Most people have come into contact, at one point or another with the idea of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Roughly, he said that certain types of needs come first; for example physiological needs like food and water, and safety concerns need to be satisfied before one can focus on things like self-esteem, or even love. This morning I came across a blog talking about the elements involved in the very last, top state of the ‘pyramid’ of needs: self-actualization, and particularly got caught on this:
“Life is an ongoing process of choosing between safety (out of fear and a need for defense) and risk (for the sake of progress and growth). Make the growth choice a dozen times a day.”
~ Abraham Maslow (comments by Derek Sivers)
Derek Sivers has put together an excellent, simple summary of Maslow’s approach to ’self-actualizing’. I’ve copied it below as well, as I think it’s a great set of reminders.
Abraham Maslow’s 8 Ways to Self-Actualize
- Experience things fully, vividly, selflessly. Throw yourself into the experiencing of something: concentrate on it fully, let it totally absorb you
- Life is an ongoing process of choosing between safety (out of fear and need for defense) and risk (for the sake of progress and growth): Make the growth choice a dozen times a day.
- Let the self emerge. Try to shut out the external clues as to what you should think, feel, say, and so on, and let your experience enable you to say what you truly feel.
- When in doubt, be honest. If you look into yourself and are honest, you will also take responsibility. Taking responsibility is self-actualizing.
- Listen to your own tastes. Be prepared to be unpopular.
- Use your intelligence, work to do well the things you want to do, no matter how insignificant they seem to be.
- Make peak experiencing more likely: get rid of illusions and false notions. Learn what you are good at and what your potentialities are not
- Find out who you are, what you are, what you like and don’t like, what is good and what is bad for you, where you are going, what your mission is. Opening yourself up to yourself in this way means identifying defenses – and then finding the courage to give them up.
i discovered a lovely post this morning about focusing attention that perfectly describes what i’ve been struggling with: doing too many things at once. trying to do too much is my tendency, and i’m not sure where or when it began. my parents and brother are always described as easy going or laid back, whereas i, growing up, garnered adjectives such as perfectionist, driven, and busy. i’d prefer to be known as laid back, but i’m not. in any case, here’s what caught me:
Four years ago, I was an enthusiastic cookie fresh out of school, ready to take on the world and to finally “Achieve Something!” I saw other people’s successes and strived to do the same. Problem was, I was finding inspiration from several people more experienced than me, saw their results and then attempted to attack all of my goals at once.
right. no longer fresh out of school i believe i caught myself thinking the same thing this week: when the bloody hell am i actually going to achieve something? what have i done with my life? is there time to do anything else?
the prescription is, for the author of the quoted post, to focus. set fewer goals. banish diffusion. notice how you feel when you begin to do so.
the results? less guilt, less dissatisfaction, less exhaustion. and when your focus is on the right things (for you — there’s a handy ‘how to figure out your focus’ list too), more power in that area. more meaningful activity.
it sounds simple. i know it isn’t. but it’s a valid reminder for me at the right time.
Just came across a couple of excellent posts by Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0.
Most applicable to me is his blog post titled What Magazines Still Don’t Understand about the Web — but his earlier What Newspapers Still Don’t Understand About the Web is excellent as well. I found the comments to the mag article particularly enlightening — it’s comforting to see that the debate about whether or not to post content for free when it is being paid for in print publications is taking place in other areas of the world as well.
My take, ripping off Chris Anderson, is that mag content should be free online. People will continue to pay — at least for a time — for the real world privilege of being able to read a magazine cover to cover in the bathtub, but online, they will simply not read anything cover to cover. Looking at my own surfing behaviour, I do read entire articles but generally only one or maybe two at a go — online, there’s always something else to do. Put it up for free and build your business model around something else.
It’s Monday in Vancouver and it’s raining: pretty much par for the course. Sunday was raining too though, and that was nice — mainly because a party on Saturday night stretched into Sunday and rain was my excuse to spend the day detoxing in my pyjamas.
