Go here to have a listen.

By reframing failures as something we want to deliberately pursue as a means to improving more rapidly, we remove tension and fear from the picture. That means less friction and more creative courage.

We want you to Pursue Productive Failures. And, we are telling people that Perfectionism is for SISSIES! Challenging enough for you? Have I gone crazy?

To learn more, see http://www.pursuefailures.com

Have a great weekend, everyone!

I would like to thank Frode Nordahl (@fnordahl on Twitter) for doing a great job with the editing and making us all look smarter and more handsome :-) This is a pretty long recording, divided into ten shorter segments.

In brief, here's the back story. I tweeted about my desire to do this all-volunteer Tweetup on my vacation in Oslo, Norway on August 18. Morten Rovik (@mortenrovik) responded and became the overarching event coordinator. He put together an amazing team of volunteers which aside from Frode Nordahl as AV coordinator, included Even Sandvold Roland (@evensr), Eirik Helland Urke (@urke), Jorgen Bjerke, and Arnstein Larsen (@ArnsteinLarsen).

This project was a great way to try out my philosophy of failure-friendly living and working (see the previous blog post, with a global project team. We basically told each other two things: (1) Shoot for the stars; and (2) Anything that works is a miracle. Of course, we used GTD to organize the project and keep track of everything.  

We ended up getting a ballroom full of people, live video streaming, a live webinar, a remote speaker from London, and...a famous surprise guest (watch the video). This project was full of productive failures (I learned a LOT myself), and we also managed to generate value for the audience for everyone concerned. I hope you enjoy it, and feel free to post your comments below!

Make a big mistake? Could be the best thing that happened to you this week!

But what would life look like if we were less fearful of failures? 

Here are eight strategies you can try to help you embrace and exploit failures.  They are intended to help you achieve more and learn faster with less anxiety and guilt. I find that they work fairly well for me, and would welcome your thoughts.

This painting (from nobelprize.org) of Alfed Nobel in his lab was made 22 years after his death. Nobel was a modest fellow who generally avoided publicity.

As many others around the world, I was more than a little puzzled when the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to US President Barack Obama yesterday. This is not just because I disagree with his politics, but because my immediate thought was, "But he just started!" 

Although I left Norway for America almost 20 years ago and have spent my whole adult life here, I learned about the history and purpose of the Nobel Prize as a young lad. Norwegians are (or at least were back then) generally proud of having been given the task of handing out the Peace Prize; understandable if you know something about Norwegian and Swedish history in the last 150 years.

A lot of organizations have a fairly high threshold for starting new projects, partially because a perceived failure could be career-damaging, but also because they operate almost without slack in terms of how they allocate resources.  New resources are not allocated very often, and high-level approvals may be required.  As a result, getting new initiatives off the ground can take a long, long time.  Meanwhile time, your competitors are out-innovating you.

I look about as sleep-deprived as I feel :-)   Because I was working with our coordinator in Oslo to prepare the GTD Tweetup there, I ended up on a crazy sleep schedule.  Let's call it...Atlantis time.  So essentially I'm jet-lagged now before I have even arrived in Oslo.

We will see if this turns out to have been a good move..

But back to Imogen Heap.  Listening to her music while at the airport is so different from listening on my computer at home.  There is something about the open space here, and the people walking by, that makes me really pay attention in a different way.  And working at the airport is great too.  I think I'm going to do this again soon, even if I'm not flying anywhere.   Though I suppose I will need a boarding pass somewhere to get past security..

Well, that's it for now - hope you enjoy "Ellipse" :-) 

The retail sector has been hit hard..

It is easy enough to be an innovator when the economy is booming and everyone is willing to take on some risk.  But that time is over, at least for a while. We are working our way through the worst recession in decades. And we have lots of government "help" which will result in higher deficits, more regulations, and higher direct and indirect taxes.

Not too encouraging to think about if you are an entrepreneur trying to fund a startup.  And if you're the CEO of an established company, you're probably gritting your teeth a lot these days.  One is reminded of Donald Rumsfeld talking about the "long, hard slog" that was ahead in Iraq .

I have a gazillion things to complete before I leave for my Oslo trip in less than a week, and the #OsloGTD tweetup has (surprise!) taken up much more of my bandwidth than I thought it would, thanks in part to the fact that we are doing everything for the first time.  The technology partner for the live, world-wide, two-way video/audio streaming is new.  The host for this blogging platform is new, and their software, albeit very user-friendly, doesn't like the video player..  Then there's a corporate tax return, a project I'm involved with for my dad's company, some payroll stuff that needs sorting out, and, oh, I'm giving ANOTHER talk while I'm in Oslo too.    I have projects and next actions for all of these, but not enough hours to get them done..