Theme 47: Transparency

I was privileged to have access to that capital from family, but in general, women don't have access to capital, especially in the restaurant industry. It's taken me 25 years to get access to capital.

Soil health, air quality, and clean water is really about human health and happy, productive people.

Triple bottom line approach boiled down is people, planet, profit. You consider all those things when you're making decisions in a business, not just profit.

The bigger the business gets, the more power accrues to me that I don't want. I want people to have their own power and responsibility.

Because we're neighborhood restaurants and I care about the arts and various social justice and agricultural issues, we try to connect in as many ways as we can with the neighborhoods that we exist within.

Carrots taste better and are healthier for you when they grow in soil that has a diverse amount of various life inside of it. From the ground up, diversity is just a better thing.

The first and foremost thing I care about is feeding people good food.

Last year we harvested about 2,000 pounds of vegetables off that lot. That's meant to be a demonstration of the level of production that permaculture can produce so we can obliterate the dominant narrative around not being able to feed the world without killing them with chemicals at the same time.

Author and farmer Wendell Berry said, "Eating is an agricultural act." Tiny Diner tries to reconnect people to the agricultural aspects of food by being surrounded by permaculture demonstration gardens. It's the strongest example of my triple bottom line approach to business.

Constraints always produce more creativity—every time.

Restaurants are the small businesses that use the most energy, the most resources, and generate the most waste. While I love food and I really love making places that people gather, we had to do it in a better way.

I wanted a less pretentious place to drink wine, and it turns out that 90s Uptown hipsters could actually smile and have fun at a bowling alley.

My goal with restaurants is to actually feed people. I have a quaint idea that that's what restaurants are about.

Running a larger business is quite a bit lonelier than running a smaller business.

because the joy comes not from comparsion, but from advancement

life, carrer fulfillment, relantionships are journeys

Empathy is the first criteria to being a good leader

Life, career fulfillment, relationships are journeys.

[…] we are all quite privileged. And I think it’s kind of a shame that lots of us complain about our lives all the time and complain about our jobs but we don’t change it. So basically we should be taking much more risks because we’re privileged and we can afford to.

I don't like the analogy of a crossroads because it suggests that you're definitely going down a path and you have to take some kind of direction. So I prefer this, sort of floating around, on a big empty sheet of paper.

I was bored working as a commercial illustrator so I decided to start working for clients.

Life, career fulfillment, and relationships are journeys.

For me, transparency is really about the fact that you cannot hide from reality.

Layoff to balance the books was not existent before the 1980's

We just love to be better than each other... but that is a depressing way to live a life.

You are your competition.

It is also in our hands the responsibility of trying to make small changes.

"What are we doing to change? Talking is the first step, and it is the most important step."

People say, "But [the internet] is not real life." But it is! Real life is life online and offline. We work on the internet, we have our friends on the internet, we have sex on the internet! It's real life, it's just an oline life."

Glass is not a precious material. It is silica, lime and sodium, and it's the energy that you put into it that makes it precious.

I didn't need to set it up all perfectly in order to work, I just needed to work and then everything on the outside sort of happened on its own.

You can make it! you can do these things. It just takes the energy and the drive.

I feel proud of my work because I love it, and I feel proud that I have raised my family with the work that I do. It's gratifying beyond means.

I like to forget about the concept of time is money and just work from the idea of love and detail

Time ends up disappearing when you work.

Do what you love and the money will figure itself out.

When we are talking about complexity, we are talking about mistakes and successes.

'If you don't want to do it, that's fine it's your business, do what you want.' The minute you switch the accountability and put it all on them, amazingly their much more open to your opinion, because now they're responsible.

Often when we say transparency, what we really mean is trust.

Intensity cannot replace consistency.

The more open and honest we've been with customers the richer that relationship has been.

Transparency breeds incredible trust.

In a transparent work environment everybody has to step up, and it makes people stronger.

And take care of the millennial friends that you have around you, because they're not mad at you and they're not bad people. They were dealt the same bad had you were dealt. Don't demand that they take care of you, take care of them. And that's part of the problem, there's an entire section in the book shop called "Self Help", and there's no section in the book shop called "Help Others."

I'm a product of my environment and this place is a mind field.

At this point of my career, I want to be as open as humanly possible. Being open about the processes that have made me who I am as well as processes I am going through right now give people I work with a better understanding of who are they working with. When I see other people being transparent of their processes instead of hiding behind facades, for me, it creates an atmosphere of trust, which is essential for every work process.

Both of those things require hard work, you are in love because you work very hard every single day of your life to stay in love, you find a job that brings you ultimate joy because you work hard every single day to serve those around you, and you maintain that joy.

It’s easy to stay in tunnel vision and to then keep resources to ourselves and not share everything that we’ve experienced and I really want to push myself, and my community, and the people I work with to lean on each other.

Finite players play to beat the people around them; infinite players play to be better than themselves, to wake up every single day and say, "How can we make our company a better version of itself today than it was yesterday?"

How can we help each other heal if we're just constantly fighting to conceal our damage?

Finite players exist to beat the people around them. Infinite players play to be better than themselves.”

Transparency is being seen through; it's also being understood. If you can create a pane of glass that people can cast a light through and there are no shadows, that's transparency.

I spent two years writing poems that were the opposite of transparency. I wanted so badly to tell somebody something that would uplift them or make them feel good or make them feel better or inspire them in some way, and all I was doing was being a phony.

The reason I opened with that poem was because that was the first time, as a writer, that I was being honest. It was the first time that I actually felt myself come out of a poem.

Joy comes not from comparison, but from advancement.

The joy comes, not from comparison; but from advancement.

It's about service to others, cause that is what it means to be humans.

Corporate cultures that value numbers over people. And they are not standard business practices. They are new. They are broken. And they're dangerous. And we're asking a young, wonderful, ambitious, amazing generation, that needs us, to work in these enviroments.

Ghosting means the lack of skill to have a confrontation.

We have a leadership crisis in America. Politics is just the mirror reflection. We get the politicians we deserve.

Nobody wants to wake up in the morning and be managed, we want to wake up and be led.

Stand up and demand that the places in which you work lead you properly

I don't want you to jump from job to job to job, you'll never find what you're looking for.

If you wanna have a happy, successful, fulfilling, confident life, you HAVE TO commit yourself to take care of the people around you.

It's about service to others, cause that's what it means to be human. Everything about our make up, our biology and our anthropology is designed to get us to look after each other.

There's an entire section in the book shop called Self Help, and there's no section in the book shop called Help Others.

You find a job that brings you ultimate joy because you work hard every single day to serve those around you and you maintain that joy

You are in love because you work very hard every single day of your life to stay in love

A job you find joy from is not something you discover

Everything is instant gratification and the problem is too many people have applied that instant gratification to their careers and to their lives

An entire generation is growing up not having practiced or learned coping mechanisms for stress.

Empathy is the first criteria to being a good leader