When hungover, I almost always vow to stop putting myself through such hell, and to consider, just consider at one point in any given evening, to stop and — hey, what an idea — have a glass of water. Or to — hey, better still — go home before 4:30am. Sadly, the vow rarely works. Does it for anyone?
Today is a dear friend’s birthday and in considering what to send her (yes, it will be late but we both expect this) I remembered a beautiful book she gave me last year: poems by Li Po. If you don’t know this gorgeous man, you must. And more so if you have a love for the wine. Here is one of my favourites:
A Vindication
If heaven loved not wine,
A Wine Star would not be in heaven;
If earth loved not wine,
The Wine Spring would not be on earth.
Since heaven and earth love wine,
Need a tippling mortal be ashamed?
The transparent wine, I hear,
Has the soothing virtue of a sage,
While the turgid is rich, they say,
As the fertile mind of the wise.
Both the sage and the wise were drinkers,
Why seek for peers among gods and goblins?
Three cups open the grand door to bliss;
Take a jugful, the universe is yours.
Such is the rapture found in wine,
That the sober shall never inherit.
Thank you, Li Po. I vow now only to remember that line — “both the sage and the wise were drinkers” — and to use it often. Preferably while drinking.
Here’s the other part of today. I’ve begun getting a daily inspiration email from the Yoga Journal, because, I am a yoga student and a yoga teacher — as well as interested in seeing examples of eNewsletters from a variety of sources for my every day work. We are all filled with contrary impulses. Everyone knows that. Anyway my eNewsletter reminded me about yamas, niyamas and Patanjali, the author of the Yoga Sutra. Together the yamas and niyamas represent principles that help one make her way along the yogic or any other path — and today’s eNewsletter spoke about the most difficult for me: aparigraha. In essence, it’s greedlessness, or stopping yourself from being jealous of just about everyone else because they have better lives than you. It’s bloody difficult. Try it. Talk to your friend with the cottage on an island or the one who’s there on the internet walking down the street chatting with Ben Harper, or the mother of a beautiful new wee boy who sleeps all the time and smells like cookie dough. Go ahead, I dare you. Then go home to your un-vaccuumed house and step in the cat barf on the stairs and go to pay your gas bill while trying to avoid looking at the astonishingly negative balance on your bank account. Some days are easier than others and of course, of course, there are a million and five things I am indeed furiously grateful for. But it’s still a challenge to resist caving in to the belief that I’m doing everything wrong while everyone else has figured everything out right.
From the newsletter:
Aparigraha leads naturally to one of the niyamas: santosha, or “contentment,” being satisfied with the resources at hand and not desiring more. Ultimately, Frawley says, “Yoga is about transcending the desire for external things, which is the cause of suffering, and finding peace and happiness within.”
Still a worthwhile aim.
“She was conscious that the things she did were the things she had always wanted to do.”
~Zelda Fitzerald, Eulogy on the Flapper
Needing a bit of inspiration today, I stumbled on the quote above during morning web-trolling — and so I hereby remind myself that although I’m no flapper (is that something I’ve always wanted to do?) I should be unquestionably doing, every day, all the things I’ve always wanted to do. I’ve made such lists before — a few are listed on an old account on 43things, many more appear in old journals. But are old lists valid? Are old selves still present? Are things I used to want to do still things I crave? I wonder about such things.
The kinds of lists I’ve written in the past are, frankly, embarassing. They feel like things that everybody wants to do and never does. None of my ‘wants’ seem realistic enough, at least on a small scale. They’re enormous goals. Lifetime goals. So? Solution? Small goals? Enjoy details?
Maybe it’s time to re-remember that poem by Mary Oliver, the one I once sent to a grieving friend — because some days do feel like loss, small moments of it, whether you like it or not, and maybe it’s important to fight that.
The web is magical — just did a search on the line “soft animal of your body” — because that’s the line I remembered most clearly from the poem. It’s called Wild Geese.
