Thursday, February 18, 2010
This blog writer has been “silent” for a while, not for lack of material—God knows the drama of the Winter Olympics and the soap opera in the U.S Congress provide plenty of grist. (Could there be any two venues that provide a more perfect thesis and antithesis of inspiration?)
Rather I have been busy generating a [...]
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Two speakers have impressed me in the last two days. On Monday night, I went to hear Laura Tyson, Berkeley Professor and advisor to the Obama White House, speak about the economy. In wonderfully understandable language, Dr. Tyson explained to a packed auditorium the current state of the economy, and outlined the central worrying points [...]
The 9-11 commission report rang with one phrase that seemed to sum up our lack of foresight into the possibility of an attack against our country–”Failure of Imagination.” The same phrase was used by President Obama when he gave his first speech about the possibility of a world without nuclear weapons. He suggested that while we did [...]
Last week, I became a bit irritated by the conversation around a conference table of twenty-five business operators. The talk was all about numbers, strategy and organization charts. Not one person mentioned that all of the plans they were cooking up had to be executed by real human beings. This is a great company, but [...]
The comments below appeared in the newsletter of A Network for Grateful Living:
“More often than not, history takes us by surprise. In 1865, chemist Friedrich August Kekulé discovered the structure of the benzene molecule – the foundation for fields like molecular biology and pharmacology – when he dozed by the fireplace and saw in his [...]
How does one person inspire others
We certainly don’t take specific political positions on this blog; our primary purpose is to explore the nature of inspiration. But whether or not one agrees with the political philosophy of Barack Obama, it’s clear that millions have been inspired by his written and spoken rhetoric in the past three [...]
Monday, February 23, 2009
When I was in undergraduate school at Linfield College in the 60s, my cadre of friends studying Religious Philosophy would drink strong coffee and discuss whether the prophets of various religions predicted the future or created it. Since I’m a believer in the power of declaration, I always came down on the side of creation.
My [...]
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Tagged Barack Obama, consumer confidence index, creation, Dennis Slattery, economics, hope, Inspiration, New York Times, optimism, Pacific Graduate Institute, prediction, Robert J. Shiller, story, the depression, the future, transformation, Yale
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Friday, February 13, 2009
Dan Ariely, a professor of behavioral economics at Duke, weighs in on the subject of motivation and inspiration in an editorial piece for the New York Times on November 20. He asks the timely question, “’What’s the Value of a Big Bonus?’” [1]
Ariely presents research that suggests that Campbell’s postulate about inspiration (see posting of February [...]
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Ask any school kid …motivation is an offering of incentive to accomplish a task. He or she can be motivated, either with a carrot or a stick, to finish a paper or do extra work for extra credit. Ask an office worker or an executive …he or she can be motivated by a bonus to perform more [...]
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Tagged 'Pathways to Bliss', Abraham Maslow, cross-cultural inspiration, Forum on Cross-Cultural Inspiration, God, hierarchy of needs, Inspiration, Joseph Campbell, meaning, motivation, mythology
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Thursday, February 5, 2009
February 5, 2009.
From the Morning Edition, July 18, 2005, comes an editorial by Iranian-born writer Azar Nafisi (Reading Lolita in Tehran) about empathy and its function in allowing us to experience the commonality between people of different heritages. She remarks, “Whenever I think of the word empathy, I think of a small boy named Huckleberry [...]
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
An Op-Ed in the New York Times on Sunday (1-25) by Scott Atran and Jeremy Ginges comments on the nature of inspiration, even though they never actually use the word. Atrans and Ginges addressed the Israeli/Palestinian issue, suggesting that conflicts based on a moral principle could not be dealt with in a secular way. Put [...]
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Tagged conflict, Inspiration, inspire others, Jeremy Ginges, morality, New York Times, peace, Scott Atran, symbolic gesture, symbolic sacrifice, values
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