Now, if you notice that the first follower is actually an underestimated form of leadership in itself. It takes guts to stand out like that. The first follower is what transforms a lone nut into a leader.
If you really care about starting a movement, have the courage to follow and show others how to follow. And when you find a lone nut doing something great, have the guts to be the first one to stand up and join in.
Another Guy Who Didn’t Get the Memo on the American Dream
Kennedy Odede grew up in Kibera, a slum in Kenya where more than one million people live in an area the size of New York City’s Central Park without sewage systems, roads, or access to basic health care and education.
And on Sunday, May 27th, he stood proudly before his graduating class with honors, and gave the commencement address. He became the first person from Africa’s largest slum to graduate from an American University.
Sounds like another guy who didn’t get the memo that America is “no longer the land of opportunity” and “the ‘American dream’ is a myth.”
The Person Who Says It Can’t Be Done Is Interrupted By The Person Doing It
In his latest book, The Price of Inequality, Columbia Professor and Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz examines the causes of income inequality and offers some remedies. In between, he reaches some startling conclusions, including that America is “no longer the land of opportunity” and “the ‘American dream’ is a myth.”
“If there is anybody at all who has a dream, then they can definitely make it happen,” she told WBTV. “There are no excuses. It depends on you and no one else.”
The second link above goes to a story about Dawn Loggins, an 18-year-old girl from Lawndale, NC, who, after her mother and stepfather left the state without her and she was dropped by her grandmother at a local homeless shelter, “just made a decision that I was not going to end up like my parents.” She did well enough in high school to be accepted at Harvard University.
I’m not a Nobel laureate but I can tell you that income correlates to things like education, skills and motivation. If you’re concerned about the inequality of your income, take the time you spend keeping up with fantasy football and reality television and invest it in learning and maintaining marketable skills, and see if your income doesn’t go up.
If you’re complaining about income inequality, and you have any idea who was voted off any reality television program in the last week, you need to pipe down and reexamine your priorities. Watch your programs if you want to, but keep in mind that you’re competing in the job market with people who are more serious than you are.
Girl Walk // All Day
This is delightful . . .
[vimeo http://vimeo.com/30293264]
This Is How the World Always Changes
Getting engaged in changing things is quite straightforward. If we have an idea, we step forward and serve. Instead of being overwhelmed and withdrawing, we act.
No grand actions are required; we just need to begin speaking up about what we care about. We don’t need to spend a lot of time planning or getting senior leaders involved; we don’t have to wait for official support. We just need to get started — for whatever issue or person we care about.
This is how the world always changes. Everyday people not waiting for someone else to fix things or come to their rescue, but simply stepping forward, working together, figuring out how to make things better.
Now it’s our turn.
Following Directions
I see the history of management as an effort to perfect the instructions that you hope someone will follow this time — even though they have never followed directions in their whole life.
Aside
Aside
Harvard Business Review: Customers Don’t Want More Features
Silence equals nonexistence. If I don’t raise my voice, it’s like I never existed. — Margaret Cho
The Elements of Style Rap
Ernest Hemingway on Symbolism
There isn’t any symbolysm [sic]. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The sharks are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know.
There Is No Digital Divide
We all know poor people are on the wrong side of an uncrossable technological chasm known as the "digital divide." Their lack of iPads and data plans and broadband is just one more way they’re doomed to stay poor right up until they become the shock troops of the zombie apocalypse, am I right?
Overheard
When Did We Forget Our Dreams?
xkcd: “The solution doesn’t involve watering down my every little idea and creative impulse for the sake of someday easing my fit into a mold. It doesn’t involve tempering my life to better fit someone’s expectations. It doesn’t involve constantly holding back for fear of shaking things up. . . .”
Click through to read the whole thing . . .
It’s Not Nice to Make Fun of People’s Clothes
I picked up a red striped T-shirt on sale at Old Navy. My son saw it and it seemed to me that he chuckled a little bit.
“What’s funny?” I asked.
“Where’s Waldo?” he said.
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
“Time’s a goon, right? Isn’t that the expression?”
Jules had drifted over from across the room. “I’ve never heard that,” he said. “‘Time is a goon’?”
“Would you disagree?” Bosco said, a little challengingly.
There was a pause. “No,” Jules said.
It’s not easy in a book to communicate the passage of time . . . you can write a book that takes place over a long period of time, but what I mean is to communicate the passage of time so the reader feels it rushing by, which Jennifer Egan has done.
Highly recommended!
Memorial Day
Hi everybody! It’s me, Lightning!
It’s Memorial Day and I just wanted to say don’t forget dogs on Memorial Day because dogs also serve in the armed forces and sometimes they get killed but they also stop a lot of people from getting killed.
— Lightning 
Aside
thinkpurpose: 3 questions about purpose for Monday mornings
Illusions of Patterns and Patterns of Illusion
In 1978, [Leonard] Koppett revealed a system that he claimed could determine, by the end of January every year, whether the stock market would go up or down in that calendar year. [Koppett’s system] worked for eleven straight years, from 1979 through 1989, got it wrong in 1990, and was correct again every year until 1998. But although Koppett’s predictions were correct for a streak of eighteen out of nineteen years, I feel confident in asserting that his streak involved no skill whatsoever. Why? Because Leonard Koppett was a columnist for Sporting News, and his system was based on the results of the Super Bowl, the championship game of professional football. Whenever the team from the (original) National Football League won, the stock market, he predicted, would rise. Whenever the team from the (original) American Football League won, he predicted the market would go down. Given that information, few people would argue that Koppett was anything but lucky. Yet had he had different credentials — and not revealed his method — he could have been hailed as the most clever analyst since Charles H. Dow.
Aside
Joel Goode: 5 Tips To Get Unstuck When You Hit a Plateau