Being Awesome

Image by eskimo_jo via Flickr

After spending a week languishing with the flu and feeling anything but awesome, this post over at Yes and Yes was a lovely boost!

It’s OK to be awesome.
In fact, it’s preferable. Highly-recommended. Perfect 10s across the board.
It’s OK to be the smartest, the cutest, the sassiest, the brassiest, the best-dressed, the most well-versed AND the most ambitious person in the room.
It’s OK to have dreams that make no sense to the casual observer — and to actualize them.
It’s OK to kick everything to the curb and start from scratch.
It’s OK to be a supernova.

There's more ... and its awesome.  Read it!

Productive Meetings

Image via Wikipedia

Nothing better than coming out of a meeting feeling that you've actually achieved something!

The best meetings are ones with an agreed purpose, a clear agenda, and that finish (on time) with a review of actions to be taken before the group meets again.

Good coffee and home made choc chip biscuits are just the icing on the cake!

Fun

Pie

I feel particularly inspired by this post by Andrea at ABC Creativity.

do not compete for tiny little slivers of pie

it’s a stupid thing to do because really, we are tripping over pies.  there is pie everywhere.  plenty of pie for everyone.

you have creative genius within you.  genius.

you can be so creative about your career.  about money.  about creating every aspect of your life the way you want to create it.

looking at others as competition and comparing and being competitive takes energy away from your ability to create magic in your life.  it also makes you small.

Read the rest - its great I promise!!

Fabulous Fonts

These beautiful, free fonts just make me want to write something fabulous ...

You can download them for your next project from kevinandamanda.com

A Beautiful Desktop

VladStudio is the project of Russian digital artist Vlad Gerasimov. The images are gorgeous and you can download them for free to turn your computer into a work of art!

There is even a fab widget that downloads a new wallpaper for you every so often so you need never get tired of staring at your computer screen.

And if you have a bit of downtime, you can waste time give your brain a workout putting together jigsaws of the beautiful artworks on the site!

Small is Beautiful

I love 'The Small is Beautiful Manifesto' from Magpie Girl

We believe stories are valuable, no matter how many people read them.

We believe following your passion is more important that watching your site

                    meter.

We believe in the handmade, the first try, the small start, and the good

                    effort.

We believe that small is beautiful.

Words Words Words

WORDLE lets you create beautiful word clouds from text that you provide. I used the english translation of Pablo Neruda's poem "Si tù me olvidas".  Aaaaaah, no one writes love poetry like Neruda!!

Licorize

Because it is an awesome way to manage all you online research.

Its a to-do list manager, collaboration tool and social bookmarking ap all rolled into one fast, minimalistic package.

And it lets you do this ...

Books I Haven't Read Yet

Image via WikipediaThe writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encylopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?” and the others - a very small minority - who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight read-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.

We tend to treat our knowledge as personal property to be protected and defended. It is an ornament that allows us to rise in the pecking order. So this tendency to offend Eco’s library sensibility by focusing on the known is a human bias that extends to our mental operations. People don’t walk around with anti-resumes telling you what they have not studied or experienced (it’s the job of their competitors to do that), but it would be nice if they did. Just as we need to stand library logic on its head, we will work on standing knowledge itself on its head. Note that the Black Swan comes from our misunderstanding of the likelihood of surprises, those unread books, because we take what we know a little too seriously.

Let us call this an antischolar - someone who focuses on the unread books, and makes an attempt not to treat his knowledge as a treasure, or even a possession, or even a self-esteem enhancement device - a skeptical empiricist.

From: The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb