THE SERENDIPITY SLIDE:

tracking wonder
H A N D B O O K two
THE SERENDIPITY SLIDE:
20-Plus Resources to TRACK WONDER
For Your Creative Profession & Life
THE SERENDIPITY SLIDE
Don’t you love serendipity? Let’s say you’re a marketer and PR guru during
the week. But it’s Saturday, and you’re at the park with your little boy. While
he’s squawking up a storm as he chutes down an old-fashioned metal slide,
you’re secretly thinking about ways to promote one of your client’s new
services. Your client helps schools develop long-term projects to improve their
respective communities and has asked your team to create a campaign brand to
distinguish what she offers. Your boy squeals, his arms lifted toward the sun,
as his sneakers land again onto the sand. Another parent and little girl show
up. You two make small talk while your kids make big laughs. It turns out she’s
a community organizer. She’s involved in her daughter’s school. She’s never
made the connection between her occupation and her passion for her child’s
education. You exchange cards. That evening your family goes out to eat. You
overhear someone complaining about his son’s school. The curriculum seems
meaningless.
Maybe that conversation at the park and the overheard conversation at the
restaurant alone don’t give you “the solution.” But they do give you a sense
you’re on the right track, gathering “accidental” resources and making
spontaneous connections. If anything, your unconscious should be primed that
night for some insightful dreaming. You’re riding the serendipity slide.
Serendipity is not only the chance fortunate encounter or connection
itself. It’s also the disposition itself to be open to such accidental good luck.
Psychologist Richard Wiseman studied and interviewed hundreds of
successful people that we might tag as “lucky.” The first of four key traits he
discovered that they held in common is they “create, notice, and act upon
chance opportunities.” Like your boy on the slide, serendipity is fun and
sometimes makes problem-solving more effortless.
This TRACKING WONDER HANDBOOK #2 proffers resources to arouse
serendipitous leads, ideas, connections, and actions as you pursue your creative
projects. The following allies and delightful surprises will keep you on wonder’s
scent.
Here’s all I ask in return if you like what you read.
Our world needs more wonder trackers. Wonder is here. We just need to let
wonder open our eyes and minds so we can experience it and help change the
world accordingly.
1.
end me a link to or note about your
S
favorite TRACKING WONDER Resource
not already on this list, and I might
add it to the handbook.
Jeffrey@trackingwonder.com
TRACKING WONDER
2. 20:10: Think of 10 people you know who
hunger to change the way creativity
happens in our homes, studios,
businesses, classrooms, communities,
forests, and beaches. Send them a note
telling them about this handbook and
linking them to this page.
EMAIL THIS DOCUMENT
The Top 20
1
World Wide Wunderkammern
17th-century Wunderkammern, Wonder Cabinets, were the glass cabinets and
sometimes whole rooms and shelves devoted to natural oddities such as skulls
and bones and exotic clothes.
«Now digital artists Marek Walczak and Martin Wattenberg are creating
the Wonder Walker: A Global Online Wundermakker. Here’s an
article about it from Mappa Mundi Magazine – itself a resource of
online wonders.
«Here’s a spontaneous collective
Flickr Kunstkammer (Curiosity Cabinet)
that might inspire your own collection.
«Cluster Flock offers some of the best random wonder on the web.
It’s an experimental collective blog. You can become part of the flock
just by using the Christopher Walken account. Over 300 posts fall
under the CF category of awesome.
2
The Imagine IT! Project
The Imagine It! Project – This non-profit gathers brilliant organizations,
entrepreneurs, schools, and individuals with a core mission: to change the
way education happens through creativity, imagination, and innovation.
Co-founded by innovative film producers and visionary entrepreneurs Rudy
Poe and Richard Tavenar, the Imagine It! Project offers numerous free video
interviews and other resources. “Creative thinking can change the world” is
one of their key beliefs. Hear here. Because we’re devoted to changing the way
creativity happens in the schools, we heartily endorse The Imagine It! Project.
3
Wonder Nonfiction Books:
I could have devoted this whole handbook to 20 nonfiction books, but I’ll limit
myself to four delightful and unique books:
«The Book of Awesome and 1000 Awesome Things – Don’t you
love waking up and realizing it’s Saturday? Or flipping over the
pillow to the cool side? Or getting the day off because it’s snowed?
Neil Pasricha had an idea. He’d start a blog and post one
awesome thing a day each weekday. Friends forwarded it to friends.
