Interviews, essays, and research exploring the frontiers of what's valuable and in our self-interest
Roundtable: What to measure and what not to measure
Background: An all-star panel explores measurement
Listen: On the web, Apple, Spotify, RSS
Watch: YouTube
“How do we connect the values that we inherently have to what gets measured?” — Silka Sietsma, Head of Emerging Design at Adobe
How ready are you for the coming year? How clear are you on what happened to you this past year? Who are the all-star people that supported you this past year and how do they need support in return?
“Welcome Angeline. Welcome Susie. Welcome Keshia. Welcome Yancey.”
There are ten of us in the room. Katy says our names and makes eye contact with each of us through the screen when she does. We smile as she welcomes us.
Though she’s leading us this morning, Katy is not a professional facilitator. She’s an architect in New York. But today she’s leading a Zoom room that includes two writers, a teacher, a product manager, a salesperson, a non-profit executive, a university department chair, an artist, and me. The ten of us are spread across upstate New York, Maine, Singapore, Geneva, London, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Brooklyn, Vancouver, and Amsterdam.
I spent this week working on two exciting bento projects.
The first is a new version of the Bentoism website, whose soothing aesthetic won’t change, but the depth of the information will. That will be launching this week. I’m super excited about it.
The second is the first in a series of posts that will go much deeper into Bentoism for a wider audience. This is in line with my Future Me goal of talking more about our work together that I shared last week.
These projects h
In a recent post on the difficult place we currently find ourselves in, I shared what the authors of the prescient book Limits To Growth said are the five steps to creating a better world. They are:
The authors admitted these steps sounded small in the face of our enormous challenges. Still, they were firm in their belief that this was how a better path would begin.
“Though my problems are meaningless
That don’t make them go away” — Neil Young
“Most things I worry about
Never happen anyway” — Tom Petty
“Now I'm feeling lonely
My mind is playing tricks on me” — Geto Boys
Our minds are our reality.
What do we want? What our minds tell us to want.
What do we worry about? What our minds tell us to worry about.
We build realities on stories our minds tell us. Even when we’re the only ones who hear them.
Last week I took an internet vacation. I didn’t go anywhere. I just wasn’t online.
I spent a lot of it in the woods. I recently moved to the Pacific Northwest and have fallen in love with the trees. They’re incredible creatures.
While I was the CEO of Kickstarter, I played in a long-running Dungeons & Dragons game with a group of my coworkers. (I blogged about this at the time here.)
If you’ve never played D&D, it’s basically an open-ended choose your own adventure game. The Dungeon Master lays out a scenario (following instructions in a book), and the players decide through conversation what to do.
In our initial times playing the game, we carefully debated and plotted to find the optimal answer to each situation
Recently released tools and resources related to Bentoism:
Like everyone else, those of us here at the Bento Society have spent the past month wrapping our heads around our new reality. We’ve whiplashed between comfort and fear, between optimism and pessimism. We’ve largely stayed balanced thanks to the bento and its bird’s eye view.
The moment has placed increased importance on the bento. I speak from personal experience. I’ve turned to the framework more often the past month to make sense of our world. I’ve also been able to feel the presence of the Us and Future spaces in a way that was harder before.
I’m not alone. The number of people who have reached out asking for what the bento has to say about this moment is evidence of this. Those spaces are becoming more real to a lot of people. The notion that a world exists beyond our immediate self-interest has perhaps never been more clear.
In my personal newsletter I’ve shared some of my feelings — about our new normal and how this might create a new kind of collective consciousness — but it’s still too early to say much definitively. Events are still unfolding. There may be multiple false endings. We need a heightened sense of awareness to navigate this. That’s what we’ll talk about today.
“Arriving late at a performance, and seated in the center of the second row, I looked up and saw what I thought was an actor having a seizure onstage. Embarrassed for him, I lowered my eyes, and it wasn’t until the young man who’d brought me grabbed my arm and said, ‘Watch this guy!’ that I realized he was acting.”
— Pauline Kael on seeing Marlon Brando for the first time
