Somebody has to say it, sooner or later.

If everyone’s still jogging in circles, it’s likely that everyone’s waiting for the starter to show up and announce the race.

Alternatively, if the starting gun was ages ago and everyone’s jogging aimlessly now, it’s likely that there’s no finish line in sight.

Go or stop. In or out. Now or never.

Whenever you’re tired of jogging, call people to their marks or string up a finish line and point them toward it.

***

Note: there are a few different versions of this challenge. In one of them, no one announced the start time or distance to begin with. In another, the race was called but no one was appointed the starter. And the third is the start with no finish, which might be a good metaphor for life but is a terrible model for a project.

In any case, there’s a real opportunity to make things better by taking responsibility for what’s missing.

And, if you happen to be nominally in charge of the track meet, you can save everyone a lot of heartache by managing starts, distances, and finish lines effectively.

Today’s a good day to think about generosity for a moment.

Are we entering the season of giving, or the season of spending?

Are we making magic, or simply putting the two turtle doves in storage in order to make room for the partridge in a pear tree (a real must-have door-buster this season)?

There’s an enormous and important difference between giving generously and meaningfully vs. giving mindlessly beyond our means.

[It’s not just the shopping mall, of course. The season of overcommitment and overextension offers plenty of opportunities to consider what it looks like to be sustainably generous in many areas of life.]

This year, some important faces will be missing at our Thanksgiving table.

It’s the holiday we all show up for and at which we’re most ourselves, yet neither my uncle (at whose home we gather) nor my grandmother are with us anymore.

I’ve written about each of them here; today, I’m grateful for their memories and for all they did — each in their own ways — to make this gathering possible.

***

P.S.: Maybe it’s time for a new tradition?

A project in motion tends to stay in motion.

Momentum builds on itself: it generates new collisions and connections, and it’s a lot harder for friction and opposition to slow or stop it.

The laws of physics can’t be suspended, but it’s often possible to turn something at rest into something in motion.

It just takes effort to get it going.

A friend recently asked, “How comfortable are you with uncertainty? How comfortable would you like to be?”

And that sparked a number of reflections:

• It depends on the kind of uncertainty. It’s one thing to improvise when the plan goes out the window, but another to live with little or murky sense of a plan in general.
• With any kind of uncertainty, there’s a difference between risk tolerance and risk capacity. If you can tolerate more risk than you can afford, proceed mindfully.
• Comfort with uncertainty can be built with practice. Taking on enough uncertainty to feel stretched — neither static nor stressed to death — can increase comfort over time.

Most of all, it emerged in conversation that life in general is a lot less certain that we tend or want to think. Planning is indispensable, but resilience and flexibility are priceless.

Blogoversary is a neologism the world probably doesn’t need.

But 365 straight days of posting is reason for celebration.

I started a daily blog last fall [2018] at the urging of Seth Godin, who’s been doing this for longer than anybody can remember.

His argument for doing this is not that you’ll become famous, or even that you’ll be read often by anyone. Instead, it has to do with changing how you go through life, how you write about it, and how you show up in the (online) world.

Noticing
When I started, this blog was called “Noticings.” Not the most creative name I’ve ever put on a blog, to be sure, but the important thing was the decision to ship. I was determined that this would be a different kind of project — and that had to start with not waiting for a perfect name in order to begin.

Now, it’s not really called anything, but noticing has become a deeply ingrained habit. Knowing I’ll have to write about something each day, I’ve found that I pay closer attention to life in general in order to find source material.

Writing
The key to consistent blogging was (and is) short blogging.

All my previous blogs went off the rails because they were infrequent and therefore massive. The longer between posts, the more I’d stuff into the next one.

What I didn’t appreciate enough then was how much that asked of my readers and me. I’d spend days writing these mini-books, then they’d land with a thump in people’s inboxes. I couldn’t make a habit of producing those, and no one could make a habit of reading.

Incidentally, I’ve also found that my writing is getting shorter and snappier overall. I still love my parenthesis, ellipses, and “dastardly dashes” (as my ninth-grade English teacher would say), but one thought per sentence is good discipline — and a service to the reader.

Showing up
Not a lot of people read this blog. And I’m OK with that for now.

Historically, it’s been harder for me to find my subject than to find my voice. Lo and behold, I can say something every day but haven’t stuck to just one thing for more than a day or two. I’m still searching for the edges, which in turn will define the audience.

The important thing is that this blog is an asset: something I own, and that I build on every day. It’s something I can point other people to and say (as Seth says), “Here, I made this.” Happily, some of them like it. And it’s edgy in its own way: if nothing else, it’s consistent and shows how I think and write.

***

Cheers to the first year, and thanks for reading.

And yes, there will be a 366th post tomorrow.

Co-ops, collaboratives, and other new-old alternative organizational models have been on my mind lately.

Without further ado, some favorite finds (really “receiveds”) from this week:

Liberating Structures: simple yet powerful ways to build conversations, meetings, and organizations that are inclusive and effective.

Liberating Structures are easy-to-learn microstructures that enhance relational coordination and trust. They quickly foster lively participation in groups of any size, making it possible to truly include and unleash everyone. Liberating Structures are a disruptive innovation that can replace more controlling or constraining approaches.

“A Typology of Structures for Cooperative Association:” just what the title promises. Hint: most — but, interestingly, not all — are variations on a hub-and-spoke model.

Recently, we teamed up with CoLab Cooperative, a worker-owned digital agency building online infrastructure for the democratic economy (including thenextsystem.org!) for a research project to explore the many options for how cooperatives can grow and scale without letting go of key values around democratic participation and shared culture.

***

A prediction: if public ownership comes under more scrutiny for short-termism, private markets catch flak for distortion and/or inaccessibility, and more people find it both exciting and lonely to become their own bosses in coming years, co-ops and other collaborative ownership structures might get a lot more exposure.

I’m late to the party on this one, but I finally read — and, more importantly, saw the difference between motion and action.

Motion is a Getting Things Done term for what Seth Godin calls “thrashing.”

That’s the researching, networking, spreadsheet-making, introspecting, strategizing, and all the other activities that precede outcome-oriented action.

Action is GTD for “shipping.” That’s hitting send on a job application (or several), making a targeted ask with a followup, or otherwise putting real work into the world.

Thrashing/shipping language didn’t come as naturally to me, but “Is this motion or is this action?” activates a clear distinction in my mind.

And that helps illustrate Seth’s oft-made point that “the time to thrash is at the beginning.” Simply applying to jobs is one way to find the one you want. But it’s a lot better to have gone through enough motion to be confident in your strategy before springing into action.

At a concert earlier this week, I heard a chorus that has been echoing in my head ever since:

I’m standin’ out here in the spotlight
Holdin’ a chair in my hand
Open the cage, I’m ready —
I’m lettin’ the lions in!

That’s from a song by Dinty Child, who’s apparently a longtime stalwart of the local roots/Americana scene and a delightful new discovery for me.

The lyrics are an extended allegory about the circus, but you know and I know that’s not what he’s really singing about.

(Dinty knows it, too, of course: in the last chorus, he changed the words to “holdin’ my heart in my hand.”)

***

[I’ve spent a long time searching for a link of any kind to that song, but it looks like I’ll need another concert ticket instead. In the meantime, here’s Dinty’s band and another song he performed — which Zach Hickman, the evening’s impresario, called his “favorite 103 seconds of music.”]

No dessert till you finish dinner.

No TV till you’ve hit the gym.

It takes five tickets to go on this ride.

“This for that.”

Word for word, that’s what it means.