In Ralph Waldo Emerson's book Self-Reliance, he starts off with this quote which translates to mean, "Do not seek for things outside yourself". I thought that that was pretty powerful and it made we think about modern day education. In today's education system, we seek for answers and explainations to everything outside of ourselves without understanding ourselves first. To me the education system is flawed in that it prolongs or better yet avoids this cycle of self-reflection. We spend about 20 years studying and then 35 years applying what we studied. As knowledge expands exponentialy and quickly in this day in age, our education cycles are too slow. Departments don't or grow quick enough, curriclums don't adjust fast enough, teachers stop learning and teach old thoughts, and students graduate uncertain of how to apply their 20 years of learning.



I think that the cycle should be more fluid and smaller like rain. We should study and apply daily. As opposed to trying to lay out the perfect blueprint for our mental mansion and then building it, I think that we should just put a few bricks on at a time. This allows us to be more flexible as the world changes and our own opinions about the world change. Under the old system, if you begin studying a subject that will no longer be relevant to the world upon graduation, then you've engaged in a costly yet fruitless mental exercise.

Knowledge begins with understanding ourselves, and then pursuing areas of knowledge based on that understanding, and finally applying that knowledge for the betterment of the world. In one of my education classes at Stanford, a professor who studies higher education at Stanford said that Stanford doesn't even use her research for its own decision making. In her eyes, she is studying higher education in order to improve higher education, but the very institution that pays her doesn't even consider how her research affects its practices. Something is really wrong. Institutions of higher education have the potential to change the world because they are think tanks, but first they have to change themselves by finding ways to connect all of their research with practitioners so that it gets applied in a useful way.

My vocation is my vacation
I’m so happy in what I do
The freeway is my runway
And I land in lot two
In the lobby everybody
Greets me just by nodding
If I can’t manage my baggage
Somebody’s right beside me

On this plane it’s insane
You can open window panes
We’ve got to oxygenate the brain
Whether sunshine whether rain
The seats can spin and roll
People switch from row to row
Meeting with new people
Talking about their goals

There’s writing all the walls
Even the bathroom stalls
If you have make up or markers
Security here won’t take them all
My room is nice and plush
With my own personal touch
I’ve got a view of the city
And my own coffee mug

Free wireless access
A gift-wrapped package
People having fun
In the halls I hear laughing
So many people I love here
All in one place
I don’t need a camera
Because I see them every day

From here I can’t escape
My thoughts are on the race
I can’t just carry on
Cause my work is in my veins
Sometimes I leave it on the plane
And wait for another day
But there’s a new carousel of items
Every hour I delay

Everyone’s a pilot
Of new projects and innovations
If our crew agrees
Then they take the navigation
See no one’s in control
We give thanks to Mother Nature
By understanding her laws
All our needs are catered

We rally as a team
In the event of emergencies
There’s no first class on this plane
We value energy equally
Every day is not a sequel
New adventures, stories, and people
Instead of watching seagulls fly
We’ve got to learn to fly like seagulls

When the storm and clouds settle
Hugs replace the hellos
An amusement park of family
Where nobody really gets old
I check in the morning
And I check out late at night
I’ve been on vacation everyday
Without even catching a flight

More precisely, a Hedgehog Concept is a simple, crystalline concept that flows from deep understanding about the intersection of the following three circles:

1. What you can be the best in the world at (and, equally important, what you cannot be the best in the world at). This discerning standard goes far beyond core competence. Just because you possess a core competence doesn’t necessarily mean you can be the best in the world at it. Conversely, what you can be the best at might not even be something in which you are currently engaged.

2. What drives your economic engine. All the good-to-great companies attained piercing insight into how to most effectively generate sustained and robust cash flow and profitability. In particular, they discovered the single denominator—profit per x—that had the greatest impact on their economics. (It would be cash flow per x in the social sector.)

3. What you are deeply passionate about. The good-to-great companies focused on those activities that ignited their passion. The idea here is not to stimulate passion but to discover what makes you passionate.

Community Programs Office
2007 Closing Banquet @ UCLA

First and foremost, I want to thank the End of the Year Banquet selection committee for giving me the opportunity to address you this evening. I was honored when I got the email from Vusi that I was nominated to speak tonight.

