into the details of all the places I lived as a teen, suffice to say I'm forever grateful to those who taught me that people can be amazingly kind and giving.

My college years in Florida were plagued with one crisis after another in which I had to take time out to take care of my brothers and sister on a regular basis. Somehow I survived those years in Florida, and then I moved to NJ in 1985.  I left from 89 - 92 to work and live in the Chicago area with Arthur Andersen, but starting over yet again proved to be too painful and I wanted to come back to the friends and "adopted" family I had in New Jersey.

My dream had always been to create a stable home for myself, and I finally did when I decided to put down roots in NJ in 1992 and STAY PUT!   I've been in the same community of Montclair / Bloomfield ever since.  I am so forever grateful to my husband, and to the friends and adopted family I have here for giving me the support and inner sense of security that enabled me to take the leap and start my organizing business.

I am also so grateful to my Grandmother with whom I spent as much time as I could as a child.  She taught me to value learning and to know the difference between right and wrong. She instilled in me a strong work ethic and strong sense of responsibility.  She made me believe I could achieve anything if I determined to do it and didn't give up. 

She was completely different from my mother.  From 1941 when her husband left her, she raised 9 kids by herself and owned and ran a halfway home for Veterans.  She was one of the strongest and smartest women I've ever known and probably was the greatest influence on me.  She helped me believe in myself by giving me lots of work to do in her business.  She taught me that I could overcome anything, and have the life I wanted, IF I wanted it badly enough and IF I worked hard enough for it. She instilled in me the desire to learn and become educated so that I didn't repeat my mother's life.

I'll save the rest of the details of my childhood for someday when I'm ready to write a book about it, but for now, I just want to express how grateful I am for how these experiences shaped my ability to forgive and to have extraordinary compassion for people living in chaos and depression. I can work with people without judgement, and with an empathy that can only come from having been through it yourself. I am so grateful for the strong intuition, street smarts, and self-confidence I developed because I was able to survive chaos and create the life I dreamed of so often as a kid.  It took me till I was in my 40's to really forgive and become grateful for my life, but better late than never! : )

I can't tell you how many sleepless nights I spent dreaming that someday I would find work that I could be really passionate about.  That I would be able to help people not be victims of their circumstances.  And now I get to do that every day.  I get such a profound joy every time I experience someone letting go of insecurity, resentment and anger, and learning to not only forgive but accept and appreciate themselves for who they are. I get such an intense sense of hopefulness every time I get to be part of someone's process of letting go of the past, reframing their sense of who they are, and learning to believe in their own ability to not only get organized, but to create the life they want for themselves.   

So yes.  I'm now actually grateful for my painful childhood and relationship experiences because it forced me to learn how to let go of my own rage, resentment and even the clutter I held on to to remind me of who I was and where I'd been. It made me tolerant, compassionate, able to inspire and motivate others to go for what they really want, and uniquely able to appreciate every little good thing I have in my life.  At Thanksgiving time and every day.

I wish you a wonderful Thanksgiving with many blessings to count!

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Ariane Benefit, M.S.Ed, Organizing Coach, is the founder of Neat & Simple Professional Organizers. She specializes in helping people create the homes & offices of their dreams! She is the author of the popular organizing and decluttering blog, Neat & Simple Living, and "The Neat & Simple Guide to Organizing Your Office" a book on home office organizing.

Learn 5 New Things About Walking

       

Preface: Start here if this is the first you are seeing these tell-tale Lx5 letters: A Mahalo November: Learned with 5. In our November study of appreciation, gratitude and thankfulness, my contributions to JJL this month have to do with the past learning I am most grateful for.

I learned how to walk in 1996.

No, not walk again. There was no accident, nothing like that. I learned how to walk for my best health.

I walk three and a half to five miles every day unless bad weather or my travel schedule interferes, and gratefully, that doesn’t happen too much. I give thanks every day for living in Hawai‘i because I get to walk outdoors and not on a treadmill; I can drink in the beauty, breathe in the ocean or mountain air, and meet my neighbors.

