Wonderful Things

I’m bumping into a lot of wonderful things that seem to be sprouting up all over the place.

To keep track of them and share them, I have made a wonderful-things tag on delicious.

Enjoy!

Persistence and Flexibility

Reading about the experiences of a web startup, the following comment caught my eye:

The key lessons I’ve learnt are the importance of being persistent and flexible in your mindset. It’s inevitable that you will go through tough times, and that your idea will evolve a lot, but what differentiates you as a startup founder is the determination you have to stick with it, and your ability to adapt.

Persistence and flexibility - two things that often seem to people like opposites. Either you are fully committed and let nothing derail you, stubbornly ploughing on oblivious to setbacks and failures, or you learn from experience, and when something is going very very badly, bite the bullet and give up.

Like a lot of important traits, what is important is learning to work with seeming opposites, and that is something that can’t be taught by just telling someone “be persistent”, “be flexible”, or even “be persistent and yet flexible”. It’s something that must be learned experientally.

Other such opposites, at least for entrepreneurs, are described in the book Smart Luck.

I described another pair of paradoxical qualities in my post on Patient Energy.

That is once again topical, as the Northern Ireland peace process reaches another huge milestone. Many people deserve great credit for that, including Tony Blair who has demonstrated incredible patience, energy and resilience in that area over ten years.

The Future of Microfinance

The conference described below is now over, but follow the links and you will find summaries of the discussion, which are a good picture of what the microfinance community is thinking about.

* * *

You may be interested in this virtual conference on microfinance:

http://www.cgap.org/Vision2015/about.html

Sessions are from 2pm-5pm GMT every day this upcoming week.

There are background papers and other stuff on the site, which are interesting in themselves.

A video that introduces the conference themes can be found here.

Before clicking, be aware this is a 66Mb MPEG-4 movie, and runs about 20 minutes.

Closely related, with more video of presentations by major players in microfinance and relevant papers here:

http://www.cgdev.org/content/calendar/detail/12276

Life’s Ironies: Prizes, Success, Points-of-View

On winning a Best Actor award at the Golden Globes, Bill Nighy commented:

I used to think that prizes were demeaning and divisive, until I got one, and now they seem sort of meaningful and real.

Also today, we got the news that Bob Dylan has apparently bought a mansion in the Scottish Highlands. Which somehow I think the young Bob Dylan would never have imagined that he would ever do. Probably he’d have associated buying mansions with selling out. I don’t know, I’m not that knowledgeable about him, but that’s my guess, based on what he sang about, and what I saw in No Direction Home.

And the greatest irony of all - John Lennon sang:

… Imagine no possesions… I wonder if you can…

And Yoko Ono is still collecting truckloads of royalties from that.

My point?

People are rotten judges on what their point-of-view will be in the future. They think their point-of-view represents some unchanging essence of who they are. But the view you have on life just depends on where you happen to be, and which way you’re looking. The same as the view out of a window depends on where that particular window is.

If you’re poor, you imagine that if you got rich, you wouldn’t behave like rich people do. (And maybe you have unprintable names that you call them.)

If you’re a success, you imagine that if you’d been born in different circumstances, you’d have been just as dynamic. That you wouldn’t give in to hopelessness and despair unlike the sad cases you see on the streets, and either pity or look down on.

If you’re blissfully in love, you imagine that your relationship will never descend into the squabbles and pettiness and stupidity that you’ve seen in other people’s marriages.

And you imagine that if you’d been born in a village in southern Afghanistan, or Victorian London, or a slave-owning Roman family, you somehow would have the same thoughts and values and personality that you do now, not the thoughts and values and personalities that people there have and had.

All of which makes you, and me, and all of us, far too ready to pass judgement on others, thinking that in their shoes we’d do something different than they do.

Mobile Phones - Impact in Africa

Tonight there was an excellent piece by BBC Newsnight on the impact of mobile phones in Africa generally, and Kenya specifically. See the 18 minute video here. (Or a short text article with alternate video link here.)

It’s also a vivid picture of life in Kenya generally, quite removed from a lot of the more cliched media pictures. It made me feel like going back there.

This reinforces the message of stories like Ringing the Changes in Nigeria and plenty of other evidence that mobiles are having a major impact on life.

As I said about this before: The kind of revolution that actually works.

What We Talk About, And What We Don’t

The BBC gives an interesting insight into what people talk about, at least when it comes to news and current affairs of all kinds. As they say about their “Have Your Say” feature:

It is a powerful body of opinion, one larger than any focus group and one which can be viewed anywhere in the world.

