Category: behavior

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Getting the locals on board is key to conservation

Beth Kelley2 Comments
An ethnic Adivasi woman from the Kutia Kondh t...
You're looking at the face of sustainable conservation. Image via Wikipedia

Great post from the Human Directions of Natural Resource Management:

Indigenous peoples are key to preserving the world’s forests, and conservation reserves that exclude them suffer as a result, according to a new study from the World Bank.

Its analysis shows how deforestation plummets to its lowest levels when indigenous peoples continue living in protected areas, and are not forced out.

Across the world millions of tribal people are conservation refugees, but the World Bank says its evidence shows ‘forest conservation need not be at the expense of local livelihoods.’

Using satellite data from forest fires to help indicate deforestation levels, the study showed rates were lower by about 16% in indigenous areas between 2000-2008.

Read more at It’s Official – The Key To Conservation Lies With Indigenous Peoples

This is something Woodland Park Zoo, Izilwane, and many other non-profit organizations have been working on for years, so it’s nice to see the World Bank back them up.

So, the next question is what can be done to support local, indigenous groups to protect and care for their natural surroundings? Most groups want to preserve their environments and keep them handy for the next generation, but it is simply economically not viable, at least not how they see it.

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anthropology · behavior · community · psychology · Social · technology

Crowdsourcing the locals for travel recommendations

Beth Kelley
Uptake helps you ask locals what to do in different locations

On a recent roadtrip, my husband and I stopped in a medium-sized town out in the middle of nowhere, tired, dirty, and famished. Neither one of us are McDonalds or Subway types, but we definitely needed meat, and fast. What to do? My husband spent 10 minutes on my smartphone trying to read Yelp for a decently reviewed restaurant, which turned out to be a real dive but had somewhat tolerable pizza. Long story short, I bet this app would have helped us out a lot:


Uptake is set up to have a web community of people passionate about their local bars, hotels, and restaurants, but the key is that they let you ask questions of your Facebook friends who are local in the city you’re interested in.

When you ask questions in an open community, you’re not guaranteed to get an answer. If you’re looking at reviews on Yelp, you don’t really know who are behind them [Editor’s note: Yeah, tell me about it!]. Your friends are usually the people you trust the most with picking a great bar or pub to eat at, so Uptake takes the extra step of drilling down to the friends who are relevant to your question.

A lot of apps and services like Nomad for iPad and Trazzler let you ask for travel recommendations, but Uptake helps you ask the people who probably know best.

Local destinations still need technology, as sites like Yelp have become a stomping ground for trolls sounding off about bad experiences. Social is the key to a good recommendation, but not many services have nailed the experience yet. When I see a recommendation from a name or avatar that I recognize, it instantly has more value to me.

Uptake is in beta right now and promises a few features that aren’t available yet.

Read more at: Uptake helps you ask locals all of your travel questions (The Next Web)

One interesting trend of crowd-sourcing apps is an attempt to reach out to pre-established tribes and communities (see yesterday’s post about creating tribes through community) and trying to tap into that local’s knowledge. As the author of the article mentioned, people trust other people they know, and getting “local” knowledge is very important to us humans. We want to feel like we’re an insider, included, and not some dumb tourist who gets taken advantage of or just looks silly.

We also trust other tribe members and their knowledge more than anything else. It’s been shown we trust word of mouth and let it influence us more than advertising, and our peers are hugely influential on what we buy, use, and spend time doing. As we travel, we will also trust our peers over guidebooks on what to do, what to see, and where to eat.

I’ll be interested to see how these social peer-sourcing apps continue to evolve over time. Visit Uptake‘s website to find out more about the app.

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anthropology · behavior · community · creativity · environment · health

Making money off the land

Beth Kelley2 Comments
A swaledale ewe on the rolling fells of the La...
You may be looking at a model of your next lawnmower. Image via Wikipedia

After the last post about dumpster diving, I thought we could focus on something a little more fresh, like growing your own food. Or your own sheep.

From renting out goats and sheep in order to naturally trim lawns and hillsides, to teaching other people how to raise chickens and bees, “urban homesteading” is becoming a way of life that is not only natural and makes people feel good, it’s also profitable.

