The rule is today we write at the bar but the tulips are underripe.
Alle kan ikke alt altid. Everyone cannot do everything all the time, Line Jensen says.
Johnny Cash wrote about love, God, murder.
Hanif Abdurraqib writes about place, grief, devotion.
—
Nobody wakes up thinking, today I will hold back my devotion.
Today I will bury my feelings alive in the sun soaked soil, let the screams compost into not sure what, except that seeds must be given to the ground before regeneration. Seeds are like death. Feelings are seeds are death.
Nobody wakes up spitting at the sky—if it is all loss
can I at least have something beautiful to lose?
Nobody with an ounce of sanity hears the sky reply—
beloved there was no promise, no assurance, no reason to believe.
—
After the talk we line up to get our books personalized by Hanif. I can't speak so G. speaks for me, You've inspired her for a long time. My vocal chords are freed and I tell him his words make me want to write. Well do you write? I say yes. Then you have already won.
Easter slipped in surreptitiously this year. I won't be participating in the traditional celebrations but I will be out of town with someone I love, and someone I work with, are the two interchangeable? (K. I hope you're laughing)
If a man died and three days later the grave was empty—regardless if you believe in resurrection—how disorienting.
The church today is not too different from in the ancient Roman empire, which is there is not a lot of room for deviation from the mean. For divergence, not in a way that promotes division, but in a way that acknowledges star differs from star in glory.
You can apply this thinking to any institution of course.
I joined Figma's (hyperactive?) user (research?) group and on today's call I marveled at how safe it felt. I was in the minority, the one GTM-side rep in a group of product, design, and research people. I don't think I've been in a meeting of such organized play and exploration since I was in B2C, or maybe when volunteering with OpenIDEO. (So many governance challenges, for another day.)
That's not to say my day to day feels unsafe—far from it—but nobody biz side wakes up thinking, what happens when we put data on an easel instead of a spreadsheet?
To be fair, there are founders and teams wrapping their career around this question, building tools and companies around it, which I suppose is assurance. Knowing it doesn't matter size and stature of company, we are all making million dollar decisions with hastily pasted graphs and dashboard screenshots in a deck.
How lovely would it be for the data to live in proximity to the messy thinking? To increase confidence rather than uncertainty in exec dialogues?
Skip the login to Rippling into Salesforce, sidebar GA4 then 2FA Hubspot.
Skip to the data, draw the line to the magic.
All in the same platform! Can you even imagine!