Your internal culture is more important than your thing.

By “thing”, I mean: Whatever it is that you do, or want to do, or think you should be able to tell people that you do.

Your internal culture is more important than your thing because your thing will change.

But the culture will hold itself.

Culture. Holds. Itself.

Over the course of the past year and a half, I have been studying Rally (Rally!).

Studying it like I was doing a graduate degree in rallying, which I was. And also studying it because I needed to understand more about its kooky, marvel-filled magic.

It took me fifteen entire Rallies to do this. Trying to get a handle on the toughest questions about Rally:

What is it, exactly? What are the results and what are the effects? How does it change people and how does it change the world? How does it change my world?

Advice-Giving mode:

“Have you tried…? Why don’t you just…?”

Implied: “Have you considered that my way might be better?”

Helper-Mouse mode:

“What do you need? How can I help you get what you want? Can you give me more information about how you’d like to feel?”

Implied: “How can I help us get even more clear about what’s important to you?”

Being a pirate queen has helped me through all sorts of business and personal challenges. Like the thing with the hackers.

Design challenges too. We now fly the Jolly Selma at the Playground.

Anyway, what follows is part of a conversation between me and the pirate queen.

Who is me. Sometimes.

The thing with projects is that they often like to talk.

When you’re willing to show up and buy them a beer.

And by project, I mean that mysterious thing that is anything at all that you’re working on or playing with. Anything you care about.

It could be the next chapter in your novel. It could also be remembering to put on lip balm. It could be making a change in your business. It could be having a happier relationship with getting up in the morning. It doesn’t matter. A thing that you are in relationship with. That’s your project.

Anyway, I’m a big fan of interviewing projects to see what they know.

And today I’m collecting interview questions.

I never end up doing that thing where people choose a theme for the year.

It makes sense, sure. I see how it can be useful to name an intention or invoke a quality. Kind of like my OOD practice.

But for whatever reason, that word theme — for me! — seems more loaded, somehow. How am I supposed to know the theme before it’s happened?

And then every year at about oh…. maybe mid-December-ish, the themes all become pretty obvious. I recognize them. They find me.

Sunday!

This morning I woke up with five sweet little wishes nestled in the palm of my hand. Like little colored puffballs.

That’s never happened before. It was a pretty cool feeling.

Let’s do it.

This would be about eight or nine years ago. I’m not sure exactly — time is being slippery that way.

I worked as a yoga teacher in a studio in a northern suburb of Tel Aviv.

The studio occasionally sponsored workshops by various famous teachers, and this time we were bringing in Bryan Kest.

I wasn’t particularly leaning towards going — all of my money went to yoga trainings as it was, and this sounded like it might be of the the kind of yoga that didn’t especially interest me (power! core! work it, baby!).

But then things happened.

One of the things we do at Rally (Rally!) is make up a ridiculous and unlikely cover story for why we’re here. My story for this week of the Great Ducking Out turned out to be that… get this, I have an obsession with monkeys! Specifically monkeys who wear clothing. And that’s why I’m at [...]

Puppies!

Apparently puppies sleep 90% of the day. For the first few weeks of being alive.

NINETY PERCENT OF THE DAY.

Sleeping.

Cuteness!