I've turned off my WhatsApp notifications. I'm part of too many active groups! But I can turn to it at any given point, much like I did this morning, and let my heart be moved by one group or another expressing love for each other.

Learning from Your Project X

Launching and piloting Your Project X was a phenomenal experience. I am so grateful for the Boston Founding Fellows, the first participants in our Boston Career Change pilot. It takes courage to be first.

I'm excited about the turns that YPX is taking. This project is right where it needs to be, the team is learning and iterating, it is practicing what we preach.

After a lot of personal reflection, I have decided to step out of the project. I have full confidence in this idea, I love the team that is bringing it together, and I know that it will iterate its way into something pretty amazing.

It was many years back that I read Kevin Kelly say “your attention is your currency.” The futurist technologist was defining the most sought after asset of this new economy - your attention. Now of course that has always been true. We would not be drowning in ads and billboards without this aggressive competition for our attention.

But the supercomputers in our pocket and the unprecedented amount of intimate, personal data that we now willingly give away, mean that our attention is literally being mined. It is being extracted from us.

Tristan Harris gave a powerful TED Talk on this very topic. I encourage you to take the 16 minutes and watch it. Your thoughts are being shaped by someone else.

We are off to the third annual Evolutionary Leadership Workshop. Here is a note to the participants:

You have probably had a set of landmark experiences in your life. You have had moments that you refer back to over and over again, you have had realizations that continue to feed you. Our goal is to craft another one of those experiences. We want the Evolutionary Leadership Workshop to become a landmark moment in your life. Our intention is to support you as you reach deep alignment with yourself and with your own highest purpose.  We want you to return home with a new community of people and a concrete set of steps that will launch you into what is next for you.  We want you to actualize your dream, we want to enroll you in the evolutionary movement of our time.

n the US it is common to make fun of the French and their unions, their strikes and their 35 hour work weeks. It is easy to forget that the unions are indeed “the folks who brought you the weekend.” I was excited to read Sweden is introducing the six hour work day.

Our relationship to work is all wrong. It is by now a cliché to say that too many of us live to work instead of work to live. But it is true. We have left our children to be taken care of by iPads, and we have limited our own lives to an idea of “productivity” that has simply come up short. Too many of us are not happy.

I’ve been struggling with “movement space.” It feels like the people who are devoting our lives to social transformation are also burdened by an unconscious shadow. This shadow takes the form of judgement and self-righteousness.

The rush to indict and exile is not exclusively applied to “the other.” It’s not just the bad guys who are wrong. The whip of self-righteousness is increasingly applied to those who are in movement with us.