A day for love, but not everyone feels it: whilst some people struggle to open their doors for piles of cards, others wait idly by for the postman, destined to spend the night alone.
Which is what i’ll be doing in my Bulgarian Hotel! So i thought i’d send a thought to the things i love and the things that have been lost…
LOVE: simple and innovative technology, like my GoPro camera. It does one thing well, it enhances my performance, it requires minimal learning for maximum return. Agility is cool. The lesson: simple trumps complexity.
LOST: my laptop. Sorry Dell, but nearly five minutes to start up and it weighs as much as Gibraltar? The lesson: Life’s just too short.
LOVE: Paper, by Fifty Three, an app developed with passion that effortlessly allow me to create and share, two key features of the Social Age. The lesson: if you develop something you’re passionate about, you might do as well as they did with this.
LOST: MySpace. I didn’t want to see you go, but you failed to innovate and now Twitter has stolen my heart. It was good while it lasted, i wish you well. The lesson: being the first is cool, but staying power takes agility.
LOVE: the global community who surround me, so that whether i’m in Malaysia, Berlin or New York, i can find good conversations and good coffee. Technology facilitated us to connect, but the conversations keep us together. The lesson: if you share your ideas, you may just find you’re not alone.
LOST: some sense of separation. Inevitably i find it harder to identify when i’m working and when i’m not, largely because i don’t even know what ‘work‘ means anymore. Maybe i’ll regret this one day, time will tell. The lesson: you’ll never be told that you’re spending too little time online.
LOVE: social collaborative technology. That means you Twitter, connecting me to ideas, WordPress, the best software i’ve ever used, my iPhone which lets me take photos and share them so easily. OK, i’m a gadget freak, but the ability to collaborate with my communities wherever i am in the world has transformed how i think and how i work. The lesson: people like people and love good stories.
LOST: the time to read books. I’m trying to find this again, but half suspect i’m clinging to the past. The lesson: some things you have to plan for because you can’t do it whilst walking down the street and typing.
LOVE: the fact that i can work out loud these days, and that people are kind enough to share their thoughts in return. The lesson: find your reflective spaces.
LOST: any notion of what a career is and whether i have one. The lesson: good riddance to notions of power and control forged on hierarchy.
LOVE: expression through writing, art, graffiti, music, dance, all those languages that we appreciate even if we never master. The lesson: explore more.
LOST: the ability to write. The lesson: develop good posture to avoid RSI. Ouch.
Ah well, i reckon in the balance it’s worked out well! Happy Valentines
julianstodd
Julian Stodd's Learning Blog 
Thanks Julian – as always, a very interesting blog. Important to think about how things are changing and whether it is realistic to embrace all the new opportunities AND hang on to things we have always loved. It is all evolving so fast and is very exciting. I share your love of the fact that we can have interesting conversations all over the world. Wow! 🙂
Thank you Gill, it’s an exciting time 🙂
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