Scott Perry's Blog, page 44

What I've Been Reading - Summer 2020

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Books are efficient and cost effective learning tools. They are my go-to source for inspiration and information in my endeavors. Here are four books that currently inform my journey in developing Creative On Purpose.

Manifesto for a Moral Revolution: Practices to Build a Better World, by Jacqueline Novogratz

Drawing on inspiring stories from change-makers around the world and on memories of her own most difficult experiences, Jacqueline divulges the most common leadership mistakes and the mind-sets needed to rise above them.

Community: The Structure of Belonging, by Peter Block

Block explores examples revealing that community building is a powerful way to address social problems. A way of thinking that creates an opening for authentic communities to exist and details what each of us can do to make that happen.

The Creativity Leap: Unleash Curiosity, Improvisation, and Intuition at Work, Natlie Nixon

Combining creativity tools and techniques with real-world stories, Nixon provokes, inspires, and invites us to unleash our innate creativity. She offers a dynamic, integrative way to adapt and innovate, allowing us to access our full human selves.

The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are, Robert Wright

One of the most provocative science books in recent years. Wright unveils the genetic strategies behind everything from our sexual preferences to our office politics--as well as their implications for our moral codes and public policies.

These four books, more than any other of the dozens I've recently read, have had the biggest impact on my journey in building the Creative On Purpose brand and developing and delivering on its promise to help others fly higher in endeavors that make a difference. You can find them and other helpful resources in the Creative On Purpose Bookstore.

Let's keep flying higher together!

Scott Perry - Difference Maker at Creative on Purpose.

Ready to get out of your own way and get going in endeavors that make a difference? Stepping Into Possibility is a 3-minute read that shares three questions that will get you unstuck and on track doing the work you're meant to do!

If what you just read resonated, please share it with a friend.

Appreciation & Presence

One of the reasons appreciation is such an effective and efficient mood lifter is that it returns us to the here and now. It cultivates presence and mindfulness.

You can’t be grateful and anxious at the same time.

Anxiety is often caused by attachment to unhappy stories you’re telling yourself about the past or unhealthy expectations you have about the future.

Unhealthy desires are the root of suffering and appreciation is the antidote to desire.

Gratitude helps you see there are opportunities in the obstacles before you and the silver linings of your situation.

Appreciation recognizes that you are not flawed or broken. You’re a work in progress.

What unhealthy stories based on your past are you ready to let go of? What outcomes beyond your control are you ready to detach from?

Let’s get where we’re going by starting where we are right now.

Excerpt from Onward: Where Certainty Ends Possibility Begins

Scott Perry - Chief Difference Maker at Creative on Purpose.

Ready to get out of your own way and get going in endeavors that make a difference? Stepping Into Possibility is a 3-minute read that shares three questions that will get you unstuck and on track doing the work you're meant to do!

If what you just read resonated, please share it with a friend.

Community & Culture

Community and culture are terms often misused and conflated.

Community is driven by proximity. The people you find yourself surrounded by defines your community. 

Culture is driven by ideas and actions. The shared ideas and idiosyncrasies of a group define culture. Culture isn’t necessarily tied to where we are at any given moment. 

We spend our lives so thoroughly immersed in community and culture that we don’t notice its impacts on us. We react and respond to its whims and wishes unconsciously.

Time to wake up.

You get to choose who you do and don’t spend time with. You also get to choose the beliefs and behavior you accept and those you don’t.

Get the community right and together bend the culture to help everyone develop their potential and deliver on their promise.

How can you be more intentional and specific about the community you spend time with and the culture you’re co-creating?

Excerpt from Onward: Where Certainty Ends Possibility Begins

Scott Perry - Chief Difference Maker at Creative on Purpose.

Ready to get out of your own way and get going in endeavors that make a difference? Stepping Into Possibility is a 3-minute read that shares three questions that will get you unstuck and on track doing the work you're meant to do!

If what you just read resonated, please share it with a friend.

 

Community Vs. Culture

Community and culture are terms often misused and conflated.

Community is driven by proximity. The people you find yourself surrounded by defines your community. 

Culture is driven by ideas and actions. The shared ideas and idiosyncrasies of a group define culture. Culture isn’t necessarily tied to where we are at any given moment. 

We spend our lives so thoroughly immersed in community and culture that we don’t notice its impacts on us. We react and respond to its whims and wishes unconsciously.

Time to wake up.

You get to choose who you do and don’t spend time with. You also get to choose the beliefs and behavior you accept and those you don’t.