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Strangers posted their own awesome things. Millions of people read
it. A book deal followed. AWESOME! for a 30-year-old guy who had
just previously lost a good friend to suicide and a wife to divorce.
Neil is an AWESOME wonder tracker.
«The Happiness Project, the blog and book – Gretchen Rubin
dropped off her young daughter at school one morning and thought,
“I’m not happy. I’m going to change that.” So she made the personal
pursuit of happiness her project for a year. She kept a blog that
recorded her daily experiment to try out every piece of advice,
scientific or otherwise, about happiness. The result? An endearing
account from a dear human being who definitely is a wonder tracker.
«The Power of Positivity - Henrik Edberg’s book and blog offer
quick tips and quotations to engage your productivity and heighten
your happiness. Like Gretchen, he gave himself a life project to shift
his attitude and has been sharing his insight along the way.
«The Age of Wonder – Richard Holmes, a British biographer,
makes the case that wonder catalyzed the two seemingly opposed
movements of Romantic poetry and of Romantic science during the
nineteenth century. You’ll find any number of reviews from The
Times to Time, but I liked this piece “Keats in Space” by writer
Molly Young. Young seems like a wonder tracker herself.
4
Positive Psychology
I blog for Psychology Today and keep in touch with a movement that is
changing the way we view our minds, each other, and happiness. It’s called
Positive Psychology.
«Martin Seligman champions the positive in the psyche.
That stance in itself flips Freud on his consternated head. We’re not
in essence neurotic emotional neophytes with an unconscious filled
with sexual demons. Well, maybe some of us are, but Seligman’s
work out of the University of Pennsylvania has carried a bright and
influential message for psychologists: Let’s study what factors account
for human happiness and see if we can’t help people act accordingly.
The founder of Positive Psychology, Seligman’s not simplistic.
His website is chock full of resources, and his TED Talk suggests
his demeanor is of intelligent good cheer.
«Jonathan Haidt is one of the few positive psychologists who
addresses wonder directly, and his book The Happiness Hypothesis:
Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom is well worth the read.
«And many of you know I’m a champion of psychologist
Mihalyi Csikzentihalyi (cheeks-sent-me-high), who coined
TRACKING WONDER
the word “flow” for that optimal feeling we experience when we’re
engaged in what we love for the love of it.
«Psychologist and author of The Luck Factor Richard Wiseman tracks
luck, as mentioned earlier. His smart website lays out the four core
elements of lucky people and gives you resources to boost your luck factor.
5
Jonathan Harris & Story-Collecting
on the Internet
30-something artist and computer scientist Jonathan Harris collects the
globe’s stories. His media are savvy computer science, outdoor adventure, and
an authentic range of compassion. His numerous Internet art projects do what
wonder does best: They evoke deep connection – to one another and to what
matters. Start with the 2006 project We Feel Fine. His 2007 TEDTalk relays
some of his latest adventures in story, compassion, & wonder.
6
Knowledge that Challenges What You
Think You Know
Wonder scampers between the nest of knowledge and the field of not-knowing.
Know, don’t know, know, don’t know. I’m a fact geek, so these sites send me
scampering. (Don’t you love the word ‘scampering’? It reminds me of a hamster
at last freed from one of those cruel plastic wheels and who’s running for his life
to a summer camp for hampsters called “Camp Scamper”!)
«Holy Crap Facts: I often play the “Holy Crap!” Game of Existential
Wonder with myself by imagining my car suddenly reeling off the
highway because there’s nothing holding up the highway but water.
So when I came across this blog, I thought, “Holy Crap!, a site to
make my head spin with factoids. Cool.” http://holycrapfacts.com/
«In Barking Up the Wrong Tree, Wired columnist Eric Barker
offers a compendium of science-based questions and a review of
current research in response to the question.
7
The Outdoors
Get outside. Really, just cross that threshold, one foot in and one foot out,
and feel how your arms and fingers kind of tingle with tiny murmurs of electric
currents. It’s as if a hundred little flowers in the body perk up with the first gust
of fresh air and sunlight. Give the eyes a break and follow your ears or nose
around the block or into the woods. If you have a Tracking Wonder Field Guide
notebook with you, record a few simple moments of sensual delight. The smell
of bus exhaust early in the morning. The smell of someone else’s wood-burning
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fire on a winter afternoon. The slap of cold wind flying off the Hudson River
onto your face to say, “Wake up!” Our children aren’t the only ones suffering
from nature-deficit disorder, and a slew of architects, designers, artists, and
writers glean glimmers of insight from the languages of the outdoors.
