ben damiano 9/3/23 ben damiano 9/3/23

Vagabonding.

Vagabonding is an outlook on life.

Vagabonding is about using the prosperity and possibility of the information age to increase your personal options instead of your personal possessions.

Vagabonding is about taking an extended time-out from our normal life-six weeks, four months, two years-to travel the world on your own terms.

Vagabonding is not a lifestyle, nor is it a trend. It’s an uncommon way of looking at life-a value adjustment from which action naturally follows. And as much as anything, vagabonding is about time-our only real commodity-and how we choose to use it.

Vagabonding has never been regulated by the fickle public definition of lifestyle. Rather, it has been a private choice within a society that is constantly urging to do otherwise.

Have a library of over one hundred travel books including all the classics and among the best is a simple book published over twenty years ago that is book about travel but also a book about living called Vagabonding by Rolf Potts which reminds us that we and nobody else must determine how we live.

Vagabonding is a book about living that choice.

Before it is too late.

Below are extracts (italicized) from the book as well as quotes mentioned in the book (bolded).

If you have built castles in in the air, your work need not be lost: that is where they should be. Now put foundations under them. - Henry David Thoreau, Walden.

Your travels are not an escape from real life but a discovery of your real life.

Regardless of how long it takes to earn your freedom, remembering you are laboring for more than a vacation. A vacation, after all, merely rewards work. Vagabonding justifies it.

Indeed, the freedom to go vagabonding has never been determined by income level; it’s found through simplicity- the conscious decision of how to use what income you have.

There is an insanity of consensus, if you will- to get rich from life rather than live richly, to “do well” in the world instead of living well.

Money is of course needed to survive but time is what you need to live.

Unfortunately, life at home cannot prepare you for how little you need on the road.

Travel can be a kind of monasticism on the move: On the road, we often live more simply, with no more possessions than we can carry, and surrendering ourselves to chance. - Pico Iyer, Why We Travel

The discoveries that come with travel, of course, have been considered the purest form of education a person can acquire. “The world is a book” goes a saying attributed to Saint Augustine, “and those who do not travel read only one page”

A good traveler has no fixed plan, and is not intent on arriving. - Lao-Tzu, The Way of Life
You can read everything there is in the world about a place, but there is no substitute for smelling it. - Bill Wolfer, Musician
Excitement and depression, fortune and misfortune, pleasure and pain are storms in a tiny private, shell bound realm-which we take to be the whole of existence. Yet we can break out of the shell and enter a new world. - Eknath Easwaran

On the road, you learn to improvise your days, take a second look at everything you see, and not obsess over your schedule.

We see as we are. If you view the world as a predominantly hostile place, it will be. By this same logic, of course, a positive world view can lead to inspiring, human-centered experiences.

Adventure is not an experience that can be captured on television or sold like a commodity Real adventure is not something that can be itemized in glossy brochures or sport magazines. In fact, having an adventure is sometimes a matter of going out and allowing things to happen in a strange and amazing environment-not so much a physical challenge as a psychic one.

The secret of adventure, then is not to carefully seek it out but to travel in such a way that it finds you.

Travel is often a matter of confronting our fear of the unfamiliar and the unsettling. - Tim Cahill, Author

Adventure is wherever you allow it to find you- and the first step of any exploration is to discover its potential within yourself.

Explore your own highest latitudes. Be a Columbus to the whole new continents within you, opening new channels, not of trade but of thought. - Henry David Thoreau. Walden

Thus, travel compels you to discover your spiritual side by simple elimination: Without all the rituals, routines and possessions that give your life meaning at home, you’re forced to look for meaning within yourself.

After all , a journey is a temporary diversion, and there would seem to be little reward in the “common miracles” it promises. That is, until you realize that life itself is a kind of journey.

ben damiano 8/27/23 ben damiano 8/27/23

Both Sides Now!

The most successful organizations and leaders are rarely defeated.

They defeat themselves.

Three common symptoms of SDD or ‘self-defeat disease” are:

a) the inability to anticipate new competition,

b) a failure to see situation from another perspective,

c) self delusion due to a bubble of filtered thinking buttressed by sycophantic deputies.

One simple exercise to avoid this fate is to make it a point to see or demand to be shown or insist on trying other options and approaches opposite to ones recommended.

To always insist on both sides now!

Three simple exercises one can apply every time a key decision needs to made are 1) to integrate outsider perspectives, 2) to unite two diametrically different models and 3) to balance roots and wings.

Think like an outsider/immigrant.

