To see people who notice a need in the world and do something about it. … Those are my heroes.*
(Fred Rogers)

Yes, you have a calling: to serve people in a way that they need (or want). The opportunity is for each of us to choose a path and follow that, not for your own benefit, but because of what it can produce for others.**
(Seth Godin)

Who are the people who need you to turn up and do what you do?

Seth Godin encourages me to focus on my “smallest viable market,” not to aim for everyone – which in the end is to aim at no-one:

Organise your project, your life, and your organisation around the minimum. What’s the smallest market you can survive on.**

If I could be there for fifty people in a year, I’d be happy.

Thank you to all those who are there for me.

(*Fred Rogers, quoted in Stillness is the Key.)
(**From Seth Godin’s This is Marketing.)

What’s really happening. What the goal is. And how it is that you’re part of the eternal flow. The important thing is the love affair. The important thing is the dance itself.*
(Richard Rohr)

I’m not rational and neither are you.**
(Seth Godin)

In his latest book This is Marketing, Seth Godin marks the important difference between being market-driven and marketing-driven.

Before you think this is not for you, the reality is we’re all marketers, we’re all selling something, whether it be a belief, a sports team, a political party, an opinion, a product, a dream, a course of action … .

Marketing-driven is basically listening to self and wanting people to “buy” what we have.

Market-driven is listening to what people and providing something they want – allowing for the fact that people may not know what they want and we have to come up with some interpretation they may not have thought about – remember Henry Ford’s suspicion that people would have wanted faster horses rather than what he had in mind.

It is the latter that makes it more possible to keep our eyes on the infinite game – to include as many as possible for as long as possible – the great flow of life we all find ourselves within for around eighty or so years.

(*From Richard Rohr’s The Divine Dance.)
(**From Seth Godin’s This is Marketing.)

Our awareness has been stretched wider than ever in history, but often at the cost of taking away a lifetime of experiences.*
(Seth Godin)

life is risk**
(Anne Dufourmantelle)

In life there is general risk and there is specific risk.

The general can come to us anywhere and at anytime. Specific risk comes through our particular pursuits of purpose and meaning.

Sometimes these merge, as they did for Anne Dufourmantelle in 2017. Seeing two children in difficulty in the water off a St Tropez beach, Dufourmantelle rushed to their aid but drowned in her effort.

Dufourmantelle’s story is a powerful one of a person reaching beyond belief and feeling into actioning, or, as Ryan Holiday would shape these: Mind, Spirit and Body. Holiday tells Dufourmantelle’s story in his section on Body – skin in the game as Nassim Taleb would call it.

The philosopher had written a book entitled In Praise of Risk and I’ve added another of her books to my wishlist: Power of Gentleness: Meditations on the Risk of Living.

Dufourmantelle’s example is both challenging and inspiring for me; I am reminded of the third elemental truth:

Your life is not about you.^^

(*From Seth Godin’s blog: Awareness vs. experience.)
(**Anne Dufourmantelle, quoted in Ryan Holiday’s Stillness is the Key.)
(^From Richard Rohr’s Adam’s Return.)

We are most whole when we are most free to give.*
(Erwin McManus)

Where your pain is, there is your life, you might say.**
(Joseph Campbell)

Some feel they need to take in order to be or make themselves. Others have learnt it is by giving they become one with themselves and have even more to give.

There are more opportunities in life for the latter than the former.

(*From Erwin McManus’ Uprising.)
(**From Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth.)

The stars align when we show up every day to make the most of the opportunity that’s right in front of us**
(Bernadette Jiwa)

For truly I tell you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, “Move from here to there,” and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you.**
(Jesus of Nazareth)

Every one has their particular mustard seed, something powerful to be nurtured and grown. (It’s likely that Jesus was thinking of a kind of mustard plant that was banned because it could take over a garden.)

Hugh Macleod doodles:

The most powerful force in the universe is human creativity.^

Not quite, but I get what he means. Pound for pound, humans are quite amazing.

In his book The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse, Charlie Mackesy includes this conversation between the boy and the mole:

I’m so small, said the mole. Yes, said the boy, but you make a big difference.^^

It’s not about how big and popular and noticed we are, it’s about focusing on what we do best. We might call this our gaze.

What is it that you come back each day to “look” at intently, to ask questions of, to find out more about, to play with, to experiment and fail with, but keep doing something with, every single day?

This is your gaze … and it’s powerful if you encourage it to grow through these ways and means.

I’ve previously shared how I’d been asked by a group of artists what my art medium was; I replied, after pondering, I’m a people-artist:

We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones.*^

(*From The Story of Telling: The Daily Opportunity.)
(**Matthew 17: 20-21.)
(^From gapingvoid’s Good ideas don’t care where they come from.)
(^^From Charlie Mackesy’s The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse.)
(*^Henry David Thoreau, quoted in Ryan Holiday’s Stillness is the Key.)

Routine, done for long enough and done sincerely enough, becomes more than routine. It becomes ritual – it becomes sanctified and holy.*
(Ryan Holiday)

There are two kinds of ritual; those that we develop from the inside-out and those that come to us from the outside-in.

The former provide us the greatest opportunities for developing the kind of routines and rituals that enlarge our worlds and those of others, to constantly stimulate the new.

Every day, I get up at the same time and move through the first moments of the day in the same way, arriving soon at my journal and pen and books and silence.

I am never lost even though the world can spin. Here the ideas are born that I take into my work with others.

A master is in control. A master has a system. A master turns the ordinary into the sacred.*

(*From Ryan Holiday’s Stillness is the Key.)

Everything we have come to call the arts seems to be in almost every 3-year-old. […] When 3 and 4-year-olds draw, the thing they are drawing can change from one thing into another, surprising them.*
(Lynda Barry)

If you see a good deal remarkable in me, I see just as much remarkable in you.**
(Walt Whitman)

Every day provides an opportunities for us to change who we are and help others to change, too.

Playfulness helps us change.

The artfulness Lynda Barry observes in the drawings of three and four year olds is an expression of playfulness we have once known and perhaps lost. She reflects:

Stories show up on their own when kids draw. The drawing itself propels the story, changing it in a living way.*

Johan Huizinga writes about how our stories contain both play and seriousness until they become civilised:

Living myth knows no distinction between play and seriousness. Only when myth has become mythology, that is, literature, borne along as traditional lore by a culture which has in the meantime more or less outgrown the primitive imagination, only then will the contrast between play and seriousness apply to myth – and to its detriment.^

Barry is noticing living stories in the art and engagement of children and engages with them to try to recover this for herself:

This is the state of mind I’m after when I make comics and spending time working beside four-year-olds has helped me re-learn one of our oldest natural and spontaneous languages. Words and pictures together makes something happen that is more than good or bad drawing.*

We look at children’s drawing and wonder whether they are finished; we may even make the worst possible mistake and judge they are not very good. James Carse helps us to see what we have lost if we are but observers of art:

Finite players stand before infinite play as they stand before art, looking at it, making a poiema^^ of it. If however, the observer sees the poeisis*^ in the work they cease at once being observers. They find themselves in its time, aware that it remains unfinished, aware that their reading of the poetry is itself poetry. Infected by the genius of the artist they recover their own genius, becoming beginners with nothing but possibility ahead of them.^*

Ultimately, we are not trying to produce something that is finished but something that allows us to continue playing and this for others, too, so they may recover their genius and help us grow in ours.

(*From Lynda Barry’s Making Comics.)
(**From Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.)
(^From Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens.)
(^^Poiema being a piece of art.)
(*^Poeisis being the spirit or genius of the artist.)
(^*From James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games.)