As an uncertain economy and a stagnant hiring climate continue to freeze people out of the traditional job market, a number of entrepreneurs like Mr. Miller, many of them in their 20s and 30s, are heading back to the land, starting small agricultural businesses. And in the process, they are discovering that modern homesteading offers more rewarding work, and possibly more security, than entering the white-collar fray.

Mr. Miller, who supplements his income by working on a local farm, has resisted raising his prices because he wants his services to be available to all. And while Heritage Lawn Mowing is not yet in the black, he says he has found a better way of life.

“It’s a gateway to that whole rural dream,” he said. “And with the type of recession we’re having, there’s stability in it.”

Other yeoman start-ups are charting a more traditional path to profits.

Carrie Ferrence, 33, and Jacqueline Gjurgevich, 32, were in business school at Bainbridge Graduate Institute in Washington State when they noticed that many local neighborhoods were “food deserts,” without easy access to fresh local produce and other grocery staples.

Their answer was StockBox Grocers, a company that repurposes old shipping containers as small grocery stores. The company won $12,500 in a local business plan competition and raised more than $20,000 online in a Kickstarter campaign to finance its first store, which opened in the Delridge neighborhood of Seattle in September.

“It’s a tough job market, and you have really few instances in your life to do something that you really love,” Ms. Ferrence said. “It’s not that this is the alternative. It’s the new plan A.”

Read more: Sheep Lawn Mowers, and Other Go-Getters (New York Times)

What is it that is so appealing to this (my) generation about growing gardens, knitting, and owning a sheep-rental mowing company? Why are we so drawn to this idea of keeping bees, growing our own vegetables, and sewing our own clothes? I have some ideas, but I’d be curious to hear yours in the comments below.

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anthropology · behavior · design · health

Food, consumption, and dumpster diving

Beth Kelley1 Comment
A typical dumpster in Sunnyvale, California.
Some people choose to make this their meal spot. Image via Wikipedia

One element of having an enriching, healthy environment is lack of trash and waste. We Americans throw away A LOT, especially food. The percentage of food we waste is astounding (I’ve read anywhere between 25% and 30%)!

In a possible reaction to this, several people, particularly Millenials, have started “rescuing” food from the back of restaurants, bakeries, and grocery stores, better known as “dumpster diving.”

For his Anthropology doctoral thesis, University of Washington student David Giles is examining how cultural assumptions of what is appetizing lead to the disposal of surplus, edible food. He’s become a pro at vaulting into Dumpsters, picking through their contents and befriending people who make a meal of other people’s leftovers.

In short: Giles is a Dumpster-diver.

The 31-year-old Australia native hopes his work will raise awareness of the volume of edible food that gets thrown out and will prompt people to think about how they might get more food into the hands of the hungry — perhaps by giving it to a food bank or handing it out to the homeless in a park.

Read more at Dumpster-diver’s thesis: Good stuff going to waste (seattletimes.nwsource.com)

One problem for restaurants is they are required to throw food out after it has been sitting for a certain amount of time. Same with grocery stores. That being said, us consumers could definitely do a lot to keep food from going to waste, such as buying less of it in the first place.

Shelly Rotondo, executive director of Northwest Harvest, a food bank with offices around the state, agrees with Giles that a lot of food goes to waste.

But she thinks food banks are doing a good job of capturing food and getting it into the hands of the hungry, and that most waste now comes from households or restaurants. Rotondo said fruits and vegetables with flaws and imperfections never even reach the grocery-store shelves — they’re sent by distributors to the food bank.

“Northwest Harvest does fantastic work,” Giles agreed. And yet, he’s seen the Dumpster evidence that lots of food ends up in the trash. He has not tried to quantify the amount of edible food that is thrown out in the Seattle area.

My hope is Giles addresses some of these restrictions in his thesis, or perhaps offers different ideas for distribution. After just going through my own Masters defense, I know you’re not supposed to speculate, but after all this work it would be good to at least have some action items come out of it.

Hunger is becoming more common in the U.S. now due to the recession, yet obesity and other lifestyle diseases are also becoming the number 1 cause of death in the US. There have also been more salmonella and bacteria outbreaks in food this past decade than I can remember, which would make one think they should steer extra clear of dumpsters for food. I think how we as Americans approach, handle, and consume food needs to be seriously looked at and re-assessed.