Get the community right and together bend the culture to help everyone develop their potential and deliver on their promise.

How can you be more intentional and specific about the community you spend time with and the culture you’re co-creating?

Scott Perry - Chief Difference Maker at Creative on Purpose.

Ready to get out of your own way and get going in endeavors that make a difference? Stepping Into Possibility is a 3-minute read that shares three questions that will get you unstuck and on track doing the work you're meant to do!

If what you just read resonated, please share it with a friend.

 

The Digital Campfire

If you're reading this, you're engaged in an endeavor or aspire to do so. You're leaning into a passion project, side hustle, or even vocation that enhances your life through serving others.

The Creative on Purpose Handbook encourages applying yourself to your work with a 'go small' strategy. Taking daily steps developing a small offer for a small audience.

A new edge I'm playing with that enhances this process of doing intentional work with and for the right people is the 'digital campfire.' Creating online meet-ups for those I serve and seek to help more directly.

Many of us whose enterprise is delivered online see others building huge digital bonfires. These conflagrations blaze bigger and brighter on purpose to attract and gather crowds of strangers.

These pyres-for-profit are fueled by advertising and clickbait. Digital bonfires of this type are impersonal, shallow, and unsatisfying. They give you a roasting stick, but nothing to stick on the end of it to toast.

On the other hand, a digital campfire is an intimate, immediate, and fulfilling gathering. They're built for people whose attention, trust, and permission you've already earned. These events are intentionally designed meet-ups created on and for a purpose.

Some digital bonfires are for sharing ideas and insights, others for asking or answering questions, still others are for discussing ideas or to work on shared challenges. The possibilities are endless.

Stealing attention and transaction are not part of the digital campfire ethos. The point of a digital campfire is not a bait and switch operation intended to sell overpriced hotdogs and marshmallows. 

You're assembling to encourage connection, belonging, and enrollment. As the convener, you are the community organizer, or cultural guide.

The consequence of committing to consistently coordinating digital campfires for the Creative on Purpose community is profound. Enrollment in the Difference Maker Community and Coaching has increased steadily.

But that is a side effect, not the ultimate aim. The motivation is to see, hear, and connect those I serve and create inspiring, insightful, and fulfilling experiences for them.

Focus on the people you're already surrounded by and serve them generously and wholeheartedly by inviting them to congregate around a digital campfire. The effort will be as rewarding for you as for them.

What digital campfire can you organize today?

Scott Perry - Chief Difference Maker at Creative on Purpose.

Ready to get out of your own way and get going in endeavors that make a difference? Stepping Into Possibility is a 3-minute read that shares three questions that will get you unstuck and on track doing the work you're meant to do!

If what you just read resonated, please share it with a friend.

The Problem with Culture

You probably heard the joke about an old fish swimming by a couple of youngsters and saying, "Hey, kids, how's the water today?" The young fish return the greeting, and then after a bit, one young fish turns to the other and says, "What the heck is water?"

That's the problem with culture. Most of the time we don't recognize we're surrounded by it. Yet, it informs and inspires our unconscious attitudes and habitual responses toward our situation and each other.

But at some point the culture, as is its wont, shifts dramatically or even violently. We're shocked and unprepared to navigate the new normal. It's upsetting and unsettling.

But does it have to be?

Most of the time, most of us swim in cultural ponds that are pretty small. We actually have more influence over 'the way things are' than we're willing to embrace.

What if we spent a little more time thinking about the culture we want to compass? What if we then convened enough of the right people and began bending the culture in that direction?

The problem with culture is solved when we choose to stop ignoring it or being a victim of it and decide instead to work together and create it on purpose.

Onward.

Scott Perry - Chief Difference Maker at Creative on Purpose.

Ready to get out of your own way and get going in endeavors that make a difference? Stepping Into Possibility is a 3-minute read that shares three questions that will get you unstuck and on track doing the work you're meant to do!

If what you just read resonated, please share it with a friend.

Volition

Volition is one of my favorite words (although coddiwomple is still in the top spot).

Volition is the exercise of will. Pursuing a difference worth making with integrity and intention. Volition and will reflect your character, who you really are.

Volition requires a readiness to make decisions and a willingness to commit to acting on them. Volition demands the exercise of will in service of creating a worthwhile or necessary change happen.

Volition entails resolve. Resolve implies firmness of purpose and determination to see your decision through, regardless of challenges, obstacles, or distractions.

