By Gini Dietrich
Welcome to the 39th edition of The Three Things, the weekly update of three links, podcasts, videos, or books you can’t miss from Michael Schechter (Honora, A Better Mess), Howie Goldfarb (Blue Star Strategic Marketing), and me!
For those of you new to this series, The Three Things arrives in your inbox on Sunday mornings (unless you don’t suscribe, but that can easily be fixed if you hurry over and enter your email address or add to your RSS feed) so you have some extra time to spend perusing the obscure content we’ve curated for you (and one another) before your week begins and deadlines, meetings, and work takes over.
This week we have thoughts on creative space, business networking, and death.
Air and Light and Time and Space
Michael on Creative Space. Of the many things I’m a sucker for in this life, tough love and Charles Bukowski top the list. Put them together and you get a little bit of magic. All too often (and I’m as all too guilty of this as the next guy, if not more) we claim we don’t have the right space or the right conditions to create. Claim as we might, the reality is, more often than not, this is just an excuse. If somehow we magically got the ideal space, we’d somehow turn it into yet another excuse to add to our ever growing list. This illustrated adoption of a Bukowski piece from Zen Pencils will serve as a nice reminder to all of us the next time we look at our surroundings and attempt to turn them into yet another excuse not to make whatever it is we’d like to create.
Gini on Business Networking: Howie and I were both reading The Economist this week. I’m not sure I agree with this article that cycling is the new golf because it’s less competitive (they clearly aren’t on the rides I’m on where the guys in front push 32 or 33 mph and expect you to keep up), but I do find it interesting that more and more business executives are turning to cycling for networking, camaraderie, and fitness. Two of our clients I met on the cycling team, and just yesterday I met someone new who may become a client. How someone rides a bike truly can tell you what they’d be like to work with…and whether or not you could spend time working with them.
Greetings Cards: The American Way of Death
Howie on Death. Now you can send a pre-death card. Here in Vermont we just passed a law like that of the state of Oregon, which allows us death with dignity. But now thanks to the inventors of Father’s Day and Mother’s Day, we can send cards to our loved ones who are dying. Worded in ways such as gladness that “our paths came together in this life” and vows, “You’re in some of the best memories I have and you always will be,” the cards are found in the “tough times” section in your local card store.
Now it’s your turn. Is there a podcast, video, book, or article you think we need to see?