Inspirations

By all intensive purposes, this was a normal day.

I went back to work after being out for a few days. I drove for the carpool and we caught up on a few items of minutiae. I went into my office, filled the plastic jug with water, closed the door and started going through the 400 emails that accumulated over the last couple of days.

Nothing new.

Then Angela emailed. She wants to go get a certificate in human performance improvement and her work will pay for most of it. Then she told me about a women in technology group that I need to join. I told her about the spiders that were in the hallways at work. Yuck. She then asked if I wanted to join the group and become part of a committee. I got a little excited about her plans, even though I told her that I've got a few things I'm working on right now (job, marriage, de-junking, the big idea that I want to have yet haven't) . We then got into an email conversation (all while I'm completing my real work emails of course) about what is the necessary background to be a good CLO (Chief Learning Officer). With some of these leadership jobs, I think that sometimes the "maybe she's born with it" phrase comes to mind. We have way too many people in leadership roles that should never have that responsibility.

But, I digress. I go on doing my work, putting out fires, making sure we have product going live, attended a meeting about tagging and metadata, talked to some people about "issues" that were going on, and made sure we had a now inappropriate telephone number removed from one of our online courses that just happens to be taken by over 100,000 people in the department of defense. Yikes!

Then I talked to Ann who was all excited about all of the real estate, entrepreneur, running a business stuff that I've always wanted to do. She brought up all of these books that I've read in the past (The Secret, Think and Grow Rich, Rich Dad Poor Dad, The Richest Man in Babylon, The Greatest Salesman in the World, etc.) and I started getting all excited about the possibilities I have in this life.

Drove home with the carpool and shared a little of my conversations with the car pool. Came home, exercised, cooked dinner and opened hotmail.

iTunes sent me a link to the iTunes U. Nice! The classy advertising lured me in and even though I already know that you can download information for free, this time I really paid attention and now really know all of the fabulous stuff you can download for FREE from iTunes U. The world really is flat! Instead of just accessing MIT Open Source or Open University on the web, you can now download it to your iPhone or iTunes. Has this been around a while? Yes. Have I used it? Only a couple of times and more for testing purposes for work. Right now I'm downloading 26 sessions on Innovations Design from Open University to listen to while I go on a walk. All kinds of topics and subjects are available. There is no excuse now for someone not to be educated or to feel like they can't have access to the best. If MIT, Harvard, Yale and others are offering their courses for FREE to all of us...no excuses. Sure, you'll have to pay the big bucks to get credit for them from those schools, but a lot of us aren't looking for college credit. We are looking for continuous learning opportunities that fit into our busy lives.

Anyway, long story even longer...

I'm feeling very inspired today after good conversations, life changing innovations and the ability for all of us to continually learn and improve.