Making it fun to change

Change can be fun? Hmm, it's certainly worth a try. So how do you make a diet fun? or reinforce new behavior you want to become a habit? How do you make a project team fun to work on?

G and I have just started the blood type diet, Eat Right for Your Type -- pretty tricky since we have different blood types. But, worthwhile if my sister's experience is to be trusted. Glenn is an A. I'm a B. We're challenged to master our own beneficial and neutral lists, never mind the things we can share.

[This change is for our health, not weight loss, per se, although I hope I lose some.]

So, how can we make it fun? Add your ideas, PLEASE!

• Teaser meals -- make yourself a meal of things he can't have. Yesterday for lunch I had a baked sweet potato with ricotta cheese and pesto -- great for a B; poison for an A. Taunt him while you eat it.
• Put on some great music and clean out the cabinets of everything you can't have. Make an A cabinet; a B cabinet; and a shared cabinet. Music to sort your cabinets? Get a job - Sha-na-na-na.
• Prepare a meal you both can eat of foods you've never cooked with before -- millet, you say? Rate every new dish, one to five stars.
  

What Does A Network Weaver Do (remix)

This brief slideshare deck describes grassroots organizing beautifully. I love how well the images work with the text. Thanks, Danielle.

What Does A Network Weaver Do (remix)

View more documents from Danielle Brigida.

The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs

Check out how an expert communicates to an audience. No Bullet Points!

The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs

View more presentations from Carmine Gallo.

Psychic benefits? Women's work? Any excuse.

Someone said to me this morning, men won't take jobs in human services because they can't support their families. The women have spouses or partners, so it's ok to pay so little.

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

To many woman working in nonprofits are single family households and are one or two paychecks away from homelessness themselves. They frequently work two, sometimes three jobs.

They are dedicated people who have spent as many dollars and years on their degrees.

They deserve better.

in reference to:

"In 2003 BusinessWeek surveyed the compensation packages of MBAs 10 years out of b-school. The median compensation package with bonus was $400,000. By contrast, the average 2004 salary of the CEO of a $5 million-plus health charity was $232,000 and of a hunger charity, $84,000. There's no way you're going to get people with a $400,000 annual pay package to take a $316,000 annual pay cut on the basis of the psychic benefits that await them. Instead, consider the enormous psychic benefits that people in the for-profit world enjoy as philanthropists. Think about this: It's cheaper for the MBA to donate $100,000 a year to the hunger charity than to go work for it. She gets $50,000 in federal and state tax savings, which leaves her $266,000 ahead of the game. On top of that, she gets a seat on the board of the hunger charity; indeed, probably chairs the board. She now gets to supervise the poor bastard who's running the hunger charity. She gets to dictate his strategy and how he goes about executing it. And if that weren't enough, the MBA is now elevated to the status of respected philanthropist in the community (while the hunger charity CEO gets demonized at the annual board meeting for wanting a $10,000 salary increase — "shame on you, that money could be going to the needy," they tell him). And, with a $100,000 annual contribution to the hunger charity, at some point the "philanthropist" gets her name on the top of the charity's headquarters. And maybe she loves her for-profit job on top it. Sounds like an awful lot of psychic benefit to me. Don't fall for this Puritan self-sacrificial psychobabble. It's not the poor who are asking you to work for less. It's the donating public, including many a wealthy donor. They're asking you to end poverty and every other great social problem and to do it for them at a discount. And they're exploiting the images of the poor to get you to agree. The fact that someone makes a one-time sacrificial gift doesn't mean you're obligated to make a lifetime sacrificial career choice. If you do the math and the psychic benefit comes up lacking for you, then ask the people who want you to make the world a better place for another kind of benefit that begins with a "p." Pay."
- The "Psychic Benefits" of Nonprofit Work Are Overrated - Dan Pallotta - HarvardBusiness.org (view on Google Sidewiki)

What about differences within nonprofit sectors?

in reference to: Amaze Your Friends with these Nonprofit Factoids | Blue Avocado (view on Google Sidewiki)

I'd like to see these figures broken out by sectors within the 501 (c)3 category, as well. If, as you mention below, you take out the hospitals and universities, I believe the differences would increase even more dramatically.

Why? The impact of unionization and/or more men working in hospitals and and universities?

Thanks, Rick Cohen at Blue Avocado, for pulling together the data.

Political genes?

Other deadlines interfered with my good intention to post on climate change on Blog Action Day yesterday. But, deadline behind me, I've spent some time reading what others posted. It led me to this post on Planetizen.

The post sheds some light on what I've often thought of as people being born with a Republican or Democrat gene. "Egalitarian" and "individualist" may be a better description, though, and linking such disputes to "clusters of values that form competing world views" is more useful than waiting for science to discover the politics gene.

in reference to:

"Some of my acquaintances believe that climate change may end human life (or at least civilization) and that the only way to save humanity is to massively reduce economic growth and consumption. Other acquaintances believe that climate change is, if not an outright hoax, a minor problem—and that even the slightest attempt to regulate emission-creating industries will itself destroy American civilization.
Whole lotta head-shakin’ going on.Most of these people are not scientists (let alone scientists specializing in climate-related science), so I strongly suspect that their opinions come from Al Gore’s movie and Rush Limbaugh’s talk show, rather than from a comprehensive review of the footnote-filled scientific papers addressing climate change. Nevertheless, they are as certain in their opinions as real scientists are. How come?"
- The genesis of the climate change stalemate | Grist (view on Google Sidewiki)

You Can Make Music with Bobby McFerrin

What a great three minute break. This little excerpt is wonderful.

Bobby McFerrin demonstrates the power of the pentatonic scale, using audience participation, at the event "Notes & Neurons: In Search of the Common Chorus", from the 2009 World Science Festival, June 12, 2009.