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?
I found this quote by Virginia Woolf as I was rummaging around some books – "Behind the cotton wool of daily reality is a hidden pattern. All human beings are connected with this; the whole world is a work of art and we are part of it." – I like that.
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01. Beautiful Conversations
A few years ago I interviewed the wonderful Fiona Reynolds, Master of Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge, and former Director General of The National Trust. Her book The Fight for Beauty describes the battle in protecting our natural environment and why this is critical to our own wellbeing.
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I want to introduce you to Bill Strickland, who is nothing less than an extraordinary human being. He runs a school in the US for disadvantaged kids. This film explains the why, and how this school is life changing.
Bill says “Beautiful environments create beautiful kids. Prisons create prisoners. Environment drives behaviour”.
Also, watch this more in depth interview with Bill.
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02. Beautifully Made
Always an inspiration to me, the creative work of Armin Hofmann (1929–2020). Never underestimate the power of communication.
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Sori Yanagi was an industrial designer, the child of Soetsu Yanagi.
Alice Rawsthorn writes: “an intriguing element of Sori Yanagi’s work in industrial design is that he succeeded in imbuing it with both the traditional materials, symbolism, shapes, making techniques and respect for artisanship that had defined the design and crafts of his native Japan for centuries and with the modernist values of efficiency, economy, usefulness and simplicity that dominated design in the 20th Century."
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Edmund de Waal's work is such a wonderful expression of beauty living in utility, and as William Morris said – "Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful."
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There are so many things waiting to be converted into art. From turning garbage bags into huge, breathing organisms, to making meditative wall installations out of frisbees, Nils Völker has dedicated his career to finding the beauty in mundane, household items. Read more.
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A postage stamp from Japan.
It's a small thing, a simple thing, demonstrating the idea that we can have beauty in the everyday with the most utilitarian of things.
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03. Beautifully Restorative
Joshua Coombes is the driving force behind #DoSomethingForNothing, a social movement that has reached over 100 million people across the world and inspired thousands to support the communities they live in.
Joshua, a hairdresser by trade, began helping homeless people in 2015 by giving out free haircuts. Joined by his friends Matt and Dave, the trio began a remarkable digital campaign to encourage the public to carry out small acts of kindness and goodwill. Based on Instagram and Twitter, they highlight examples of kindness from across the world, bringing together diverse communities of people for good causes.
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SEEDS isn't just a better way to pay. It's a solution to the greatest crises of our time. It's a digital currency and financial system like we've never had access to before. One that serves, rewards and finances the people and organisations committed to creating a healthier and more equitable planet.
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Final report published February 2021. The 600-page Dasgupta Review, commissioned by the UK Treasury, is the first time a national finance ministry has authorised a full assessment of the economic importance of nature. (An abridged version is also available.)
The review was conducted by Cambridge University economist Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta, and contains a foreword by Sir David Attenborough.
A similar Treasury-sponsored review in 2006 by Nicholas Stern is credited with transforming economic understanding of the climate crisis.
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04. Beautifully Built
From Dezeen twelve of the most interesting architecture projects that are planned to complete in 2021, including the Wormhole Library in Hainan Province, China.
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‘Today to talk of beauty in policy circles risks embarrassment: it is felt both to be too vague a word, lacking precision and focus and, paradoxically given its appeal by contrast with official jargon, elitist. Yet in losing the word ‘beauty’ we have lost something special from our ability to shape our present and our future.' – Dame Fiona Reynolds
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05. Beautiful Reads
Ghost Town – Jeff Young
A book of beauty and longing. Retracing his past through the labyrinth of old Liverpool, Jeff Young has conjured a book of plangent beauty and longing. Ghost Town is in essence a memoir, but within its short span it contains multitudes: a meditation on loss, a family album, an ode to the power of reading, a loving memorial to a city, and a long goodbye.
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The White Goddess: A historical grammar of poetic myth – Robert Graves
At the end of last year I was thinking a great deal about RG’s book 'The White Goddess'. A vast work on folklore, mythology, religion and magic that has intimately touched all aspects of our culture. The extraordinary interweaving over millennia of our sacred belief systems, combined from cultures across all continents — I recommend it. It's not easy reading, there is just so much to take in. My counsel - persevere.
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06. Beautiful Food
Where does our food come from? Stating the obvious – nature.
Claire Dunn is a guide to the wilds inside and out, and her passion is nature-based human development. Why does all this matter right now? Because reconnecting with nature and our own wildness “not only re-enlivens us as individuals, but also erodes the outworn Western worldview of a meaningless, disenchanted universe upon which life-assailing business-as-usual depends.”
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Meet Tyler Lee Steinbrenner, the “Bacterial Care-Taker” behind New York’s Anti-Conquest Bread Co. The bakery is named after anarcho-communist Peter Kropotkin’s 1892 critical text, The Conquest of Bread, a work that points out the defects of capitalism and feudalism and how both maintain poverty and scarcity.
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San Francisco’s Plenty is a tech startup on the forefront of vertical farming technology. The company’s farm is yielding enough produce to fill 720 acres of typical farm land, but they are doing it with just two acres of vertical farming. Plenty says their farm produces around 400 times more food per acre than the traditional farm. Aside from the impressive food production, they are also managing production with robots and artificial intelligence. Read more.
