LIVING BEAUTIFULLY
Living Beautifully by beautiful.business is a regular newsletter to share and inspire a different way of looking at the world. What would our world look like were we all to make it a little more beautiful?
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01. Beautiful Conversations
Daniel Humm is the chef and owner of Eleven Madison Park, New York, voted as the world's No.1 restaurant in 2017. During lockdown he nearly went bankrupt, turned his Michelin Star restaurant into a community kitchen, then decided to become an only plant based restaurant. He continues to serve those who struggle with food poverty.
Listen in, this is not a conversation about fine dining, it's about community, love, hardwork, food poverty, relationships, family, transformation, and a values based life.
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The Economics of Happiness describes a world moving simultaneously in two opposing directions. On the one hand, government and big business continue to promote globalization and the consolidation of corporate power. At the same time, people around the world are resisting those policies – and, far from the old institutions of power, they’re starting to forge a very different future. Communities are coming together to re-build more human-scale, ecological economies based on a new paradigm – an economics of localization.
The real problem is not human nature, but what is as an inhuman system.
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02. Beautifully Made
In the early hours of the 14th June 2017, a fire broke out in Grenfell tower a block of flats in one of the wealthiest boroughs in West London. This tragedy caused the deaths of 72 innocent lives - the greatest loss of life, on English soil since World War II and the displacement of hundreds of residents from their homes. The lives of those who once called Grenfell home and this community who lost loved ones in this tragedy have been forever changed.
I know of this story intimately through Feruza Afewerki, the Creative director for Gold & Ashes, we met in 2018. After losing her sister and niece in the fire, Feruza wanted to help rewrite the narrative around Grenfell and rehumanise the tragedy through photography. Her vision for Gold & Ashes was to create a space for the families who lost loved ones and homes to share their stories.
You can order the photobook here.
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Integration is the path to wisdom. Arpit Kaushik says “systems have been developed that turn data into information and information into knowledge. But what about wisdom – the judgement, the sense, the wit, the intuition – that is needed to solve complex problems and make effective multifaceted decisions? That wisdom is organic, not linear... How does one integrate knowledge, make sense of it on a large scale?”
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RIDE: Hundreds of motorbikes are animated frame by frame in this homage to the iconic motorcycle design and culture of the 1950s and 60s. A rider prepares his bike and departs on an idealised journey into the countryside and into the future.
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03. Beautifully Restorative
The Ants and the Grasshopper, a film about gender, race, climate change and the future of the planet that asks "how do you change someone's mind about the most important thing in the world?"
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04. Beautifully Built
The real urban jungle: how ancient societies reimagined what cities could be. They may be vine-smothered ruins today, but the lost cities of the ancient tropics still have a lot to teach us about how to live alongside nature.
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The building industry is responsible for 38%, or around 14 gigatons, of all energy-related greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions each year. Global decarbonization trajectories indicate that the industry needs to reduce these emissions by 50% by 2030 if it is to reach net zero by mid-century and achieve the climate goals of the Paris Agreement.
This new report from the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), supported by Arup, calls on the built environment industry to adopt a whole life-cycle approach to assessing GHG emissions from buildings.
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World-renowned architect, Kengo Kuma, shares his advice to young architects. Kuma explains the importance of traveling to the farthest part of the world at a young age, “it will influence you for the rest of your life”. Kuma also explains how a two-month research trip to the Sahara Desert changed him while studying the villages there.
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05. Beautiful Reads
A week's walk in the Sahara: tracing an ancient route across the Sahara Desert once caravanned by pilgrims on their journey to Mecca, Anna Badkhen contemplates human movement across shifting landscapes, the impermanence of memory, and what remains eternal in the face of erasure.
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The Chaos of Science in Power – Nicolas Villarreal
The dramatic rise in the power and prevalence of technology over the past three decades is challenging ideologies and the very nature of how society operates.
Analyst and author Nicolas Villarreal believes we need “new epistemologies”, capable of encompassing the old, but more appropriate for our current times. Stiffen the sinews, summon the blood.
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Fire and Ice – Debra Gwartney
A moving account about the last days of her husband. It is also a story about an extraordinary man, who lived an extraordinary life.
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The Musical Human. A history of life on earth – Michael Spitzer
165 million years ago saw the birth of rhythm. 66 million years ago came the first melody. 40 thousand years ago homo sapiens created the first musical instrument.
