win wall

Introducing the Win Wall:

In 2014 it wasn’t hard to find someone who had a TED talk they loved and would rave to you about. I am not ashamed that 12 years later, I am still loving and raving about this TED Talk from Hans Rosling and it is something I often cite as the basis for one of my strongest world views:

If you want to have a realistic and an optimistic view of the world and of human progress, you need to learn how to slice the data.

For me, that usually looks like narrowing down the information sources that are giving me ‘data’ (less news, less social media) and either taking a more global view, or a more granular view on how things are going. To do this, you have to believe that more than one thing can be true at a time. Maybe focusing on progress in one area won’t negate the lack of progress in another area, but rather it inspires and motivates us to change what still needs to change.

This also means taking a more personal view on a lot of things. Tragedy seems to constantly be occurring, and sometimes one of the things that gives me the most comfort is knowing that a real person I love is doing well, or that a new business is opening up in my own neighborhood.

Every day I write personal “happy’s” that I track just like my most important tasks and not important but for some reason still have to get done tasks. Lately my daughter has been making up silly words and sounds and when you ask her what they mean she says, “It means you get a hug!” My husband and I had dinner with that daughter the other day, and for whatever reason she was pretty entertained with her book and table toys and her meal, and he and I got to talk like we used to at every meal, to each other, nerding out on stuff we’d read or heard the previous week. These things really matter.

If you’ve ever worked with me, you know that one of the ways I encourage this mindset on my teams is by celebrating weekly woohoo’s or a quarterly ‘win wall’ where I ask people to put up a thing from the week that served as a bright spot, or an accomplishment they’re proud of.

I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about what I am doing with my $20 per year domain name, and one of the things that resonated with me a lot was creating an online space where people could go when they want to feel human, and feel better. And so we’ve got the win wall. It’s just a news feed where you, a real person somewhere in the world, can share something nice from the week.

I hope you come back and see what other people write. I hope you give out some hearts (You can give out infinite ones, but don’t overload my database please!) and I hope you realize that optimism is not naive or ignorant, and it’s not denying the work to be done or the sadness of the world, it’s actually a pretty defiant, punk rock, incredibly intelligent thing to nurture and participate in.