For those who have been here for quite some time, you can testify that I grew up in the CPO. But being exposed to a new campus, new people, and a new way of thinking outside of this context has given me the chance to reflect, compare, and contrast how I grow in different types of environments. Speaking of exposure, I got to see the SHAPE students this weekend as they culminated their Rites of Passage program by observing youth initiatives in the Bay Area. It was amazing to see the seed still growing and the tree bear good fruit. I have been exposed to a lot in these past two years at Stanford and today I return to you, my family, to report what I’ve learned. The title of tonight’s speech is “The C in CPO”.

What is community? Where do its boundaries end and begin? Are there even boundaries? Is anyone excluded? Or is everyone included? Do people need to be initiated? Who leads? How are the chosen?

As I transitioned from UCLA to Stanford, I wondered if I would be able to find community. Stanford’s El Centro and Black House just weren’t the same. The CPO is a unique place and you won’t find anywhere like it, but I knew that without community I couldn’t survive at Stanford. So I had two options; find it or create it. During my search I realized that community was less about a physical space like the SAC; community is defined by the interactions between its members. After finding a community at Stanford, I came to believe that communities do 3 fundamental things together:
1. Work together.
2. Eat together.
3. Pray together.

Communities work together.
• If we examine all of our cultural origins, we find that our ancestors worked the land together. Work was a family affair. Everyone worked in the community on behalf of the community.
• In the same way, the students that came before us fought to turn what were traditionally volunteer-based projects to paying jobs. Since its conception, the office has created almost two dozen full-time university positions and over 100 student positions.
• But we must acknowledge that despite sharing a physical space, in many ways the office is still divided along cultural lines. We have to ask ourselves why. Are our cultures truly that different? Is an African Rites of Passage that much different than a Native American Vision Quest? Few projects have been able to break this barrier, but it is imperative that we critically analyze these divisions as a community. There is a difference between working in the same place and working together.
• In corporations people work together, but that doesn’t make them a community and that takes me to my next point.

Communities eat together.
• I remember one of the first meals I had with a group of friends from Stanford. We ate at this well-known Ethiopian restaurant called Zini’s. When I sat down, I felt like I was in pre-school. The tables where knee-high and circular and the 6 of us sat on stools. One of my friends ordered for us all and the food came out on one big plate. There were no utensils either. Everyone was expected to eat with their hands. That was on of the most intimate dining experience I ever had. I truly felt like I was eating with my brothers and sisters.
• Since the beginning of Spring quarter, a group of friends and I have been organizing weekly potluck dinners. It started off with just 10 of us and since then it has grown to 60 people crammed into a small house in East Palo Alto. Attendees include Stanford students and alumni, neighbors, the youth, and elders. People come to get fed physically by the food, mentally by the wisdom of the elders, and spiritually by each other’s energy
• Food unites people. The CPO Banquet and the CPO Open House are two of the most important events because they create space for everyone to contribute and express themselves through food. If we wanted to, we could have a CPO buffet every day with the best dishes from all over the world.
• There is something about cooking together and co-creating a meal that can’t be substituted by Panda Express or Dominoes. Real relationships are made over food. Communities are united by food.

That brings me to my third point. Communities pray together.
• This quarter has been extremely rough for me. My best friend’s father died. Our community lost a brother to suicide. One of our elders was hospitalized. And my other best friend’s mother was diagnosed with cancer. All of these things were out of my control; sometimes life just has to take its course. Literally, it was enough for someone to take a quarter off. But I wasn’t alone. I had a supportive space to pray with others for healing and restoration for all of the things I just mentioned.
• When is the last time that we all prayed together? When did we become so revolutionary and empowered that we forgot about the Spirit within that gives of life every single day?
• During my second year as the SHAPE director, I remember the CPO being hit hard by a cult. I believe we lost about 4 key members and it crippled us momentarily. Thinking back, I asked myself, what were they looking for that we didn’t provide? The only answer that came to mind was spiritual nourishment.
• Spirituality is central to the success of any social movement; just look at the role it played in the Civil Rights Movement. I recently read an article about African American coping strategies and the research showed that African Americans used internal coping strategies rooted in spirituality more than their White counterparts who tended to rely more on external coping strategies. Before there was religion, there was spirituality and all of our cultures were spiritually-rooted. As a community, we cannot sit here and neglect one of our greatest assets, which is our connection to Spirit.
• Granted there are times where we have to be militant and take over Murphy Hall, I honestly believe that the fall of the Black Panthers, whom many of us revere, wasn’t because of cointelpro; it was because in their effort give back power to the people, they forgot to acknowledge the source of their power in Spirit.