Spitzer takes us on quite a journey from Stormzy to Mozart via Whitney Houston, K-Pop, Islamic Qawwali devotional singing and Afro-Spanish son cubano. We are left in no doubt about music’s transformative power. His conviction that music is one of the essential, elemental things that make us what we are.
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06. Beautiful Food
The Plan – part two of the UK Food Strategy Report is an important read, proposing that by 2032 national consumption of fruit/veg increases by 30% and fibre by 50% but highly processed food falls 25% and meat 30%.
The food system of the future must:
- Make us well instead of sick
- Be resilient enough to withstand global shocks
- Help to restore nature and halt climate change
- Meet the standards the public expects on health, environment and animal welfare.
To deliver this the report suggests a £3/kg tax on sugar and £6/kg tax on salt; mandatory reporting for food companies with more than 250 employees; extending free school meal eligibility; guaranteed funding for farmers to make the transition; high standards in trade deals; give over 5-8% of unproductive farmland to protecting nature.
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Groundswell, hosted by Weston Park Farms, provides a forum for farmers and anyone interested in food production or the environment to learn about the theory and practical applications of Conservation Agriculture or regenerative systems, including no-till, cover crops and re-introducing livestock into the arable rotation, with a view to improving soil health.
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07. Beautiful Experiences
Being Simply Beautiful: Stuff everywhere! Bags, clothes, cars, iPads. We love our stuff. And over time, we’ve come to believe that this 'stuff' is what defines who we are. But our possessions will never fully satisfy the inmost desires of our soul. They never have. And they are not about to start. In fact, most of the time, possessions distract us from the very things that bring meaning to our lives.
Filmed in Grahamstown, South Africa. Featuring Theo du Plessis. This film is full of joy.
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How do we decide whether to undergo a transformative experience when we don’t know how that experience will change us?
This is the central question explored by Yale philosopher and cognitive scientist L.A. Paul in Do you want to become a vampire?
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In the summer of 2012, the artist Ragnar Kjartansson gathered a group of musicians at Rokeby, a historic estate in the Hudson Valley. By the end of the week, they had created a multiscreen video installation that has been acclaimed as one of the defining works of our time.
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Big old trees are the “keystone structures” of forests, on which many other species depend. The very trees that foresters have tended to weed out – forked, twisted, lightning-struck, rotten, dead – are those that harbour the most life.
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This ITV News exposé in the UK underscores a larger problem, how goods are treated as disposable. More – via Fastcompany.
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Bloomberg’s perspective on The New Green Deal.
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Jason Hickel recommends that high-income nations adopt post-growth policies that will allow them to create strong social outcomes without growth. Allowing space to scale down excess production, reducing energy demand whilst enabling a rapid transition to renewables. Published by Nature - short version available here.
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Employment in the energy sector will dramatically expand as economies decarbonize. A team calculated that a decarbonized world could lose 9.5 million fossil fuel jobs—and gain 17.4 million renewable jobs – via Anthropocene.
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We tweet, we like, and we share— but what are the consequences of our growing dependence on social media? As digital platforms increasingly become a lifeline to stay connected, Silicon Valley insiders reveal how social media is reprogramming civilization by exposing what’s hiding on the other side of your screen.
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Our universe might be a giant three-dimensional donut, really – via Live Science.
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The nature of space and time. Recent results in the study of black holes and string theory suggest new perspectives on the nature of spacetime. In this talk, these advances will be explained by Brian Greene who is a professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University, and is recognized for a number of groundbreaking discoveries in his field of superstring theory. This just gets better.
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Image: Calleja, Diario de Navarra
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09. Beautiful Leadership
I write about leadership as generosity in my book Do Build. This lovely story from El Paīs is a great example of generosity.
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Values shape behaviour – found at Indiana University.
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10. Beautiful News
I recently appeared on the Iowa Idea Podcast (great concept) hosted by the wonderful Matt Arnold, this was a special conversation.
Did you know you are a part of a community of over 30,000+ people, from all over the world?
You tell me of your growing appetite to remake, reimagine, redesign, rebuild, recreate, regenerate, rewild our world to be more beautiful than the one we currently have.
The more people we can inspire and engage through this simple yet powerfully optimistic idea, the more our world and humanity’s relationship with it will transform for the better.
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Join us on our immersive six-part programme - How to create a business the world needs.
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We run open as well as bespoke client programmes. For more information, please send a beautiful hello.
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