8
Creative Action Figures
No mind experiments for these guys. The G.I. Joes of creativity consulting, these
creativity consultants would agree with Rene Descartes who said that wonder is
dangerous if it does not lead to curiosity and inquiry. In other words, all wonder
and no action makes Jack a dreamy-headed do-nothing.
«Scott Belsky leads this troupe with his 99% Conference
and collective blog (and his incredibly useful and engaging book
Making Ideas Happen). I tote his nifty Action Cahiers wherever I go, and
now so does my wife. I’ve bought them for friends, too.
«Mark McGuinNess, a poet and consultant in London, offers
similar principles in his consulting business Lateral Action.
McGuinness hones in on the particular challenges creatives face in
designing a whole and successful life. New York-based giddy dad, yogi,
multi-talented venture partner, and consultant Jonathan Fields
offers smart, generous advice, services and a blog full of resources
aimed to keep you moving in genuine action toward your clients.
9
Jivamukti
In the 1990s crazy black and white photographs tucked in the back of Yoga Journal
would show a thin near-naked guy sticking out his tongue with his eyes rolled
back while an elegant woman dressed in tights and heels gestured in an acrobatic
pose. Who would practice yoga with these people? Millions of people, it turns
out. Those two people in the ads were Sharon Gannon and David Life. Both
performance artists in the ‘80s, together Gannon and Life produce music CDs,
write books, and galvanize people around the world. They are changing the way
millions of people engage their bodies and minds creatively and spiritually.
Jivamukti – it means, simply, the self freed from its own shackles in this body
and in this lifetime.
10
Your Body
And for that matter, just relish this fleshy mobile home that’s uniquely
yours. It doesn’t simply “house” the mind. It’s part and parcel of the
brain, and it probably comprises a good 95% of the mind itself. If you
never saw the Our Body: The Universe Within exhibit, you can still
explore the site of resources. It’s too bad a pretty boy pop musician had to
steal the title, but your body is a wonderland.
TRACKING WONDER
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David Abrams & the Alliance
for Wild Ethics (A.W.E.)
David Abrams & The Alliance For Wild Ethics (A.W.E.)
If you’re going to track wonder, you want David in your tracking party. His
special background in phenomenology and shamanism makes him a dynamic
spokesperson for changing the way we can re-connect with our fellow plants and
animals by reclaiming our delightful bodies.
12
The Art of Nonconformity & Chris Guillebeau
Did you ever fantasize about traveling to every country? Not only that, but that you
also would meet and talk with people in every country about changing the very world
you’re traveling around? And not only that, but that you also would make a living
by showing people how to do the same and live unconventionally and according to
their passion? And, hey, why not throw in a World Domination Summit aimed to
galvanize young armies of like-minded people who are all ready to create a world
in which we all can live with passion? Meet Chris Guillebeau. He’s 32.
He tracks wonder around the world and is doing all of the above. Go, Chris!
13
Delightful Social Networking & Gwen Bell
Many creative contrarians bristle at the mega-social networking hurricane. Can
being on Facebook feel like being in a yogi group of soulful like-minded people?
Can Tweeting your latest insights and links feel like sending out cosmic cupcakes
to strangers? Gwen Bell would probably say so. She’s a “social web strategist.”
That means she helps you feel connected on the web, but she does so with delight,
pleasure, and pure joy. Her yoga and meditation practice probably help. Gwen is
a wonder tracker for the social web as her ideas for a digital sabbatical show.
14
A Box of Crayons for CEOs
A Box of Crayons for CEOs. Don’t even mention “think outside the box” to Michael
Bungay Stanier. Bungay Stanier is a down-to-earth, savvy Fortune 500 coach and
author of Do More Great Work (and former Rhodes Scholar). His flick 8 Principles of
Irresistible Fun alone puts him on this list as a valued wonder tracker in the boardroom.
15
quirky Graphic Artists
MARIAN BANJTES and STEFAN SAGMEISTER prove that you can defy corporate
slickness and be outrageously successful. Bantjes’s art and design have her indelible stamp
of elaborate ornamentation, exquisite care, and delicious delight. Rather than work for
40 years and retire at seventy, Sagmeister and his design firm take year-long sabbaticals
every seven years to refresh their perspective. Both of them stay on wonder’s scent.
