"Despair is a black leather jacket in which everyone looks good, while hope is a frilly pink dress few dare to wear. Rebecca Solnit thinks this virtue needs to be redefined.

Here she takes to our pulpit to deliver a sermon that looks at the remarkable social changes of the past half century, the stories the mainstream media neglects and the big surprises that keep on landing.

She explores why disaster makes us behave better and why it's braver to hope than to hide behind despair's confidence and cynicism's safety.

History is not an army. It's more like a crab scuttling sideways. And we need to be brave enough to hope change is possible in order to have a chance of making it happen."

"the opportunity to offer guidance from experience is a gift…"We don't describe ourselves as 'bursting with pride' over our own success, but we do for others…" … reward requires commitment: "to generate the emotional reward of naches, we have to throw ourselves into the act of mentoring."

As we live and work on this electric frontier, it's important to build and renew our own traditions. My goal with /mentoring is to encourage people to believe in one another, and to make it the easiest, most natural thing in the world to express and welcome that belief."

Examples:
http://blog.dianakimball.com/mentoring
http://revolution.is/diana-kimball/
http://geemus.com/mentoring
http://nickd.org/mentoring/
http://www.michaelgalpert.com/mentoring
http://kvans.squarespace.com/mentoring/
http://adambrault.com/mentoring
http://trash.davidcole.me/mentoring
http://patrickewing.info/mentoring

[Twitter @mentoring and Wiki at: https://github.com/dianakimball/mentoring/wiki ]

"Damn. I make no secret of the fact that I didn’t like Cooper Union much when I went there. But I loved Bob Breer. He taught me how to see some things I’d never really looked at, and was the kind of professor who taught from the margins, from the edges, and respected the work that came from those same places. <br />
<br />
Among everything else, Bob was — like my dad — a product of the period immediately following WW2, when America (and in Bob’s case, Paris) provided opportunities for veterans who would otherwise never have had them. Which is just a reminder of the value of such things, because that was value that was passed on to at least two generations of his students. He was generous with his ideas and his time, and I have thought of him often. RIP, Bob Breer."

"There’s a difference between superficial conformity and authentic change. Great leaders create environments where authentic change is possible."<br />
<br />
"Change agents: (1) Give lavishly. The people that most powerfully enrich others don’t barter and make deals. They give without strings attached. (2) Share information. In my opinion, protecting information is usually a sign of weakness, fear, and manipulation. Backstabbers hide information. Granted, regulated, proprietary, or personal information is meant to be private. (3) Continually grow. Growing people grow others. Changing people change others. (4) Share themselves. Leaders that share their personal journey of frailty to success create environments where people grow and change. Fakers only produce fakers that groan rather than grow."

"In this episode, a question that haunted Charles Darwin: if natural selection boils down to survival of the fittest, how do you explain why one creature might stick its neck out for another?<br />
<br />
The standard view of evolution is that living things are shaped by cold-hearted competition. And there is no doubt that today's plants and animals carry the genetic legacy of ancestors who fought fiercely to survive and reproduce. But in this hour, we wonder whether there might also be a logic behind sharing, niceness, kindness ... or even, self-sacrifice. Is altruism an aberration, or just an elaborate guise for sneaky self-interest? Do we really live in a selfish, dog-eat-dog world? Or has evolution carved out a hidden code that rewards genuine cooperation?" [Related: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/11/books/review/deWaal-t.html?pagewanted=all ]

"If your boss asks you to move a box from point a to point b, it's probably not okay to say, "I don't feel like it right now."

"Can money buy happiness?...it depends...as social psychology professor Elizabeth Dunn puts it, "Just because money doesn’t buy happiness doesn’t mean money cannot buy happiness.”...she means...that the ways that most people currently spend money--plowing discretionary income into consumer goods-doesn't buy happiness. But that other types of spending can. As Drake Bennett writes in the Globe: "Beyond the point at which people have enough to comfortably feed, clothe, & house themselves, having more money - even a lot more money - makes them only a little bit happier...But starting to emerge now is a different answer to that age-old question. A few researchers are looking again at whether happiness can be bought, & they are discovering that quite possibly it can - it’s just that some strategies are a lot better than others. Taking a friend to lunch...makes us happier than buying a new outfit. Splurging on a vacation makes us happy in a way that splurging on a car may not."

"Now history is about to repeat itself, as the charitable innovations of the Google founders and Bill Gates inspire their peers to meet – and exceed—their visions."