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Mashable description of the Muslim man who blindfolded himself and asked people to hug him if they trusted him. Hundreds of people did. Moving video.

interesting take by Margaret Manning on boomers' and even older adults' reliance on technology, great comparison picture showing how many tools that we used to buy are now available in a smartphone.

Offers the beginning of blog posts by Margaret Manning and others on starting different kinds of business, websites, etc.

by Margaret Manning at Sixty&Me, part 4 of a multi-part series

Margaret Manning interviews John Tarnoff, reinvention guy who writes for Huffington Post Reinvention each week. Our initial challenge is our mindset and finding out who we are now after 55 or 50 years of living. Then reframing who we are to avoid or discard stereotypes of old-aging ideas.

How the Golden Years Disappeared by Marc Freedman, Salon, April 2, 2012. This is an excerpt from the Big Shift, a book written by Marc Freedman, the man who started Civic Ventures about 10 years ago. Perhaps the WLStudio takes on this social imperative and this is how we get funding? "The new migration is across time and the life course, as tens of millions (8,000 a day, one every ten seconds, are turning sixty) reach the spot where middle age used to end and old age once began, the new territory where a resurgent purpose gap, and gulf in identity, stands. Opportunity is there as well. The surge of people into this new stage of life is one of the most important social phenomena of the new century. Never before have so many people had so much experience and the time and the capacity to do something significant with it. That's the gift of longevity, the great potential payoff on all the progress we've made in extending lives. Realizing these possibilities will require the courage to break from old and familiar patterns that once were our friends but just don't work any longer. It means considering ideas like "gap years" for grown ups, new kinds of internships and fellowships for Americans moving beyond midlife, remodelling higher education to help retrain people who have been working for 40 or 50 years, even the creation of new kinds of investment accounts to help cover the costs of transitioning to new careers. What we're facing is not a solo matter; it's a social imperative, an urgent one that must be solved as the great midlife migration gathers scale and momentum."

Great short post by Oprah on getting unstuck. The quote by Turecki is so true: "Nothing happens until you decide." Excerpt: When our expert, Dr. Stanley Turecki, finished watching, he said something that made the hairs on my arm stand up: "Nothing happens until you decide." The reason her 3-year-old didn't sleep in his own bed was that the mother had not decided it would happen. When she did, the child would go to his bed. He might cry and scream and rant until he fell asleep, but he would eventually realize that his mother had made up her mind. Well, I knew he was speaking about a 3-year-old, but I also knew for sure that this brilliant piece of advice applied to many other aspects of life: Relationships. Career moves. Weight issues. Everything depends on your decisions. For years I was stuck in a weight trap, yo-yoing up and down the scale. I made a decision two years ago to stop wishing, praying, and wanting, wanting, wanting to be better. Instead I figured out what it would really take to improve my life. Then I decided to do it. When you don't know what to do, my best advice is to do nothing until clarity comes. Getting still, being able to hear your own voice and not the voices of the world, quickens clarity. Once you decide what you want, you make a commitment to that decision. One of my favorite quotes is from mountaineer W.H. Murray: "Until one is committed there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves, too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way. I have learned a deep res

An amazing interview with Maria Popova of Brain Pickings, July 2013 Highlights: What is your area of expertise as a writer or online publisher? I'm not an expert and I aspire never to be one. As Frank Lloyd Wright rightly put it, "An expert is a man who has stopped thinking because 'he knows.'" Brain Pickings began as my record of what I was learning, and it remains a record of what I continue to learn - the writing is just the vehicle for recording, for making sense. That said, one thing I've honed over the years - in part by countless hours of reading and in part because I suspect it's how my brain is wired - is drawing connections between things," "Do you believe in "writer's block"? If so, how do you avoid it? I think the operative word here is "believe." If you fixate on it, it'll be there. It's kind of like insomnia - the more you think about not being able to fall asleep, the less able to fall asleep you become. It's different for everyone, of course, but I find that you break through that alleged "block" simply by writing. As Tchaikovsky elegantly put it, "A self-respecting artist must not fold his hands on the pretext that he is not in the mood." The writer's creativity … Define creativity. The ability to connect the seemingly unconnected and meld existing knowledge into new insight about some element of how the world works. That's practical creativity. Then there's moral creativity: To apply that skill towards some kind of wisdom on how the world ought to work."

article by Tim Wu in NYT weekly magazine, June 3, 2014 in Culture. Maintaining your brand The euphemism is "sharing," but Klein would probably just call it selling a personal brand, whether you consider yourself the pretty young thing with literary tastes and a traditional side, the family man who brews his own beer or the tough lawyer with a sense of humor. It can be nice to share, but brand maintenance takes constant work and demands consistency. A serious self-brand should have some presence on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Foursquare, Google+ and Tumblr; keeping it all up can feel like working as an unpaid intern for a Z-list celebrity known as Oneself. excerpt Any old-timer will tell you that anonymity online is nothing new, but how things originally were. There has, of course, always been an anonymous culture, usually tied to deviancy or dissidents. In the '80s and '90s, anonymity was indelibly linked to online culture, concurrent with getting at stuff that was otherwise hard to find or illegal. It was kind of the point really, to go where, as one early adopter wrote, "no one knows you're a dog." It allowed users to escape to a place with few restrictions, where you could say things, and maybe do things wholly without social consequence. In the early days, there was no need for any consistency with the rest of your life, and that's what was so great about it.

interesting article on young Swedish director who died at age 36 after finishing his low-budget documentary on Sixto Rodriguez on an iphone film app and who won an Oscar in 2014. Talking about inspiring in so many ways!!!! The Looking for Sugarman story led to our becoming fans of Rodriguez and renaming Metro Jethro "Sugarman"!

riveting interview with Deirdre McCloskey, economist on two points: transition from man to woman, and writing.

Preoccupations by Jonah Stillman on millennials using smartphones to take notes during corporate meetings and how a senior staff person first chastised him (privately) but after being informed that he was using the phone to take notes, the senior staff/mentor encouraged participants to ask for notes from earlier presentations from the young man.

Great TED talk on interactive design and why MoMA has acquired and is displaying video games.

Great TED talk and good thoughts about interactive design. Just to spark our thinking about online interaction

nice summary slide program on what AND men can do to help foster equality in the workplace

good article on how more work is shifting to an always-on demand model in order to succeed or at least stay employed. Mathew Ingram, August 20, 2015

blog post by Ernie Smith, May 27, 2014. The inventor of passwords has given up on passwords calling them a nightmare to maintain. "Unfortunately it's become kind of a nightmare with the World Wide Web," he told the Wall Street Journal. "I don't think anybody can possibly remember all the passwords that are issued or set up. That leaves people with two choices. Either you maintain a crib sheet, a mild no-no, or you use some sort of program as a password manager."

interesting lengthy article on Zuckerberg's style and plans for Facebook, November 2015

website by Mac Rivera on ProjectManBeyond

blog post from ProjectManBeyond, Self-Evolution for Men, posted 2/26/2016 with excellent ideas for growing willpower to do the things important to you. each essay offers a read time, ex. 7 minutes. By Mac Rivera, founder of a site for advanced self-development

Interesting post on heightened presence of the Girl Scouts at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January 2016; they have a Cookie 2.0 personal website and app to assist cookie sellers/buyers and encourage girls to go into STEM fields.