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Connecting Again As Human Beings
Wonder opens us to what matters, and so do these thinkers:
«Alex Steffen and WorldChanging
Former environmental journalist Alex Steffen heads up the vast
global media network called WorldChanging: Change Your Thinking.
With over 10,000 articles, a 600-page book by the same title full of
resources (and designed by Sagmeister), and a network of thinkers,
WorldChanging puts you in touch with what matters, and tracking
wonder is all about acting upon what matters.
«Douglas Rushkoff and Life, Inc.
More than almost any other thinker lately, Rushkoff puts his keen
intellect and capacity to research to work on behalf of recapturing
meaningful connections between and among human beings in
this digital age. A nine-minute history of corporate America and
a six-minute interview on the Colbert Report will get you started.
Then, get off the computer and start a barbecue gathering!
17
Spell-Binding Writers
Poets, fiction writers, and essayists are among our most ancient traditions of
wonder trackers. Here is a sampling of some favorite writers whose work reminds
us that language and story can still cast spells. Charles Baxter speculates
that the heart of fiction begins with wonder and questions, and his own novels and
short stories prove it so. Nicholson Baker has earned a reputation – not
always favorably – by writing a series of novels and novellas in the voice of boyishly
obsessed, digressive, near-goofy, but always wondrous narrators. In country boy
Ted Kooser’s essays and poems, wonder arrives in barns and leaves and the
slice of light in October. A guy who titles his memoir A Private History of Awe merits a
place on this list, don’t you think? Scott Russell Sanders has carved an
oeuvre made of reverence, reflection, and not-knowing musings.
18
Houses of Imagination
Part of my curiosity is how we can shape spaces to invite more wonder,
reverie, and optimal creative flow.
«SyFy Station Commercial:
Here’s a commercial that would spin Don Draper’s head. If you like the
song “Happiness,” it’s by the English synthesizer duo Goldfrapp.
«Anthony Lawlor & the Foundation for Consciousness in Architecture:
Lawlor has been writing about and building sacred spaces for a long time.
His soulful workspaces will give wonder ample cozy nooks & crannies.
TRACKING WONDER
«Pattern Language and Christopher Alexander:
I love nooks and crannies. Our old farmhouse has a few cozy spots to hide
away and daydream. Theorist and architect Christopher Alexander might
applaud. In his books and on this website, he lays out elegant principles for
drawing upon over 250 fundamental patterns of design that make homes,
work space, and neighborhoods livable, fulfilling, and compatible with the
planet. Environment shapes the mind. So why not shape your working and
living environment with wonder?
you wonder what a modern-day Wonder Cabinet would look like?
Do
Check out this Brooklyn artist’s house: http://vimeo.com/14938491.
Ben Wu and David Usui of Lost & Found Films (lostfoundfilms.com)
made this short to initiate their “This Must be the Place” series that explores
how we make our homes.
«Candyland Rooms:
Prague-based photographer Jan Faulkner creates surreal rooms that
evoke what I’ve been calling lately “Mind Rooms” – those shaped categories of
thought that we ask our minds to sit, lounge, and romp in. Faulkner says on
her own website, “My personal work is still in progress. I am trying to find the
way between reality and fantasy, natural and artificial, original and imitation,
personal and global. I focus on the aesthetic quality of depicted objects or
persons, there must be some signs of beauty, truth and deeper value.”
Beauty, truth, and deeper value – those are key elements that define wonder.
19
Wonder Performance Pioneers
After John Cage flipped the art and music worlds on their silent heads in the
1960s, the 1970s and ‘80s erupted with pioneer wonder trackers. David Byrne
just doesn’t stop creating. Neither does wonder vocalist Meredith Monk.
20 A Hut of Questions
If I do my job well, A HUT OF QUESTIONS will become your regularly
resource for serendipitous reflections, links, and tips for crafting a creative life
rich with meaningful work, project completion, and dynamic relationships.
Dwell in some questions with me.
The experience of wonder is not a relic of childhood. It’s a reminder that some
things are more important, more real, and more beautiful than others. It’s also not
an accessory for people with easy lives. It’s as essential for us to thrive in this human
life as is good food and love and fresh water and play.
See you in the woods,
Jeffrey
www.trackingwonder.com