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behavior · brain · environment · health · mental health · neuroscience

Your brain on oceans, now part of a study

Beth Kelley1 Comment
Fishing in the Maldives
The ocean has a significant, presumably positive, effect on the brain. Image via Wikipedia

Several researchers have looked at the effects of nature on the brain, but usually look at wooded environments. But how does the ocean effect us? Some argue a lot.

One researcher, Wallace J. Nichols, is looking at the effect that the ocean has on our brains.

If the ocean has a direct, neurological impact on our brains, an awareness of this connection will change the way we treat it—and the policy implications could be profound. That’s the hope, at least, that motivated “neuro-conservationist” and turtle specialist Wallace J. Nichols to invite a group of neuroscientists, marine scientists, journalists and artists to start a conversation about our emotional connection with the sea.

Nichols thinks that our grey matter is actually uniquely tuned into the Big Blue. “When we think of the ocean—or hear the ocean, or see the ocean, or get in the ocean, even taste and smell the ocean, or all of those things at once,” Nichols said in an OnEarth interview, “we feel something different than before that happened. For most people, it’s generally good. It often makes us more open or contemplative. For many people, it reduces stress.”

Nichols aims to tap into this emotional response to oceans—what he calls the Blue Mind—to help build support for responsible stewardship of the world’s marine ecosystems.

more via This Is Your Brain on Oceans

I like the term “neuro-conservationist,” but I’m not sure what it means exactly, even after reading this article. But anecdotally I agree the ocean has a definite effect on the brain.

What information or experiences are already out there that involve the ocean.

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behavior · brain · community · happiness

Using the 5 love languages to best show your appreciation for someone

Beth Kelley

Next week is Halloween, which means in the U.S. the “holiday season” is officially upon us, as well as company bonuses. This is definitely the time of year to show your appreciation for someone or something, and being appreciated is a quick and fast way of feeling better or enriching someone else.

This article was originally written as a gift guide for the impending holiday spending frenzy, but it actually provides some interesting insight into how to enrich the lives of others around you, through giving time, attention, or other enrichment activities:

The Five Love Languages can help you figure out who in your life responds best to which type of gift.

The Five Love Languages are:

  • Words of affirmation
  • Acts of service
  • Physical touch
  • Quality time
  • Receiving gifts

Don’t know your own love language—let alone which one your friends and family speak? “You can pick up cues about your friend or family member’s inclinations during everyday conversations,” explains Dr. Natalie Robinson Garfield, psychotherapist and author of “The Sense Connection”… But in case you’re pressed for time, we’ve compiled this handy guide to help you decode who speaks what—and plot the best gift-giving strategy.

more via Guerrilla Guide to the Holidays: Make Your Gift List | Living Frugally | Love & Money | LearnVest – Where life gets richer.

The Five Love Languages have been around for awhile, but it’s still an important element that is often missed when people are scrambling for the best way to motivate or show appreciation towards others, or even themselves. It is also a nice reminder that we all perceive the world in different ways and need different things.

behavior · children · education · mental health

Reading, Writing, Empathy: The Rise of ‘Social Emotional Learning’ | GOOD

Beth Kelley
Creative Curriculum: CDCs provide tools to con...
Learning how to empathize improves the entire learning process. Image by familymwr via Flickr

How does empathy and social learning improve the learning experience at schools? A lot, apparently! And some research is finding that actively teaching empathy and social understanding can be taught in a public school setting, with great benefits for the entire learning process:

At a time of contentious debate over how to reform schools to make teachers more effective and students more successful, “social emotional learning” may be a key part of the solution. An outgrowth of the emotional intelligence framework, popularized by Daniel Goleman, SEL teaches children how to identify and manage emotions and interactions. One of the central considerations of an evolved EQ—as proponents call an “emotional quotient”—is promoting empathy, a critical and often neglected quality in our increasingly interconnected, multicultural world.

Brackett quickly learned that developing empathy in kids requires working on their teachers first. Ten years ago, he and his colleagues introduced a curriculum about emotions in schools, asking teachers to implement it in their own classrooms. When he observed the lessons, he was struck by the discomfort many of the instructors showed in talking about emotion. “There was one teacher who took the list of feelings we had provided and crossed out all of what she perceived of as ‘negative’ emotions before asking the students to identify what they were feeling,” Brackett says. “We realized that if the teachers didn’t get it, the kids never would.”

