By Stephen Abram, Toronto Chapter, Business & Finance, Information Technology, Leadership & Management Divisions

Part 1

And the future is still in front of me and always will be! Cindy Romaine asked me to write a guest post for this blog and I am honoured to do so. I believe that her future ready theme is right on. The only thing we need to prepare for is the future. The past is gone and the present disappears in the blink of an eye. By coincidence I’ve just passed my 30th anniversary of graduating from library school and it’s caused me to reflect. I tell myself that I probably have another 30 years left. So I’ve decided that I am still mid-career. What have I learned in the first half of my library life about preparing for the future that may be in any useful?
Listed below are some personal insights that I’ve learned and have found them personally meaningful over the years, so I pass them on to you here in the hope that it helps us all become more future ready. Honestly, I’ve made a lot of mistakes and it’s probably better to learn that way, but here goes:

1. Watch the Banana: When it comes to observing user behaviour and changing behaviours it is wise to remember the banana. I was once forced to watch primates for days as part of a bachelor level primatology course. We often watched them eat. Upon returning to class, the professor gave us all bananas and asked us to peel them like an ape. North Americans grab the banana by the stem and pull it open. This method crushes the top. The whole class proceeded to do it this way. He then showed a film of an ape peeling a banana. If we carefully observe chimpanzees and bananas we can see that they carefully pull the skin of a banana from the softer non-stem end and the white fruit is pristinely unwrapped as a thing of unbruised beauty. The lesson for us budding primatologists and ethnographers that I never forgot: Observe carefully. Don’t look for what you expect. When you’re looking for insights into human behaviour or the direction of the world, you’ll find it in what you don’t see at first.
2. Play with Vigor and Intent: Everyone who knows me knows that I am a huge proponent of play in the workplace. This isn’t just playing with all of the new technology toys and websites that are presenting us with opportunities on a daily basis. I love that as much as the next person. What I am also advocating is that we also include ensuring that fun and humour enter our work lives on a daily basis (or more) too. Secondly, focus is good but focusing too intently is not as great. You can see opportunity in new things when you play. When you research or investigate something for work alone with your workplace goggles on, sometimes you miss the biggest opportunities in the innovation. Occasional undirected play at work loosens the unconscious and frees the mind to explore new ideas. Successful people and work teams leave time for play – alone and together. Play is not frivolous but remains one of the most potent learning strategies there is. And, frankly, it makes it fun to go to work every day. Happy teams, having fun together, is, I believe, a predictor of workplace success, employee retention, and lifelong health. Do you make time to play? Relax. You will see more opportunities for a better future in a relaxed state than all of the moments of intense concentration combined. Are you laughing and giggling enough all day? Live intentionally.
3. Hang out with different people and people who are different than you: Lately, I’ve been thinking about the echo chamber that is librarianship. I worry that we are listening too much to each other and not enough to others. I am not advocating that we listen less to eachother but that we adjust the balance to include more voices. How do our real customers talk about their encounters with the new information technologies? If we talk about ‘e-books’ and they talk about ‘reading’ (see the difference?), are we framing the issues correctly? And, how diverse is the community of people you deal with? Are there enough non-librarians, non family members, in your circle? How about the wonderful demographic mosaic of gender, age, nationality, ethnicity, race, language and geography in your conversation zone? Is it diverse? Do you have personal experience with young librarians and young people or vice versa? Do you travel enough to challenging experiences and places? Don’t sit with friends all the time at events or conferences – you already know them! People from diverse backgrounds can approach issues, decisions and problems in different and still valid ways. If your peers are non-diverse, I believe that it affects the quality of your insights and decisions. Mix it up.
4. Avoid the Eeyores! Some people add no value to your life and you run the risk of damaging yourself by being around them too much. People who are negative or critical in the extreme, but devoid of critical thinking are negative influences in your life. I love being around people who bang away at ideas aggressively to make them better. They’re awesome. I am talking about avoiding people who are joyless. As the economy gets worse, there seem to be more of these negative folks. Critical thinking allows for seeing weaknesses in an idea or argument and working toward correcting or improving or disproving the thinking. People for whom criticism, devoid of a context to improve ideas, where snark and name calling rule the day, are best avoided when the time can be spent with others who focus on making the world of ideas a better place. If you’ve ever met a person who is a black hole and sucks all of the life and happiness out of the room and conversation, you know what I mean. Run towards the light! The future needs to be somewhere where you want to be, and some people just can’t make that voyage. They’re locked in the ambiguity of the present tense.
5. Fail and Fail Often, but Fail Safe: You’ll discover the future by trying to invent it yourself. There are two kinds of people – those who create the future and those who live in their own personal, endless Hell of the present. Make the choice to be an animator in life. The avoidance of risk is death to growth and adaptability. Take small and manageable risks in order to learn. You’re not learning to ski or skate unless you’re falling down. How many small risks of failure did you take today? It can be as simple as meeting someone you don’t know, trying a new website, changing your
   personal style of interaction or something even bigger like loading new software or temporarily changing a work process. Try to recall when you learned to ride a bicycle. Remember the failures and then the heart floating feeling of balance and movement? I remember when I first tried public speaking with some embarrassment but I got better over time with my supportive SLA network. The opportunities to try new things are endless and, yet, we seem to partake of them too rarely. Can you schedule a daily potential-risk-of-failure-event until it becomes a habit and part of your work life? Grow pearls when you discover an irritant. Start small, pilot and experiment. Nurture and incubate. You’ll be a better professional for it.
6. Listen to your Gut: Bio-feedback works. I have learned to listen to my gut and persevere when I don’t feel right about something. Not every technology is future ready. Many have severe shortcomings or run the risk of damaging the world of information, knowledge, learning and more. Some just aren’t ready for primetime or anyone other than the early adopters. My subconscious tells me things if only I’d listen to it. I am not saying that it is telling me in black and white to do or not do something. It is often telling me things that affect the direction and experience. My gut senses distrust faster than my mind. It tells me when something might be conflicting with my personal or professional values or morals. My gut tells me when I’m not quite ready. My gut tells me when I have lingered too long in a lovely past paradigm that is now failing me. Trust your gut.
7. Do and Try: It’s not enough to be just an observer. Participate in the world as it changes. Comment and learn. Share – write, blog, tweet, and have deep conversations. Experience comes from participation. The person watching the gold fish in the bowl does not understand the goldfish.
8. Encourage the Heart: One of the most delightful aspects of librarianship is our supportive networks. Also our workplaces tend to be clean and safe. We have a personal responsibility to take this gift and improve upon it. We have potentially thousands of interactions a month. With each interaction, with each moment of truth, we represent the best of what we have to offer to the world. We can make a huge difference in people’s lives. And, with our attitude we can encourage the heart. Wake up every day choosing to make a difference in your end users lives, and, for that matter, all of your co-workers, neighbours, and colleagues.

