courtesy Pink Sherbet Photography

Well, I’m all moved out of my old apartment and into the new. I’m getting unpacked, having fun setting up my new space, and it’s nice here. Still, I felt kind of sad last night as I locked the door to the old place for the last time. I have lots of great memories of that flat; my years there were very, very happy.

Even deeper than that, though, is the fact that the apartment represented security for me—the most and best security I’ve had in my life. This was huge, and very nourishing in a way that I sorely needed after my chaotic childhood.

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image courtesy of torres21

The to-do list to get us from where we are to the clean, just, beautifully designed future we want is extremely long. Lots and lots of things need to change—everything, in fact. Which is quite overwhelming.

It’s so overwhelming that a sensitive, concerned person could easily get lost in wondering where to start. Ask me how I know this! I can’t even begin to count the hours I’ve spent daydreaming about the best way to contribute. Should I install solar panels in poor communities, teach workshops to kids, create an urban homestead like the Dervaes family? What would be the most impactful? Where could I do the most good? What would I enjoy the most?

The result of all this? I’m sure you guessed it. Nada mas. And, oddly, contemplating all these options not only didn’t help anything—it also made me feel like crap. Every discarded idea actually made me more helpless. If I couldn’t even figure out what to do with myself, how could I help change the world?

Eventually I realized that it’s not really possible to sort all this out on paper. It requires action. For many reasons, any project is better than no project.

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image courtesy of David Paul Ohmer

This week I’m getting ready to move, and so I’ve been focused on small, mundane details and plans. Rushing around getting everything ready, I realized that I tend to see the day-to-day minutae of my life as somehow separate from the larger mission of creating a lovely, fair, functional future, like I have to choose between attending to what needs attention right now and what needs attention in the larger sense.

Silly, right? I think most of us do this, though. We focus on the everyday demands placed on our time, and we lose the thread of our larger desires and goals. How do we stitch the two back together? How do we live each day, and make each choice, in the context of creation and responsibility?

It depends on where we put our focus, and how we spend our time. Here are some things to keep in mind as you decide where to apply these precious resources each day.

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What if you could do some good while waiting on line at the grocery store? The Extraordinaries want to help you help the world by giving you chances to volunteer via their iPhone app.

The project is still in its infancy right now—there were only about 10 active projects when I looked at the app the other day, and most of them were requests to tag photos in big image libraries. And of course there are limits to what can be done in a few minutes on an iPhone, but there’s tons of potential here. I envision volunteers answering questions from school kids, documenting buildings that need to be weatherproofed, reporting on neighborhood meetings for community sites, assisting non-profits with online research ... No doubt as The Extraordinaries build their pool of volunteers and tasks to be done, more and more good opportunities will emerge.

Crowdsourcing has produced some of the best resources available today—like Wikipedia itself—so why not apply the same idea to doing a bit of good? In this short video, co-founder Jacob Colker explains what The Extraordinaries are up to. Want to be a part of it? Get the iPhone app here.

image courtesy of jonnykeelty

Grumpiness happens. For me, it’s when people are willfully clueless and/or bad drivers and/or walking too slow on the sidewalk in front of me. I can feel myself get tense and then I start muttering to myself like a crazy person. It’s not pretty!

Beyond ‘not pretty,’ though, it also has a larger impact. On days when I give in to being grumpy, I get less done. I spend valuable moments replaying the annoying things that happened and parsing my reactions to them. “I shouldn’t have been snippy with so-and-so,” etc.

Of course this is a total waste of time.

Why your mood matters

There’s also the fact that, as I learned in Winifred Gallagher’s excellent book Rapt, negative emotions cause us to see fewer possibilities, and to constrict our focus. Think about millions of grumpy faces dotted across the world on any given day. How many great opportunities and connections are we missing because we’re focusing on the wrong things?

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image courtesy of jurvetson

The beginning of a new software project feels like the start of a quest—you can see that something needs to be done, but there’s no clear path to the goal. You have to dive into the details and figure it out.

There are two general ways to go about this. One is to get a bunch of business analysts together and send them out to get information. They talk to the folks who will be using the software; they gather requirements. Then they write a specification, a document that lays out in minute detail how the system should work: every screen, every button. Then the programmers get to work building it, and you release it to the users at the end.

The second way to develop software is to create one tiny bit of it, release it to the end-users, gather their feedback, then correct that tiny bit and create one more. Keeping the end goal in mind, your software grows bit by bit until it provides everything the users need, or at least the most important stuff.