In this office, we use the word empowered a little too freely. If you give me any acronym with and E in it, if I guess education or empowerment, there is a 99% chance that I’ll be right. But when I examine the lives of the people we admire and wear on our t-shirts like Che, Bob, Ghandi, and Biko, I realized that empowerment not the final step in their development. There are three stages of development; victim, empowered, Spirit working through you as you. Fortunately, Tim has some famous quotes that he has been using for years to guide us through this process.

1. If you have ever heard Tim say “Excuses are tools of the incompetent,” he is suggesting that you are thinking like a victim. Whenever we make excuses, we are literally saying that we gave in to circumstances.

2. When Tim is encouraging us to be empowered, he shares his most famous quote from Biko “The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.” He is merely challenging us to take control of our lives by transforming our thinking.

3. And lastly, through you and as you. He doesn’t say this one publicly, but if you’ve every had a chance to have a 1-on-1 with Tim at the crack of dawn when he arrives, he will tell you “You are a spiritual being having a human experience.” For many, that is hard to accept because it requires the shedding of many debilitating beliefs. But if you don’t believe Tim, just listen carefully to Bob Marley:

We're Jah-men
We're Jah-men
To think that Jah-men was a thing of the past
We're Jah-men
And we're Jah-men in the name of the Lord
We're Jah-men
What you are-re-re-re
We’re Jah-men
What you are

In conclusion, how will we know when we’re a community?
• We will know when every project doesn’t need its own hole puncher, stapler, and scissors
• We will know that we are community when everyone is equally accountable for the office’s existence: How many times have you walked away from the broken printer or copier or left it with no paper?
• We will know when cubicles don’t exist
• When everyone can articulate the CPO’s vision. Right now we are trying to put a puzzle together without the box. Where is our vision?
• We will know when one-time programming turns in daily practice. If you have to make a flyer, it’s a program. We shouldn’t have to persuade people to come to programs. If it adds value to them, they will tell others and people will come.
• We will know that we are a community when everyone is counseling each other and the collective accountability within the office obviates the need for counselors
• We will know when the office is empty because that means that we are actually serving the community
• When Tim leaves and we have to carry the vision forth without our heroic leader
• When the CPO advisors and Mandla are supported by the 5,000 UCLA graduates that have come through this office.
• When there is a seemless link between the communities we serve and the office. Perhaps when there is a CPO somewhere south of the 10 freeway.
• We will know when we work, eat, and pray together.

research by Jerry Porras, Steward Emery, Mark Thompson

Sample Selection

• The people we were interested in interviewing were individuals whose traditional successes had lasted for decades, including many Nobel Laureates, government and community service leaders, teachers, scientists, and Olympians, as well as Pulitzer, Grammy, Peabody, and Academy Award winners and the CEOs of large and small organizations.
• 2 decades of impact in a certain endeavor
• ultimately interviewed 200 people between 1996 and 2006

Research

• Successful people also said that “loving what you do” is a necessary condition for success. Indeed, Chapter 2, “Love It or Lose—Passions and the Quest for
  Meaning,” reviews the dangers of not doing what you love because people who have that passion can outlast and eventually outrun you in the task. In a global economy, for every person who is half-hearted in a job, there are dozens of others who are passionately waiting to take that job from them. Passion for what you do is not just a creative imperative—it is a competitive necessity.
  
