Deep Thoughts by Maggie Utgoff

I’m not religious, so to keep it together I watch this video and worship my lord Friday Night Lights every week.  

Someone asked me what I want from my job…

I don’t need to be famous or to make a ton of money, I just want the things below (from my job). I hate that this isn’t something everyone gets, since I don’t think it’s too much to ask.
Having these things would make me incredibly happy: 
  • To be learning about anything and everything.
  • A work life balance.
  • I like the people I’m working with so much that when the toilet is clogged I just plunge it without a thought.
  • A place where I can spill out my ideas and people get that I don’t care if they don’t like them, I just want people to listen and give me honest feedback.
  • To be surrounded by people smarter than me.
  • Help understanding what I’m good at and to do what I’m good at.
  • Honesty.
  • Laughter.
  • Appreciation.
  • And most importantly… to be inspired.

Humility is not part of the Steve Jobs leadership repertoire — and that’s worked out fine for him. But humility has become a crucial part of the job description for leaders who aren’t Steve Jobs. So marvel at his products, applaud his feel for design, wonder at his capacity to cast such a large shadow over so many industries…. But don’t think you’ll do better as a leader by acting more like Apple’s leader. Trust the art, not the artist.

—[Harvard Business Review 2009]

Heaven and Hell… Making Work More Like the Former

 Here is a Zen story I remember hearing about as a kid:

Once upon a time, in a temple nestled in the misty end of south hill, lived a pair of monks. One old and one young.

‘What are the differences between Heaven and Hell?’ the young monk asked the learned master one day.

‘There are no material differences,’ replied the old monk peacefully.

‘None at all?’ asked the confused young monk.

‘Yes. Both Heaven and Hell look the same. They all have a dining hall with a big hot pot in the center in which some delicious noodles are boiled, giving off an appetizing scent,’ said our old priest. ‘The size of the pan and the number of people sitting around the pot are the same in these two places.’

‘But oddly, each diner is given a pair of meter-long chopsticks and must use them to eat the noodles. And to eat the noodles, one must hold the chopsticks properly at their ends, no cheating is allowed,’ the zen master went on to describe to our young monk.

‘In the case of Hell, people are always starved because no matter how hard they try, they fail to get the noodles into their mouths,’ said the old priest.

‘But isn’t it the same happens to the people in Heaven?’ the junior questioned.

‘No. They can eat because they each feed the person sitting opposite them at the table. You see, that is the difference between Heaven and Hell,’ explained the old monk.

The moral of this story is simple: A turn in mind is all the difference between Heaven and Hell lies (一念天堂，一念地獄). Be nice to people and people will be nice to you. 

I thought of this story at work the other day. I’m working at a new start-up (Rally) and we are going through the process of defining our company culture. I do like a list with words like honesty and integrity (common for company values made public), but it would be nice to take the most important part of what makes a good work environment and just make one rule. Things like “Don’t be an Asshole” and “Don’t be Evil” have always appealed to me, but these mantras aren’t specific enough.

I think creating a workplace where people give each other recognition on a regular basis and no one EVER takes credit for another person’s work is a foundation for success. The best people I have ever worked with never toot their own horns and sometimes suffer because of it. If I can create a workplace where we are always recognizing each other for contributions and hard work and don’t feel the need to point out our own accomplishments, it would be awesome. 

So if the noodles are recognition and the chopsticks are appropriate forms of communication for the recognition at hand, lets make the chopsticks REALLY long. 

And then, there are these people:

Got Hope? Harvey Milk.

‎”I want you to connect with me through sharing and understanding the concept of dry mouthedness.”

The 'Radiolab' Effect

Melissa Stanley went to school for music—or rather, Music Industry. The 26-year-old recalls “taking maybe one physics class in college, and that was it” for her formal science education. After graduation, she became a director of A&R and booking at Jezebel Music, a concert-promotion outfit for unsigned acts in Williamsburg. Then, at the office sometime in 2007, things changed. “One day,” she said, “we just got tired of all of the music that we had on our computers, so I turned on WNYC.” The program on the air was Radiolab.

(via Instapaper)

Why Conservatives Should Read Marx

Every thriving political movement contains diverse and often warring elements bound together by little more than strength of feeling and the lure of power, so it would be stupid to look for unblemished ideological consistency in a political party. But it is hard to take such a view of ourselves.

(via Instapaper)

Reading about Critical Pedagogy

I was talking to a friend who teaches 11th and 12th grade English in San Francisco this weekend. He told me about “critical pedagogy” which seems to accurately describe how I want to contribute to education. Why can’t we make school relevant for kids? It’s important to engage students and get them excited about learning. I didn’t really get that in school and I’m glad people like Ricardo (the English teacher) are getting it done! Yay for great teachers! 

Critical pedagogy is an “educational movement, guided by passion and principle, to help students developconsciousness of freedom, recognize authoritarian tendencies, and connect knowledge to power and the ability to take constructive action.”[1] Based in Marxist theory, critical pedagogy draws on radical democracy, anarchism, feminism, and other movements for social justice. Critical pedagogue Ira Shor defines critical pedagogy as:

“Habits of thought, reading, writing, and speaking which go beneath surface meaning, first impressions, dominant myths, official pronouncements, traditional clichés, received wisdom, and mere opinions, to understand the deep meaning, root causes, social context, ideology, and personal consequences of any action, event, object, process, organization, experience, text, subject matter, policy, mass media, or discourse.” (Empowering Education, 129)

Critical pedagogy includes relationships between teaching and learning. This proponents claim that it is a continuous process of what they call “unlearning,” “learning” and “relearning,” “reflection,” “evaluation,” and the impact that these actions have on the students, in particular students who have been historically and they believe continue to be disenfranchised by what they call “traditional schooling.”

Philosopher John Searle[2] suggests that, despite the “opaque prose” and lofty claims, the true goal of critical pedagogy is “to create political radicals”.

I love Paul Rudd. I don’t care if marriage is an endless unfunny episode of Everybody Loves Raymond. I would be happy if it was with Paul Rudd. 

This may be my favorite scene, in any TV show, movie, or thing that distracts me from my real life, ever.

This may be my favorite scene, in any TV show, movie, or thing that distracts me from my real life, ever.

Way Down in the Hole

This is a great piece about the Chilean miners. I’ve read a ton of articles, and this one is by far the most honest and compelling argument for regulation:

For more than two months, thirty-three men have been stuck deep underground, trapped in the stifling confines of a Chilean copper mine. Now, on the eve of their rescue, Sean Flynn reports on the circus at Camp Hope—mistresses! mysteries! miracles! cannibals!—and unearths the deeper stories of men who would happily trade their fates for a few dark months down below

(via Instapaper)

If you want to know what is actually occurring, inside, underneath, at the center, at any given moment, art is a truer guide that politics, more often than not.

—Percy Windham Lewis (1884-1957)