Embracing volition doesn't guarantee the outcome you seek, but it does ensure the journey will be worth it. Wherever you end up as you coddiwomple along in your endeavor, volition helps you build identity and forge meaning as you go.

Are you applying yourself to your endeavors with volition?

Onward.

Scott Perry - Chief Difference Maker at Creative on Purpose.

Ready to get out of your own way and get going in endeavors that make a difference? Stepping Into Possibility is a 3-minute read that shares three questions that will get you unstuck and on track doing the work you're meant to do!

If what you just read resonated, please share it with a friend.

What Outrage Teaches

Outrage is a natural reaction to injustice. We're programmed by biology and culture to express disgust, anger, or frustration when experiencing a personal offense or moral injustice.

Outrage triggers our ‘fight or flight’ instinct. When confronted by an abuse, the impulse to either lash out or stand mute is a fundamental human inclination.

To deny or suppress outrage is neither sensible nor healthy. We must sit with our outrage and the outrage of others. We must listen and consider, and do so with care and compassion.

It's seductive to feel entitled to our outrage. It's easy to let outrage inspire what we do next. But are acts dictated by outrage likely to promote progress or well being?

Can acting on outrage make things truly better? Can we honor the humanity and dignity of all concerned while outrage reigns?

Yes, we are entitled to our outrage. But if we put it in control of what happens next, we must also accept that we earn the fruits of outrage.

What to do?

The truth is, I don’t know.

There are atrocities. They are inhuman and intolerable. We must listen and try harder to understand. We can, and must, be and do better.

But is outrage the best motivation for a better way forward? I wonder if outrage isn't better at pointing to the problem than it is at solving it?

I believe that justice requires us all to do the work. Yet, that effort won’t get us where we need to go if we allow outrage to decide what we do next.

We must, of course, acknowledge and learn from outrage. It's not the answer, but like every great teacher, it points to essential questions.  Outrage is helping us see the change we need to make.

Based on what outrage teaches, let's endeavor together to make things better not full of outrage, but full of grace.

Onward.

Scott Perry - Difference Maker at Creative on Purpose.

Ready to get out of your own way and get going in endeavors that make a difference? Stepping Into Possibility is a 3-minute read that shares three questions that will get you unstuck and on track doing the work you're meant to do!

If what you just read resonated, please share it with a friend.

Productivity Vs. Progress

I conflated productivity with progress for a long time.

What I learned is that getting lots of different things done (productivity) is a seductive way to hide from getting one thing done well (progress).

Productivity is merely the ability to create or generate goods or services. Progress is the more important activity of moving toward a goal.

Progress doesn't demand that you grind, hustle, pull long hours, over-do, or anything else you might do to feel productive.

Progress simply requires that you commit to making a change worth making and do only what must be done to achieve it.

Progress isn't the result of productivity. Progress is the result of essentiality.

What can you put on your 'stop-doing' list today to help you make actual progress in your endeavor?

Scott Perry - Difference Maker at Creative on Purpose.

Ready to get out of your own way and get going in endeavors that make a difference? Stepping Into Possibility is a 3-minute read that shares three questions that will get you unstuck and on track doing the work you're meant to do!

If what you just read resonated, please share it with a friend.

Right Now It's Not My Turn

When you're a committed difference maker, the impulse to try to make things better is strong. The default posture for people like us is to leap to action and lead. We want to help and think the best way is for us to do something now.

I wonder if the more helpful thing for some of us to do right now is to pause, pay attention, and listen? Maybe this is a moment when some of us should resist the urge to stand up and speak up. Perhaps some of us can better serve others and the situation by collecting dots before connecting them.

For some of us, the hard part about work that matters is sitting with the tension of unknowing and uncertainty. We're programmed to jump in and thrash our way to clarity. Often we are quick to judge and slow to consider.

We have that quite backward.

If you think you might be "some of us," let's make some time and space for seeing, hearing, and understanding the perspectives and lived experiences of others before we chime in with what needs to happen next.

I believe, more strongly than ever, that we enhance our lives most through endeavors that serve others.

And yet...

Before we start to step together through a broken status quo and into a better possibility, we must agree on the journey we're all enrolling in and recognize that it may be someone else's turn to lead.

h/t Randah Taher on the title of this post.

Scott Perry - Difference Maker at Creative on Purpose.

Ready to get out of your own way and get going in endeavors that make a difference? Stepping Into Possibility is a 3-minute read that shares three questions that will get you unstuck and on track doing the work you're meant to do!

If what you just read resonated, please share it with a friend.