• They understand their unique passions and allocate their view of the right amount of time to each (not equal or balanced portions, but rather their own individually chosen preference
• Setbacks don’t make me ABANDON my passions or causes”
  
• successful people are more concerned with doing what they love than being loved. They don’t treat their passions like a trivial pursuit or low-priority item. Successful people focus on being good at what is meaningful to them, and do that, not “whatever” comes along.
• “People who count support me in following my passions”
• The key distinguishing characteristic is a strong interest in recognizing what their true passions are and acting in a manner that addresses these various passions in the right proportion.
• “Pursuing many different passions increases my effectiveness and creativity”

Suggestions for a Happier Life by David G. Myers

1. Realize that enduring happiness doesn't come from success. People adapt to changing circumstances—even to wealth or a disability. Thus wealth is like health: its utter absence breeds misery, but having it (or any circumstance we long for) doesn't guarantee happiness.

2. Take control of your time. Happy people feel in control of their lives, often aided by mastering their use of time. It helps to set goals and break them into daily aims. Although we often overestimate how much we will accomplish in any given day (leaving us frustrated), we generally underestimate how much we can accomplish in a year, given just a little progress every day.

3. Act happy. We can sometimes act ourselves into a frame of mind. Manipulated into a smiling expression, people feel better; when they scowl, the whole world seems to scowl back. So put on a happy face. Talk as if you feel positive self-esteem, are optimistic, and are outgoing. Going through the motions can trigger the emotions.

4. Seek work and leisure that engages your skills. Happy people often are in a zone called "flow"—absorbed in a task that challenges them without overwhelming them. The most expensive forms of leisure (sitting on a yacht) often provide less flow experience than gardening, socializing, or craft work.

5. Join the "movement" movement. An avalanche of research reveals that aerobic exercise not only promotes health and energy, it also is an antidote for mild depression and anxiety. Sound minds reside in sound bodies. Off your duffs, couch potatoes.

6. Give your body the sleep it wants. Happy people live active vigorous lives yet reserve time for renewing sleep and solitude. Many people suffer from a sleep debt, with resulting fatigue, diminished alertness, and gloomy moods.

7. Give priority to close relationships. Intimate friendships with those who care deeply about you can help you weather difficult times. Confiding is good for soul and body. Resolve to nurture your closest relationships: to not take those closest to you for granted, to display to them the sort of kindness that you display to others, to affirm them, to play together and share together. To rejuvenate your affections, resolve in such ways to act lovingly.

8. Focus beyond the self. Reach out to those in need. Happiness increases helpfulness (those who feel good do good). But doing good also makes one feel good.

9. Keep a gratitude journal. Those who pause each day to reflect on some positive aspect of their lives (their health, friends, family, freedom, education, senses, natural surroundings, and so on) experience heightened well-being.

10. Nurture your spiritual self. For many people, faith provides a support community, a reason to focus beyond self, and a sense of purpose and hope. Study after study finds that actively religious people are happier and that they cope better with crises.

Digested from David G. Myers, The Pursuit of Happiness (Avon Books, 1993)

