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Dan Pink’s excellent book, “A Whole New Mind,” was a wonderful bit of neon holiday reading. It worked great on the airplane to add a splash of color with the huge title and bright orange cover. Seriously now, the book helped recognize some important trends that make certain skills much more valuable and critical in the new economic environment. Specifically, abundance, Asia, and automation are making the previously lucrative analytic and left brain skills less of a competitive advantage. And it makes right brain abilities like design, empathy, and narrative, much more important. There’s a lot of material in Dan’s book for blogging, but I’ll stick to narrative for this one.

The picture to the left is a photo from my mother’s school newspaper when she was growing up in Hawaii. Dan Pink’s book helped me to see that photo, as a result of following his advice and looking up StoryCorps as a way to develop my narrative skills. I found the link before I arrived at the place of my spawning in New York City, and after reading the link I was encouraged to interview my mom on video tape again. I’ve videotaped interviews of other peoples parents, but the interview process never clicked for me before – despite a deep desire to record and remember the stories and heritage from my parents, relatives, as well as friends and even strangers. The idea of taking my camera to new people and asking interesting questions has appealed for many years. The StoryCorps site helped me generate a set of questions that led to some amazing discoveries when I interviewed my mother on the kitchen table. I never knew she had won several competitions, including airplane trips to other islands, and was chosen as a 4H club beauty queen. She pulled out a scrap book and I saw her many photos in old newspaper articles, one of which was the national 4H club magazine.

If you want to set up your own interviews, check out the StoryCorps online question generator program, get a tape recorder and ask away. Just a little bit of preparation and planning makes a big difference for a good interview. With that I learned some new stories and some old stories, and hearing those stories made the world richer for me, maybe it can for you too.

Gas prices have risen considerably, and it is clear that the supplies of oil are diminishing. It is well known that any oil field once it is tapped will at some point reach its peak production capacity, and after it reaches its peak, the production level will drop off, sometimes dramatically. If you look at the entire earth as an oil field, the question becomes, when is the earth at peak production, and when will the production level start to fall. Some believe that we have hit that peak production capacity. The concept is called “peak oil”, and I’ll let you research it on Google if you want to know more about it. It clearly has repercussions. I get some investment newsletters, and clearly the investment community knows about this issue. A lot of dollars as well as government policy is chasing this one. Some claim our Middle East policy is largely about this issue.

But rather than add to the clamor which has taken up plenty of conversation time at home, here’s something you might not have heard about. There’s plenty of energy. Maybe we’ll run out of petrol, maybe not, but there’s plenty of energy wealth. Here’s why.

Perhaps the best medicine for the Malthusian blues is to take a gander at the ideas of Paul Zane Pilzer. Pilzer is “a world-renowned economist, a multimillionaire software entrepreneur, an adjunct professor, and the author of seven best-selling books and dozens of scholarly publications.” He also served as economic advisor to two presidential administrations, and predicted the Savings and Loan crisis in the eighties.”

Pilzer has written books about this issue. In an interview by Anthony Robbins Mr. Pilzer explained that if you had an island where everyone fished for food, and one person invented a fishing net that made all the fishing jobs obsolete, what would you do? It might seem that you have a “net” loss of jobs and thus the island is poorer, but the reality is completely the opposite as the new invention has actually added productivity and value to the tribe. A good economic policy would not force a single fisherman to fish so that everyone else could eat. Instead, just let the newly unemployed do other things that now become possible because of the fishing net. The former fisher people can become teachers, artists, scientists, etc. Oil in the ground used to mean that the ground was not arable, and was thus worthless. Finding that oil could be used to make gasoline essentially created a new energy source unavailable before. There was a prediction that coal would run out in England during their Industrial Revolution, and that coal prices would skyrocket. Coal prices did increase short term, but long term, replacements were found. And the supply did not run out, they kept finding other sources.

Amory Lovins was featured in Discover magazine this past February. A physicist, economist, inventor, and co-founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute in Colorado, he makes clear that there is an issue, but rather than sink into despair, we should see what we can do about it. There are many options for renewable resources, and a healthy path to get there.

