is good at something. In a ServiceSpace context, that's a daily assumption -- by design. When your organizing principles forbid you to hire staff, or fundraise, or sell anything, you are happily forced to make art with the colors you've got in front of you. And as we've witnessed over the years, creative constraints like these can actually end up seeding inspiring innovations.  Last Wednesday, I met V. R. Ferose, a like-hearted artist who applied this thinking in an unlikely setting: The corporate world. In fact, a tipping point in Ferose's journey came when he published an article in Forbes. The title? Everybody is Good at Something. T... posted on May 27 2015 (28,637 reads)

studies reveal how to deliberately cultivate gratitude in ways that counter materialism and its negative effects. Now that we’re a week into 2015, most of us have come down from the buzz of the holidays and returned to life as normal. And after spending weeks, if not months, obsessing over the gifts and goodies that awaited us in December, some of us may feel a post-holiday hangover, where we realize that we’re probably no happier than we were before we got that new flat screen TV or cappuccino maker. This won’t come as a surprise to anyone tracking the science of happiness, which suggests that material things are unlikely to boost our happiness in a sustained o... posted on Apr 9 2015 (34,950 reads)

to revel in the “sudden awareness of the citizenry of all things within one world.” Nearly a century before  modern neuroscience presented the uncomfortable finding that mind-wandering is making us unhappy, Bertrand Russell contemplated the conquest of happiness and pointed to the immense value of “fruitful monotony” — a certain quality of presence with the ordinary rhythms of life. The diaries and letters of humanity’s greatest minds are strewn with such instances of finding happiness in simple everyday moments, but no one captures the humble grace of presence better than Mary Oliver in one particularly bewitching passage from ... posted on Apr 30 2015 (19,971 reads)

is how other people want us to live our lives… Choosing Must is the greatest thing we can do with our lives.” “Does what goes on inside show on the outside?,” young Vincent van Gogh despaired in a moving letter to his brother while floundering to find his purpose. “Someone has a great fire in his soul and nobody ever comes to warm themselves at it, and passers-by see nothing but a little smoke at the top of the chimney.” A century later, Joseph Campbell stoked that hearth of the soul with his foundational treatise on finding your bliss. And yet every day, countless hearths and hearts grow ashen in cubicles around the world as we... posted on Jul 1 2015 (15,751 reads)

finish the moment, to find the journey’s end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom.” In contemplating the shortness of life, Seneca considered what it takes to live wide rather than long. Over the two millennia between his age and ours — one in which, caught in the cult of productivity, we continually forget that “how we spend our days is … how we spend our lives” — we’ve continued to tussle with the eternal question of how to fill life with more aliveness. And in a world awash with information but increasingly vacant of wisdom, navigating the maze of the human experience in the h... posted on Aug 3 2015 (1,612 reads)

12 years at Microsoft, 5 of which were spent in India, applying electronic technologies for international development, Kentaro Toyama came to one conclusion: technology is not the answer. In our digital age of exponential tech innovation—where the average American adult spends 11 hours a day on electronic media, the majority of the nation’s cell phone owners sleep with it by their side, and companies like Google and Levis are coming up with ‘smart jeans’— the undercurrents of mainstream culture seem to be marching to the beat of a drum far different from Kentaro’s—one that toots technology as an indefatigable sign of progress.  ... posted on Aug 12 2015 (14,494 reads)

finish the moment, to find the journey’s end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom.” In contemplating the shortness of life, Seneca considered what it takes to live wide rather than long. Over the two millennia between his age and ours — one in which, caught in the cult of productivity, we continually forget that “how we spend our days is … how we spend our lives” — we’ve continued to tussle with the eternal question of how to fill life with more aliveness. And in a world awash with information but increasingly vacant of wisdom, navigating the maze of the human experience in the hope of ar... posted on Aug 3 2015 (12,499 reads)

of the best ways to increase our own happiness is to do things that make other people happy. In countless studies, kindness and generosity have been linked to greater life satisfaction, strongerrelationships, and better mental and physical health—generous people even live longer. What’s more, the happiness people derive from giving to others creates a positive feedback loop: The positive feelings inspire further generosity—which, in turn, fuels greater happiness. And research suggests that kindness is truly contagious: Those who witness and benefit from others’ acts of kindness are more likely to be kind themselves; a single act of kindness spreads through ... posted on Dec 12 2015 (21,605 reads)

been an avid hiker my whole life. From the time I first strapped on a backpack and headed into the Sierra Nevada Mountains, I was hooked on the experience, loving the way being in nature cleared my mind and helped me to feel more grounded and peaceful. But, even though I’ve always believed that hiking in nature had many psychological benefits, I’ve never had much science to back me up…until now, that is. Scientists are beginning to find evidence that being in nature has a profound impact on our brains and our behavior, helping us to reduce anxiety, brooding, and stress, and increase our attention capacity, creativity, and our ability to connect with other peo... posted on Mar 20 2016 (27,764 reads)

most demanding part of living a lifetime as an artist,”Anne Truitt observed in her ceaselessly insightful diaries, “is the strict discipline of forcing oneself to work steadfastly along the nerve of one’s own most intimate sensitivity.” But if locating that nerve weren’t hard enough, contacting it can be terrifying and staying with the excruciating vulnerability of that contact for a lifetime can feel next to impossible. And yet great artists have managed to make the seemingly unimaginable the raw material of their art. What it takes to master that vulnerable-making discipline is what Annie Dillard — one of the finest writers and most radiant... posted on Apr 15 2016 (13,126 reads)

of discernment. The way of intentionality, the way of experimenting, and conversation, and collaboration in the family around what the central priorities are. RW:  Okay. Now, this story that you told about the little girl who says, “The Lion King is too loud.” And then you found out she was talking about what was going on in her head. I mean, that’s a pretty disturbing story. Mary:  It is, and it should disturb us. That’s what’s happening. These images are so strong and so fearful. The father dies, the uncle’s evil. It doesn’t correspond to children’s daily life. It’s exactly that that’s the issue for me; instead... posted on Jul 11 2016 (21,468 reads)

