musings of an itinerant lover

So I’ve made a commitment with some of my closest friends to blog once every couple of days for the next month in our ongoing crusade of sorts to consistently blog. It started with once a day for a week, then turned into this with a biweekly check-in. Though I have a nutty month coming up I think the purpose is that its not that hard to write a couple of paragraphs at night and share what you’re thinking, what you’ve learning, what you’re musing on. So here it is to bloodpact blogging!

One of the themes that’s come up frequently recently is the practice that Baha’is refer to as consultation. Its the community’s mechanism of collectively seeking truth and finding consensus. In consultation you don’t own your contributions per se, but rather once you share your perspective on the matter of hand that perspective belongs to the consulting group. We try to maintain both a frank as well as a loving atmosphere and the goal is at all times to put truth before our current thinking. As such it is my understanding that you act upon the consultation just as much as the consultation acts upon you. You might be informed as deeply by the consultation as you are informing it, and often may find yourself in the position of changing your opinion on a matter a number of times during the course of the consultation.

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I was recently asked by a mentor of mine what motivates me as an entrepreneur. He said that in many industries people talk and talk and talk and you just want to grab them by the collar and say “Enough already!!! DO something!!!” But that with business people, and in specific entrepreneurs, the dilemma is actually quite the opposite. That we are almost plagued by the need to act immediately and that you almost want to tell us “WAIT!!! We don’t know enough yet…just stop and think for a second!”

I’ve been thinking about his question and in particular about being almost “plagued” by the need to act immediately on things. I’ve also been thinking about how I think about things to get a little bit freaky meta on you.

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Ok…so I have failed MISERABLY in writing 2 blog posts per week…noted.  However, I learned something in my Arabic class from my brilliant teacher Nooshi Saberi.

Going into the class she told me that the most important thing in learning Arabic was consistency…it didn’t matter how much you studied every day, just that it needed to be consistent.  I was telling her that when I traveled I was totally failing to keep up with my studies and then felt terrible when we’d video-conference for my weekly lesson because I hadn’t actually learned anything even though I’d done a remarkable job at forgetting just about everything I had learned the previous week.

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