worlding at institutional scale

It is possible that the spiritual malaise and the epidemic of depression that has swept all the wealthy nations (Seligman, Reivich, Gillham, & Jaycox, 1996) have at their core the use of the shortcuts displacing the use of the strengths to produce positive emotion."

What is a World?

We could say a World is something like a gated garden. A World has borders. A World has laws. A World has values. A World has dysfunction. A World can grow up. A World has members who live in it. A World gives its members permission to act differently than outside of it. A World incentivizes its members to keep it alive, often with ... See more

We regularly think of worlds operating with specific external boundaries, which contain relative internal coherency despite the occasional leak.(1) The Victorian fascination with terrariums demonstrates this well. But what if the opposite were true, and unstable boundaries are precisely what constitutes worldness?

To think about beginnings, we have to go back to the moment before a World is born, to the moment of a curious creator looking at Reality — chaotic, meaningless, scary, but latent with potential — and wondering what to do with it. Philip K Dick said, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” A World is conceived when ... See more

Posting can be fun, entertaining, and even enlightening. But when we want to share a creative act we went deep into the void to create, we owe our work more than a post. We owe it a RELEASE.

A RELEASE is a richer and deeper expression of an idea. A release is not just the work, it’s anticipating the work. There’s an invitation to become part of it i... See more

Worlding is the art of devising a World: by choosing its dysfunctional present, maintaining its habitable past, aiming at its transformative future, and ultimately, letting it outlive your authorial control.

When you stand on the precipice of something you’ve worked hard on finally seeing the light of day, the life of the project flashes before your eyes.

In those moments the practical concerns that consumed you during the creative process fall away. Instead we retrace the emotions. The elations of discovery. The moments of doubt. The day things turned... See more

Linus Torvalds's style of development—release early and often, delegate everything you can, be open to the point of promiscuity—came as a surprise. No quiet, reverent cathedral-building here—rather, the Linux community seemed to resemble a great babbling bazaar of differing agendas and approaches (aptly symbolized by the Linux archive sites, who'd ... See more

[Willed introversion] cannot be described, quite, as an answer to any specific call. Rather, it is a deliberate, terrific refusal to respond to anything but the deepest, highest, richest answer to the as yet unknown demand of some waiting void within