crystallize!

Two recent favorite reads, forming an interesting study in contrasts:

• The new North: an account of a woman’s 1908 journey through Canada to the Arctic, by Agnes Deans Cameron
• Two coots in a canoe: an unusual story of friendship, by David E. Morine

Cameron was a remarkable character. After a 20-year career as a schoolteacher in Vancouver, ended abruptly as a result of her flouting a rule she deemed unfair — she allowed a student to use a straight-edge to draw a straight line, in order that his otherwise promising academic career not be jeopardized by such a trivial requirement, and her superiors could not condone such misbehavior — she moved to Chicago, became a journalist, and thence undertook her impressive voyage, with her niece as traveling companion. She documents her nearly-six-month trip in crisp and vivid language, providing enough detail to paint an interesting story without ever becoming bogged down in minutiae. Her descriptions of the people who host her, the towns she passes through and their agricultural outputs, the culture of the Hudson’s Bay Company, the local flora and fauna, the river, the scenery, her fellow travelers — all are engagingly presented. Her discussion of the Eskimos she meets, especially, is a fascinating study, since they are quite unlike what she had expected: a tall, regal people, for whom she expresses great admiration.

Morine’s book documents a modern adventure, a trip down the Connecticut River from source to sea. Before he retired, Morine served as head of land acquisition for the Nature Conservancy; his traveling companion was an old friend from grad school whom he hadn’t seen in years. The gimmick for the trip was that instead of camping, they stayed each night with different hosts, “relying on the kindness of strangers.” Since I live right next to the Connecticut myself, midway along their route, many of the places he describes are familiar to me, so it was especially interesting to read about who he met along the way.

I wonder what Cameron’s journey would be like in this century, or what Morine’s would have been like in hers.

Pleased by this pair of recent articles, both about how to bring the experience of travel closer to home.

5 Ways To Travel More With Less at zenhabits suggests looking for nearby adventures, specific ideas traveling frugally (all tactics I can personally recommend as well), and remembering to relax (I’m still working on that one).

Rolf Potts writes at Tim Ferris’s blog about 5 Travel Lessons You Can Use at Home, “key ways in which the lessons you learn on the road can be used to enrich the life you lead when you return home.” These ring deeply true for me, and indeed reminded me that a large part of what I love about travel is that it really enforces living in the moment and stretching outside your comfort zone.

These are good challenges for me for right now.

Interesting recent NYTimes column by Nicholas Kristof: What Could You Do Without?, profiles a family’s startling adventures. They took the “crazy, impetuous and utterly inspiring” step of “selling the luxurious family home and donating half the proceeds to charity, while using the other half to buy a more modest replacement home.” Their forthcoming book, The Power of Half, chronicles their story.

Also interestingly, they are evidently getting negative reactions from folks who consider them “sanctimonious showoffs,” when their actual goal in sharing their story is to demonstrate that an initially selfless gesture turned out to be of at least as much benefit to themselves.

Lots more about the project, the book, and an encouragement to find your own “half”: thepowerofhalf.com.

Everyone knows that offering incentives to employees yields better results, the same way we know that dangling a carrot in front of a horse will motivate him to walk toward it. The only problem is, it turns out that we’re wrong.

In a recent TED Talk, Dan Pink explains the mismatch between how the business world handles motivation, and what science shows about what really works instead. Carrots worked well for 20th century tasks involving mechanical manipulation, but once you shift over into 21st century tasks that are more about cognition, introducing an extrinsic motivator not only doesn’t help results, it harms them.

Fortunately, science also knows what does work instead: intrinsic motivators. You’ve seen the famous cases like Wikipedia and google labs. Watch this TED Talk for more insight into the way you think about rewards.

Layers of clarity:

“when i am confused, i look out & think the issue is money. when i take a breath and look in, it is always about time.”
—my friend Judith, on Facebook

“When I look at time and money, it’s often about breath.”
—her friend Gene

Both of these feel true to me. Though I am wanting to place “attention” in this equation as well. The concept popularly known as “time management” really turns out, for many people, to be framed more usefully as “attention management” — not the juggling of tasks into time periods, but the focusing on what’s most important. Breathing is a good start, and often helps you see where to focus next.

Breathe. What’s next?

When I was in library school, we had a dean who could be counted on to draw at least one Venn diagram on the whiteboard any time he addressed an audience. It made for a great running joke, as the rest of us found excuses to join him in diagramming just about any subject matter into the same neat format. Perhaps that accounts for some of my fondness for the medium.

Today’s favorite new diagram: How to be happy in business, from whatconsumesme.com. (He’s now offering high-res poster-sized copies of this image.) A nice visual reminder of what to hold in focus, especially if you need to keep monetizing in the mix.

If you prefer your elegant diagrams with more twist of the unexpected, perhaps you’ll also enjoy one of my favorite daily blogs, Indexed, whose creator Jessica Hagy has been turning out witty graphs for nearly three years now. She juxtaposes things you probably hadn’t thought of in the same sentence before.