Srinivasan and her husband Ragu Padmanabhan had Silicon Valley careers, when in 2008, soon after having their son Aum, they promptly sold everything off and moved to rural India. They wanted to farm, but had no experience in it and so set out as students of the land -- for instance, when they planted 9000 trees on their barren land, thousands didn't make it, but thousands blossomed into a mini-forest. More generally, they jumped in with the intention of living and being in a way that was better aligned with their inner voices, and learning what they needed along the way. In their own words, they just saw it simply as an"experiment in laying a new path on an old road that leads... posted on Sep 22 2016 (25,871 reads)

an effort to shop from socially-conscious brands this holiday season, I came across an interesting startup that caught my eye. Two Blind Brothers is a cause-driven clothing brand that sells luxury causal wear and gives 100% of its net profits to medical research to cure blindness. Read on. The line was founded by Bradford and Bryan Manning, two brothers affected by a macular degeneration disease known as Stargardt. The disease causes progressive damage to the center retina causing a loss of central vision. The National Eye Institute estimates that one in 10,000 people are affected by the disease. Since being diagnosed at age six, both brothers have progressively l... posted on Dec 30 2016 (12,747 reads)

paradox here is that the accommodations needed for somebody with a mental illness are often minor—things like flex time to see your psychologist during lunch. The cost to the organization is miniscule, but people are too afraid of the shame and stigma to even ask for it. There needs to be support for individuals with mental illness to dare to disclose. Contact and support are urgently needed, including empathy on the part of the general public. We need to change media images. We did a study on how mental illness is portrayed in the media—with coders blind to what we were looking for—and found little change in how mental illness has been portrayed over t... posted on Sep 4 2017 (9,859 reads)

install solar panels at College of the Atlantic's Beech Hill Farm. Photo courtesy of College of the Atlantic These are the colleges and universities making an impact not just on campus, but in the world at large. As many environmental regulations in the United States are reconsidered and loosened, these colleges and universities are committed to cultivating sustainable campuses and future environmental leaders. The vegetables harvested by students from University of California, Davis, go to the Yolo County Food Bank. Photo courtesy of Gregory Urquiaga/UC Davis UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, DAVIS; DAVIS, CALIF. U.C. Davis is among the schools leading the way in... posted on Nov 18 2017 (10,956 reads)

Sharma was born to a family of farmers in a village close to Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh. He started farming at the age of 10 along with his family but moved to Bhopal after class 8 for higher education. A few years later, Prateek – the boy from a small village, was appointed as a chief manager of Kotak Mahindra Bank. After 10 years of banking, he earned a good pay and had a comfortable life. He even married Prateeksha, who also worked at Kotak. But, Prateek could not continue the corporate life with ease, as his heart was always in farming. Prateek and Prateeksha “When I visited my village after 20 years, I realised that everyone was moving out of the villag... posted on Dec 27 2017 (12,584 reads)

back to high school, or even earlier. What sort of things pointed you toward the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, for instance? SG: Well, I started writing poetry when I was nine or ten. My first poem was put in a collection of kids’ poetry. It was kind of a crazy poem, “My Experience in Hell”—perhaps motivated by a strong religious upbringing. I'm Eastern Orthodox, which isn’t a hellish journey by any means. It’s just that you absorb a lot of images and symbols and if you have a creative mind, a lot of these things come alive and influence one’s creative output. And shortly after that poem, I wrote “Blue Paradise,” a poem... posted on Nov 17 2017 (14,528 reads)

molecule noradrenaline. At the same time, key emotional and memory-related structures of the brain are reactivated during REM sleep as we dream. This means that emotional memory reactivation is occurring in a brain free of a key stress chemical, which allows us to re-process upsetting memories in a safer, calmer environment. How do we know this is so? In one study in my sleep center, healthy young adult participants were divided into two groups to watch a set of emotion-inducing images while inside an MRI scanner. Twelve hours later, they were shown the same emotional images—but for half the participants, the twelve hours were in the same day, while for the other half t... posted on Apr 22 2018 (17,750 reads)

connecting us as sensory beings. It reveals messages and meaning, it can create comfort through a colour palette, a chord, a poem, a photograph. Art can enhance an environment or soften it. It creates space, it allows room to breathe and connect to the present. I think art helps us acknowledge our own humanity, and remind us that we are all in this together, all deserving of the kindness of strangers. Which is why the Super Power Baby Project has had such an impact I guess. The images in the book shine back at you with so much life! Photography was my tool for communicating how amazing the children are. I was able to capture them, and their personalities and spark in a way t... posted on Aug 27 2018 (9,106 reads)

any given day, many of us wrestle with our fears. We might be contemplating a career change, telling someone we love them, or wanting to speak up for what’s right when we see injustice. But a voice within us pipes up saying that there’s no point, or that we aren’t really capable of creating the life or world we desire.  Whether you call it “fear” or some other name—anxiety, stress, discomfort, life challenges—the cycle often plays out in the same way. We have a desire for change, but our fear of what might happen or the worry that we are somehow not enough can keep us stuck. In my new book, The Courage Habit, I argue that when it c... posted on Apr 18 2020 (31,881 reads)