 Hi, I'm Jerry Mikulski, and I am story threading Unfinished 2021. Story threading is not graphic recording, meaning I'm not trying to create a visual capture of what was said exactly at the event. I'm trying to thread nuggets that I hear along the way into a different story, into a narrative that sort of broadens the conversation. So, we're looking here at my story threading tool. Other story threaders will use completely different tool sets. This happens to be one that, as you'll see, I'm quite addicted to and reasonably quick with. And I'm showing you here a node in my brain. Each node is called a thought that I created for the story threading of the Unfinished 2021 conference. So, the theme of this conference is midnight. Here are some of the speakers. Ida Benedetto and Jessica Hartsell, whose event I will actually go story thread in just a moment. But here are some other sorts of people. And in fact, here's Christian Movila and Capuchin Groh, who are the organizers, some of the organizers of this event. So, if I go back to the story threading and look for Ida and Jess at Unfinished, their session is called Midnight Sanctuary. And I've watched it, and I kind of want to do two things. I want to show you what notes I took here and refresh your memory about what was said in that conversation just briefly. So, at the very beginning, they talk about the lunar phases. They talk about the moon and where it is. And so this is, if I click right now, it'll take us to the Wikipedia page for lunar phases. So, here's Wikipedia, just a corner of it. But this is the Wikipedia on lunar phases, right? And I had that in my brain already because I had the moon and so forth. But I didn't have full moon, give us moon, crescent moon. I added those as a result of listening to Ida and Jess, which only goes to show you that I'm a little bit distractible. Here is Ida, who teaches at the D School, which is the Hasseau-Platner Institute of Design at Stanford. So do these other people. She has a website called Uncommon Places. She is a user experience expert and used to work at Stone Yamashita. Jess is at Esalen, which is a noted institute that comes out of the human potential movement from back in the 60s. Interesting people thought they're like Abraham Maslow, Fritz Perls, George Leonard, and lots of others. They also talked about mugwort and later also sweet pea. So mugwort is a flowering plant that I added. And one of the statements that came through was, at midnight, the seed could be anything. It could be sweet peas. It could be mugwort, which I thought was really a nice capture for a piece of what was happening because a lot of what was being talked about was dealing with loss or coping with grief, which is a thought, a thought, a node that I had done a lot of work with over time. So I have it under grief and loss, but also there's notions of healthy grieving. There's a website called Modern Loss. There's a poem called Meditation at Lagunitas by, let's find out who, by Robert Haas. So a lot of the conversations seem to be about coping with grief, and my take on it was really about how to react to events. How we react to events is incredibly important. Very often we are hijacked. Our brains, it's called limbic hijacking or amygdala hijacking, whatever you want to call it, but basically we get triggered, we run off, and suddenly we're really not conscious of what we're doing. We may react very emotionally. We may react with incredible grief and so forth. And I think one of the really important things in life is to figure out that how we react changes how events unfold, changes how events actually get recorded in our bodies and how events affect our future lives. So one person said, if you can change how you label events, you can change your reactions. This comes from the ultimate reframe, which was written by Michael Burnoff, who has some interesting ideas about six steps to make sure that the shit that happens to you doesn't bother you, for example. So I actually want to take this conversation in the direction of one of my favorite words, which is grace. And I want to dwell on grace just a tiny bit as a way of expanding this conversation. Certainly I mean grace under pressure, which is really interesting, like how do you keep calm when events are really happening? I've got that link to stress reduction tools and techniques, which is kind of normal. But also, back to grace, sorry, but also this idea of, I'm not really talking about the Christian notion of grace or other kinds of religious divine grace, God's grace. Those are not the kinds of grace that I'm thinking about. And divine grace in Hinduism is known as kripa and is the basis for Kripalu Yoga, which is one of many different types of yoga. So there's laughter yoga, kundalini yoga, raja, vini, yin, yoga nidra, karmak, integral, hatha, etc., just to show you what happens when you feed one memory for 23 years. So that's what I've been doing with this mind map, and it has so many strange things in it. Kind of the place I want to go in grace is, for example, something I call the grace factor, which is a mind hack I learned long ago. I've forgotten where I learned it from. But basically, you're driving. Some small percentage of the time that you're driving, things will go wrong. You'll blow a tire, your battery will die, you'll be in an accident. And those things do go wrong. One way of seeing them is to be happy that the percentage, your grace factor, let's call it 1% of the time you're driving, is getting smaller. You've used up some of your grace factor. So that's one way of thinking about grace and events. Another way is, a really long time ago I was a technology trends analyst, and our vice president of sales came back from a meeting with IBM, extremely upset and concerned because the prospect he was pitching at IBM had my written article in front of him all marked up and read, and it's like, Jerry, Jerry, you've got to get on the phone with this guy. And the weekend passed, I think Monday, Tuesday, I got on the phone with Dave Liddell from IBM, and he was really thoughtful at the beginning of the call. And he started the call by saying, over the weekend I was reading this book, and I don't remember what the book was, and he says, and I have a feeling we're using the same words with very different meanings. And long story short, I had written an article about IBM's Image Plus offer, a technical thing, and I had said that it was neither strategic nor open. And yet, within the world of IBM, Image Plus was certainly part of their strategic product offers, and it was more open than most anything else IBM had done because you could kind of reach in and grab an image, and reach in and put an image into the software. Which, seeing from the outside in from my vantage point was clearly not very open. I was a huge fan of open source, which was already a growing movement back then. And then strategy being really about corporate strategy and a whole bunch of other things. And for me, saving dead images into CD-ROMs at the time was really not strategic. So we agreed that we disagreed on words and he became my client and proceeded to receive my written research. We had a great relationship after that. Whole story to say that for some reason I entered that conversation calmly and he entered that conversation kind of in a state of grace about it because what could have been a really messy conversation about what was happening turned out to be really good. So that's my story about states of grace and this is the beginning of our story threading. So we're just experimenting here. All your feedback is really valuable. I hope you're really enjoying Unfinished 21 and I'll see you with some more of these. Thanks.