Robbie MacKay

It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Company visions, corporate identity and the process they use to get there seem to be built on an assumption that employees should agree with or buy into the identity/vision.

But individuals would rarely be totally aligned with an organisation. They might be ‘for’ an organisation, ie they agree with ti and are happy to work towards its goals, etc.

However they will still have their own goals and their own (possibly unconcious) vision for the world/people/etc. It is important to acknowledge that.

Let them find themselves in the organisation and find where they don’t agree or have concerns outside the organisation.

Look at how you can support the differences and the similarities. Hopefully leading to happier, more loyal & long term staff.

For anyone who hasn’t played with an XO, the laptops made by the One Laptop Per Child project, you really should. They’re quite brilliant: simple, easy to use, and very unlike any laptop I’ve used before.

There are testing groups in both Auckland and Wellington, New Zealand, that spend their weekends messing with XO’s, installing software, testing it, tracking bugs and reporting the results. There’s a simple joy to it. Learning how to work these laptops. Trying out all the software. Showing young kids how to use them. Discovering the kids can use them better than you can (!).

Find your local group. Join in.

OLPC testing. The joy of

I wrote this over a year ago, after watching the morning news covering a terrorist attack in Mumbai

I don’t get it

Whatever their cause, whatever their goals…
How does killing or injuring other people become an appropriate or acceptable action?!

How do they justify that?

I can only think these people must be disconnected from reality. How do you not recognise that there is another person you’re hurting…

There is supposed to be a development stage for people as we grow up – at some point we develop empathy, we realise that when we do something it actually has affects on other people, or more to the point: we realise thats there IS actually another person over there. That like us they can feel things.

The world becomes less about us as we realise we are not the only one who can feel.

How do some people miss this? or forget it? and end up treating a whole section of the world population as people and another section as thought they’re not people?

It seems like this is tied to an illusion of seperation that we all have (to varying degrees): different countries, cities, families, businesses, teams, etc.

We talk about growing the economy of a country and think about the factors in those decisions based on what’s best for the country (or insert some other group / decision here).

We forget to account for the effects on other countries.

The borders are all artificial anyway – we’re all one people.
It is one planet.

Even seperating humans from animals and nature… life is life.. we should be looking after all of it.

I’m not saying anyone should give up everything for another person… that serves neither person. But sometimes we could give up something for the good of another. Not because we have some self interest, not as a compromise, but just because it helps someone else, because it pains us to see someone else suffer.

(and in the end, that other is us)

First up.. you should check out Johnny B. Truant on Making your own luck.

So here’s my grand plan of awesomeness… are you ready?

1. Don’t stop
2. Be there. Waiting for the opportunity
(3. Own it)

It’s not mind blowing, it’s not complicated, and it’s definately been said before in various forms.

Don’t stop
When you’re out to get something. Don’t stop and don’t give up. Even when it seems like you’re not getting anywhere. (Check out Seth Godin’s The Dip)

Be there. Waiting for the opportunity
This is really a continuation of the previous point. If you’re out to get something, make sure you’re there waiting for an opportunity. The moments of coincidence that get you where you want to go, that seem like good luck, really only happen when you get yourself in the right place and put yourself out there.

Own it
I’m not sure this is necessary. You might get results anyway. But you’ll enjoy life a lot more if you own it. And take responsibility for the things that work and the things that don’t.

Simple, but this works for me.

I think about the work non profits do a lot, for some obvious reasons: I used to work for one, Greenpeace NZ, and I helped start another one, Engineers Without Borders NZ. Even for causes and purposes that aren’t particularly interesting to me, non profits are still close to my heart.

I appreciate the special something it takes for someone to decide they want to dedicate a massive amount of effort to something for a reason greater than just money.

But that’s not really what I want to write about.

What I’ve noticed recently is that the link between environmental issues and development issues is often over looked.

To be more specific – since no one knows what the hell ‘environmental issues’ or ‘development issues’ actually are! – I’m talking about the link between environment damage, destruction of habitats, pollution, climate change, etc.. and poverty, disease, hiv, political persecution, repression, etc.

So how are these linked?
It’s seems likely that all these issues are the result of the same mindset. But I’d suggest its actually a more direct link then that.
First just take a look at where a large amount of environmental damage is done, by whom its done, and who bears the brunt of the cost.
It often occurs in developing countries, funded by governments or large corporations in developed countries. And poor and underpriveleged communities often bear the worst cost: destruction of their home and the environments they need to survive.

People in poverty have little power (in our current world model anyway), and have little ability to protect their environment. They’re also sometimes desperate enough that they will take a short term deal to make it through… even if it makes things worse for them later.

If these people had more power – it would be much harder for us to live the way we do, exploiting them and their resources. We do terrible damage to our own countries environments. but not on the scale (and without being noticed) that it is in developing countries.

I used to think these problems were separate. And weigh up supporting environmental charities against development charities. Usually deciding to support those fighting climate change. Reasoning that there wasn’t much point helping developing countries, if our eco system just stopped functioning.
But really, you can’t have one without the other.
We need to have both.