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Miho Imada has won international acclaim as a tôji, or master brewer of the traditional Japanese sake. The small batches of award-winning premium sake produced by Imada Shuzô in Akitsu, are made in a fishing town overlooking the Inland Sea in rural Hiroshima prefecture.
Beautiful things are prepared with love.
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07. Beautiful Experiences
I have had a love affair with Max Richter's music, so I want to share him with you. Sleep is a meditative respite from the rush and chaos of modern life that studies a universal experience.
The BBC documentary film follows acclaimed composer and musician Max Richter and his creative partner, artist and Bafta-winning film-maker Yulia Mahr, as they navigate an ambitious performance of his celebrated eight-hour opus, Sleep.
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“The World I Wish People Knew”: Photographer Cara Romero on Redefining Contemporary Native art.
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A chronicle of the formative years of the Kamoinge Workshop, a collective of Black photographers established in New York City in 1963. “Kamoinge” comes from the language of the Kikuyu people of Kenya, meaning “a group of people acting together,” and reflects the ideal that animated the collective.
Working Together: The Photographers of the Kamoinge Workshop, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Nov 21, 2020–Mar 28, 2021.
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Intimate and timely, this expansive exhibition explores the intricacies of armed combat through the work of photographer An-My Lê, who lived through the Vietnam War.
An-My Lê: On Contested Terrain, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh.
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08. Beautiful Insights
The Watershed Election of 2020 in the Long View of American History – a thought provoking piece by Peter Leyden.
The end of the conservative era, the beginning of the dominance of progressive Blue America and the economic consequences to follow from 2020 to 2050.
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A change is gonna come. In a good way, says Jane Goodall, via The Guardian.
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Ten charts that tell the weird story of oil and energy in 2020. The future is looking bright for renewables. Fossil fuels? Not so much. Via Bloomberg.
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We need to significantly rethink the way we imagine future cities, and move our focus from an overarching technological vision to other priorities, such as environmental sustainability and the need to tackle social inequalities.
My view is cities are all about people, not about technology.
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What Buddhism can do for AI ethics. The explosive growth of artificial intelligence has fostered hope that it will help us solve many of the world’s most intractable problems. However, there’s also much concern about the power of AI, and growing agreement that its use should be guided to avoid infringing upon our rights. Via MIT Technology Review.
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Stakeholder capitalism comes of age. The idea that businesses should seek to serve the interests of consumers, suppliers, workers, and society, as well as shareholders, isn’t new. Nope it's not, but as Rajnish Kumar, chairman of the State Bank of India says “Covid has been a true inflection point, and whatever we learn through this process—it must not go to waste.” It's about time.
The next normal arrives: Trends that will define 2021–and beyond, via McKinsey.
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Tackle poverty, reduce deforestation. A new study has shown that a scheme designed to reduce poverty has, as a side-effect, substantially reduced deforestation. Via Science Advances.
What I think, not everyone is going to Mars, so we might as well fix the planet we already have.
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Analysis shows that in February 2020 almost half the world’s GDP was covered by net zero targets. Then, last September, China declared a net zero target, with Japan and South Korea following hot on its heels. These targets are informed by the latest climate science, which over the same period has been able to firm up predictions of future warming and detail the ever-increasing risks we face as the world warms. This has made net zero a global imperative: it’s no longer a matter of if, it’s a matter of when.
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Cooperation and collective intelligence are our superpowers. If COVID-19 vaccines bring an end to the pandemic, America has immigrants to thank – via NPR.
Katalin Kariko's scientific recognition is long overdue – How mRNA went from a scientific backwater to a pandemic crusher – via Wired.
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Research suggests that if a circular economy model were adopted in just five sectors (steel, aluminium, cement, plastic, and food), annual GHG emissions would fall by 9.3 billion tonnes of CO2e by 2050.
The Ellen MacArthur Foundation report on how the circular economy is reshaping our world.
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09. Beautiful Leadership
I have chosen the theme of generosity to oneself. For the many that are impacted psychologically by these difficult times, give yourself some healing compassion.
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You might think more money, a better job, or Instagram-worthy vacations would make you happy. You’d be wrong. In "The Happiness Lab" podcast, Yale professor Dr Laurie Santos takes you through the latest scientific research and shares some surprising and inspiring stories that will forever alter the way you think about happiness. She's changed the lives of thousands of people through her class "Psychology and the Good Life," described as the most popular class at Yale.
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Silence your inner critic: a guide to self-compassion in the toughest times. Is your internal monologue friendly, calm and encouraging – or critical and bullying? Here is how to change it for the better. Via the Guardian.
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'Perception' by Krishnamurti, builds upon silencing your inner critic.
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10. Beautiful News
Do Design now available in Spanish - published by Koan Barcelona.
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Hawkwood are hosting a series of online seminars with me, aimed at helping you create a different type of business: one that will regenerate and restore our economy, our environment, and our communities.
For more information please visit Hawkwood Centre for Future Thinking.
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Meanwhile, you can read the intro to my new book 'Do Build. How to make and lead a business the world needs'.
Publication takes place on 4 March 2021 in the UK, and 15 March 2021 in North America.
To preorder the book:
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