Year: 2009

The swimming pool, a story and a metaphor.

Most of us have been here but the ‘message’ is worth a ponder.

Last year as a friend and I were about to leave the heat of the United Arab Emirates, he announced that he was going to buy an above ground swimming pool to take back to England. I don’t know where he bought his, but I bought a similar

From this ...?
From this ...?

one which for some reason cost nearly twice as much.

What with one thing and another I never got round to erecting the pool, partly because the children seemed quite happy with the small plastic baby pool that they could jump in and out of.

This year I vowed to get the have the swimming pool up and running.

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More on that ‘passion’ word!

Passion may be the key to many, many areas of success.

Following John’s Post on Sunday about passion, two other items passed my virtual desk that seemed to resonate with the theme.

The first was my regular Sunday ‘newsletter’ from Philip Humbert.  Sometime it comes across as a bit too good to be true but that may be a little bit of cultural mismatch from an Englishman’s eyes. Philip describes himself as a “Personal Success Coach!” and offers a free weekly newsletter that is worth trying out.

Anyway, to the point of this Post.

Read more about Passion

Understanding unemployment, Part Two

Examining unemployment in more depth.

In an earlier post, I explained how the reported U.S. unemployment rate, which was 9.6% in August of 2009, is unemployedmeasured. This post will explore the reported unemployment rate in more depth, distinguishing between the short-term, temporary sources of unemployment and the long-term, more structural, and troubling aspects of the unemployment rate.

The 9.6% U.S. unemployment rate remains the same next month if no one changes their employment status.  But the rate also remains unchanged if the same number of people hired get fired.  In truth, the U.S. unemployment rate nets out enormous flows of people into and out of the labor force and, for those in the labor force, between being employed and unemployed.

A representative month in the unemployment statistic tells the story.

Read more about unemployment

More on the meaning of integrity: wholeness

Integrity from the perspective of wholeness.

Having recently begun to contribute to this blog, I’d like to add my perspective on the meaning of “integrity”. In an earlier post, Paul referred to a meaning which relates to honesty and to adherence to a moral and ethical code or principles; this is generally accepted and commonly applied.

However the dictionary definitions also list additional meanings. The free dictionary definition, that Paul referred to, includes:

  • the quality or condition of being whole or undivided; completeness

Another online definition, at dictionary.com, agrees and includes:

  • the state of being whole, entire, or undiminished

It seems to me that this is probably a deeper issue which underpins the more generally used meaning. Read more on these two meanings