Earlier this week a long time friend of mine, Lou Paskalis, was in Chicago. During a drive I shared some key themes from a keynote I had given earlier in the week to a legendary company aiming to be bolder to ensure their continued leadership in a changing world.

One key point I conveyed was the importance to look at things from an outsider’s perspective or that of an immigrant.

While not all of us are immigrants to a country we are always entering new companies, new jobs, new cities and when we arrive we come without the baggage of knowing and the wonder of fresh eyes and thinking. We wonder why certain things are the way they are and our acts of noticing and curiosity are acute. This allows us to bring in fresh perspectives. It is one of the reasons successful firms combine experienced individuals with long tenure with new external talent.

Lou mentioned that one of his bosses at American Express (the legendary John Hayes) had given him similar advice when Lou had just been hired by saying “Lou do not become one of us”.

It is important that individuals while they respect and align with a culture of a firm do not get assimilated by the Borg ( Star Trek!)

If one like the Mandalorian and begins to believe “This is the Way” we will be beaten by the Lawrence of Arabia’s who say “Nothing is written”

Combine an insiders understanding with the provocative thinking of an outsider.

Both sides now!

Only the Schizophrenic Thrive.

Andy Grove the late CEO of Intel once wrote a book titles “Only the Paranoid Survive”

Today we are living in a connected and constantly shape shifting world and paranoia is a recipe for decline as Intel has suffered from.

One cannot succeed without collaboration, partnering and trusted relationships.

Seeing all outsiders as the enemy to be resisted or defeated is a recipe for irrelevance.

Microsoft under Balmer followed this “Windows good everything else bad” paranoia approach and it took a partnering oriented “Linux is also critical” and it is “Azure no longer Windows” Satya Nadella to turbocharge Microsoft.

Companies need to optimize for today AND re-imagine for tomorrow sometimes with different teams with different incentives and goals to ensure continued relevance.

The biggest mistake is to somewhat focus on today with a leadership team incentivized for today while running “task forces” and “models 2.0” as a side project with a diluted focus on tomorrow ( a second class team with a limited budget and constraints told not to rock the boat or destroy the existing business model).

These optimize neither today or tomorrow but create a warm goo of board documents and sinecures for people the company does not know what to do with (notice how many tomorrow projects are run by individuals who did not do a good job running today ?).

Instead, empower some real superstar talent with real budgets and minimal constraints to do what it takes to win tomorrow or put today’s firm out of business while also having world class teams focussed on delivering the margins and leadership needed today to fund tomorrow.

Two models acutely focused. The first on today and one on tomorrow both reporting to the Board and CEO.

Both sides now !

Roots and Wings.

If every individual and company is a story with a place we came from, every individual and a firm is also about a place we are going to.

The best leaders and firms all integrate the dualities of roots and wings.

Too rooted and we may wither way as changing times and climate bring drought to the place and way we were.

Too winged and we may be blown away in the gusts of change.

Too rooted and we may be seen as old school, hide bound to tradition and inflexible.

Too ready to fly with change may find us painted as unreliable, undisciplined, and short-term oriented.

Transformation is twisting ourselves and companies into new shapes with the clay of what we were and new skills and pieces we acquire.

To believe and better understand where you are going people want to know from where you are coming.

Heritage, provenance, legacy, story, first principles, and foundations are all critical.

So are re-invention, setting sail, taking risks, pioneering and re-imagining.

Roots and wings.

Both sides now!

ben damiano 8/20/23 ben damiano 8/20/23

Attention.

A definition of success is the freedom to spend time in ways that gives one joy.

Joy is more than happiness which is often transitory as it ebbs and flows with external events.

The joy that comes with deep satisfaction and contentment however endures and its contours do not waver with the oscillations of the transient.

Experience, time, and observation reveals there are ways to architect joy.

To be free to use your time to pay attention to what matters and what matters to you.

Or as the late David Foster Wallace said in his mind shifting talk This is Water:

“The important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom. That is being educated and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.”

Every day there are more and more things that vie for our attention. This has been true long before algorithmic social media or soon the customized cuddle puddles of applied statistics ( also known as AI) transforming code to vie for our attention.

In “Things of the World” the poet Kay Ryan writes:

“Wherever the eye lingers
it finds a hunger.
The things of the world
want us for dinner.
Inside each pebble or leaf
or puddle is a hook.
The appetites of the world
compete to catch a look.”

Above is a cover illustrated by the cartoonist Chris Ware from nearly 15 years ago for the New Yorker described by Francoise Mouly, the Art Editor of the New Yorker.