1996 was the year I finally broke free from the hotel business and went to work for HDC, the land developer who designed and built the Hualalai Resort. The difference wasn’t really the business, but the lifestyle of the people I soon found myself surrounded with — they were all fit and trim work-out junkies. The resort was not yet open for business, and so at 4:00pm sharp everyone turned off their cell phones and computers, locked up their construction trailers, switched from hard hats and construction boots to baseball caps and running shoes, and did 90 minutes of speed-walking before heading for home. We had the luxury of an almost-open 5-star resort at our disposal, and the fanatics among us would run and did sprints barefoot on the golf course fairways. Eventually, I did too.

Eleven years later, the habit has stuck.

It’s not always at 4:00pm, and if I head for a golf course these days some marshal will surely kick me off. But I keep walking for my best health because it makes me feel so good; I like knowing I am taking care of myself in a smart, fulfilling way.

Here is my LearnED in 5 about walking for best health:

.....Walking is serious exercise and you should treat it that way.

Walking is not an easy way out of other exercise, and you can’t cruise through it. It doesn’t count unless it’s speed-walking, at least enough to elevate your heart rate, and make you feel like you’re workin’ it. When I started with the Hualalai fitness junkies, the rule we adopted was that we’d walk at a pace that made it difficult to keep a conversation going; if you talked too much, you were a slacker. The agreement was that we were working out, and helping each other keep healthy, not making a social call.

There are rights and wrongs. Never skimp on good shoes or wear them down, or you’re asking for trouble (such as aches in your shins, calves, or lower back), especially if you are walking outdoors and on asphalt instead of grass. (Impact stress makes speed walking far better for me than running.) During the summer in Hawai‘i, sunglasses and sunscreen are musts, as is lip balm to prevent windburn.

Learn 5 Ways to Stop Complaining

       

We have begun our study of appreciation, gratitude and thankfulness on MWA Coaching through the 3-way Promise of Mahalo (living in thankfulness) in this framework:

• Knowing Mahalo through Appreciation
• Becoming Mahalo through Gratitude
• Sharing Mahalo through Thankfulness

Currently we are concentrating on appreciation, and it brought something to mind for me that I could share with you as another Lx5 (LearnED in 5 keepers), though this one always qualifies for me as continual LearnING too! Here are,

5 ways to Stop Complaining

Have you noticed that those who are appreciative rarely complain?

Appreciation is terrific medicine for curing the complainer’s bug, for it helps us to recognize what is right with us instead of our focusing on what might be wrong or missing. To borrow Starbucker’s favorite adjective, appreciation fuels the “half-full” view shared by those positive people who are optimists.

1. Instead of thinking “I have to,” say to yourself, “I get to.”

2. Instead of hurting with pain, recognize the signal.

3. Instead of saying “you did this,” examine how “I created this.”

4. Instead of lodging a complaint, make a request.

5. Instead of demanding something, shine a light on what you would appreciate.

Can you imagine how wonderful a world we could create if we all just stopped complaining?
~ Rosa Say

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Just clicking in? Catch up with my other Lx5s this month:

• A Mahalo November: Learned with 5
• GTD Learned with 5 Take-Aways

Post Author:
Rosa Say is the founder of Say Leadership Coaching, and author of Managing with Aloha, Bringing Hawaii’s Universal Values to the Art of Business.

Read more about Mahalo, the Hawaiian value of appreciation, gratitude and thankfulness on Rosa’s coaching blog this month, Managing with Aloha Coaching. Start here ~ Mahalo: 3-way Promise, 5-fold Learning.

GTD Learned with 5 Take-Aways

       

Preface: Start here if this is the first you are seeing these tell-tale Lx5 letters: A Mahalo November: Learned with 5. In our November study of appreciation, gratitude and thankfulness, my contributions to JJL this month have to do with the past learning I am most grateful for.

What a dream come true for the Managing with Aloha workplace mission it would be, if even a modest third of the Getting Things Done crowd instantly recognized MWA the way they do GTD.

I first heard about David Allen and GTD in early 2005. Blame Dwayne Melancon, JJL contributor and author of Genuine Curiosity, for really getting me into it, hook, line, and sinker. Today? Mahalo Dwayne, you get credit and not blame!