It speaks volumes about people trying to make sense of the new world order post 9/11, trying to work through the relations between different religions and cultures and shed some light on what is increasingly a complex and difficult world.

The BBC’s analysis of what people read and commented on in 2006 shows that 5 of the top 10 topics were about the Middle East or relationships with the Islamic world.

(And another two topics of those top ten were reactions to the death and near-death of two celebrities, Steve Irwin and Richard Hammond.)

This comes in a week when the Archbishop of Canterbury and other religious leaders have been telling us that the world musn’t ignore the issue of Middle East peace.

Ignore? All my life the world has obsessed about it. And never more so than in the last five years. But there is a world of difference between not ignoring something, and having the slightest idea of what to do that will work.

The Archbishop’s answer, of course, is to promote reconciliation and understanding and goodwill between men. Perhaps grounded in the injunction to love your enemies, and others.

And this is obviously wise and good. And just as obviously, it has been said many times before, and saying it one more time is unlikely to make any difference at all.

Loving your enemies hasn’t become popular these two thousand years. As John’s Gospel would have it: “The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.”

So if just repeating it one more time will have little effect, what will?

I don’t have the answers, I’m asking the question.

Maybe what it will take is a Gandhi, a Mandela, or a Martin Luther King to emerge in the Middle East. And that is not something any of us can make happen, except the one out there that takes that task upon themselves.

. . .

Meanwhile, notice what the world is not talking about.

As I pointed out in my discussion of terrorism, in the UK during 2006, precisely zero people were killed by terrorism. While in the same year three thousand people were killed in road accidents.

We talk about what is dramatic, new and visceral, and forget what is chronic and ongoing.

We love stories with villains and heroes, where we can get worked up in righteous indignation about the evildoers, whoever we decide they are.

And if 3,000 people died in the UK in road accidents in one year, by comparison 3,000 people die of malaria in Africa every single day, most of them children. Of course, Africa is a big place, and we need to get a sense of the numbers in terms we can relate to. In a population the size of London or New York, that would be 30-35 deaths from malaria every day, or roughly 12,000 in a year.

And that’s just a fraction of the deaths every day associated with extreme poverty.

But the world doesn’t talk a lot about that. Except when there’s a rock concert or a tsunami to bring it momentarily back into public discussion.

I don’t think it’s that the world doesn’t care - just look at the outpourings after the tsunami.

I think it’s that the world has collective attention deficit disorder.

Doctor Who Music Videos

Some video interpretations to Doctor Who soundtracks..

Beware: There are lots of spoilers for both 2005 & 2006 series.

They’re all good, but I especially like the two versions of Song For Ten, and If You Wait For Me, as they’re a bit of a different take than the others. Fans of Classic Who will love the Seven Doctors version of Song For Ten.

Muhammad Yunus on web and video

As you probably know, Muhammad Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize this year.

The text of his lecture at the awards ceremony is available here. The video of the lecture is currently not working, but footage of the ceremonial parts of the event can be found in the YouTube videos below. Note that these give a flavour of the celebrations, with a lot of music and dance, as well as discussion of Yunus’ work and thought. Yunus’ own lecture starts 16 minutes and 45 seconds into Part 2, but is incomplete.

Ceremony Part 1 (Approx 40 min)

Ceremony Part 2 (Approx 30 min)

. . .

It turns out that there is also a website devoted to Muhammad Yunus, founder of Grameen Bank. This site appears to be something like a fans and supporters site, rather than Yunus’ own doing, but it has lots of useful information, and it seems he was willing to cut the ribbon for its launch, so is presumably happy with it.

An official site seems to be planned, and “coming soon” here.

Meanwhile buried in the very professional fan site - as I hope I can call it without offending anyone! - there are links to a number of videos by Ashoka.

I haven’t had time to view them yet, as they are each about 40 minutes long, but they appear very interesting. Although they definitely have a promotional spin, rather than being independent documentaries.

The one on Yunus’ life (”Banker to the Poor”) looks especially interesting as it gives a real insight into the making of the man.

Direct links to the videos are:

Banker to the Poor

Building Social Enterprise

Creating a Poverty-Free World

Also on the site is a video by Ashoka founder Bill Drayton, on the concept of social enterprise:

Nothing More Powerful

A nice feature of all these videos is that subtitles are available in many languages.