Erika > Recent Status Updates

Joan had let men like Jimmy set the terms. But the terms were false, even to him. He was just as scared as anybody else. … She didn’t want to lower herself to the game men played.

I'd like each of you to tell the story of this situation as though you're the only one in the world responsible for where we are." Both of the women had a hard time honoring this request. They lapsed quickly into finger-pointing...
When Forrest prodded them to the explain the situation as if they were the ones responsible, they uncovered their power. They went from feeling like victims of the problem to feeling like

“AI is like any by-the-book bureaucrat who, settling on the rule that prohibits coffee purchases from any vendor but A, will give you no explanation as to why vendor A can purchase Starbuck’s coffee but you cannot. Asked why that rule is the right rule, they insist only that it is the rule.”

“Discretionary acts are an organization’s way to build in checks on the moral and practical legitimacy of laws and rules. We need wise enforcers when legalism hits its limits, and even when it doesn’t. Wise enforcers, like wise citizens, make a society worth living in.”

“Unlike Hobbes and the even more pessimistic Machiavelli, Han Fei did not identify humans as by nature brutish, stupid, irrational, or gullible. Instead, they are mediocre. Whatever else he was wrong about, Han Fei was right about this. We are mediocre.”

“Freeman ended up using a form of restorative justice to address the issue. In collaboration with a nonprofit working to supoort young people, they got some of the bus-riding youth and the owner in a room together, creating a space for conversation about why they wanted to hang out on the Mall. The owner gained insight and confronted his prejudice- after that the kids were able to hang out without issue.”

Justice Wilentz 1994: “As owners of land-based shopping malls who have, by design and demographic accident, replaced the traditional town square, profit from the human need for physical community, they should also be required to pay the minimal cost of providing a space for real public disciurse, unmediated by corporate sponsorship.”

“It seemed to be speaking directly to him, but he knew this was the trick of all great art - it spoke to all men and addressed each one at a time, in the solitude of his own mind and heart.”

I’m inspired by Anna Rosenberg who had exceptional project managemt skills as well as emotional intelligence to influence almost anyone into cooperating.

“Plus, Google already had people glued to their Pcs and smartphones all day and evening. The one hour they didn’t have (besides sleep) was the thirty minutes to and from work that people were driving. That would give their advertising clients a whole new dimension. They could reach people while they were in the car if only their eyes weren’t on the road.”

“One of the things I learned in the bankruptcy is, if you have a problem or a challenge, it never gets better over timre. You have to address it. Once you know what you need to do, you need to do it.”

“It wasnt just financial” “think about how much time and leadership we spend on Opel, just a tremendous amount of energy on the hope that one day we’ll stop losing money…we have to focus our financial resources and bandwidth that will put us in a position to be ahead of the future, not behind it.”

“If you don’t like the plan, we will help you find happiness.”

She was particularly annoyed by CAVE people, the ones who are Continually Against Virtually Everything.”

Late fees are a penalty for misplanning or forgetting, yet they create an even more hostile environment for those living with scarcity.

Scarcity captured the mind. Just as the starving subjects had food on their mind, when we experience scarcity of any kind, we become absorbed by it.

How to Do It:
Grab Me, ONE Big Thing, Why It Matters, Go Deeper, The Right Words

Write your business email or letter. Then, when you’ve written the whole thing, go back and make the first two or three sentences say all of what you wrote below. It’s often the only part that gets read.” Chris Sacca

Picture in your head the person you’re trying to reach…specific individual…if you try to speak to everyone, usually you reach no one.

Once when I was about to fly to the other side of the world and asked my church for prayers, my pastor said, "By the time you get on a plane, it's too late for beggy prayers. It's time for trust and surrender." These two things are almost all I want, but unfortunately, neither one is my strong suit.

God keeps giving, forgiving, and inviting us back. My friend Tom says this is a scandal, and that God has no common sense. God doesn't say, "I have had it this time. You have taken this course four times and you flunked again. What a joke." We get to keep starting over. Lives change, sometimes quickly, but usually slowly.

Even though I often remember my pastor saying that God always makes a way out of no way, periodically something awful happens, and I think that this time God has met Her match...Nothing can possibly make things okay again...It's beyond bad. It's actually a nightmare. But people don't bolt, and at some point the first shoot of grass breaks through the sidewalk.

They take it as their due. But you'll know. And it can change your whole day, which could be a way to change your whole life. And maybe one person in the car in the lane next to you or in line at the bank or at your kid's baseball game will notice your casual generosity and will be touched, lifted, encouraged...and later will let someone else go first. And this will be quantum.

You could almost flush with appreciation. What a great scam, to have gotten people of such extreme quality and loyalty to think you are stuck with them. Oh my God. Thank you.

...through prayer, we take ourselves off the hook and put God on the hook, where God belongs...When you get your hooks out of something, it can roll away, down its own hill, away from you. It can breathe again. It got away from you and ... listening to you whine "What if?" and "Wait, wait I have ONE more idea..."

There is Thomas Merton's famous prayer, the beginning of which reads, "My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me."

There's freedom in hitting bottom...relief in admitting you've reached the place of great unknowing. This is where restoration can begin, because when you're still in the state of trying to fix the unfixable, everything bad is engaged: the chatter of your mid, the tension of your physiology...It's exhausting, crazy-making.

Sometimes the first time we pray, we cry out in the deepest desperation, "God help me." This is a great prayer, as we are then at our absolutely most degraded and isolated, which means we are nice and juicy with the consequences of our best thinking and are thus possibly teachable.

"My father got the elephant in India when his missionary parents traveled there to save Hindus from their misguided belief in gods of pure love, forgiveness, joy, and new beginnings."

I wrote it down and later taped it to my bathroom mirror, where all truth resides at least briefly.