Pre-GTD I already had something I called MWA3P in my MWA coaching model, for starting with the first client I ever had, I quickly learned that like it or not, productivity-coaching comes with the territory when you deliver management and leadership coaching. Managers are busy (maybe not effective or accomplished, but they are busy), and for them to make room in their lives for Managing with Aloha or any other coaching, I have to help them clear away some of their busy-ness clutter, with MWA filling in those newly-vacated spots lovingly and with them enjoying far superior results.

Luckily for me, I love the study of productivity.

Early in my management career, Stephen R. Covey had been a key influence for me on how I did work that mattered in the coaching of his Principle-Centered Leadership [See Why GTD reminds me of the 7 Habits]. David Allen became another influencer quite naturally; I welcomed him into the fray! These days, it is the combination of Marcus Buckingham and Tom Rath as I further develop my Strong Week Plan, and learn more about workplace engagement within the strengths management movement.
[See Learning Project #2 here on JJL.]

So back to GTD. How did I come to have it LearnED in 5?

A Lesson in Learning Leadership at JJL University

In this weekend’s USA Weekend (in many Sunday papers as a weekend magazine type supplement) there was a Back-To-School feature which asked, What if George Washington were your teacher? Or Teddy Roosevelt? Or John F. Kennedy? It was called A Lesson in Leadership (thus my title.)

Presidential historian Richard Norton Smith explained why Washington would’ve made a great geography teacher, why Roosevelt would have been his pick for gym class, and why Kennedy (or Lyndon Johnson) would have been a fine debate coach.

I thought this would also be a fun exercise for us here at JJL in creating a modern-day dream team from the ranks of our JJL contributing authors.

Tell me if you agree: I started by using the same “faculty positions” but then added a few for our illustrious group … in parenthesis are Smith’s presidential mentors for us.

~School administrator: Dean Boyer, for he has the most experience with this, and is that rare educator brave enough to suggest unlearning too.

~World history teacher (James Madison): Dwayne Melancon, because he seems to put in the most miles, and can most likely navigate a global map better than the rest of us. I’m also guessing his bookshelf is the most globally biographical and surprising one: He learns something wherever he goes.

~Gym teacher (Theodore Roosevelt): Terry Starbucker. Another one of our road warriors, Terry has to be in great shape with all the moving around he does, and have you seen the man dance?

~English teacher (James Garfield): No contest here. Joanna Young, our confident writing coach! Creative writing, grammar-busting bravery … the woman can teach us all of it!

~School newspaper advisor (Warren Harding): Benjamin Bach, our very own interview editor for our Jubilant Learners Speak Up! series. I betcha Benjamin would be a terrific editor/advisor for the financial section too.

~Speech teacher (Woodrow Wilson): EM Sky, for the dialog she has been sharing with us in her very creative writing. I can “hear” EM in each email she writes me.

~Foreign language teacher (John Quincy Adams): Guess that would be me, as the one getting us all to aloha, think ho‘ohana, and say mahalo generously and enthusiastically!

~Football coach (Gerald Ford): John Richardson. I don’t know if John has ever played football, but I think he’d be a terrific coach at it. No dips, just winning seasons.

~Science teacher (Jimmy Carter): My pick would be Chris Owen for the focus  we have on this campus with human sciences, for Chris knows all the secrets we have to learn in cultivating successful relationships.

~Mathematics teacher: Ariane Benefit. Ariane can tell us what is too much, and what is just right, and math is supposed to be neat and simple. We never seem to be dealing with any negative amounts here :)

~American history teacher (Franklin D. Roosevelt): Phil Gerbyshak, for his skillful navigation of up-to-the-moment living of relationship building as history happens before our very eyes. (Because he was in the Navy, Phil also has tenure with this one.)

~Drama and the Performing Arts: We scored with David Zinger. David would know exactly who to cast in what role from a strengths perspective, and he likes to get people up on stage.

~Band director (Bill Clinton): Definitely Steve Sherlock, remembering Steve’s book review, and his way of getting us all to sing along with him.

~Home economics teacher: April Groves, for the way she makes beautiful homes happen personally and in the real estate market.

~Debate coach (John F. Kennedy): I’d have to give this one to Greg Balanko-Dickson, for he consistently teaches us that things are “a matter of perspective.”

