🧭 Navigating The Weirdness via "The School of Life"
Cultivating a learning mindset as a form of resilience
**Let’s learn and practice together in School of Wise Innovation’s 🌸 Spring Cultivator starting April 3rd!**
Fellow travelers,
Happy spring equinox! I hope this note finds you well, and perhaps even contributes to some more wellness, in a time where that seems harder and harder to come by 🙏
It has been quite a season for many of us. A little more “WTF is going on?!” than usual…
I don’t have the answers or know the way, but I want to share a couple of recent vignettes that speak to a sense of how we might better surf some waves in these dynamic times.
❌ Anti-KPI: Deferrable Work > School of Life
Many in the business world are familiar with KPIs or Key Performance Indicators: a measurable value that demonstrates how effectively an individual or organization is achieving key business objectives (e.g. sales or social media engagement).
In contrast, an Anti-KPI measures something you want to discourage or reduce.
Undesirable behaviors, inefficiencies, or negative outcomes. Like a fight or a burnout day.
One of the Anti-KPI's I’ve been keeping an eye on is the number of times I am "too busy to show up for friends and family when the opportunity arises to" as I've noticed this happen a few times too many in recent years. It's not how I want to be. But it is sometimes how I am. And often a source of deep regret.
I spent a good chunk of this winter living on a regenerative farm near LA. On an inconspicuous Tuesday, one of the goats went into labor! I hung around for a bit to get in on the action, having never witnessed an animal let alone a human birth before, but heard things were going to take a while, so I put my headphones on and got lost in my to-do list. An hour later, I saw photos and videos pouring into the farm WhatsApp group of the beautiful birth, and felt quite silly for missing it 😭
I texted one of my collaborators, Ryan:
“Anti-KPI: missing goat births for random computer work 🐐"
The very next day, we received an alert for a fire close by and immediately huddled up to prepare to evacuate. No small task for a complex facility with lots of people and livestock and work-in-progress protocols for this kind of situation.
I initially cancelled a big Zoom call, had the awareness to pause and consider how I wanted to show up in this crisis moment, and did some little things to support the IRL operation. But wound up hopping on that Zoom and spending much of the day doing things that weren't super relevant to what was happening here and now...
I texted Ryan again:
“Anti-KPI: forgoing live climate disaster resilience training for non-urgent Zoom call 🔥”
A couple of days later, another goat went into labor! and this time I was DETERMINED to be there to witness the moment of birth. But believe it or not, I missed it again!
And so the following week, when I learned that my Great Uncle Harold was in the ICU, I didn’t hesitate to cancel all my calls and drove two hours to be by his side for the next 48 of impromptu death doula training, in what would be one of the more meaningful and educational experiences of my life (happy to share more upon request).
What are your personal KPI’s? Anti-KPI's?
What's The School of Life for you today?
By “School of Life” - what I mean is learning from direct experience of what’s happening here and now. An unlimited well, available all the time and everywhere, if we can get curious about it.
Which feels like an important well to drink from a little more these days, as modern Western education focuses more on training an industrial workforce than creating healthy, whole, and resilient humans.
Of course, we can’t always defer productivity in favor of stopping to talk to the person on the street or getting curious about what the birds are up to. Prioritizing “life” and learning vs. “work” is a real tension many of us wrestle with, at all time scales, with varying degrees of material and psychological capacity.
But as the modernity experiment unravels, I don’t know about you but I’ve been hearing Earth crying: “alright humans, everybody back to school!” Re-learn how to live and work well. How to be here now together in a good way. How to be in what some indigenous cultures refer to as “right relationship” with the web of life. Individually, organizationally, communally, collectively.
I’m not sure if any of us are adequately prepared to meet today’s unique challenges. To hold multiple viewpoints amidst a toxic information ecology, to take care of our bodies amidst a toxic food and water system, to make wise choices amidst great uncertainty...
Wherever we are positioned, it seems there’s a clear invitation for us to embrace the reality that we are in a process of un-learning and re-learning, and adopt a learning mindset moving forward. Place a higher value on learning.
We can and ought to engage in structured learning as capacity allows - courses and workshops, podcasts and books to help us build relevant skills and awarenesses. And of course, there will be those big life experiences that are bound to school us, and we ought to pay extra close attention to those.