Watch for part two and 10 more!

Stephen Abram, MLS is a Past President of SLA and is Vice President, Strategic Partnerships and Markets, for Gale Cengage Learning. He is an SLA Fellow and the past president of the Ontario Library Association and the Canadian Library Association. In June 2003 he was awarded SLA’s John Cotton Dana Award and the AIIP Roger Summit Award in 2009. In 2011 he is Canada’s CLA Outstanding Librarian of the Year. He is the author of Out Front with Stephen Abram and Stephen’s Lighthouse blog. Stephen would love to hear from you at stephen.abram@gmail.com.

Cindy Romaine, SLA President, has an AWESOME conversation with Neil Pasricha.

I’ve followed Neil’s blog 1000 Awesome Things for some time and feel that his perspective is especially valuable in a time of change and transition, so I was thrilled when Neil agreed to be interviewed for the FutureReady365 blog.

Neil Pasricha is the author of The Book of Awesome: Snow Days, Bakery Air, Finding Money in Your Pocket and Other Simple, Brilliant Things. A self-described “average guy” with a typical 9-to-5 job in the suburbs, Neil Pasricha started his blog 1000 Awesome Things, as a small reminder — in a world of rising sea levels, global conflict, and a troubled economy — of the free, easy little joys that make life sweet.

He didn’t anticipate that his site would gain a readership of millions of people, win two Webby Awards (“the Internet’s highest honor” according to The New York Times), be named one of PC Magazine’s Top 100 Sites On the Internet, or become a place where people from around the world would come to celebrate the simple pleasures of daily life. His first book The Book of Awesome became a #1 International Bestseller for #38 weeks, and The Book of (Even More) Awesome comes out today, April 28, 2011.

I asked Neil a few questions about change and transition. Here are his remarks:

1. Neil, what strikes me about your blog 1000 Awesome Things is how unassuming and yet powerful your insights are. There’s something universal and appealing about snowy days, bakery air, and roller-coaster rides. And yet you’ve experienced some unpleasant things in life, too. How do you keep a positive attitude?
   

   Ha ha, well I don’t always! To be honest, I’ve never thought of myself as an optimist or someone who wears a clown-faced grin all day. And I don’t know if keeping a positive attitude 100% of the time is even possible…or desirable.