“Chris aims at pinning the butterflies of our most basic and universal emotions. His beat is daily life: how we relate or fail to relate to each other. For a Halloween cover, Ware stayed away from the usual Halloween signifiers of kids in costumes, pumpkins and straw, colorful candy. He condensed the Halloween narrative into the upturned faces of the children as they knock on a door-and behind them on a street, the parents faces turned downwards towards their phones. Both are slivers of white masks, the parents faces illuminated by the light of the phones. The eager young excitement and the jaded boredom exist in perfect contrast…”

The Garry Winogrand Way of Seeing

Garry Winogrand who died in 1984 was the first digital photographer decades before digital in that he was not constrained by the scarcity of film and took over a million pictures. He combined a disinterest in technique with an obsessive devotion to shooting on the street all day, every day.

Garry was most alive when he was outside of himself which was when he was behind a camera lens. He once said “I get totally out of myself. It’s the closest I come to not existing, I think, which is the best – which is to me attractive.”

To him seeing was key:

“Sometimes I feel like … the world is a place I bought a ticket to,” Winogrand once said. “It’s a big show for me, as if it wouldn’t happen if I wasn’t there with a camera.”

“When I’m photographing, I see life.”

Garry Winogrand suggests to see better we need to look more often, look with different perspectives and look where others do not.

Experience, time, and observation reveals there are ways to architect joy.

What makes the ordinary and every day extra-ordinary is that one day it will not be so.

There will be a last day a child will crawl. A last day you will see someone. A last day you will visit a place or drive a car or go to a restaurant. Sometimes we know the last times and often we do not. When we are aware of the last times, we have a higher sense of attention and a sensitivity to the specialness and the passing of the moment.

But these last times come every week and sometimes every day.

The ordinary becomes extra-ordinary when we pay attention, and we find poetry in the crevices of every day.

As some of you may have noticed, a couple of weeks ago, I offered a FREE spot at the Quilt AI event in NYC on Sep 06, 2023. My post received an overwhelming number of requests which far exceeded the slots I had. I spoke to the Quilt AI team (am on the Board) and have received a few more FREE slots. And all attendees will receive an autographed copy of my book.

Titled the “AI-volution of Culture”, it is structured as a day of blending AI and Culture (or math and meaning, as I like to call it) to drive better marketing.

This is the link for registering for the event: Culture eats AI

Please use the free code: rishadxquilt

Speakers in addition to me include:

Gillian Tett, Chair of the Editorial Board, Financial Times

Jeremiah Lowin, the CEO of Prefect and Marvin AI

Deepa Mehta , the Oscar nominated filmmaker

Bhaskar Chakravorti, the Dean of Global Business, Fletcher School, Tufts University

Luke Burgis, Author & Entrepreneur

David McCandless, Journalist and Designer

Katherine Ann Paul, the Curator of Asian Art, Birmingham Museum of Art

ben damiano 8/13/23 ben damiano 8/13/23

Loss. Love. Learning.

Loss.

Loss is central to the human experience in three ways.

First, is we often lose in our attempts to succeed. We lose promotions, jobs and opportunities. We lose money and valuable assets.

Many times, we also win.

Some people win a little and others win a lot.

But we all lose.

But these losses however daunting and disappointing are not the big ones.

The second set of losses are the losses we will face of loved ones and friends either because relationships end, or death comes.

And our final loss is that of ourselves.

Our health.

And then our lives.

Franz Kafka wrote that “the meaning of life is that it ends”

How we live amidst these losses defines a large part of life.

The joy we make is because time is precious, and this moment of victory may not last forever.

Given that loss is part of human existence it pays to be kind and to think about how to help those in loss and deal with and recover from loss.

To learn to practice “personal resurrections” after setbacks and to endure and keep on growing and going.

Love.

A big part of what makes life worth living despite the guarantee of loss is love.

Love of people, of work, of art, of culture, of craft and of things and hobbies.

It is in fact this love and attachment that is deeply intertwined with the feelings of loss.

The Buddha said to avoid suffering one should avoid attachment.

Attachment is programmed into our DNA, so as a way of living and an ideal or a guiding path this is all well and good but is hard to live this way.

Love does not compute; and computers though they are getting increasingly advanced into deluding us that they love us since they ingest all our stories and then customize their reaction to be our “personalized” friends cannot love us.

In part that is because they cannot feel.

And therefore cannot feel loss.

And with love comes loss and love is an anti-dote to loss.

Also, though we individuals care about ourselves and what is ours, it is the love of something bigger, greater and outside us that often matters more.

