One Creative Moment is a daily email for founders, owners, and creators. You'll get insights, irreverence, and inspiration to help you build a better business & live a more creative life.
Words matter!
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Lloyd Alter’s new book came out this week, and even the title alone is interesting. The Story of Upfront Carbon: How a Life of Just Enough Offers a Way Out of the Climate Crisis. If you aren’t familiar with Lloyd, he’s a Toronto-based architect, professor, and writer whom I’ve talked about before (here and here, for example). His writing lives at the intersection of many things I care about. Such as architecture, “green” living, sufficiency, design, urbanism, planning, spaces, living, aging in place, the power structures and systems that hold us captive…and much more. One of the things I most like about his book is that its title is a term that he and his circle of collaborators coined. They found the established phrase “Embodied Carbon” to be a misleading way of describing the overhead energy expenditure that the creation of a new building or product emits. “Embodied” makes it sound as though the energy is trapped within the building, whereas, in reality, it is released into the atmosphere—which is the whole problem. So, they came up with “Upfront Carbon” as a replacement term. As in, regardless of the energy savings this building or product may enable in the future, it takes X amount of carbon, up front, to make it now. Which is a crucial distinction to make, as well as a powerful act of positioning, of marketing. Words matter! |
One Creative Moment
by James E. Turner
One Creative Moment is a daily email for founders, owners, and creators. You'll get insights, irreverence, and inspiration to help you build a better business & live a more creative life.
Not to be that “newsletter recommending” guy, having just yesterday drawn your attention to a new one I’m enjoying. But this has to be done and has to be done now. (I had meant to do it before the start date! But, life…) So I’m sharing this in case you would also find it interesting: Craig Mod’s latest pop-up newsletter, “The Return to Pachinko Road.” It’s, as Craig puts it, “…an 18-day pop-up walk, walking 600km from Kyoto to Tokyo along the Tōkaidō (“Pachinko Road”). Starting on May 14,...
Just read the second issue of a promising new newsletter from Finn McKenty. (I know him from LinkedIn, but am most intrigued by what he has to say about making YouTube work.) It included this painfully true quote: “… opportunities usually go to the people who are the most visible, not to the people who “deserve” them.” If you needed an extra boost to help you put yourself out there (or remind yourself why you’re doing it in the first place), there you go. There I go, too! Be seen, James
Think about the way your living space is set up right now. Has it always been that way? I’m guessing not. And yet, I was reflecting today that to our children, our kitchen/dining arrangement, for example, must seem permanent. Things that to them are the only way-things-can-be are, to us (Kayte and me), more like something we’re trying out “for now.” To them, this house is the seat and centre of tradition. To us, this is our suburban bungalow period. (Note: I’m not saying they’re wrong, nor...