research by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

* While personal income in the US more than doubled between 1960 and the 1990s in constant dollars, the proportion of people saying they are very happy remained a steady 30% (20)
* The quality of life does not depend on happiness alone, but also on what one does to be happy (22)
* In the course of an average day, about 1/3 of the time people will say that they do what they do because they wanted to do it, 1/3 because they had to do it, and the last 1/3 because they had nothing better to do (23)
* Flow tends to occur when a person faces a clear set of goals that require appropriate responses (29)
* Only 20% of people find flow. (33)
* Flow is generally reported when a person is doing his or her favorite activity--gardening, listening to music, bowling, cooking a good meal. (33)
* National surveys find that when someone claims to have five or more friends with whom they can discuss important problems, they are 60% more likely to say that they are "very happy". (43)
* The excellence of daily life finally depends not on what we do, but on how we do it. (47)
* One finds more occasions of flow on the job than in free time. What often passes unnoticed is that work is much more like a game than most other things we do during the day. (59)
* Even in our enlightened days, with all the emphasis on "human resources," management is all too often disinterested in how employees experience work. Therefore it is not surprising that many workers assume that they cannot count on work to provide the intrinsic rewards in their lives, and that they have to wait until they are out of the factory or office before they can begin to have a good time-even though this turns out not to be ture. (60)
* Unfortunately, while free time might be a necessary condition for happiness, by itself it is not sufficient to guarantee it. Learning how to use it beneficially turns out to be more difficult than expected. (60)
* It is not the external conditions that determine how much work will contribute to the excellence of one's life. It is how one works, and what experiences one is able to to dervie from confronting its challenges. (62)
* Free time is more difficult to enjoy than work. (65)
* Physical health is better when a person focuses on a goal. (65)
* The relationship that leads to order in consciousness instead of psychic entropy has to meet at least two conditions. The first is to find some compatitibility between our goals and that of the other person or persons...The secnod condition for a successful interaction is that one be willing to invest attention in the other person's goals. (81)
* Successful families combine discipline with spontaneity, rules with freedom, high expectations with unstinting love. (88)
* Creative individuals stress the importance of seeing people, hearing people, exchanging ideas, and getting to know another person's work. (94)
* Three main reasons why jobs are resented:
1. The job is pointless-it does not good to anyone
2. The work is boring and routine-it provides no variety or challenge
3. The job is stressful-especially when there are poor relationships with co-workers
* By taking the whole context of the activity into account, and understanding the impact of one's actions on the whole, a trivial job can turn into a memorable performance that leaves the world in a better shape than it was before..But the meaning we derive froma job does not come free...One must do some thinking and caring beyond what the job descriptions calls for. And this in turn requires additional attention, which is the most precious resource we have. (103)
* How to turn a routine job into a professional performance:
1. One must pay attention so as to understand thoroughly what is happening and why
2. It is essential not to accept passively that what is happening is the only way to do the job
3. Entertain alternatives and experiement with them until a better way is found (105)
* Successful people often make lists, or flowcharts of all the things they have to do, and quickly decide which tasks they can delegate, or forget about, and which ones they have to tackle personally, and in what order. (106)
* Most createive persons don't follow a career laid out for them, but invest their jobs as they go along. (107)
* The secret of starting a good conversation is really quite simple. The first step is to find out what the other person's goals are: What is he interested in at the moment? What is she involved in? What has he or she accomplished, or is trying to accomplish? (115)
* Happiness is not a very good indicator of the quality of a person's life...It is not enough to be happy to have an excellent life. The point is to be happy while doing things that stretch our skills, that help us grow and fulfill our potential. (120)
* To control attention means to control experiences, and thereofre the quality of life. (128)
* Enjoying what one does is not a sufficient reason for doing it...Thus in creating a good life it is not enough tto strive for enjoyable goals, but also to choose goals that will reduce the sum total of entropy in the world. (140)

research by Richard Boyatzis
Am I a self-directed learner?
Self-Directed Learning by Richard Boyatzi

1) Has the person engaged their passion and dreams? Can they describe the person they want to be, the life and work they want to have in the future? Can they describe their Ideal Self?
2) Does the person know himself or herself? Do they have a sense of their Real Self?
3) Can the person articulate both their strengths (those aspects he/she wants to preserve) and gaps or discrepancies between their Real and Ideal Selves (those aspects he/she wants to adapt or change)?
4) Has the person held their attention on both Strengths and Gaps— not letting one become the preoccupation?
5) Does the person have their own personal learning agenda? Is it really their own? Can the elements of the plan fit into the structure of their life and work? Do the actions fit with their learning style and flexibility?
6) Is the person experimenting and practicing new habits and actions? Is the person using their learning plan to learn more from their experiences?
7) Has the person found settings in which to experiment and practice in which he/she feels psychologically safe?
8) Is the person developing and utilizing his/her relationships as part of their learning process? Do they have coaches, mentors, friends, and others with whom they can discuss progress on their learning agenda? Do they have relationships with whom they can explore each their new behavior, habits, new Ideal Self, new Real Self, new strengths and gaps as the process unfolds?
9) Are they helping others engage in a self-directed learning process?

Climbing the Corporate Ladder and Waiting Until Later

research by Srully Blotnick 1960 to 1980

A survey of 1500 MBA students taken prior to graduation