Keep your eye on the Prize!

Profound and inspiring  poster produced by  Alex Koplin in Collaboration with David Meiklejohn.

Looking at this poster is a reminder that it really does pay to keep things simple.

The philosopy illustrated in this image is applicable to both personal and worklife.

In essence it’s like the  principles of successful change, simple to state but difficult to impliment.

Making effective change is  about awarness and alignment.

Awareness

• Know what you want
• Know where you are

Alignment

• Change behaviours, systems and attitudes until they are in alignment with what you want
• Maintain awareness to help track your progress
• Work with what works; learn from and discard what doesn’t

(adapted from smart things to know about change, david firth, capstone publishing,1999)

In grand terms we could describe this as an example of systems thinking but  if you stop and think it through it’s really just common sense.

If you dont like where you are then decide where you’d rather be and work to get there,  rinse and repeat.

If we apply this  idea to society we pretty much have the Urban Ascetic philosophy in a nutshell.  It’s about simplifying life and focusing on what makes you happy and fullfilled, without wasting time, effort or resources on stuff that doesn’t matter or that actively gets in the way.

Happiness in this sense represents a  long term,  fullfilled, socially integrated and sustainable  kind of happy rather than a short term who ate all the pies kind of thing.

I’ll finish this short post with some smart things said by a very smart man on the same subject:

• Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awarness that created them.
• Everything should be made as simple as possible but not one bit simpler.
• Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.
• Truth is what stands the test of experience.

Einstein’s three rules of work

Albert Einstein Quotes from the Quotation page.