Beginning the week with motivational ideas, we moved through discussions of branding, diversity, reality, and unemployment. There is so much more to talk about on these topics. You can count on seeing continuations of these ideas in the weeks to come.
Mar 11 - Philanthropy of Experience - Everyone has some unique experience to share with the world. This is not because of their individual worth because even those living under a rock can sometimes show us the pathway to bettering ourselves. We hear the term “pay it forward†and live in a world that has given us the ability to do exactly that… to repay the debt we owe to learned mentors, teachers and parents by bringing it alive to a new audience through the collaborative intelligence of social media. – more –
Mar 12 - The Art of Tootology– Some phrases are difficult to define and are usually not translatable into another language. According to some accounts, John F. Kennedy made a major German language faux pas in his famous “Ich bin ein Berliner†speech in Berlin, Germany. The more grammatically correct text would have been “Ich bin Berliner.†So instead of saying “I am a citizen of Berlin†as he intended, his thick Boston accent and the insertion of a single word could have been understood as “I am a jelly doughnut,†the “Berliner†being a type of popular pastry in Berlin. – more –
Mar 13 - Gender Equilibrium – Dinner table conversation at my house usually gravitates toward the “How was your day, Dear?†type of discussion. It usually is a real discussion rather than small talk because my wife and I are both professionals working in strange and exotic lands… well not really, but it seems like it at times. She is an engineer working in a field seemingly populated entirely by alpha males and I am an HR professional with typically more female than male professionals. – more –
 Mar 14 - A Job Search Is Reality, Not Reality TV - Well, the truth is out now. I absolutely loathe reality TV. One part of me is in deep admiration of the producers who epitomize capitalism by capturing something that is marketable, selling the concept and raking in tons of cash. God bless America! On the other hand, most of them appeal to the most frivolous of all animal instincts and with shock and awe attempt to pass off abnormal behavior as reality. – more –
Mar 15 - About Unemployment Figures and Liars - I had always heard that it was Mark Twain who originated the phrase “Figures don’t lie, but liars do figure.†It sounds so Twainesque that it makes total sense to attribute that clever saying to him. Garson O’Toole writes a scholarly blog Quote Investigator in which he traces the origins of this and other commonplace phrases. He seriously questions whether or not that it was Samuel Clemens, aka Mark Twain who first used the phrase. – more –