Month: November 2013

Disconnecting … and reconnecting

As I plan to overindulge in food and holiday cheer this long Thanksgiving weekend, I also plan to curtail my digital gluttony by unplugging from the online world for a bit. I hope this plan helps to slow things down and bring a bit more focus to my life and my thinking.

This idea came to me after I read Kneale Mann’s recent post about Warren Buffet, The Disconnected Leader. At first, the title threw me. What leader wants to be disconnected? We need to be in touch, engaged, on top of things.

Yes, that’s all true. But we need to be in touch, engaged and on top of the right things. The things that matter.

I’ve been a bit out of touch with some of those things lately. I hope to reconnect with some of them over the Thanksgiving break. In the meantime, I’ll leave you with this thought from Mann’s blog post:

Imagine we woke up tomorrow and there was no Internet, the smartphone had not been invented and there is no email. We have all those things but one idea we could try is to type less, turn off our toys more, and speak directly with humans rather than devices or channels. 

Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours.

Friday Five: The words of JFK (off topic)

kennedyThis being the 50th anniversary of the shooting of President John F. Kennedy, and the 50th anniversary of my first memory of any public event — or any event that occurred beyond my neighborhood, for that matter — I want to commemorate JFK by sharing five of my favorite JFK quotes. Feel free to add your own in the comments below. (If you need some help, there’s a lot of material on BrainyQuote.)

1. “If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.”

2. “Tolerance implies no lack of commitment to one’s own beliefs. Rather it condemns the oppression or persecution of others.”

3. “A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on.”

4. “Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer, but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past. Let us accept our own responsibility for the future.”

And finally, appropriate for this time of year:

5. “As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them.”