HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW: 70 WORDS OF (UNCONVENTIONAL) WISDOM FOR 2010
In a project called What Matters Now, 70 innovators, authors, and bloggers were challenged to come up with a single word that everyone should think about in 2010 and an explanation for WHY. The result is a collection of unconventional wisdom, with suggestions ranging from generosity and passion to evangelism and — from Arianna Huffington — sleep.
Harvard Business Review Excerpt:
What better way for business thinkers to celebrate the holiday season than with the gift of great ideas? As the year 2009 — as difficult, divisive, worrisome, and hopeful a year since, well, 2008 — draws to a close, my friend Seth Godin, the innovator, writer, and blogger extraordinaire, has persuaded 70 other innovators, writers, and bloggers to participate in a project he calls What Matters Now.
The idea is simple: Each of us suggests one word — literally one word — that all of us should think about in 2010, and then takes one page to explain why and how that word matters.
The result is an intriguing, inspiring, and at times downright moving collection of unconventional wisdom that is available free to everyone as of this morning. I urge you to download the PDF, process its diverse ideas, messages, and calls to action, and then share it with as many friends, associates, and colleagues as possible. Think of it as an intellectual yule log meant to brighten your spirits and light a fire for the future.
What struck me about the ideas in What Matters Now is that they arrange themselves into a few distinct (but related) categories. (The collection itself does not impose these categories, this is my interpretation.) A bunch of the words involve the stuff of human emotion and motivation — what makes us tick. Seth begins the PDF with a riff on generosity. “When the economy tanks it’s natural to think of yourself first,” he writes. “You have a family to feed and a mortgage to pay. Getting more appears to be the order of business. It turns out that the connected economy doesn’t respect this natural instinct. Instead, we’re rewarded for being generous. Generous with our time and money, but most important generous with our art.”