Each edition contains the latest from the Grokkist Press, a roundup of events and highlights from our community, and a care package of snackable outside links selected to nurture your curiosity.
We respect your inbox. Use the link at the bottom of this email to unsubscribe if this is no longer for you – no hard feelings!
Hey friends,
We grokkists love to make connections between all sorts of ideas, experiences, and information.
Our deep understanding and unique wisdom lives in the strength and complexity of these connections – our gifts to the world are often about helping others benefit from the connections only we can see.
Because all this synthesis is going on deep inside us, life rarely presents the right occasion and container for us to shine forth our wisdom.
When a good moment unexpectedly arrives, we sometimes get so excited that it comes out like this:
This is all part of the fun! Or at least it is if you are among friends and once you remove the fear of being misunderstood.
Living the painful consequences of being misunderstood over and over again leads many grokkists to learn a style of communication that puts such huge pressure on ourselves to shine forth our gifts in exactly the right way that we often end up not allowing them out at all.
This is a quiet tragedy that I am determined to do something about.
'I'm not ready' and 'I'm not enough' are like thorns in our paws that hurt us every time we put pressure on them, so we learn to walk around with a limp instead of planting our feet firmly where we stand.
An animal with a thorn in its paw doesn't need a motivational coach, a better day planner, or to just get on with it.
It needs someone who can help it to safely take the thorn out. Someone who understands that its snarls and whimpers come from pain and self-preservation.
Once the thorn is out – no matter how long we may have been carrying it around – we can go back to being ourselves.
Without the familiar and ever-present pain, we will likely find we already have everything we need within us to place our feet firmly on the ground.
And that we did the whole time.
Now I would like to use the rest of this space to introduce you to the voices of two amazing women whom it has been my pleasure to get to know over the past year.
One is the actual voice of Kendra Fee-McNulty sharing her wisdom on authentic communication and empathy in our recent podcast conversation.
The other is the written voice of Margarita Steinberg, who you will find speaking from her heart to yours about the dance we all do with our relationship to money.
I invite you to listen to what it sounds like when we allow ourselves to speak in a way in which our gifts naturally shine forth.
When we plant our feet firmly in the right occasion, the wisdom that pours out of us sounds light and effortless because we have spent such a long time metabolising it, and because it contains the memories of the many thorns we have come to know.
May we all find ways to let our wisdom shine forth and lift each other up. That is how change and renewal will come.
Grok on!
- Danu
Our Dance with Money
by Margarita Steinberg (19 min read)
If money plays such a central role in our lives, why is it so difficult to talk about it freely? Each of us has a lived story with money that opens some doors and keeps others firmly shut. But is there a way to rewrite this story, giving our relationship with money a fresh start?
Message Received: how authentic communication helps us find our voice and share our story - Kendra Fee-McNulty | S4E4
by Danu Poyner (6 min read / 83 min listen)
Kendra is the founder of empathy-driven marketing consultancy Raveloe+Co, which helps mission-driven organisations to find their voice and share their story authentically. We discuss empathy, effective storytelling, and balancing creativity with commercial interests without compromising your values.
From the Grokkist Network
Events and updates from our community
Learn more about the Grokkist Network ↗Featured events and meetups
🟢 Free and open to all
🟠 Open to all with suggested cover charge. Free for Full Members.
🟣 Exclusive to Full Members only (Grokling, Indie Grokker, Groksmith)
Demystifying Creativity (so you can reliably make great stuff)
🗓️ Wed 14 Aug | 4–6pm PDT (UTC-7) (view in your timezone)
Hosted by Jasmine Samra
🟢 Free and open to all.
In this interactive workshop, we will explore ways to build habits that alleviate creative blocks, focus our creative energy, and reinvigorate our work with a sense of play and discovery.
We often mistakenly believe that creativity is a mysterious resource that some of us are simply gifted with in greater abundance than others. In reality, creativity is a family of skills, habits of mind, and habits of work that can be practiced and strengthened over time. This workshop will provide tactics big and small for cultivating your personal creative practice. The strategies presented will range from methods to find source material and inspiration to simple but powerful algorithmic processes for generating ideas. We will explore strategies for both solo and collaborative creation.