This isn’t to say there won’t be bumps along the path, but the correct way of thinking is to know that the solutions are out there, and to get to it. There’s even a great pay off if you can help find new energy resources. And that’s not just the kind that makes the cars run. There’s plenty of energy wealth between your ears to solve other problems that can produce more value, whatever your gifts are.

Face it, the news can be a real downer. And is it really the truth? If you stick your head in a septic tank and report every detail of how things are decaying and falling apart in there, yeah, it’d be true, but the question is how true. Outside, a tree blooms, children play, birds sing. If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, perhaps truth is in the heart. If that’s true, what kind of truth do we want to put there?

I’ve seen some great truths, some beautiful truths, some helpful truths at 100bloggers.com. The material you’ll find can help improve your game of life, but even more amazing is that you can get in conversation with these folks, and they’re up to great things, writing books, forging networks, and making this little blue brown ball a little better. Check them out, from the founder Troy Worman, to the wonderful Phil Gerbyshak, Trevor Gay, and many others.

A friend once related a horrible study where the mad white coated scientists put cats in a vise so they could see the world, but not interact with it for a long time, and then dissected their brains and compared it to a normal kitten’s development. He said they found it was mush. Don’t let your brains become mush! The bloggers need your comments and interaction to keep them going, and it will help your brain too. See you in the blogosphere.

My wife and I saw a movie in downtown Missoula last night, “An Inconvenient Truth“. I came out moved, despite having heard about global warming for many years, I was shocked at how bad it really is, and how well understood the crisis is. Please please, if you care about the planet, check out the film. It was very well done, and it deserves your attention. At the very least, you’ll be more prepared in case we don’t turn the tide. It’s pretty clear Katrina was a result of global warming, and Katrina will look like a picnic if the trends aren’t significantly reversed. Here’s the official site for the movie, www.climatecrisis.net.

Conferences are wonderful opportunities to network, meet people, and to learn about the topic area of the conference. If you’re fortunate enough to be a speaker, the opportunities increase even more.

What about hosting one?

Tim O’Reilly has invited friends in the computer field to participate in his exclusive “Foo Camps”. They’re conferences that are bascially self-organizing, if you’ve been lucky enough to be invited. But some didn’t feel like waiting, and they started “Bar camp”. You just find a space with several rooms where speakers can speak, invite whoever you want in whatever topic area you like, and let them create the conference.

Would like you like to host a conference? If you need some inspiration, check out this video.

Browsing Phil Gerbyshak’s quite generous offerings, full of great links, I found this link to Bill Kinnon’s mention of the Generous Web. Bill’s post describes beautifully how one billion online people sharing freely and generously of their knowledge is creating a powerful force for good, a disruptive conspiracy that is changing the world.

Generous websters share the best of what they see on the web, and they do it rapidly through links (and there are wonderful links on Phil’s and Bill’s sites). I challenge everyone to go and do likewise, be a part of the generous web. Take from it, and also add to it. There are many challenges around today that are asking for the best from each of us. Join the conspiracy!

Hello from a hotel in Battle Mountain, Nevada. It was as far as I made it last night on my way back to Montana from San Francisco. Notice my new shiny MacBookPro, showing the inbuilt iSight running on iMovie. So this is sort of an iBlogPost. Thank you to Hugh, it was through his support and encouragement I took the bold step of getting this sweet machine. I was seeing it everywhere in California, as I roamed JavaOne 2006 in Moscone Center, San Francisco, hoping I’d get to show of my new MacBookPro, and it was all over the place. Including on the big stage. I was roller blading around Golden Gate Park yesterday, and someone was using it on the side of a road. It was someone who was part of a movie crew.

This fortune showed up a few weeks ago in a Chinese Restaurant in Missoula. Carl Jung, the Austrian psychologist and contemporary of the atheistic Sigmund Freud was one of the early great psychologists, and for me at least, more useful. Carl Jung taught things that have been proven in more modern empirical studies, such as religious conversion is often the best path to deep personal change. Rather than being stuck in a scientific materialist model, which only allowed Freud to go as deep as the sexual drives, Jung was able to delve into the realm of spirit. For many, this is a problem, because the study of spirit and the study of material science had been divided up very cleanly between the priests and the scientists. It wasn’t ok for anyone to wander into the no-man’s divide between the realm of science and that of spirit. But Carl Jung did so, and his theory of Synchronicity made for a wonderful dance song in my college years that perhaps can explain why I think fortune cookies can work.

