John Carrier

Colin Beavin, aka No Impact man, posted today on the problem of air travel and its impact on the environment.

I don’t consider myself an environmentalist, per se, and I’m not proposing to start the horse-and-buggy revolution in business travel and bi-coastal commuting (I’m talking to you, Schouweilers).

I do consider myself a “mental environmentist”: I believe that our mental environments our cluttered, principally by outmoded assumptions that no longer serve us.

Colin talks about the significant and growing impact of air travel (largely business-related) on the health of our atmosphere and suggests we look at alternatives like high-definition teleconferencing and other advances in telecommunications. I’ll take it a step further…and a step closer to home.

This is a special case of something I’ve been thinking about for a while: people hanging on to old ways of doing business despite new information (or technological progress) because the cost of change — questioning your own assumptions, admitting you were wrong — exceeds the perceived benefit of switching.

More prevalent case than air travel, but related: Where I live (Minneapolis) people commute an average of 45 minutes per day (round-trip) so that they can gather in the same building to work, even though they spend 80% of their time or more isolated in their own cubicles. Furthermore, they usually commute by driving alone in an SUV (by my observation, at least).

The assumption? People work better when they congregate in a central location. The reality? This model gained acceptance and solidified as a best practice well over a hundred years ago, sometime after the great urbanization of the US but decades before modern communication technology.

I haven’t seen updated numbers lately, but I heard JetBlue and Best Buy were doing quite well with homesourcing and reducing their employees’ impact on the environment, to boot. If you care about that sort of thing.
A lot of people will fight to the death for the idea that business requires facetime, by which they mean guaranteed access to physically observe and interrupt their coworkers during a fixed interval totaling 40+ hours per week.

I think it’s a combination of clinging to outmoded assumptions and lack of trust, which begs the question, if you don’t trust the people you work with, why do you work with them?

Please share your opinion in the comments below. I’m dying to know if I’m wrong about this.

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the conditions that surround him… The unreasonable man adapts surrounding conditions to himself… All progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

George Bernard Shaw

Today, I’m going to do a little mashup of ideas from two of my current living heroes, Timothy Ferriss and Keith Ferrazzi.

Keith’s new thing is sharing your goals with your friends to garner their support (and deepen your relationship with them), and in that spirit, he recently blogged his goals for the new year.

Tim’s book, the 4-Hour Workweek, teaches you to throw out your reasonable goals in exchange for unreasonable ones. His logic? Since (a) radical goals can be waaaay more motivating than humdrum ones, and (b) there’s less competition for the far-out stuff (more people dream of owning a dream house than a dream castle), then (c) you are more likely to reach your crazywild goals than your run-of-the-mill ones, if you take your crazywild goals seriously and actually take the first steps toward achieving them.

The mashup: here’s my list of the Top 10 Insane Goals I want to accomplish this year. I came up with this list after much thought over the recent holidays using the methodology Tim calls “Dreamlining.” Out of 30 or so things I would do if I had $100 million in the bank and there was no way I could fail, these 10 (in no particular order) would be the most life-changing.

1. Take a family trip to Israel.
2. Run a 50-mile race.
3. Take the BOSS 28-day wilderness survival course.
4. Purchase a dining table that seats 12 people.
5. Take a volunteering trip through AJWS.
6. Through-hike one Triple Crown long-distance trail.
7. Take sushi-making lessons. In Japan.
8. “Winter” (as a verb) someplace warmer than Minnesota.
9. Take a family trip to Europe.
10. Start a “virtual” brewery: Develop a tasty beer recipe, contract-brew it at an established brewery, and distribute it solely through the Internet.

Accomplishing any one of these goals would change my life for the better. Accomplishing 2 or 3 of them would make it the best year of my life (after the birth of my children, marrying my wife, blah blah blah). I’m going for all 10. Now, where’s the coffee?

Has anyone out there done any of these things? What’s the best way to start? Please use the comments below for tips and trips, or better yet, to list YOUR most outrageous goals for 2008.