Thus the human search for purpose, identity, meaning and belief.

Learning.

Today we have large language models that learn by ingesting, sorting, parsing, co-relating, re-combining and digesting all they can eat.

It is clearly a form of learning and the machines are getting “smarter”

Thus while machines may not know about love and loss they definitely can learn.

But do they feel joy as they learn?

Without the reality of loss or the feeling of love can they turn information into insight into wisdom?

Learning is particularly joyous.

Learning in its first form is building knowledge.

With great knowledge and practice we build skills and craftsmanship.

Human progress has been driven by learning and passing on the learning to those who follow.

We architect, hone and sculpt our lives into forms that fit and resonate.

Learning is also seeing things from other perspectives which gives us understanding.

Sometimes if we are lucky, we can graduate from knowledge, skills and understanding to wisdom.

Love, loss and learning are intertwined with each one feeding and influencing and resonating with each other.

Life is about love, loss and learning and how we live our life is deeply affected by how we incorporate and then unify, balance and integrate them into our lives.

ben damiano 8/6/23 ben damiano 8/6/23

Three Years Later…

This is the 156th issue of this thought letter.

It has been published each and every Sunday morning (Central US Time) for three years.

The thought letter was conceived to be both a gift to the reader in that it would be totally free, 100 percent opt-in, easy to opt out, would carry no advertising, nor use the mailing list in any way besides to email the weekly post.

If done right it also be a way to build goodwill for the author.

Three years and a quarter of a million words later ( 5 full length books! ) the thought letter has nearly 22,000 subscribers each of whom have chosen to enter their email address into the subscription box, enjoys high engagement (weekly open rate of 48%), a very low opt out rate ( about .1% or 25 readers of 22,000 a week or a 5% annual churn) and adds about 150 new readers a week.

Subscribers include hundreds of CEO’s, thousands of C-Level executives with a concentration in the fields of marketing, technology, strategy, innovation, HR and education.

The readership far exceeds the 22,000 subscribers with a much larger group of readers engaging with the content in other ways including LinkedIn ( last week’s post on A Company of One was seen by 30,000), or in other publications where it is re-published including Media Village and The Continuum among others in the US and around the world, and most importantly it is forwarded weekly across organizations and to friends and often to the readers children!

Readership spans 135 countries with most of the readers living in eight markets ( United States and Canada in North America, India and Singapore in Asia, the United Kingdom, France and Spain in Europe and Australia).

The five most popular posts have been:

Re-Thinking Presentations which suggests that if one cannot make a case in 9 slides or less one does not have a case to make.
12 Career Lessons which takes ten minutes to read is far more useful than most career books for any stage of one’s career.
The Future of Marketing is People reminds us that most marketing speak including consumer fixation is possibly wrong and most firms are severely marketing challenged particularly in the Board Room.
De-Bossification! is a real thing and if you are or want to be a “boss” watch out! It is one of the reasons companies are struggling with hybrid-remote work.
Ruptures in the Mediascape written two years ago anticipated all the big shifts that have happened since.

Also strongly recommend these five:

The Four Shifts which explain the four shifts that are driving the future which every individual and company needs to align with.

The Six Keys To Change explains why change is difficult and having a strategy, M&A plan and a re-org alone almost never work.

Six Ways to Be and Feel Better will likely leave you changed as a person and is the one most shared by parents with their grown kids.
Architecting Joy begins by defining success as the ability to spend time in the ways that give you joy and then builds from that…
Time Passages reminds us that time is all we have and looks at it through different prisms.

Now 3 years of writing distilled and organized on one page!

The 156 pieces written over the past three years span 12 different subject areas including The Future, Managing Change, Becoming More Effective, Leading with Soul, Creating Great Cultures, The Future of Work, Managing Careers, Personal Growth and even Wisdom but have kept away from news and politics and therefore have remained evergreen.

You can access the best of these pieces organized, curated and kept up to date here: https://rishadtobaccowala.com/100

This one page is accessible on any device anywhere in the world totally free and all the materials can be used with or without attribution.

Many professionals book mark it and use it as a thought starter (like a GPT-4 but written by a human) when they are grappling with a topic like managing teams and creating cultures, learning to learn or on remaining relevant in an AI age. Some share articles as part of their monthly or weekly all hands. Others use the many frameworks shared to help brainstorm ideas.

Do click here and take a look at it. It could save a lot of time and help one become more productive.

Thank you for being a reader and please share this post with others who may benefit from this writing by forwarding it or clicking below:

And if you would like to get this writing delivered every Sunday for free please subscribe