I haven’t posted here for quite a while but I’ve still got quite a few drafts I haven’t edited. So I’m going to just post them with minimal changes just to get them out and clear a space.
Lets see how this goes

Off the top of my head here are some things that are hard and shouldn’t be:

• Code review
• Switching version control systems (not all projects will use the same tool)
• Collaborating closely but not breaking the staging site
• Version control for non-geeks (i.e. designer changing CSS, manager messing with the text or something in a template)
• Deployment (sometimes) – especially updates and especially PHP applications
• Trivial HTML rearranging in CMS output (Drupal in particular)

These are just pulled from my daily work, or other things I’ve done recently.

When I say these are hard I mean that that they take significant effort, and significant thinking. I say that they shouldn’t be hard, because these are all ‘admin’ processes, parts of the development that aren’t actually Development, but need to happen to allow development to go smoothly.

In some of these cases, I probably haven’t found the right tool yet. In some they are a system that’s ‘broken’, not fit for purpose. But in other cases, the most interesting ones, these represent a gap waiting to be filled. An opportunity for a product, or package, or simply a formula (just a blog post maybe?) which solves the problem and turns it into a near automatic process.

Well I’m finally off. As I write this I’m on Flight MH130.. about 2 1/2 hrs from Kuala Lumpur in the first stage of my trip to the UK (stopping over in Penang, Malaysia on the way).
I’ve had a lot of thoughts and ideas going on in the last 2 weeks, lets hope I can tie them together into something coherent.

Letting Go
The preparation for this trip has been an experience. An exercise in something, many things in fact: patience, planning, growth and most of all letting go.

Letting go of people, of places, of comfort, letting go of all the things I ‘needed’ to do before I left. And putting some faith in the universe, in things working out. In love and friendship being enough to keep a connection to people half a world away.

Knowing that while I hate to leave people behind, I wouldn’t be myself if I didn’t go chasing these adventures. As Chris says: If being a part of something something meaningful comes with sadness, pain, and loneliness, so be it. It may come with all of those, but it also comes with love, amazing experiences, a closeness to others that’s hard to match and a feeling of peace at doing great work.

Its been a great experience working at Greenpeace, and I think the time limit on my stay there allowed me to really throw myself into the job.. nothing held back, making as much difference as I could.
It certainly paid off – both in having done some great things while there, having got into every bit of the organisation, and having made connections with some amazing people in a short time.

But at this end of things, leaving was painful.

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Communicating love

A slight aside: I found that one of the hard bits was not having a way to express the love I felt for people, realising how deep the emotion for some of them went.. and that the normal ways to show that: a hug or a kiss on the cheek, didn’t quite cut it.
I wonder, is this just me? Do other people find this or not? How many things do we do, things we say.. that are an attempt to communicate ‘I love you’. We have expressions for love with partners/lovers, a simple passionate kiss. But for most cultures that’s off limits for anyone else. How do we show love? and do people recognise it when we try to express love?

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I have at points in this process wondered whether we’d be better off if we couldn’t travel. Being able to see the world so easily is amazing… but it also means people do move more often. Whether you personally move or not, you will end up with friends spread around the globe.

And what if you didn’t travel? How do you shift your perspective? How do you know if all you hear about other places is true? how do you find that feeling of discovery and exploration?

What if you had just 1 flight left?
In time we may end up having less travel anyway, and people returning to more fixed close communities, gathering with the people closest to them. But trying to force it? I’m not sure. I do hope that as my closest friends settle down (IF they settle down) we mostly end up in NZ, close enough to see each other often.

But this all led me to a question: What would you do if you only had one flight left?
Just one long journey? and if everybody had the same?
Who would you see? where might you return too?
Who would you try to collect back in one place… what village would you build?

Note: It’s taken me over a month to finally publish this. It was originally written on June 24th while on a flight. I’ve now been in the UK a month. I’ll update more soon.

Another repost of my blog comments:

Thank you so much for this.
I’m about to move to the UK from New Zealand, I have 1 week of work left… working what has been my dream job for Greenpeace NZ. And part of me really doesn’t want to go.

I’m excited about the trip and work in the UK is looking promising… but I don’t want to lose the community I’ve got here

Except if I stayed I’d probably be restless still.

So I’m leaving the office, with people I’d consider family… and I’ll hold on as long as I can… but eventually it will be time to go…

Change is great.. and change sucks sometimes too.

And a quote from the original post by Chris Guillebeau:

I say: hold on to the moment as long as you can. Fight for it if you have to. Get up early and stay up late. Be brave. Choose the raw emotion, even the awkwardness if necessary. If we must go on to something else, let’s at least think about what was and what could have been.

The more intense the feeling, the better. If synchronicity and the feeling of being part of something meaningful comes with sadness, loneliness, and disappointment, so be it. I just know that I don’t want the alternative—mediocrity, routine, the safe and the comfortable.