My blog, though I am far from prolific, has taken a ‘hit’ lately as I set up social media goods and write blog posts for local ski area Mount Peter. Here are links to some of our online goods….
Also started work on a YouTube channel but I have to get some videos going in order to finish this piece of the pie.
Weather cooperating, the mountain will open Saturday, December 17 – woot!! Santa is visiting on Sunday at noon-time. A nice, on snow, photo op for all you parents! Hope to see you there!
Most Stoked volunteers and mentors are New Yorkers or daily New Yorkers (commute daily for work and after hours fun). Though I worked on Madison Avenue often, I didn’t make too many trips far from the Port Authority to Madison Avenue commute.
Traveling outside my normal circle, as Stoked teens did by participating in all the activities Stoked introduced them to, gave me new understanding of the NYC bus and subway systems that I would not have had without Stoked.
On the surface, trying surfing or snowboarding or figuring out the subway system are not connected and are not life altering things. But in my day-to-day reality they are…
In board sports we learned that we all fall down. We learned that we choose to get back up and try again. Trying again is where we end up with success.
For me, a mentor, Stoked opened up a whole new world I hadn’t explored. NY Transit museum in Brooklyn. Paley Center for Media “museum.” Coleman Playground under the Manhattan Bridge. Metropolitan Life Tower in Manhattan. Places I’d never thought about visiting before let alone visiting via a transportation system I didn’t fully understand.
As a northern New Jersey guy, I could drive my car. I’ve driven from LA to NYC, Florida to Quebec, Colorado to New Jersey… When I couldn’t drive point to point, I’d fly and rent a car. I’ve driven in Utah, Texas, Georgia, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio…. My wheels have touched down in most of the fifty states.
Point is that I had control of the wheel headed for a destination. I didn’t feel that way traveling to these new locations while a mentor with Stoked. I knew I could handle it, don’t get me wrong. I/we would get to our destination safely. But it was a reach outside my comfort zone… A new schedule, a new map…
Like trying snowboarding for the city-bound, the experience helped me stretch outside my comfort zone. In this odd way, that my teenage mentee will never know, he helped me grow in very substantial way.
I save too much crap. But this isn’t a good example of that…
In a clipping from an old magazine I found in a book in my garage was the following quote from King of the Blues, B.B. King:
“I play The Thrill is Gone every night. But I never do it exactly what I did last night or the night before. I tell my band to play it as they feel it each night. I like that. It keeps it fresh.”
“I have a motto: Always do your best. When I was in grade school there was a poem a teacher used to tell us. It went something like ‘Be the labor great or small, do it well or not at all.’”
“I do the best I can each night. Even though a lot of nights my best is nothing as good as I’d like it to be.”
“Everyday I learn something. I have a computer that’s my professor. If I don’t learn something everyday, it’s a day lost.”
-As told to Richard Gehr and quoted in AARP magazine’s Setp/Oct 2008 issue
I typed “content management” into my search engine and one of the top results said, “Enterprise Content Management helps companies manage content.”
Initially, that sentence seems ridiculous. Content management systems to manage content. Snow shovels to shovel snow… Hello?
But, the rest of the description says that content management, “optimize business processes,and enable compliance with an integrated infrastructure.”
That (content management) is much more important to any business than just managing content.
When “content” is “undefined” managing it means nothing.
But, when you realize that “content” is the meat of what any organization says to customers, investors and employees – whether through the internet, print, radio, outdoor – it’s all content but its significance is huge, its implication far reaching…
I reported recently on the Keen footwear promotion Recess Toolkit so a 1907 quote tying “playgrounds” to National Forests from caught my eye…
“Playgrounds.—Quite incidentally, also, the National Forests serve a good purpose as great playgrounds for the people. They are used more or less every year by campers, hunters, fishermen, and thousands of pleasure seekers from the near-by towns. They are great recreation grounds for a very large part of the people of the West, and their value in this respect is well worth considering.”
Over a century ago, when National Forests were first being established, the leaders knew that the National Forests were a perfect place for recess. The quote comes from a book titled The Use of the National Forests published back in 1907 by the US Department of Agriculture, Forest Service.
So, get out there! Find your nearest National Forest, here.
In the past two years (2010-11) I’ve made at least dozen trips across Pennsylvania. North to South. East to West. New Jersey to Ohio. Philadelphia to Rochester. Hershey. Gettysburgh. Route 80. Route 78 . Route 81. Route 15. PA Turnpike. Backroads….
Each one of these cross-state trips has included many hours in the driver and passenger seat. Quiet times like these often lead to wandering, introspective, minds. Through the miles, there are many things I’ve learned about the state, it’s people and myself.
Here is Part 1 of my journey… My journey starts out slow. Slow, with simple observations from the road jotted down with a cheap hotel pen on a freebie sticky pad I found in the bottom of my bag. It starts with a list of animals seen from a seat on the road across Pennsylvania…
Pigeon, turtle, ground hog, gold finch, mallard, Canada geese, white tail deer, rabbit, crows, turkey vulture, turkey, barn swallows, red wing black bird, robin, grackle, squirrel, herons…
In a post titled “Time for Recess”, I wrote a little bit about recess and how kids (really we all do) need some time to get away from the desk (or screen) and play outside.
Well, the good folks at Keen have developed a program dubbed the, “Instant Recess Toolkit.” The resource helps employers of all sizes easily implement daily activity breaks at work, which Keen has smartly coined “recess.”
The new Instant Recess Toolkit, which was designed to help improve workplace health and productivity, and re-energize employees, is available now in a free download.
Smart marketing – perfectly in line with their brand. Congrats to the marketing folks at Keen, the employers who put the “Instant Recess Toolkit” to work and the employees who get some activity in their workday. Bravo!
“We crave comfort and security. We crave novelty and exploration too. We crave calm and excitement, and we even crave fear. Can we reconcile these seeming contradictions? They are not contradictory. They are intricate, interdependent forces, working together to create what we call life.”
-Laurence Gonzales, Deep Survival, National Geographic Adventure, November 2008
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