You’ve probably seen this viral video before, but I’ve never gotten bored of it.
Matt Harding a video game designer figured there had to be more to life than his day job (been there before?), quit his job, and traveled the world.
This might not be what we typically associate with beauty, but beauty is written all over it.
The very act of leaving the status quo in search for something more is an act of beauty.
These sites and landmarks shown are glimpses of the spectrum of beauty that marks our planet.
I absolutely love the song (fyi – It’s called Praan by Gary Schyman sung by Palbasha Siddique), I have no idea what it’s saying but somehow it screams of beauty.
And the fact that people from all sorts of cultures can get together to do some silly dance is nothing short of beautiful.
This video has almost 30 million hits because something about it deeply resonates with all of us. Sometimes it may seem impossible, or too ridiculous, but every one of us long to be a part of creating and expressing beauty.
Toronto is the most ethnically and culturally diverse urban area on planet earth. Half of its citizens are visible minorities.
You can find glimpses of the entire world in one city. Over a 140 languages and dialects are spoken.
Toronto is formed and shaped by the people of the globe – half of the population is foreign born.
Toronto is a model mosaic city. Ethnic enclaves are everywhere. Every city on the planet has a china-town, Toronto has at least six and counting.
Approaching 6 million people in the Greater Toronto Area it is the fifth largest metropolitan area in North America.
Toronto is geographically a hub to America. Within a 100-mile radius of Toronto a quarter of Canada’s population resides here, as well as 125 million Americans or roughly 40% of the U.S. population.
Richard Florida who wrote “Rise of the Creative Class” describes Toronto as being one of the most creative cities and is on set to be “a world leader in innovation and prosperity”
Toronto’s leading sectors include finance, business services, telecommunications, aerospace, transportation, media, arts, film, television production, publishing, software production, medical research, education, sports, sustainability, and tourism industries.
Toronto is undergoing massive renewal and gentrification – creating a city in flux with new needs and opportunities
Toronto is a city of the future. The world is increasingly becoming more diverse and more urban as Toronto already is. If you can make something work in Toronto you have the potential for modeling and leading it for the rest of the world.
Your thoughts? I’d love to hear why your city matters to you.
More than 130,000 advertising professionals have lost their jobs in this Great Recession. Lemonade is about what happens when people who were once paid to be creative in advertising are forced to be creative with their own lives.
You can watch the whole thing online for free until tomorrow by subscribing. HT: Cruciformity
Whether you’re a leader, an artist, or an every day working person – after basking in the glow of doing something extraordinary, the inevitable question always starts to cloud over - “How will I ever top this?”
How can you possibly win gold again? How do you surprise her with just the right gift again? How do you create something earth-shattering and timeless all over again?
Ever wonder what happens to one-hit-wonders? When I hear Biz Markie’s ‘just a friend’ or the New Radicals ‘you get what you give’ on the radio, I imagine they probably tried a number of times cranking it out once again. But like many of us do, they probably realized at some point that a large part of their previous success was because they had just the right tune, hook, melody, lyric, and marketing, at just the right time.
Even if you’ve put your 10,000 hours of hard work in, the truth is, most noteworthy accomplishments have an element of the stars aligning just right for the extraordinary to happen.
So why do we often live assuming we can reproduce it all again? Our skills, our hard work, even our passion, doesn’t entitle us to extraordinary outcomes.
There’s no such thing as defending champions. You can only defend something that can be taken away from you. Your past achievements will always be yours no matter what. You’ve made your mark in history; now let’s stop living there.
While there’s some truth to ’success begets success’, it can also cripple you to living in your past ‘glory days’.
Pat yourself on the back, and move on. The world owes you nothing. You owe it to yourself and your God to be utterly faithful to the call you’ve been given this next moment.
What’s extraordinary is when you can live each day putting every ounce of yourself on the line, regardless of the extraordinary.
A friend was recently commenting on how Eminem sucks now because his latest releases have been garbage and nothing has ever compared to his second album.
While it’s debatable by some whether Eminem’s work is ‘art’, it bothers me when we treat people like products.
What we produce is a part of who we are, but it’s far from the sum total.
It’s a sick world when we’re valued solely by what we’ve accomplished last.
Whatever you do, don’t live for the crowds. They’ll consume, critique, and discard you as soon as you’re not hiting it out of the park again.
I’m fairly blown away by this video below from Ukraine’s got talent. No it’s not one of those funny ones, the artist Kseniya Simonova retells the story of Russia’s ‘Great Patriotic War’ against the Nazis in the 1940’s. Definitely check it out.
My thoughts were, wow. How do we get her to do something for our church? And this is just another example that goes in the face of people who always mutter “it’s all been done before”. There is talent, creativity, and beauty, yet to be seen…
Since my last post about U2’s song “moment of surrender”, there’s been a number of verses that provoke me, but the line “vision over visibility” has really stuck with me.
Is there something that you see, that others can’t? A vision, a reality of what could be, that others don’t seem to ‘get’?
It looks dark and murky but you’ve got this strong gut-level hunch it’s a direction you ought to be going in?
Please keeping moving forward.
Seize it, for the love of God. Do something about it.
We’ll always be working in low-visibility, but vision doesn’t always come.
Take a hold of it and make it into a reality. We need you to help us see it. Our world is filled with too many people with eyes wide shut, working merely with the visible.
That statue waiting to be carved out of that stone block; that word of truth or encouragement that no one else can quite articulate the way you do; that service your community or city desperately needs but knows how to go about it… we need you to help us see the invisible.
Because if you don’t, it might slip away. And worst yet, it might be lost to humanity forever.
