It helps make sense of it all…
It’s the only remedy in a world of noise…
It splashes on us fulfillment, experience, and meaning…
It’s our ‘why’…
It says what words cannot…
It’s bigger than ourselves…
It’s forever mused, but never mastered…
Ashton.Gustafson
Pause by the orchid. Listen to the bluebird sing. Be love.
Category Archives: Change The World
Forgetting to Praise the Scribbling
Below is my daughter’s first attempt at her personal art.
I love this.
I can only wonder what she sees here. An ‘A’? A cursive ‘s’? A yarn galaxy? The baton path of a conductor during Symphony No. 5: Adagietto? Or perhaps her color coded map at 2 years old?
I see hope. I see her at the MOMA. I see her finding a metaphor. I see her trying to say something.
And so I must praise, promote, and ask for more scribbling…for it is the yes given now to the scribbling that will lead to her to masterpiece(s) later.
When is the last time you praised the scribbling of your followers?
How or why would your followers ever give you an ear if you never praised them at the get-go?
Think. Pause for a moment. Allow this to be heavy.
How much incredible music have we missed because someone was told they weren’t musical in music class?
How much jaw dropping art have we missed because coloring outside the lines never won best in show at elementary school?
Emerson says it better than I ever could…“Treat a man as he is, and he will remain as he is. Treat a man as he could be, and he will become what he should be.”
Waltzing In Constant Pursuit of Opportunity
Opportunities birth opportunities that birth opportunities.
If we can get this, we would want to smile a lot more, shake a lot more hands, and connect a lot deeper and quicker in our newly formed relationships.
Key word here is want. When you’re aware of the serendipitous nature of opportunity it makes you aware of the possibility it holds and makes you want to see it come to fruition and partake in its fruit.
The waltz of business is to a song called connect the dots and you’ll find that each dot leads to a bigger, better, and more meaningful dot than the one you’re at now.
#LTMP
Defining Need.
Business school did a great job of pounding into our heads that we were to leave, go find a need, and find a way to fulfill it.
The challenge now is in wrapping our hands around the ever-evolving definition of need.
We’re finding that the further we travel up Maslow’s pyramid the more difficult it is to put our thumb on and fulfill these needs.
Could it be that the postmodern entrepreneur’s role and responsibility is to build lodging at the top of pyramid for his customers and co-workers?
I think so.
Experience, connection, and meaning has to be the aroma, sound, feeling, and taste of whatever we build from here on out.
If you look around, that’s where we’re as hungry as we we’ve ever been.
Faces and Spaces
Where’s the so-called middle man? The promoter, the publisher, and the “retailer”. Hard to find him, isn’t it?
Our network economy has become the middle man itself. The web is now the middle, the market, and the space where the magic happens.
Think about it. In a way your book sits right next to Stephen King’s book on Amazon’s shelf, your album is in the same iTunes jukebox with U2, and your ideas are one click away from Einstein’s. This was not the case in 1995.
This entry is for our awareness in the commercial shift from places to spaces.
We must realize the economy of the world is not headed towards more physical places, but rather ONE space we can interact, produce, create, communicate, and share in.
You and your ideas don’t need a storefront, they just need to connect with the right people and ideas in the space we call the web.
Ashton.Gustafson 