But there’s also a treasure trove right under our noses, that little by little can support greater understanding, emotional regulation, connection, health (physical, mental, spiritual), meaning and love.
"Everything that happens is a teacher. The art is learning to sit at the feet of your own life and be taught by it." - Pema Chödrön
Developing the strength and skills to deal with challenges effectively and grow from them will not only help us adapt well in the face of coming adversity, but better enjoy the beauty of being alive now and show up with more love in moments that matter. Influencing what we'll remember on our deathbed. And how we'll be remembered.
Something small yet mighty that has been part of my learning journey is adopting Shabbat (considered God’s greatest gift to the Jewish people - a temple in time for renewal and learning and all the good stuff!).
Building off great results, I’ve been exploring extending Shabbat to all time scales:
Because I find that if I don’t take fallow time to pause and regenerate myself, I wind up making shitty choices and ripples from a place of wound, illness, and fear instead of wholeness, health, and love...
+ integrating a more cyclical relationship with time not only reconnects us to natural ecological cycles, but also creates placeholders to fill with the practices that regenerate our lives and work!
They say you become what you practice, so I've also been thinking about what kinds of practices might support those exploring how to live, work, and create with greater harmony. Here’s a whole bunch of activities that I’m enjoying leaning into, that pair well with Regenerative Time:
Yes, we’ll also need policy and incentives changes, mass movements and miracles to navigate the weirdness of this transition between worlds. But the little changes we make in our thoughts, speech, and actions matter too.
One of adrienne maree brown’s principles of Emergent Strategy is Small Is Good, Small Is All. The large is a reflection of the small.
Small-scale interactions and changes (especially at the personal and interpersonal level) are fractal patterns that connect to and influence larger systemic change. Transformation at the smallest level matters profoundly because these patterns repeat and expand to create larger impacts.
"Greet the dawn. Orient to a liturgical calendar. Note the differing qualities of silence in a day. Be there for others. These will do us the world of good. These are technologies for defeating demons." - Martin Shaw
🎶 Navigating The Weirdness
The latest Emerald podcast says it much better than I can. If you feel overwhelmed by the news cycle or generally confused about how to orient, get comfortable and give this podcast a listen.
As usual, I find Josh offers the most valuable perspective that is underrepresented in mainstream discourse. This one just might help calm your nerves and open your heart:
“We live in times of individual, sociocultural and planetary crisis, exacerbated by rising divisions between people. How have humans historically navigated such times of crisis? Yes, we've organized, taken action, and responded as we've been called to respond. But we have also deepened our connection to the greater cosmos, through songs and poems and rituals of devotion, through crying out to a beloved universe whose workings remain a mystery but to whom we feel intimately and inextricably connected.” - Josh Schrei
+ a few related podcasts that have been moving me this year:
🌸 Spring Cultivator
If you resonate with some of what I’ve shared above, you might enjoy our upcoming offering!
In efforts to re-imagine innovation education, School of Wise Innovation has set out to design a year-long A̶c̶c̶e̶l̶e̶r̶a̶t̶o̶r̶ ̶D̶e̶c̶e̶l̶e̶r̶a̶t̶o̶r̶ CULTIVATOR program that touches upon all aspects of entrepreneurship, especially those which have been neglected in dominant culture, which has exacerbated the crises we face.
We’ve divided the year into four seasonal cohorts, each with a distinct focus:
❄️ Winter on Inner Development
🌸 Spring on Collective Wayfinding
☀️ Summer on Organizational Development
🍂 Fall on Vision Actualization
Whereas winter was more focused on integrating the lessons from the previous year, regenerating ourselves, and realigning with our vision and values for the coming cycle,
Spring is more focused on navigating tremendous change while shaping our projects in community, with the following learning outcomes in mind:
This is not your average business school. It’s the business school that is needed if we want to cultivate the conditions for a healthy, thriving, and equitable world for the next generations.
Please help us pass along the word to anybody who you think might resonate. We’re hosting an Info Session next Wed March 26th featuring School for Seasonal Living’s Belinda Liu.
Those who sign up for Spring Cultivator will also get access to recordings from Winter Cultivator.
It’s such a joy to learn alongside friends. Happy to pass along discounts to the homies 😎
It’s about time 🤭
With gratitude,
Andrew