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
I am struggling currently with finding tools that are appropriate for me and my team when it comes to project planning. I have used MS Project in the past and absolutely despised it, resenting every moment I had to spend using it. Perhaps that’s a personal thing — but I simply found it too cumbersome and HUGE for my needs.
Being a big fan of OmniGraffle and having implemented Basecamp as a collaborative tool for my growing team, I did a search recently and found a number of people — some here in Vancouver — who use OmniPlan in conjunction with Basecamp, so I’m giving it a try. Thanks to Alexandra Samuels and Patrick Rhone for their excellent blogs on the topic. I’ll report on my findings here.
Here’s an aha moment for you — after talking yesterday about trying to find a definition of project management, this morning in checking my RSS feeds I came across this definition of program management which basically seems to take project management up a notch (find the post here).
This is interesting to me because in my work I have for the past year been trying to build a division within an existing company, and in the process have been trying to manage a whole lot of projects — now working on training someone else to take some of the project management off my hands. In essence, though, I haven’t really been able to easily classify just what I do — since project management has been just one of my responsibilities.
Here’s how Michael F Hanford defines program management:
What is program management? Is it really management at all?
To answer these questions, let’s begin by looking at an accepted definition of project management:
Project management is the planning, organizing, directing, and controlling of company resources… for a relatively short-term objective. 1
It is clear from this definition that project management is concerned with the dynamic allocation, utilization, and direction of resources (both human and technical), with time — in relation to both individual efforts and product delivery schedule — and with costs, relating to both the acquisition and consumption of funding. As a corollary, it is safe to say that without the direction project management provides, work would have to proceed via a series of negotiations, and/or it would not align with the goals, value proposition, or needs of the enterprise.
Within a program, these same responsibilities (i.e., allocation, utilization, and direction) are assigned to people at three levels in the management hierarchy; the higher the level, the more general the responsibilities. For example, at the bottom of the management hierarchy, project managers are assigned to the various projects within the overall program. Each manager carries out the management responsibilities we described above.
He goes on to specify the precise duties of a program manager — as similar to those of a director (which I am, formally titled):
Responsibilities of a program manager/director
- Accountable to executive sponsors for schedule, budget, and quality of all program elements.
- Leads high-level sessions for program plan and schedule development.
- Reviews/approves project plans for conformance to program strategy and program plan and schedule.
- Acts as the communications conduit to executive sponsors and program steering committee and conducts periodic briefings/status updates.
- Escalates decisions to executive sponsors as necessary.
So it appears that I’ve found myself. Hoorah. Now what?
I’ve been talking a lot lately about the role of a project manager versus a product manager, and I’ve really realized that I don’t know the distinction at all. Someone just sent me this article (Why a Project Manager), though, which makes me feel much better for realizing that, well, who the blue christ cares which is which? It’s a complex role, call it what you like.
I particularly like the description of the kinds of qualifications needed by project/product managers:
Use both sides of the brain. Because the project manager needs to balance the details and the big picture, he or she needs to have creative problem-solving skills as well as a head for numbers and schedules. The best project managers usually have hands-on creative experience—either as writers or designers—and understand how to work through project challenges based on past experiences. When faced with difficulties, the project manager needs to guide the team to make adjustments or changes with all of the pieces in perspective. Be creative, analytical and tactical.
I’ve always loved the term “commonplaces” or “commonplace books” and have tried to keep them throughout my life. Although Wikipedia may define them differently, my definition of a commonplace book is really a collection of notes, quotes, observations and lessons that one picks up — and records — along the way. I have journals and notebooks and steno pads full of the things. Maybe someday I’ll transfer them to a blog … but for now, why not start fresh?
For today, I’ll simply record the quote I have stuck to my computer. Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson has been reminding me for the past couple of weeks that “With the past, I have nothing to do; nor the future. I live now.” A very good reminder for those of us whose many thoughts tend to concern themselves more with analyzing things said or done, or wondering how to do or say things, than with what is going on this very minute. Which is, for me, thinking, typing, doing something I’ve been meaning to do for a very long time: writing this blog. We’ll see how things go.
