I gave a friend a piece of advice recently, and she circled back later to thank me. Something I said – I think it had to do with fences and good neighbors, or maybe fences and good dogs fences -- led to a positive outcome.
Which was a shocker, not because it worked, but because so few people ever take my advice. Then again, I rarely take theirs. We humans constantly dispense and receive advice; it’s almost as natural as breathing.
I suspect that’s because advice isn’t only potentially useful, it’s also cheap, easy, and takes very little effort. In the realm of helping our fellow man, offering advice is the very least we can possibly do, and so you might say, we do the very least as often as is humanly possible.
Nevertheless, flushed with the triumph of my last piece of advice, I come bearing some brand new advice. Let’s attend the Altadena Community Visioning Workshops, the first one, at the very least.
Admittedly, I was ready to blow the whole thing off, primarily because I saw the word “Visioning” in the title of the flyer. Old corporate buzzwords do that to me. “Root cause,” “Data-points,” and all the “uber-this and uber-that.” More than a decade ago, when I heard “think outside the box,” for maybe the millionth time, I decided, since apparently everyone was now outside the box, I’d be a true renegade and jump back in. Corporate-speak, but most especially nouns morphing into verbs morphing into nouns fill me with dread suspicion. Maybe because, during a stint in corporate communications, I was instrumental in reinventioning some of them. (More on Patch)
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