Rejection is a fact of life. We don’t get the jobs we want. Or the date with someone who seems attractive. Plenty of magazine editors reject my short stories, even when the editor says, “I liked it. It just doesn’t fit.” Those rejections feel personal—and they are in matters of the heart. But more often, […]
How Do Rejections Affect Your Ability to Be Resilient and Adapt? Read More »
This is the September 2024 Create an Adaptable Life Newsletter, from Johanna Rothman. The Unsubscribe link is at the bottom of this email. When I went to college, I referred to my female friends as “women.” My mother laughed at that, saying we were still girls. I asked her, “When do male people become men?
How Do the Names We Call Each Other Matter? Read More »
Mark and I just returned from a week-long trip to Switzerland and Germany to explore some of my family’s origins. We had a great—and exhausting—time. I learned a ton, not just about my family’s past, but about designing for the entire experience, and how my perseverance interacts with my learning. Design for the Entire Experience
How Can You Integrate What You Learned from Traveling to a New Place? Read More »
In the agile community, we have the idea of “Yesterday’s Weather.” That means that what happened yesterday is roughly what will happen today and maybe tomorrow. (We expect small or no Foreign Elements. See Where Are You In Your Changes? for more details about the Satir Change Model.) As assumptions go, that’s reasonable for progress. However,
What Would It Take for Us to Embrace Continual Change? Read More »
We moved into this house ten years ago, so Things Are Breaking. Our garage door sounded sick a couple of months ago, but I’ve learned to wait until the spring breaks before fixing it. The Last Responsible Moment for fixing occurs after the spring breaks. (Very few garage door people will replace the spring before
When Do We Realize the Last Responsible Moment Whooshed By? Read More »
An amazing thing occurred in the recent French elections. After the first round of voting, the third-place centrist-left candidates dropped out and asked “their” voters to support the other centrist-left candidate. That’s how the center-left overwhelmed the far-right candidates. Yes, the third-place people stayed committed to their principles but did not stay attached to their positions.
How Can We Be Committed to Principles, But Not Attached to Positions? Read More »
My twenty-year-old pillow died several years ago. Instead of supporting my neck, my head just plunked down. That led to back pain and insomnia. I needed to sleep. The manufacturer is out of business and there was no straight replacement. That’s when I started to experiment. I bought many pillows. The image on the left
How Can We Realize the Experiment is Over and It’s Time to Clean Up? Read More »
We all live through various hype cycles, personally and professionally. (Hype cycles look a lot like the Satir Change model, the image in this post.) Right now, in 2024, “generative” AI is having its moment. But AI is not generating anything, certainly not new insights. Instead, the engines have ingested (without paying creators) lots of
How Can We Avoid Confusing the Hard Parts (People) with the Easy Parts (Tools)? Read More »
Johanna Rothman’s Create an Adaptable Life Newsletter for June 2024. We use boundaries to choose who’s in or out of our families, our work, and our lives. Those choices help us decide our responsibilities to the people inside and outside our boundaries. However, those boundaries are not particularly static. The boundaries evolve as we move
What Responsibilities Do We Owe People In or Out of Our Boundaries? Read More »
I could tell when my parents had overdosed on their favorite news channel. They said things like, “Kids these days…” Because I’m a bad, bad daughter, I used to ask, “Which kids? Can you name two or three? Do you mean our children?” (Their grandchildren.) “No, not our children,” they said. Their next favorite saying
How Can We Postpone Old (Age) Thinking and Create New Ideas? Read More »