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In this TED Talk, science writer and founder of AskNature Janine Benyus explains Biomimicry—the process of looking to nature for sustainable solutions to design problems. As she says, “We live in a competent universe. We are part of a brilliant planet, and we are surrounded by genius.”

During the talk, she reveals dozens of new products that take their cue from nature with spectacular results. Take a look: 

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image courtesy of Beyond the Lens

I started writing a post about how it pisses me off when people say things like, “It’s easy to be optimistic when you have such a cushy life.” As though I am so happily clueless that I couldn’t possibly understand the Big Bad Facts of how screwed up things are. Because if I did, I’d obviously be as cynical as most everyone else.

Now, it’s true that I am a happy, privileged person, but I also get how screwed up things are. I really do. And yet I don’t respond cynically. My take on it is that having privilege means that we have a duty to put that good fortune into making the world better. To me, cynicism looks like a cop-out, a convenient way to shirk that responsibility: “Well, we’re screwed anyway, nothing I can do about it, so I may as well sit on my ass and watch TV.” It’s a lazy, victimized mentality, and it’s bullshit.

HOWEVER. I did say on Monday that my goal is not to argue with cynics, and it’s not. The last thing I want to do is perpetuate patterns of argument and polarization that, in the end, amount to so much wheel-spinning. Furthermore, people have a right to any point of view they want, even if it looks wasteful and wrong to me.

My goal in writing here is to connect with people who are already beyond cynicism, who see their responsibility to change the world for the better, and who want to engage with it.

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image courtesy of Pear Biter

Over the last few days, we’ve had an explosion of conversation here on The Sunny Way. It’s amazing to see so many people grappling with this stuff, and so important! Lots of ideas are in the mix, but I’ve noticed that they largely seem to boil down to one major question, and so that’s what I wanted to look into today:

Is development real?

Subquestions: Have humans evolved at all? Are things really better now than they were before industrialization? What should we be aiming for: a return to the past, or a new future that we can’t even really imagine yet?

If you’ve been on The Sunny Way for more than 30 seconds, it’s probably obvious what my answers are. But my goal—really—is not to argue with people who see things differently. My goal is to share the worldview that allows me to be optimistic, in hopes that it might help others find the strength to lay aside their habitual disgruntlement, and the courage to create what’s never been created before.

In short, I want to share with you a rational framework for optimism in the 21st century. Here are the reasons why I think it’s reasonable and accurate to be optimistic. Incidentally, this also gets into the reasons why personal development is a crucial part of changing the world.

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Happy Friday, friends!

Today I wanted to point you to a “Can Do,” a great piece on Ben Franklin from And the Pursuit of Happiness, Maira Kalman’s blog on the NY Times site. In it, she looks into the genius of Ben Franklin, which was as much about pointed self-improvement as it was invention.

This part made me particularly happy: “I don’t think he was ever bored. He saw a dirty street and created a sanitation department. He saw a house burning down and created a Fire Department. He saw sick people and founded a hospital.”

And this: “Everything is invented. Language. Childhood. Careers. Relationships. Religion. Philosophy. The Future. They are not there for the plucking. They don’t exist in some natural state. They must be invented by people. And that, of course, is a great thing. Don’t mope in your room. Go invent something. That is the American message.”

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image courtesy of erix!

These are the questions that circle round my brain all day, every day. These are the questions we have to tackle if we want things to change.

1) Why are so many brilliant, wealthy, educated people—the luckiest, most powerful people ever to be born on the planet—stuck in apathy, despair, and anger about the future?

2) How do we get them unstuck so they can unleash their power and use their privilege to bring about transformation like nothing we’ve ever seen?

Why are these questions important? Because we (lucky, rich, educated people) have the responsibility to push things forward, and we’re not doing it, for a variety of reasons. How can we get beyond this? How can we make the transition from angry adolescent to mature and motivated adult?

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image courtesy of ZeHawk

Several months ago, I bought a new brassiere. This is no ordinary bra—it is Italian, hand-made, and beautifully engineered. It cost about 5 times what I normally spend on bras. I call it The Magic Bra.

At the time, I felt very decadent dropping 3 figures on a single undergarment. The first few times I wore it, I showed the hot pink and gold lace appliqued straps to my friends and said, “Can you believe I spent so much money on this?” I had never bought such a fine item of lingerie before, and I felt pampered and gorgeous every time I put it on.

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