This workshop is for you if: you identify as an artist; you don't identify as an artist; you love creative work; you dread creative work; you feel stuck; you feel free; you want to reliably make great stuff.
Other Upcoming Events
- 21 Aug | 🟠 Plant Communication and the Language of the Heart
- 22 Aug | 🟢 Grokkist Network Office Hours
- 27 Aug | 🟠 Making Friends with AI
🍬 Snackables
Assorted awesome links to nurture your curiosity
#1 - The crazy wisdom of skateboarder Andy Anderson
Long after many considered skateboarding to somewhat suffocated by corporate concerns, Canadian professional skateboarder Andy Anderson is introducing the sport to a new generation of enthusiasts, embodying "one of the most refreshing and best things that could have happened to skateboarding. He is the essence of what skateboarding is." This 12-minute film showcases both his talents and his vulnerabilities, his painful-looking crashes and successfully-executed feats of excellence exist alongside each other, all with joy and respect for the practice of skateboarding as an infinite game. Unlike most pros, he also wears a helmet.
#2 - Mary Gartside - the woman who theorised colour
Kelly Grovier
Five years before Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Theory of Colours, Mary Gartside, an English watercolour teacher and painter of botanical subjects, published An Essay on Light and Shade in 1805. She published it modestly at the time as a guidebook to watercolour painting for "the ladies I have been called upon to instruct in painting" – a form which "constituted a respectable outlet for women, where critical thought was not." Gartside's pioneering study on colour theory "reveals evidence of extraordinary creative genius, accompanied by a series of strikingly abstract images unlike any produced previously by a writer or artist of any gender." Little is known about the woman herself today, but it is widely agreed that it hard to think of a way of representing colour systems "that is as inventive and radical as Gartside's colour blots."
#3 - Free fonts that are legit good
A curated collection of stylish and quirky typefaces available under a variety of free licences, including free for commercial use. You can sort by cursive, display, monospace, sans serif, serif, and slab. If this is for you, prepare to lose yourself for several hours of fun.
#4 - India's complicated linguistic history and future
Shougat Dasgupta
“In India, English as my first language makes me a member of a tiny elite — 300,000 people in a country of 1.4 billion. It is the preserve of the educated, the urban, the middle-class and upper-caste. It’s an equally uncomfortable truth that in today’s Hindu nationalist India, English is a defence of pluralism against the imposition of a single Indian language on a country with dozens of mother tongues.”
A highly readable essay on the politics of language, third culture kids, complicating colonialism, and decolonising the mind.
#5 - Simpsons characters imagined as real people using AI
Matt Growcoot
Photographer and graphic designer Milie (who goes by Princess Prompt online) used Midjourney and Magnific.ai to create AI versions of The Simpsons characters. “The challenge of this exercise was to give a human look to The Simpsons‘ characters: I didn’t want them to have yellow skin, I wanted us to be able to see them as people we could meet in everyday life.” Lots of fun examples and interesting insights into Milie's workflow and prompting methods.
A pair of parting thoughts...
“If the dance is right, there shouldn’t be a single superfluous movement” — Fred Astaire
"Only someone who is well-prepared has the opportunity to improvise” — Ingmar Bergman
This newsletter was sent to 610+ curious and caring subscribers. Help us expand the grokkiverse by telling a friend. Here's a direct link to join the mailing list or you can share this edition directly with others too:
grokk.ist/newsletter/49/
- Hit reply and share what's on your mind
- Join the Grokkist Network and explore our self-paced welcome tutorial
- Come to an upcoming event or check out our courses and classes
- Explore ways to get involved in the grokkist community
- Consider becoming a Grokkist Member
🔖 Become a Grokkist Full Member
As a paid Grokkist member, you'll directly contribute to our social purpose while also enjoying a range of additional benefits as part of a grokking community of practice.