Synchronicity is the theory of meaningful coincidences, and for me at least, I find valuable synchronicity in the fortune cookies I receive. They can be messages from the universe and the Creator, and not just a cookie factory. And it occurred to me from that fortune cookie that I am reluctant to share bad news even more than good news. But there does seem to be value in it, and it’s something I’m going to practice right now in the blog. The bad news is the meal around that cookie wasn’t very good, and we should have known better, we just forgot that the restaurant wasn’t that great. The good news, it occurred to me it would be a good blog topic and worth sharing. I photographed it on top of a Java book, as I was preparing to get to JavaOne 2006 in San Francisco. And that’s more good news, as I’m done and it was a great conference. Perhaps a topic for a later blog.

I’ve become addicted to 43 Things recently. The website is a place to list 43 goals, and where you can give and get help and encouragement in achieving those goals. But an entry I read recently from someone who cheered one of my goals really struck home. It was titled, “Don’t stop to wave, you’ll drown”. The inspired entry quotes from a couple authors and it explained some of my problems using the 43 Things website, and how I can use it better.

The essence of the entry was that life is like a river, and you have to keep swimming. If you stop to wave, to get appreciation, to be acknowledged, to be anything, you will drown. Waiting for people to notice kills dreams. After a few days I chose a goal to give 43 cheers as I noticed others had chosen similar goals. Many have given 1000 cheers on 43 Things. But in order to give cheers, you have to get cheers. You can get cheers from others, and you also get “a handful” of cheers from the system every day. I started feeling like a lab rat hitting the lever hoping for a bit of food. I was glad when the goal was over.

The “Don’t stop to wave or you’ll drown” entry clarified my troubles. The “high” on 43 Things is being cheered, or recognized, or when someone leaves a comment or response. But it’s better not to want or need that recognition. Perhaps it’s good to appreciate the cheers, but the focus needs to be on the real goal, to keep swimming, flow with the current, and keep moving.

These new social networking websites have a tremendous power. I like 43Things.com because it offers support and encouragement. But the real power comes from giving. Giving others a cheer, or an answer to a question, or just a supportive comment, is a way to appreciate others, and to enrich the internet. I don’t want to wait for others to notice anymore. I choose to keep on swimming.

Growing up, the dogma of the day was that you had only so many neurons way before you became an adult, and after that, the number just declined. The neurons were never replaced. It was a dismal picture, and I could never quite believe it. Recent research has disproved this idea. Adult brains can grow new neurons, not just new branches on old neurons. Granted, this isn’t new news, but the implications can hardly be emphasized enough.

A great article on Kathy Sierra’s blog shows that being in an office cubical can cause brain damage, or something very much akin to it. Isn’t it strange that so much creative intellectual work would be done in cubicles? Or is it really productive work after all?

Another great blog post from Kathy shows that being around angry people causes brain damage too. Researchers have found we have “mirror neurons” that match the people around us. We just have to watch someone be a rock star, and part of our brain turns into a rock star. Or being around someone who is angry causes the mirror neurons to match, and we become angry.

Perhaps the soil metaphor for our mind and spirit is a scientific one too. If our brain actually grows, maybe it’s a good idea to plant good seeds. Like the parable Jesus used in the gospels. And maybe it’s a good idea to keep the soil fertile too with good fertilizer. Good fertilizer for the brain as well as the soul. The mirror neuron research indicates that being around happy people would lead to healthy brain soil. What do you think would be good NPK for the head? Or the mental equivalent of healthy fertilizer?

Being a programmer, my sense is it’s all about the environment. Having a healthy pleasant environment. The soil is like our experience. Going back to the issue of cubicles, is it any wonder that a company like Google is doing so well, coming up with such great ideas, when it not only gives all the programmers real offices, but Google also offers free healthy meals. How are you nourishing the environment of your life?