Current Habits Challenge

Below written by Chuck Swoboda August 2020 - worth sharing

Southwest Airlines Doesn’t Settle For Best Practice – And You Shouldn’t Either

"Best practices are often sold as the answer to all your problems — if you follow these steps, you will likely have success. Even better, you won’t get in trouble if the results aren’t what you wanted. However, the truth is that best practices limit your ability to impact significant change. The same boundary conditions that prevent failure, also limit success and get in the way of uncovering the best ideas.

Challenge your current habits!

Habits are a powerful and useful tool to get things done effectively and efficiently. But once formed, they often go unquestioned and unchallenged. When left unchecked, they become an excuse for accepting best practices and ignoring the inevitable truth that there is always a better way."

Mark Twain once said: “A habit cannot be tossed out the window; it must be coaxed down the stairs a step at a time.”

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We have been persuaded!

Over the past 100 years we have been persuaded to become the ultimate consumer, perhaps against our will, and most definitely without our conscious knowledge. 

Below is from "A Brief History of Consumer Culture" published on The MIT Press Reader. Which is an article adapted from Kerryn Higgs book “Collision Course: Endless Growth on a Finite Planet”

Sobering words to ponder:

Frederick Allen wrote in1931, “Business had learned as never before the importance of the ultimate consumer. Unless [the consumer] could be persuaded to buy and buy lavishly, the whole stream of six-cylinder cars, [], cigarettes, rouge compacts and electric ice boxes would be dammed up at its outlets.”

"President Herbert Hoover’s 1929 Committee on Recent Economic Changes welcomed the demonstration “on a grand scale [of] the expansibility of human wants and desires,” hailed an “almost insatiable appetite for goods and services,” and envisaged “a boundless field before us … new wants that make way endlessly for newer wants, as fast as they are satisfied.” In this paradigm, people are encouraged to board an escalator of desires (a stairway to heaven, perhaps) and progressively ascend to what were once the luxuries of the affluent."

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Placement

If the soul has a say in where it was to be placed on earth, the conscience keeps no remembrance. If it was merely a request, how does it know that it was granted or denied?

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Sell them their dreams!

"Sell them their dreams. Sell them what they longed for and hoped for and almost despaired of having. Sell them dreams—dreams of country clubs and proms and visions of what might happen if only. After all, people don’t buy things to have things. They buy things to work for them. They buy hope—hope of what your merchandise will do for them. Sell them this hope and you won’t have to worry about selling them goods."

Advice to participants in a 1923 convention of marketers - William R. Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture

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Consumption

If they can't sell you your desires, they will sell you your fears.

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On Being Right

An overwhelming desire to be right, could lead to an irrevocable wound in a treasured relationship.

Granted this is a complicated statement, and there are multi-layered factors that need to be considered before any semblance of an answer can find a foundation. Starting with the type of relationship: is it a parent and a child, extended family members, life-long friends or a partner relationship; each hold background causal factors, that lead to the desire to be right. Each person’s life experiences, as well as, the relationship being healthy and balanced or shrouded by an underlying complication, needs to be measured as a foundational block to this statement’s validity.

So today it is worth asking, in this moment in time is being right worth the wound?

Secondary question one might ask: is it a desire to be right or is it a desire to prove another person wrong?

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Hershey's Bar Day

It won't fill your belly but it'll make you forget you're hungry. If only for a while. 

May our hearts be momentarily filled up in the memory of your greatness!

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Gusty Days

Gusty summer days elapse with a favorable friendly wind across our cheeks. Autumn days our backs bend against a brisk discomforting chill. Winter days, the birds perch among the unmoving ice burdened branches, and our ears strain heeding the slightest motion of life. Nerves unsettle in the frosty quiet stagnant stillness. We anxiously await the tender days of spring.

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Landing the Truth

 We are not responsible for anyone else's happiness, and a safe landing is not always a greaser.

Wisdom from my aviator husband.

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Real

 

The struggle is real but you don't have to give it a voice!

~MDJune~

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Once...

... upon a time there were two peas in a pod, and they almost shared the same birthday. 

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Seasons

Seasons undulate drop by flake, full to empty, cycling through the color wheel with dizzying accuracy. Driven by the magnetic force under Atlas's unconscious control, seasons tilt us awry. Our season may yet again bloom, heavy with bounty, laden with laughter.

~MDJune ~​

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