“These last few years have been hard for trying. The act of surviving in a global pandemic, in the chaos of climate change, in waves hands in all directions, taps a lot out of you.” Here’s Dan Sinker with some wisdom about trying. What I like about this: the recognition that most of us, most of the time, are just trying—with no guarantee of success or even a plan for getting anywhere, just making it up as we go. And also the acknowledgement that even trying has its fallow periods—but given time to rest, a fallow field will eventually reseed itself.
Recent entries from the blog.
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This exceptionally rigorous and insightful article from Maurice Mitchell outlines the challenges faced by social justice institutions, alongside a set of clear, actionable, and thoughtful approaches to addressing them. Somewhat unsurprisingly, nearly everything in here is just as applicable to those of us working to build equitable and resilient mission-driven workplaces, whether nonprofit or otherwise. The trends Mitchell outlines—from maximalism to cherry picking to glass houses and unanchored care—would be familiar to most workers and managers I know. In addition to absorbing all of the strategic advice he offers here, I’m struck by how much of his framing involves not avoiding conflict but navigating it with grace, transparency, and patience.
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I love this post from Elspeth Michaels about a year-long daily creative habit. Michaels and her friend note that the small (twenty minutes) daily commitment helped them to make incremental progress while also making more ambitious projects feel accessible. I don’t personally care for tracking streaks—I think they can make taking care of your body (or someone else’s) feel like a failure, and that’s never my goal—but having a regular habit you can return to over and again is a magical way of staying rooted in work that you like while also finding new (and fun) ways to keep learning.
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From adrienne maree brown, a short incantation that holds some balanced new year energy. Her phrasing of a “right sized extension of energy”—neither overextending nor witholding—is something I come back to often. But the strongest resonance for me here is about practice, and how regular commitments to practice are a kind of fortifying and learning and healing all at once: “we become what we practice. what are you practicing?”