So in 2005, Brackett and his team at the Health, Emotion, and Behavior Lab at Yale developed a training program—now called RULER—that instructs teachers in the skills, knowledge, and attitudes necessary for emotional health, then helps them shift the focus to children. The program focuses on five key skills: recognizing emotions in oneself and others, understanding the causes and consequences of emotions, labeling the full range of emotions, expressing emotions appropriately in different contexts, and regulating emotions effectively to foster relationships and achieve goals. Classrooms adopt “emotional literacy charters”—agreements that the whole community agrees to concerning interpersonal interactions—and kids use “mood meters” to identify the nature and intensity of their feelings and “blueprints” to chart out past experiences they might learn from.

Read more at Reading, Writing, Empathy: The Rise of ‘Social Emotional Learning’ at GOOD Magazine.

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behavior · happiness · mental health

How Optimism Affects the Economy | LearnVest

Beth Kelley
find your happy place
Image by emilychang via Flickr

Seattle is known for its gray skies, and perhaps stand-offish attitude to new comers, but I’d argue we are a surprisingly optimistic metropolis. In fact, we’re number four on a Gallup poll’s list of happy major cities. It turns out this is also a good thing for our local economy.

According to new research… the happier you are, the quicker the area you call home is likely to recover. In other words, it’s not just the economy that affects ours moods—it might actually work the other way around, too.

A recent study by the University of Miami School of Business Administration has shown that in in states where people are more optimistic, an economic recession is weaker, expansion is stronger and recovery faster.

Alok Kumar, one of the study’s researchers and a finance professor at the University of Miami School of Business, measured optimism levels across different U.S. states by looking at three key factors: weather, sports optimism and political optimism. In other words,  warm, sunny weather encourages the release of serotonin in the brain, which makes people alert and cheerful. Additionally, we’re happier when the political party we like is in power and our sports teams are performing well.

After creating an index to measure economic well-being in those same places, the researchers crunched the numbers to reveal the correlation between mood and economic activity. Overall, they found that happier places had higher retail sales, which improves the economic climate and helps lessen the effects of a recession. The results of the study showed that other non-economic factors—like warm weather and good sports teams, which improve happiness and optimism—also helped improve local economy, meaning that your mood (and the mood of your town’s fellow residents) can directly impact your area’s economic outlook.

read more about the study via Find Your Happy Place: How Optimism Affects the Economy | Living Frugally | Psychology Of Money | LearnVest – Where life gets richer, and check out their recommendations for happiest large, medium, and small cities.

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behavior · health · learning · psychology

There’s more to health than food, and there’s more to life than health – The Healthy Skeptic

Beth Kelley
New Zealand postage stamp, 1933: Public health.
Image via Wikipedia

Great post by Chris Kresser, also known as The Healthy Skeptic, although these days he’s just blogging under his name. Usually focusing how to be healthy by what food you put in your body, particularly for pregnant women, Kresser takes a step back and looks at the value of measuring overall health. Not just what you put in your body, but also how much sleep you get, how much stress is in your life, and if you make time for enriching activities.

“…it’s a mistake to assume that food is the only consideration that matters when it comes to health, and that all health problems can be solved simply by making dietary changes. Unfortunately, this seems to be an increasingly common assumption in the Paleo/Primal nutrition world these days.

I see a lot of people in my practice that have their nutrition completely dialed in, but don’t take care of themselves in other ways. Maybe they don’t manage their stress, they don’t exercise, or they don’t sleep well.

Even if this person eats a perfect diet, are they really healthy?

And what about the person who doesn’t eat particularly well, but sleeps like a baby, gets a massage a couple times a month, has a lot of fun, spends lots of time outdoors, and doesn’t have any health problems?”

more via There’s more to health than food, and there’s more to life than health.

It’s nice to see a holistic view when so many specialists only focus on one element of overall health.

What are some “blind” areas in your life? Areas where you ignore or neglect taking care of yourself?

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behavior · creativity · design · happiness

“You’ve got to find what you love” » Steve Jobs’ 2005 Stanford Commencement Speech

Beth Kelley1 Comment

Reposted from “You’ve got to find what you love” » The Business School of Happiness, and the Stanford Report, June 14, 2005

‘You’ve got to find what you love.’ Jobs says

This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960′s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

…

Thank you, Steve. RIP (1955 – 2011)

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