~Geography teacher (George Washington): Dave Rothacker, for the journeys we take with him on his Road Well Traveled. I have never enjoyed geography as much as now with Dave teaching it.

~Philosophy teacher: Karen Wallace. Thanks to Karen we have already learned about discovering the hidden power of giving in, and we all can benefit from her serenity coaching!

~Student government teacher: Tim Milburn, for there is none better when it comes to coaching student leaders! Tim can also take the complicated and get it to make so much sense with his pictures (we definitely do need him in government.)

School is now in session … and lucky us, for these are people who Make A Difference.

Make sure you make it to class for our visiting professors this month too: Pete Aldin, Adam Kayce, Robyn McMaster, and Reg Adkins are in the faculty lounge and they brought donuts! Be good boys and girls and they might apply for residency with us!

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Post author Rosa Say teaches at real universities occasionally, but on management and not foreign language. (she is the one who brings the donuts).

She coaches online within her Value your Month, Value your Life program at Managing with Aloha Coaching. Add it to your feed reader!

Learning about blog fighting

Tim Ferriss recently shared some great tips for dealing with "haters" in the blog world, but I notice that a lot of his concepts apply in the real world, as well. Consider Tim's list:

1. The only way to win a fight is to avoid it. 2. Focus on getting your desired outcome, not on being right. 3. If a fight is inevitable, strike first. 4. To diffuse a fight, admit mistakes and validate others' feelings. 5. If a group fight is unavoidable, take out the leader. 6. Remove anonymity. 7. There is strength in numbers. Never fight alone unless you have to.

He also hits the nail right on the head with the reason these blog fights happen in the first place:

Why do people attack others trying to do good things? I can only come up with two theories:

1. There are two ways to increase perceived self-worth: elevate yourself or cut down others. The latter takes less time. It's a case of "the worse you look, the better I feel about myself" and a short-lived high.

2. Empowering others involves removing external excuses for inaction. This is threatening to those who would rather complain than take action to improve their circumstances. Their alternative solution is thus 1 above: attack the messenger instead of the message (referred to in logic as an ad hominem attack).

Awesome advice, and Joyful Learning about a not-so-Joyful topic. Go read the full post on Tim's site - it's worth it just for the picture of the apology note he wrote in first grade.

 

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About the author: Dwayne Melancon is the author of Genuine Curiosity, where he is always on the lookout for new things to learn.

Start a Bigger Thinker’s List: “What I Want to Learn”

I have begun to read The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss. I’m only about seventy pages into it, but I can already tell it will be one of those books that really gets me to re-think about things that I have come to believe I’ve already thought through. It’s a book that is telling me how wrong I am on virtually every page, and I’m okay with that. In fact, I’m thrilled. Ferriss can give my brain as many kick-starts as he wants.

You can never get too lazy about thinking. Thinking is the humility muscle in your brain that lies somewhere in-between those other two halves some people talk about. Far as I can tell, there’s no learning without thinking. I call it the ‘humility muscle’ because it can handle that bully we all have inside us called our ego.

Now thinking can be laborious and joyless, or it can be liberating and jubilant. So far, Ferriss is giving me the liberating and jubilant kind of thinking, and I really, really love it!

In what I’ve read so far, there’s been one thought in particular that keeps bugging me though, so much so that I had to put the book aside for moment to write this for you.

Ferris says that “most people will never know what they want” and the more I think about this, I realize how right he is about that.

Most of us struggle with our goals because we are really terrible at dreaming up the good stuff. We just copy-cat the dreams which currently seem to be popular with most of the world, even though they don’t keep us up at night chomping at the bit for them. If we actually manage to nail them, we then wonder why achieving our goals is kind of boring, and not all they’re cracked up to be.

I run into this within my coaching business when I challenge people with ‘Imi ola, the Hawaiian value that urges us to seek (‘imi) our best possible life (ola). I ask them to describe what their best possible life would be, and what should be a really easy question turns out to be pretty difficult for them.

Why is that? Why is dreaming about what we want, and learning to articulate it so hard for us? Why can’t we think bigger and brighter, and more lick-our-lips eagerly about what we want?

