Law & Entrepreneurship News is hosting this week’s CotC and they’ve done a really nice job of organizing all the posts. You’ll find my post JetBlue’s Cultivation of a Soulful Workplace under Marketing. It’s good to see so many Ho’ohana Community Members there. Enjoy!

I love Brian Alger‘s thoughts on learning. A little while back, he wrote a post at Experience Designer Network called Inevitables. I’ve had it bookmarked and keep coming back to it. Each time I return, I find something new, something that I missed on the last read. I think that’s when you know you’ve come across something special.

Most of us are educated based on what is known or inevitable in life. We are taught knowledge, but not encouraged to cultivate wisdom. Wisdom is embracing the unknown, respecting it, enduring it, learning from it. Why is it so hard to enter the unknown? Consider what Brian says:

For a person limited to the [safety of] knowledge, the unknown is to be
avoided for it is a place where years of intellectual scaffolding built
up around certain assumptions or presuppositions can come tumbling down
in moments. Knowledge, in this context, needs to be held still to
preserve identity.

I’ve experienced this collapsing of intellectual scaffolding and it’s not fun. When something is bound to our identity, it becomes potentially very dangerous. It’s easier to align ourselves with a lie or half-truth rather than change ourselves to reflect what we know to be the truth. Yet, there comes a point when scaffolding built on such shaky foundations falls to earth and we’re left with a decision: recreate as before or rebuild on a stronger base.

Be the architect of something better in your life. Create from a foundation of your unique and true self. Don’t get fooled into quickly erecting a prefab Wal-Mart. Instead, lovingly and patiently place each brick in the Cathedral of You. Be an enduring figure.

One of my favorite archived posts is now up at The Best of Me Symphony. This carnival’s humor can be  raunchy, the political views can be off-color, and the pictures can be bizarre…all a perfect reason to check it out. Kind of puts my more soulful entry in strange company (at least I’m not alone…Steve Pavlina‘s there, too) This week’s special guest is Kurt Vonnegut.

Have fun and enjoy the cotton candy.

I decided to get out of my home office today and visit two places that I desperately needed to go: the library and Starbucks. I needed some good fiction and you’ll see to the right that I chose Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. I’ve been wanting to read this since high school. Not exactly light reading, but I need to keep filling my head with good literature.

Then, off to the local Starbucks for a latte and some thinking. For some reason, perfectionism and mistakes have been on my mind lately. Since I took the risk that’s leaving my comfy job for the solo life, I’ve been meditating on whether it was a good decision. Add now my realization that I need and want to return to organization life. Here’s what I’ve come up with…

What exactly is a mistake?  Curious, I went to dictionary.com for a definition and found this:

An error or fault resulting from defective judgment, deficient knowledge, or carelessness.

Gee, that’s awfully harsh. Here’s my definition, which I believe it a lot more forgiving:

A result that deviates from an expected or desired outcome and encourages new insights.

If someone told you that you made a mistake, which one would you prefer to consider? If you want to encourage your staff to take risks, which definition of mistake would urge them to be more fearless in their actions?

As a recovering perfectionist, I’m learning more now than ever before. Mistakes are always opportunities to grow if we can get beyond the fear. Problem is that fear hits us when we view mistakes from the first definition. Who wants to be accused of having defective knowledge or being careless? However, if we reconsider our definition of a mistake, we might just realize that the outcome of a mistake is just as relevant to our own growth as a success. It’s all in how we look at it.

So, learn something this weekend. Make a mistake.