Two things happened this week to prompt this post about the halfway point of 2008.
1. I looked over at the calendar and saw the month of JUNE staring me down..
2. I took part in a great discussion on grassroots/personal sustainability with Saatchi & Saatchi S.
GROWTH:
As we all know, personal growth is not automatic. When we stop learning, we stop growing and when we stop growing there is no way we will reach our full potential. All too often, we let life get pretty routine & our passions then start to wane. Once our passions start to wane, we tend to get lazy and even fall asleep at the wheel. So I am asking you (and myself)…are we heading down the path envisioned at the start of this year? And what about that seminar, or that book reading plan? Where do we stand with our relationships? Are we reducing our carbon footprint?
THE GOOD NEWS:
There is still time left in 2008!
PERSONAL SUSTAINABILITY
Many of us set out this year to start becoming more Green or BLUE or whatever, but maybe we have been a bit slow to start. S & S S has proposed a way for corporations to help “nudge” people toward change via simple voluntary commitments called Personal Sustainability Practices (or PSPs). In a nutshell, S&S S’s PSPs are SMART…(3 acronyms in 1 sentence!)
Sustain the planet
Make you happy
Affect the community
Repeatable
Take visible action
PSP Examples: Biking to work. Parking in the spot that’s farthest from where you’re going. Changing your lights bulbs to CFLs. Caring for a park.
Picture credit: Pushing America by hypertypos
NUDGE ME PLEASE
Currently, P&G is competing against several other companies in Switzerland to see which company can get the most employees to bike to work during the month of June. I realized after the S&S S discussion that I had been gently “Nudged” by my company into a sort of PSP via the corporate biking to work incentive program. Indeed, I haven now decided to turn biking to work into my own PSP. Side Note: For more discussion on using “nudges” to improve health/wealth decision making, check out the much hyped recent book, NUDGE by Thaler & Sunstein (tks to my dad for recommending). Click here to check out a blog called the lazy environmentalist. Josh Dorfmann keeps his blog packed with ideas for sustainable day to day decision making. You might find something in there that you can make a PSP.
PSPs are a great idea…what are yours?
Ryan Jones is interested in marketing and good causes. He currently works in Global Brand Management at Procter & Gamble and resides in Geneva, Switzerland.