Week 21.33 Birthday Presence

Weather, people, and traffic all conspired to enable an amazing birthday weekend last week. It started with harvesting oysters at low tide 10:30 am on Saturday and the rest of the weekend was equally magical. I reflected with gratitude for the relative ease with which I have been able to transit the pandemic, and with compassion for so many around the world for whom it has been so terrible. After taking some deep breaths in the warm salty air, my thoughts turned to some reflections on a takeaway from last year, an observation from the weekend, and something to use for the new year to come.

Last week's newsletter (Permission to Speak) brought the expected result unexpectedly. I had written that creating space for people to speak up is one of the most important attributes of a leader, and that if all of the voices you are listening to are agreeing with you, you are listening to the wrong voices. With immense gratitude, I received emails from friends and members of the community about some of the topics I had been bringing up and how I had been voicing them. While I like to think I am egalitarian, I am limited by the context of the people I know. My invitation to speak, and the courage of the people to take me up on that offer was one of the greatest gifts of last year and I am looking forward to the conversations to follow. I am so grateful for the comments and suggestions!!! Thank you they are welcome

This weekend I took a chance and brought my business world and personal world together by mixing people from each world. I have done this from time to time in the past, and was reminded of how bringing great people together from different communities creates unanticipated miracles. It was a validation of the powerful effect of mixing up people with different ideas and contexts. I plan to experiment with this more this year.

Buckminster Fuller said "So I’m positive that what you do with yourself, just the little things you do yourself, these are the things that count. To be a real trim tab, you’ve got to start with yourself, and soon you’ll feel that low pressure, and suddenly things begin to work in a beautiful way."?I had always thought of birthdays as marking another year completed and being grateful for what had happened and reaching the occasion. This year, I had the realization that a birthday is also a celebration of starting a new year, of refining or resetting goals, or setting new ones. January 1 is everyone's New Year, but your birthday is specifically yours. It is even a better time to set what I am calling my New Years Aspiration: the goal that I am going to commit myself to reach for during the coming year, with the expectation of making progress towards. It is a perfect time to make Trim Tab (description here) adjustment to your unreachable goal which over time, will lead to a fulfilling life.

I am so pleased to share my birthday presents with you: the gift of people sharing honest disagreement, the gift of bringing together different types of people to spark glorious new relationships, and the gift of using a birthday as a time to make trim tab adjustments and set aspirations for the new year. Oh, and I received another small gift, a request to write a slightly more brief newsletter. Thank you Mom for everything!

Week 33 of 52 weeks of giving: Haiti Crisis / Partners In Health

The emergency response to the earthquake in Haiti continues. Zanmi Lasante (as PIH is known in Haiti) teams are providing immediate trauma care near the epicenter, and they are scheduled to receive critically injured patients at our hospitals in the Central Plateau as soon as roads can be cleared and transport secured.?The Zanmi Lasante team is 99% Haitian, who have served as the government’s and country’s trusted and committed partners in providing emergency relief and building long-term system resiliency. They have nearly 40 years of experience responding to natural and human-caused disasters in Haiti, and are using every bit of that experience to save lives right now. https://tinyurl.com/33of52weeks

To Come Up with a Good Idea, Start by Imagining the Worst Idea Possible (Ayse Birsel in HBR)

How have chefs invented new dishes and scientists sequence DNA? The answer may surprise you: reverse thinking. To give it a try yourself, try looking at a problem as a beginner would see it; granting a beginner agency to tell you what to do; or, most radically, suspending hierarchy entirely. When we give ourselves permission to have bad ideas, we often come up with the best ones. Remember, the key to wrong thinking is coming up with a seemingly bad idea to challenge the status quo, pushing ourselves to imagine new and disruptive ideas, beyond our own preconceptions. When we give ourselves permission to have bad ideas, we often come up with the best ones. To Come Up with a Good Idea, Start by Imagining the Worst Idea Possible (hbr.org)

Going All In: 3 Olympians Share Lessons In Cultivating Passion (Ruth Gotian in Forbes)

Just because you are good at something, does not mean you enjoy doing it. It certainly does not mean you are passionate about it. Being passionate about something means you cannot envision yourself?not?doing it. You would do it for free if you could.?The road to the Olympics is never simple or easy. The Olympians all had a deep rooted passion for their sport. They loved everything about it and thought about it constantly. To figure out your passion for your career, consider doing a?passion audit?to illuminate what you love doing. Going All In: 3 Olympians Share Lessons In Cultivating Passion (forbes.com)

Martin Lindstrom & Marshall Goldsmith with Thomas Ranese and Chris Brogan (wowx4!!!)

Join Martin and Marshall LIVE August 17th (today) at 12 pm eastern for the next episode of the M&M Show! They will be joined by two incredible guests?Thomas Ranese, VP of Global Marketing and Social Impact at?Uber, and?Chris Brogan, Strategic and Brand Advisor. Be sure to turn on post reminders to be notified when we go live:?https://www.dhirubhai.net/posts/lindstromcompany_linkedinlive-uber-marketing-activity-6831642637360095232-0xvU

• Thomas brings more than 20 years of public- and private-sector experience as a marketing leader, brand builder and strong operator with a history of demonstrated business impact. At McKinsey, Thomas counseled companies on marketing strategy and org effectiveness. And as the first CMO of New York State, Thomas led marketing for economic development (including revitalizing the famed?I Love NY?campaign), so he is passionate about local communities and understands the opportunities and challenges for Uber at the local level. Before joining Uber, Thomas spent the last 10 years at Google, where he played a hand in building a highly successful marketing organization working across dozens of products and countries.
• Chris is an executive-level strategist and CEO advisor, working with companies at the 100M+ revenue range including Disney, Coke, Google, GM, Microsoft, Coldwell Banker, Titleist, Scotts, Humana Health, Cisco, Sony USA, and many more. The projects he works on with C-level executives involve everything from scouting M&A opportunities in B2B enterprise SaaS, strategic pathing and decision-making, reorg efforts, and more. He is also president of Chris Brogan Media, offering brand and digital content strategy as well as business strategy advisory services.?

This is one you won't want to miss! Be sure to turn on post reminders to be notified when it goes live:?https://www.dhirubhai.net/posts/lindstromcompany_linkedinlive-uber-marketing-activity-6831642637360095232-0xvU

HAPPY BIRTHDAY Darek Lenart on Aug 17 and Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez on Aug 18

And, as always, thank you, Marshall, for making all of this possible.

With love and gratitude

Scott