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    Mark Twain Quote on Life

    15/1/2016

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    " Twenty years from
    now you will be 
    more disappointed 
    by the things you
    didn't do than by the
    things you did do, so
    throw off
    the bowlines
    sail away from
    the safe harbor.
    Catch the trade winds
    in your sails.
    Explore
    Dream
    Discover"
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    Jack Kerouac Poem

    14/1/2016

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    I see workers in a dream rushing around carrying staircases
                                        bringing walls
                                    levelling emptiness
                worried lest God might think them lazy
                    and all he wants them to do
                            is
                                rest
                                        and
                                               be
                                                       kind

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    James K Baxter  - Ballad of John Macfarlane and the Water Woman

    14/1/2016

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    Ballad of John Macfarlane and the Water Woman
     
    Five hundred feet from the lakebed
    John Macfarlane sat
    With a bottle and a transistor
    In the shepherds hut,
     
    With a collie and a rifle
    And heard as the night came on
    The wind blow through the tussock
    And the water-course pour down
     
    For a fifty-year-old shepherd
    A fire of matagouri
    Whisky, dog and radio,
    Were too much company,
     
    Or so it looked. The music spun
    Like a rattle of dry bones
    (It could have been the Beatles
    Or perhaps the Rolling Stones)
     
    And suddenly Macfarlane knocked
    The noise box to the floor,
    Trampled it, and kicked [it]
    Clean out the open door,
     
    Finished the fourteenth bottle
    And let the empty roll
    And went to get another
    From the case beside the wall
     
    But in the open doorway
    A naked woman stood
    With her long hair wrapped around her
    And a keas’s eye in her head.
     
    The collie growled. Macfarlane grabbed
    The rifle from his coat –
    “Stand back,” he said ‘I’ll have
    No woman in this hut’.
     
    ‘Oh John,’ she answered,
    You’re making a mistake.
    I find it lonely lying
    On the bare stones of the lake;
     
    ‘Even a water goddess
    Gets tired of eels and gulls,
    I need a man to comfort me
    And take away the chills
     
    ‘When a boy came here from the Tourist Bureau
    I raised a flood for him;
    I dug him out of his camera van
    But the poor stick could not swim.
     
    ‘Then a man of the Ngati-Awa
    Drove his tractor down my shore.
    But he fell for a blonde at the Pembroke pub
    And I saw his face no more.
     
    ‘But when you broke the noise-box
    I knew I found the man
    To appreciate  a woman
    Who belongs to the water clan.
     
    ‘You’re strong enough to lie with me
    And grip the natural truth;
    I like the stubble round your jaws,
    I like your whisky breath.’
     
    She took one step across the room;
    The old dog howled in dread.
    Macfarlane raised the gun and put
    A  bullet through her head.
     
    One angry cry rang out, and then
    The wind slammed tight the door
    And there was nothing in the hut
    But lake weed on the floor,
     
    And while the shepherd lay dead drunk
    The floor-boards gushed out rills
    From the water-course that broke its banks
    From a cloud burst in the hills,
     
    And the next day John Macfarlane
    On the lakeshore with no shirt
    Frowned at the sun, his hair an beard
    Loaded with shingle dirt.
     ​
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    Inspirational Quote -Diane di Prima   Excerpt (1953 in New York remembered) 

    14/1/2016

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    "Do you see? It wasn't just the work, though the work was clearly blessed. Nor the rewards, which were none, as far as I knew. It was the life itself - a vocation, like being a hermit or a samurai. A calling. The holiest life that was offered in our world: artist. One that required the purest flame, clear lines of demarcation. Renunciation. 'Sacrifice everything" we would write on apartment walls. "Sacrifice everything to the clean line". Continual offering of our minds and our hearts. Offering impersonally our most personal passion. Most secret vision. What comfort we could give, and give each other. The beauty. Compassion disguised as aesthetics."
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    Judging Others and What Great Leaders Do - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

    14/1/2016

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    "Judge [people] not by what they are, but by what they strive to become."
     
    "The more incompetent he/she feels, the more eager he/she is to fight." Fear is often a factor False Expectations Appearing Real.
     
    "Look at children: they fight precisely at the age when they have not yet learned to express their thoughts"
     
    Maybe we should stop and listen and ask the question "what is your passion and what do you want to make of your life? If the answer is "I don't know" then maybe we can help and encourage mindful exploration of possibilities. Yes that's what leaders do!
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    Being versus Becoming - John Steinbeck

    14/1/2016

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    The fact that we humans have such a notoriously hard time changing our minds undoubtedly has to do with the notion that “human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished,” which belies the great robbery of the human experience — by calling ourselves beings, we deny our ever-unfolding becomings. Only in childhood are we afforded the luxury of inhabiting our becoming, but once forced to figure out who we want to be in life, most of us are so anxious about planting that stake of being that we bury the alive, active process of our becoming. In our rush to arrive at who we want to be, we flee from the ceaseless mystery of our becoming.
     
    To show up wholeheartedly for our becoming requires doing one of the hardest things in life — allow the possibility of being wrong and incur the anguish of admitting that error. It requires that we grieve every earlier version of ourselves and endure the implicit accusation that if the way we do a certain thing now is better than before, then the way we did it before is not only worse but possibly — and this is invariably crushing — even wrong. The uncomfortable luxury of changing our mind is thus central to the courage of facing our becoming with our whole being.
     
    This constant tussle could be especially difficult for artists, who imbue their creative work with an enormous amount of their being at the point of creation but must also include it in the ongoing record of their becoming. Hardly any figure in creative history has faced that anguishing moment of changing one’s mind for the sake of creative integrity, and faced it publicly, with more courage than John Steinbeck.
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      Hamish Ott. I am the Managing Director of Gotham Universal Limited (established 1998).

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    Gotham Universal Ltd are based in Christchurch, New Zealand. We provide business services such as organisation development and HR consulting to national and local clients in the private, public and not for profit business sectors. 

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    We have over 20 years experience working in business management, organisation development and assisting organisations with their strategies, structures and people. ​

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