Now consider this, written by a good friend of mine, a very wise, wily Coyote kind of guy;

Learning and living are the same. When you stop learning, you start to die a little every day. Strong scientific evidence links between brain cells can regrow at any age if you give them some exercise. Your brain is a case of "use it or lose it."
—Adrian Savage

I agree with Adrian, and here’s my theory: If we can dream bigger about the things we want to learn about, our dreams for our best possible lives will get better too. We’ll be more daring, break some rules, continually ask “Why not?” and go for it in more joyful, jubilant ways.

How about testing this theory with me?

Do you know what you want to learn about? Can you write a list out for yourself? What would be on it?

• How about speed-reading?
• Another language … something exotic like Etruscan or Patois?
• Can you draw a family tree? How about genealogy, or about parenting step-children?
• How about Paleontology, or making life-sized dioramas?
• Appreciative inquiry or Stand-up comedy?
• Bungee jumping or para-sailing?
• How to make a salt-water fish tank, or the world’s largest ant farm?
• Needlepoint? Ice-carving with a chainsaw? Making spun sugar? Mud wrestling?

You can do me better, I know you can.

Start a Bigger Thinker’s List. Call it “What I Want to Learn for No Reason Other Than the Joy of it.” Keep a slip of paper with you for the next week, and just write down all the intriguing ideas which come your way. Just one guideline: It has to make you smile broadly or giggle like a silly child.

Better yet, don’t wimp on this with a slip of paper. Go get a flipchart sized page and doodle your list all over it. Roll it up and carry it around with you with a bunch of colored sharpies. Be brave: Show it to people and ask them if they can be crazier than you. Laugh about it together.

And for goodness sake, do NOT begin to list any reasons why you can’t learn any of the things on your list, for you can learn them all. Remember that can’t usually means won’t.

Dream like a Bigger Thinker dreams.

Are you with me?

Dear Me, From Me

How was your Christmas?
I’ve got 364 more days to wait, and here I am, already jazzed up for the bounty of Christmas in 2007! So much so I wanted to share why with you.

On this, the morning after Christmas day, I was blessed with a very quiet house. After making myself some coffee, I sat to write my morning pages, those free-form stream-of-consciousness pages that author and writing coach Julia Cameron has recommended we practice, and I found myself creating a list. On my list were all the things I had hoped to get done for this Christmas but didn’t; grand plans that fell by the wayside to other priorities, distractions, and bouts of laziness. We had a wonderful Christmas Day, however Christmas is the kind of holiday where I’m always left knowing I could have done a little better. I always seem to end up remembering what I’d forgotten to do when the clock has no more minutes to give me. My list includes a lot of little things, things that probably don’t matter to anyone else but me, but my opinion counts for something too; it counts for a dissatisfaction with self that drives me nuts.

This year, my resolve loomed larger though, and those morning pages morphed into an entry for my Outlook calendar on Saturday, October 20, 2007.

The appointment: Start the Christmas Countdown

In the ‘Location’ field I wrote: Open me up, Read well, and Take Action to begin!

In the Notes field I wrote myself a letter. It begins with, “Dear Rosa,” and it ends with, “From the person intent on being a better you, your genius, Rosa”

Eleven Things

“Learning and connecting have been around forever, but they have been limited before because of locality. It often was only by chance that one would come into contact with others with similar goals, thought processes, and communication styles. What the Ho‘ohana Community has achieved is to bring us together, in ways that, as Phil's #11 says, was never possible before.”

“Is the Ho‘ohana Community a team? In terms of collaborative learning, absolutely! Three key characteristics of a team are that team members share common objectives, have complimentary skills, and are mutually accountable for results. I believe that the Ho‘ohana Community shares the common objectives of learning and connecting, and participants clearly have complimentary skills. I ask the community, to what extent is there mutual accountability for results?”

—Blaine Collins, author of Stronger Teams Blog within the learning dialogue of Joyful Jubilant Learning 2006

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This, is incredibly exciting.

This, is the passion of the Ho‘ohana Community.

This, is the birth of Joyful Jubilant Learning as an all-year endeavor.

Join us each day for an invigorating shot of LEARNING. Participate in it, and thrill to it as we do.

Here’s what I can tell you about us so far: