Monthly Archives: September 2012

Encore! How Old Letters and Recovered Memories Bring Satisfaction and Hope.

Posted on September 26, 2012 | 2 Comments

We lay aside letters never to read them again, and at last we destroy them out of discretion, and so disappears the most beautiful, the most immediate breath of life, irrecoverable for ourselves and for others.
 ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
 

Last week I was doing some spring cleaning and came across a collection of letters I had written to my parents some forty-five years ago. At the time, I was a young man teaching in Ghana. After University I’d joined CUSO, a Canadian voluntary organization similar to the Peace Corps, and had been assigned to the West African country for two years. I’d asked my mother to keep these letters as a partial record of my experience…Read more.

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Posted in Inspiration, Life stories, memoir, Personal historian, Writing

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Encore! How to Avoid Landmines When Producing Video Ethical Wills.

Posted on September 19, 2012 | Leave a comment

A reader recently asked, “Two people have consented to [an ethical will] but I think video taping them would be more personal for the receiving family. Can you see some possible landmines?” This was my reply….Read more.

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Posted in End of life, Ethical will, How to, Tips, Video production

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Monday’s Link Roundup.

Posted on September 17, 2012 | Leave a comment

In this Monday’s Link Roundup don’t miss Can a photograph be true or false? It’s a a thought-provoking  interview with filmmaker Errol Morris. And if you want to improve your website’s credibility, and who doesn’t,  check out How to Improve Your Website Trust Factor.

  • The Ultimate History Project. “In recent years, an academic job crisis has led many highly trained historians to leave their profession.  The Ultimate History Project draws on the skills of many of these scholars, providing them with an opportunity to publish and promote their scholarship.  The Ultimate History Project also encourages faculty members to write for the general public and it provides a forum for academically trained historians to work alongside avid genealogists, independent historians, and collectors, enabling them all to collaborate and learn from one another.” [Thanks to Francie King of History Keep for alerting me to this item.]
  • Dead Again. “Two decades ago, the Book Review ran an essay, “The End of Books,” in which the novelist Robert Coover questioned whether print could survive the age of “video transmissions, cellular phones, fax machines, computer networks, and in particular out in the humming digitalized precincts of avant-garde computer hackers, cyberpunks and hyperspace freaks.” Was the book as “dead as God”? …Every generation rewrites the book’s epitaph; all that changes is the whodunit.”
  • Hints for Memoir Writers from Woody Allen. “A few months ago, I pulled a page from Bloomberg Businessweek. The article was called, “The Woody Allen School of Productivity” and the author was John Lopez. The premise was that there are valuable lessons in examining a career that has been as successful as Woody Allen’s. Between 1965 and 2012, 47 years, Allen has directed 43 films. Just about one a year…John Lopez researched Allen and came up with eight points. I’ve turned five of these into tips for memoir writers. With thanks to Lopez for this inspiration.”
  • The Last Pictures: A Time-Capsule of Humanity in 100 Images Sent into Space for Eternity. “Inspired by cave paintings, Sagan’s Golden Record, and nuclear waste warning signs, MIT artist-in-residence Trevor Paglen set out to create a collection of 100 images, commissioned by public art organization Creative Time, to be etched onto an ultra-archival, golden silicon disc and sent into orbit onboard the Echostar XVI satellite this month — at once a time-capsule of the present and a message to the future.”
  • How to Improve Your Website Trust Factor. “Is your website harming the trust and credibility of your business? Are people worried or put off when they visit you online? Could your site be working against you rather than working as a business asset? I’m sad to say that this is more common than we would like…The GOOD news is, a lot of the problem areas that cause mistrust or unease in your visitors are easy to fix. Check out these factors and see if improvements can be made in your own site:”

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Encore! The Cluttered of The World Unite!

Posted on September 12, 2012 | Leave a comment

We seem to be inundated these days with exhortations from neatness mavens to declutter and organize our lives for a happier and better tomorrow. The implication seems to be that a cluttered existence is a sign of failing. There’s a whiff of Puritanism to all this. We are told that being cluttered wastes time, hinders our productivity, makes us tired, and no doubt has a detrimental effect on our sex lives. But where’s all the evidence for this? I’ve  never seen any authoritative studies that support the claims made by the decluttering brigade… Read more.

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Posted in Home Office, Personal Care, Self-employed

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Monday’s Link Roundup.

Posted on September 10, 2012 | Leave a comment

In this Monday’s Link Roundup, if you swoon over typography, you’ll want to take a look at Elegantissima: The Design and Typography of Louise Fili.  It’s a feast for the eyes.  And for a more mindful approach to living, be sure to read A Primer on Full-Screen Living.

  • What is Narrative Therapy? ” Narrative therapy starts with the understanding that everybody’s life is multi-storied to an almost infinite degree.  If I were to sit down with you, and you were to talk non-stop 24 hours a day for 30 days about different things that have happened to you in your life, you would only have just begun to scratch the surface of all the stories associated with your life.  That’s because  stories are much more than events themselves.  They are perspectives, ways of making meaning about the situations we encounter.”
  • Book Review: Patrick Nathan on Boarded Windows. “The act of remembering — on a literal level it’s an act of creation. Every memory is rebuilt anew every time you remember it… What you’re remembering is that memory reinterpreted in the light of today, in the light of now. […] The more you remember something, in a sense, the less accurate it becomes. The more it becomes about you and the less about what actually happened.”
  • Elegantissima: The Design and Typography of Louise Fili. “For more than three decades, graphic designer Louise Fili* has been producing some of the most consistently exquisite typography, frequently hand-drawn and building upon thoughtfully curated vintage sources. In her decade as art director for Pantheon Books, she created nearly two thousand book jackets, each with remarkable attention to detail.”
  • Boost Your Freelance Brand 100 Percent with Your Expert Status. “To build a lucrative freelancing career, it isn’t enough to have the best skills out there, despite what these reality television shows may indicate. But you do absolutely have to be an expert: you need to be the person that advises your client so that they get the result they want, not the project they asked for.” [Thanks to Pat McNees of Writers and Editors for alerting me to this item.]
  • This Is Your Life (and How You Tell It). “When we first started studying life stories, people thought it was just idle curiosity — stories, isn’t that cool?” said Dan P. McAdams, a professor of psychology at Northwestern and author of the 2006 book, “The Redemptive Self.” “Well, we find that these narratives guide behavior in every moment, and frame not only how we see the past but how we see ourselves in the future.”
  • Book Review: How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain by Leah Price. “When is a book a book, and when is it something more? What is it that matters about books, and where is that meaning made? Why, and how, do we value books? And how has the meaning of books changed: what did books mean in an era experiencing the rapid rise of print, and what do they mean to us now as we shift into the digital age? These are all questions raised by Leah Price’s engaging and incisive How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain.”
  • A Primer on Full-Screen Living. “What’s full-screen living? It’s a life where we allow one thing to take up the entirety of our attention — going into full-screen mode, like a video on your computer — while allowing everything else to fade into the background. Let’s take a look.”

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Book Review: “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking” by Susan Cain

Posted on September 5, 2012 | Leave a comment

The following review is by Dhyan Atkinson of The Five Essential Skills. Providing business skills training, consulting and business coaching to English-speaking small business owners around the world.  Learn the business skills you need to be successful and get help using them out in the real world to find clients!

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I am an introvert.  I love public speaking. I love teaching my classes.  I love working with my clients and I do these things well… but I am a dyed-in-the-wool introvert all the same.

One of the best explanations I have come across for the difference between an extrovert and an introvert has to do with the things that energize and rejuvenate them.

Extroverts get energized by interacting with people and being in public. They find group energy stimulating and enlivening.  They thrive on teams and competition, and relish expending lots of energy which, in turn, energizes them more. They would rather be with people than be alone.

Introverts are the opposite. Although they may enjoy being with others, they tend to get drained by too much time with too many people.  At a party, they are more likely to be in the corner having a deep quiet conversation than dancing with a lampshade on their head in the center of the room.  Sooner or later, they are ready to leave the party for some quality time alone.  It is the alone time that gives them more juice and feeds their contributions to the world.

When I saw Susan Cain’s book “Quiet:  The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking” advertised on my Kindle I bought it at once and have relished every page!  Susan Cain, herself an introvert (and a Wall Street Lawyer), talks about the dilemma introverts face every day living in a world that admires what she calls “The Extrovert Ideal.”   Think Tony Robbins.  Think Mega-churches.  Think our current political leaders.  Think Harvard Business School.  Think every mega-training program you have ever heard of.

Cain has clearly done her homework.  The book draws on cutting-edge research in psychology and neuroscience speaking to the biological origins and differences between introverts and extroverts.  Every chapter contains entertaining stories of real people (both introverts and extroverts) in real life situations.  (My favorite story is when Susan attends a Tony Robbins seminar to research extroverts in action.  I loved the descriptions of the cheerleading, the jumping up and down, the chanting, the pumping up of enthusiasm, the mega-screens, Tony as bigger than life, the fire walk – mostly because I could enjoy these things in print and never have to attend a seminar myself!  I know this is not for me!)

She also identifies many famous introverts and their contributions to the world.  Without introverts we would not have the following:

The theory of gravity
The theory of relativity
The theory of evolution
Personal computers
W.B. Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’
Chopin’s nocturnes
Proust’s ‘Remembrance of Things Past’
Van Gogh’s ‘Starry, Starry Night’
Peter Pan
Orwell’s ’1984′ and ‘Animal Farm’
The Cat in the Hat
Charlie Brown
‘Schindler’s List,’ ‘E.T.,’ and ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’
Google
Harry Potter

It isn’t just that I enjoyed this book and learned from it: I felt validated reading “Quiet.”  I felt encouraged.  I gained a renewed sense that I can do anything an extrovert can do and I can do it in my own quiet way.  I have been telling my clients for years that they can love their work and find ways to find clients without resorting to the fist-punching bravado of your classic salesperson.  It’s true!

I would highly recommend this book to people who dread being out in the world in an open, extroverted way but fear that if they don’t “change themselves” their business will never survive.  “Quiet” is a celebration of the “other” way of living – a sweeping validation of the power, creativity, contributions, and self-worth in being an introvert.

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Monday’s Link Roundup.

Posted on September 3, 2012 | Leave a comment

Happy Labor Day! I hope you’re resting from your labors today. If you’re looking for an enjoyable diversion, why not check out my Monday’s Link Roundup?  Every week I bring you an eclectic  mix of articles that I find fascinating and that relate in some way to life stories, memories, and self-employment.

  • In Andalusia, on the Trail of Inherited Memories. “There are scientific studies exploring whether the history of our ancestors is somehow a part of us, inherited in unexpected ways through a vast chemical network in our cells that controls genes, switching them on and off. At the heart of the field, known as epigenetics, is the notion that genes have memory and that the lives of our grandparents — what they breathed, saw and ate — can directly affect us decades later.”
  • The Next Big Idea From Twitter’s Founders? “Evan Williams and Biz Stone think their new site, Medium, could mark an “evolutionary step” in web publishing…their new venture, a platform for collecting and displaying stories, images, musings and more, isn’t just noteworthy for its web-visionary pedigree …In a sense, Medium’s intended to be a Pinterest for our own lives, an elegant repository for photos, projects, and stories we’ve actually lived, as opposed to a re-blogged clearing house for pictures of wedding dresses and eggs baked into avocados found elsewhere around the web.”
  • Apps for Journaling, Keeping track of your memories…“How do I keep my professional life separate from my personal life without driving myself crazy. I want to list a few apps that are possible solutions to this… I also want to list some differences between all of these that I have found.”
  • All About Me: How Memoirs Became the Literature of Choice. “Memoirs are the great equalizer of writing. In a genre utterly non-denominational, there is room for any story in any pattern of prose. The Christian Science Monitor reports that memoirs have seen sales increase from $170 million to $270 million since 1999. Most nonfiction MFA writing programs are geared substantially towards the genre; Hunter College even requires prospective students to submit a memoir proposal as part of their application. Many bookstores can count their autobiography sections among the most frequented and their popularity thrives.”
  • Anaïs Nin on Self-Publishing. “Besides artist and author, Nin was also a publishing entrepreneur. In January 1942, she sets up her own small press in a loft on Macdougal Street, and soon set out to print and self-publish a new edition of her third book, Winter of Artifice, teaching herself typesetting and doing most of the manual work herself.From The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 3: 1939-1944 (public library) comes this beautiful passage on the joy of handcraft, written in January of 1942 — a particularly timely meditation in the age of today’s thriving letterpress generation and the Maker Movement.”
  • Peter Sellers: His Life in Home Movies. [Video]“Peter Sellers was a compulsive home movie maker…In 1995, fifteen years after Sellers’s death, producers from BBC Arena sorted through his extensive archive and assembled some of the best footage for a film called The Peter Sellers Story. In 2002 they shortened it into The Peter Sellers Story: As He Filmed It (above), which tells the story of the comedian’s life almost exclusively with footage from his own camera.”
  • Attracting High-End Clients. ” Everyone wants to attract more clients. But I think it’s even more important to set your sights on attracting more High-End clients.”

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