Tag: activism

How to

John Corrigan

In his book “Outliers” Malcolm Gladwell goes over a study by Anders Ericsson. The study reviews musicians and their performance in the study Ericsson comes up with the “10000 hour rule”. Ericsson realized that all experts have one thing in common and that is practice and the number of practice hours to become an expert is 10000 hours.

The readers of Outliers dropped the book and started practicing. Some reached the 10000 hour limit and were not experts. Was the rule wrong? Not really. The authors of the study came back and made the rule more robust. That link will take you to the article but if TLDR the answer is that practice must be good and involve teaching and learning.

Every place that I have worked has had campaigns for charity, some of the campaigns allow employees to choose the funds that they can contribute to. When I review the funds I always look for funds that have low admin costs. This way I feel like money is more effectively being used.

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There is a new movement now though called Effective Altruism. Effective Altruism EA for short is a movement and a community.

Everyone wants to do good, but many ways of doing good are ineffective. The EA community is focused on finding ways of doing good that actually work.

excerpt from the EA website

The world is bad off right now, and can do much better. Governments are not picking up the slack and doing their jobs (which is to provide for the people that they govern). Because governments ar not taxing correctly (Billionaires pay less tax than the working class) and lack funding to provide for the welfare of the nation altruism is very important and often comes from the working class and poor. It is important to doante to charities that provide the biggest bang for your buck.

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Education always seems to be the key and this is no different. Know what your charities do and how they do it, if you can get involved beyond just writing a check. You will be helping yourself more than helping others and with education you will be effectively heling everyone.

Only for a Moment

John Corrigan

My work takes me to different sites and the other day I was outside of an art room. On the wall leading to the art room there was a picture with a quote attributed to Banksy on it.

If you get tired learn to rest not quit

Banksy

I don’t know the man but I know of the man Banksy. He is an amazing artist and a political activist in England. His film Exit Through the Gift Shop is a satire that really makes you question authenticity of the entire art market. His work highlights environmental disasters, siding with the powerful through inaction, the dichotomy between rich and poor, and much much more. Even in his anonymity Banksy is a voice heard by the youth mostly, that spurs that generation to take action.

There is an author Simon SInek and in one of his books “The Infinite Game“, he explains that much of life and business is indeed an infinite game with different rules, no time limit and the goal is to survive and flourish so there are really no winners.

Surviving, flourishing, and being the best person we can be can be tiring, it can be grueling and the desire to give up can be strong. Banksy has worked in anonymity since 1990. Thirty years and I am sure that he has wanted to quit. Most of Banksys work is street art or graffiti and illegal. I am sure that he gets tired of working in the shadows but maybe he knows how important his activism is and this pushes him forward maybe he knows how to as he so eloquently put it rest not quit.