   The truth is we all have dark days, dark months, and even dark years. I started writing The Book of Awesome after my wife told me she didn’t love me anymore… and after my best friend took his own life. It was the darkest year of my life.

   When it comes to dark times I say … let them be dark.

   You just have to remember there are awesome things at the end.

   It’s all about enjoying simple pleasures like stepping on dry crunchy leaves on the sidewalk, flipping to the cold side of the pillow, or the smell of a bakery…waiting for you at the end.

2. In your Ted Talk on The Three A’s of Awesome, you say, “We are all going to get lumps and we’re all going to get bumps. None of us can predict the future. But we do know one thing about it — it ain’t going to go according to plan.” Library and information centers are changing very dramatically and corporate libraries have been closed or downsized around the world. What attitude do you recommend to make us ready for the future?
   

   Well, life is short.

   We all live for a blink of an eye on a tiny spinning rock…and we could go at any time.

   So when it comes to attitude I say embrace this temporary nature of life and embrace the fragility and instability of everything…embrace it by filling as many minutes as possible with simple pleasures.

   Because sure, when we’re on our last legs we’ll look back and remember the high highs of first dances at weddings and the low lows of losing loved ones and funerals. But dotting those major moments will be all the tiny seconds we spend appreciating the smell of an old book, the look on a kid’s face after they close their first paperback, or the inner satisfaction that comes from finishing up a new display in your front window.

   Awesome things add up to hours and days and months and years.

3. As library and information professionals, we’re actively working with social media services in an effort to connect with our clients and customers. Your blog has gone viral with millions of hits a day. Is there a secret sauce for such impressive growth?
   

   When I was 15 my friend Chad and I started a website called “When I Was A Kid” as an online collection of funny things people believed when they were little. Over the three weeks the site lasted we only got one submission…and it was from my sister. She thought fish lived in waterbeds.

   I think over the years I’ve had fun experimenting with tiny websites in school projects, with friends, and just while tinkering around online. And they all probably got a grand total of a few hundred hits, most of which were my mom and dad and me hitting the “Refresh” button over and over.

   Now http://www.1000awesomethings.com has had over 30 million visitors, won multiple awards, and has two books—The Book of Awesome and The Book of (Even More) Awesome—coming out of it.

   So what’s my secret?

   I say try a lot and fail a lot. If you aren’t failing, you aren’t trying, if you aren’t trying, you aren’t failing. But when you’re doing both you’re always learning and getting better…

4. In your Ted Talk on “The Three A’s of Awesome,” you talk about awareness and using new eyes to see the world. When it’s “permanent whitewater everywhere,” how might awareness help?

Well, I don’t have kids of my own but I always love hanging out with three year olds. I love the way they see the world because they’re seeing the world for the first time.

Whether they’re staring slack-jawed at their first baseball game, on their hands and knees looking at ladybugs, or spending an entire afternoon picking dandelions in the backyard for the Sunday dinner centerpiece.

And…we all used to be three years old! That three year old boy is still inside you, that three year old girl is still a part of you. They just grew into someone who doesn’t spend as much time looking at ladybugs anymore.

But that’s where awareness of the tiny things in The Book of (Even More) Awesome is meant to come in. After all, there was the first time you experienced déjà vu, the first time a baby fell asleep on you, and the first time you snuck candy into a movie theater.

Being aware of these tiny little pleasures helps remind us how awesome life is.

5. Thanks in part to the Internet, library and information centers are changing dramatically right now. Information professionals are learning they have to be consistently awesome with their clients in this fast-changing landscape. What advice do you have to help us become awesome?
   

   Well, I think you already are! You guys are some of my favoritest people ever. I’ve honestly spent a good chunk of my life in libraries. My mom took me every Saturday morning and we’d drive home with a stack of books sliding all around the back seat. I’d crack into them at night and finger peel my way through The Hardy Boys, Encyclopedia Brown, and my sister’s Babysitter’s Club books when she wasn’t looking.

   I absolutely love books. They’re a record of everything! They’re the way we communicate with our past and the way we send messages into the future.

   You are already very awesome so there’s really no need to try…just stop and appreciate the awesome things around you already. Enjoy coming back to your own bed after a long trip, smile when you let go of the gas pump and land perfectly on a round number, and get into the moment when the cashier opens a new lane at the grocery store…and you get to be first in line!

   Thank you so much for the chat and thank you sincerely for the very gracious words of support for The Book of (Even More) Awesome. I hope you enjoy it. Sending lots of love from snowy Canada and have a very awesome day,

   Neil