carolstimmel.net

Today, I’m moving on from Tendril, Inc.  I was offered a position quite close to my heart as a Research Director at E Source, in Boulder, Colorado.  I have loved my tenure at Tendril and will miss the many fine people that work to make that company great and compelling.  My position there allowed me to learn the energy industry from the consumer to the back office, and give back to the industry new ideas about saving energy. A heartfelt thank you to the team at Tendril.

At the same time, the opportunity to write, research and work with other researchers on Energy industry business intelligence rang bells throughout my being.  I’m a writer at heart, and I am thrilled by the opportunity to analyze energy efficiency and sustainability issues in a time where this industry is accelerating and reforming as a nascent industry.  I am honored to be able to participate in the conversation.  Please continue to follow my personal blog here at carolstimmel.net and my thoughts on the industry at Watts Ability.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary. I was lucky - I found what I love to do early in life. Sometimes that first step is the hardest one. — Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs

The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel’s charitable foundation, lost all of its $15 million in assets invested with Bernard Madoff.

Elie Wiesel

When my life seems to be partly or wholly in ruins, I build on them. I may even use the ruins for the buildings. Second, I will never allow anyone to change my life or destroy what I have done with it,” he said. “Somehow what I must keep in mind is what I think of myself.

Brilliant! In a world that is filled with unprecedented self-indulgence, Viktor Frankl provides rich concepts and a moral framework that is a message of hope and spiritual guidance:

…man is not he who poses the question, What is the meaning of life? but he who is asked this question, for it is life itself that poses it to him.  And man has to answer to life by answering for life; he has to respond by being responsible; in other words, the response is necessarily a response-in-action. [Man's Search for Ultimate Meaning, Viktor Frankl, page 29.]

I’m always privileged to read another Frankl book rife with depth of wisdom and his experience in the death camps of World War II.  If we can’t answer our questions intellectually, we may as well do it existentially.

I am the world’s worst relaxer and first-rate worrier.  Granted, I think my worrying drives a certain attention to detail that helps me understand nuanced details, but certainly has interfered with my sleep.

I’m also an iphone-lover and use it for just about everything in my life from GTD (Things) to putting me to bed at night.  The Hibino Sound Therapy Lab created this sleep app, and it is amazing!  Combining imagery and music, with therapeutic frequencies, I am drowsing and asleep within 2 cycles of celestial viewing.

At first I felt a little foolish staring at my iPhone in bed, but with such a strong prescription for sleep that leaves my brain intact, my nighttime frets are a thing of the past.

As you can see by the temporal spread between today and my last post, blogging has been way out of my central focus.  Even my incessant twittering seemed to take a hit as my work load climbed, uncomfortable things happened in my life, and my energy plummeted. Just now recovering from hip surgery, my desire to care and feed my blog has re-emerged.

As most of my friends know, I love to read and write.  Being a “writer” has always been my dream from my days in college when I tucked my Sylvia Plath book securely under my arm, to the utter joy at the opportunity to produce a real book with Don Olson in 2001.  I seized the opportunity to write publicly even with twitter, and tried all sorts of little private social experiments, including tiny-lies and nano-manipulations (all in good fun, of course).  Sarcasm doesn’t always translate, by the way.

But at some point, the little shouts into the aether from my phone, the incessant influx of information, to the cynical tools available to leverage other people’s “content” for one’s own blogging advantage, I must admit began to discourage me.  But it wasn’t all bad.  In the face of personal tragedy and the loss of my new friend Kevin Haythe in July, it was indeed Twitter and SMS that kept me bouyed up.  People reached out to me in an immediate and meaningful way.  My relationships were indeed ambient, and as rich as a 140 characters burst allowed.

I’m not completely ambivalent.  The emergent social graph is only somewhat trustworthy, because I know that I can’t really always say what I feel, even when I want to.  It’s a form of psychological flooding and a transient moment can get trapped and absconded by robots and social silos.  Not to mention, misunderstood.  But, at the same time, even electronically-mediated communication doesn’t always have to preclude the beating of the human heart.  We have a new form of unity and togetherness that can be adopted for good.  I like that.