Getting to know who you are can help

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Oscar Wilde may have said, “only the shallow know themselves”, but a little introspection can go a long way.

Kimberly Blessing recommends a book and online assessment called “StrengthsFinder” to put to language what your natural strengths and inclinations are so that you can better put them to use.

She mentions the Keirsey temperament sorter in relation to Strengths Finder and it’s an assessment I’ve taken a few times over the past ten or so years. I always end up in the Idealist camp, sometimes among the Champions, sometimes among the Teachers. Re-reading the description of the Idealist I’m actually taken aback at how close it maps to me, including what my values are and what stresses me out.

I’m looking forward to finishing reading StrengthsFinder (quarter of the way through) and taking the assessment, it will be fun and helpful.

: StrenghtsFinder indicated my top 5 strengths are: Connectedness, Input, Individualization, Activator, and Strategic. These make a lot of send an emphasize elements of the Keirsey identified Idealist in me. These strengths compliment each other nicely.

Being an Activator, being driven to make things happen, works well to balance out the Strategic strength, which is to anticipate and project ahead. You can actually see how these two strenghts can be in conflict with one another too.

Individualization, looking for the unique qualities in each person and finding a way to help people work together, assists with Connectedness, which is all about bridge building and seeing the larger picture, the meaning of things.

As for Input, well Richelle calls me Number 5 (from Short Circuit) 🙂

I’d bet that Adaptibility, Context and Learner were among my top 10, if there was access, I’d bet they were there.

I highly recommend taking StrenghtsFinder. Even if you don’t believe in this kinda thing, and think that who we are as people is far more fluid than these kinda things would suggest, I do believe a little introspection can go a long way.

Two questioning reports on social networking and culture

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Jeffrey Rosen in the NYTimes reports on the effects social networking will have on our efforts to redefine ourselves:

It’s often said that we live in a permissive era, one with infinite second chances. But the truth is that for a great many people, the permanent memory bank of the Web increasingly means there are no second chances — no opportunities to escape a scarlet letter in your digital past. Now the worst thing you’ve done is often the first thing everyone knows about you.

Tom Meltzer in the Guardian reports on the strange paradox of loneliness among the most connected generation seemingly ever:

This is not just a teenage problem. In May, the Mental Health Foundation released a report called The Lonely Society? Its survey found that 53% of 18-34-year-olds had felt depressed because of loneliness, compared with just 32% of people over 55. The question of why was, in part, answered by another of the report’s findings: nearly a third of young people said they spent too much time communicating online and not enough in person.

In a YouGov poll published by Samaritans last December, 21% of young people aged 18-24 identified loneliness as one of their major concerns. Young people worried more than any other age group about feeling alone, being single, about the quality of their relationships with friends and family. Such figures have led newspapers to dub us the “Eleanor Rigby generation”; better connected than any in history, yet strangely alone.

Interested in data and visualizations?

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Check out the Guardian’s Datablog, and while you are at it, read/watch the Guardian’s Simon Rogers interview with Jonathan Stray of Nieman Journalism Labs on the rise of data journalism and the tools they use.

My first interview, “Huey & the Banjo”

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Last week I took part in a project that led me to help interview a large group of great co-workers and friends at CIM. To get some practice, I stopped by Suburban Station to interview one of the musicians who play there and was in luck when I found Huey & the Banjo. Here is the interview, plus some performances:

YouTube: “Huey & the Banjo 7.27.2010”

For more information on Huey & the Banjo, you can contact him at hustonwest at live dot com

I hate a song that…

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“I hate a song that makes you think that you are not any good. I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing. Because you are too old or too young or too fat or too slim too ugly or too this or too that. Songs that run you down or poke fun at you on account of your bad luck or hard traveling.

I am out to fight those songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood. I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built.

I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work.”

That’s Woody Guthrie on songwriting. You can hear Will Greer reading those words, plus a great set of original recordings from Guthrie and Lead Belly, on the Smithsonian Folkways collection, “Folkways: The Original Vision”.

Is this a ‘Have you no sense of decency momment?’

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The Atlantic: James Fallows: “On Today’s Hot Media Stories: Sherrod, “Journolist”.

The only way it would be so is if we collectively stop watching, stop clicking, and stop linking to such witch hunts, such hatred, served in pursuit of traffic and ratings.

And you would think that by now, in our media-savvy land, we’d instinctively know that soundbites out of context lead to misunderstanding.

For a world of context from all sides, check out the Memeorandum thread.