Inspiration is a dish best served in a pretty font.

A good manifesto has the power to move the spirit, incite action and change lives. It’s no wonder that rules for life have been put on paper, given the typographic treatment and posted all over Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Pinterest – then instantly shared, retweeted, reblogged and repinned. Inspiring words never get old. Here, a collection of our favorite manifestos, some vintage and some brand new, from across the Internet.

Work Is Not A Job

33 Ways to Stay Creative

Baking for Good’s Recipe for Change

Mary Schmich’s “Advice, like youth, is wasted on the young” column (“Everybody’s Free” song by Baz Luhrmann)

A Manifesto for Women in Business

Indie Travel Manifesto

55some’s Five Simple Rules for Happiness

Platform21’s Repair Manifesto

Apple‘s 1997 “Think Different” Campaign (poster design by Jared McDaniel)

The Why Cheap Art? Manifesto from Bread & Puppet

Skillshare Manifesto: The Future Belongs to the Curious

Hello Handmade Manifesto

Creative Something’s Rules of a Creator’s Life

Ira Glass‘s Nobody Tells This to Beginners

The Holstee Manifesto

Image: Jay Mug

The post 15 Inspiring Life Manifestos appeared first on EcoSalon.

A list of EcoSalon’s favorite quotes on thinking outside the box.

There has been opposition to every innovation in the history of man, with the possible exception of the sword. -Benjamin Dana

Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. -Steve Jobs

I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones. -John Cage 

In the modern world of business, it is useless to be a creative original thinker unless you can also sell what you create. Management cannot be expected to recognize a good idea unless it is presented to them by a good salesman. -David Ogilvy

Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen. -John Steinbeck

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. -George Bernard Shaw

Never before in history has innovation offered promise of so much to so many in so short a time. -Bill Gates

All work and no play doesn’t just make Jill and Jack dull, it kills the potential of discovery, mastery, and openness to change and flexibility and it hinders innovation and invention. -Joline Godfrey

You can have brilliant ideas, but if you can’t get them across, your ideas won’t get you anywhere. -Lee Iacocca

The best way to predict the future is to invent it. -Alan Kay

Learning and innovation go hand in hand. The arrogance of success is to think that what you did yesterday will be sufficient for tomorrow. -William Pollard

You miss 100 percent of the shots you never take. -Wayne Gretzky

If you always do what you always did, you will always get what you always got. -Albert Einstein

Capital isn’t so important in business. Experience isn’t so important. You can get both these things. What is important is ideas. If you have ideas, you have the main asset you need, and there isn’t any limit to what you can do with your business and your life. -Harvey Firestone

The greater the contrast, the greater the potential. Great energy only comes from a correspondingly great tension of opposites. -Carl Jung

If you’re not failing every now and again, it’s a sign you’re not doing anything very innovative. -Woody Allen

Never innovate to compete, innovate to change the rules of the game. -David O. Adeife

It’s easy to come up with new ideas; the hard part is letting go of what worked for you two years ago, but will soon be out of date. -Roger von Oech

Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity. -General George Patton

Stay hungry, stay foolish. -Whole Earth Catalog, via Steve Jobs

I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work. -Thomas Edison

Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads. -Erica Jong

The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas. -Dr. Linus Pauling

Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought. -Albert von Szent-Gyorgy

A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing. -George Bernard Shaw

Held in the palms of thousands of disgruntled people over the centuries have been ideas worth millions – if they only had taken the first step and then followed through. -Robert M. Hayes

Anyone can look for fashion in a boutique or history in a museum. The creative explorer looks for history in a hardware store and fashion in an airport. -Robert Wieder

The only thing all successful people have in common is that they’re successful, so don’t waste your time copying “the successful strategies” of others. -Seth Godin

Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats. -Howard Aiken

Some men look at things the way they are and ask why? I dream of things that are not and ask why not? -Robert Kennedy

Ideas won’t keep. Something must be done about them. -Alfred North Whitehead

Just as energy is the basis of life itself, and ideas the source of innovation, so is innovation the vital spark of all human change, improvement and progress. -Ted Levitt

If you can dream it, you can do it. -Walt Disney

The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it. -Michelangelo

The practice of R&D involves making mistakes, realizations, corrections, and more mistakes. Trial and error is a fundamental part of the process. Too many managers in corporate America learn to avoid invention and new thinking because they have been convinced that their careers depend upon not making mistakes. -Tom Huff

The innovation point is the pivotal moment when talented and motivated people seek the opportunity to act on their ideas and dreams. -W. Arthur Porter

Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking, and don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. -Steve Jobs

It’s not about breaking the rules. It is about abandoning the concept of rules altogether. -Paul Lemberg

Genius is one percent inspiration, and ninety-nine percent perspiration. -Thomas Edison

Vision without action is merely a dream. Action without vision just passes the time. Vision with action can change the world! -Joel Arthur Barker

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Images: tallpomlin, UggBoyUggGirl, Erik Charlton, Maurizio Zanetti 

The post 40 Best Quotes on Innovation appeared first on EcoSalon.

10 global events we were all intrinsically part of.

What makes an event memorable? How does a “happening” sear into our collective mindset and take up permanent residence in our hearts and in our souls? Most often, of course, we are not personally there to witness or directly experience occurrences of global importance.

How many of us were in Cairo’s Tahrir square as protests raged earlier this year?

Who among us lost a loved one or ate radioactive food in Japan, or suffered pangs of hunger in East Africa?

In our media-saturated world, memorable events – indeed memories themselves – are delivered to us via an increasingly wide range of words and pictures, bits and bytes, accounts that stream to our attention, some touching us for a moment, some for a lifetime. Here’s a look at our Top 10 (in no particular order), with links to the stories and accounts that made them indelible to us.

1. March of Horrors: Japan’s Suffering

A tsunami generated by a magnitude 9.0 earthquake off the coast of northeast Japan killed nearly 20,000, caused hundreds of billions of dollars in damage and triggered a nuclear power plant disaster that unleashed radiation into the environment. Within hours, videos of the unimaginable waves crushing the Japanese shoreline flooded world consciousness via YouTube and other Internet outlets.

2. The Harder They Fall: Arab Spring

Beginning with a small demonstration in Tunisia that grew to topple a regime, flames of unrest spread to Egypt, ousting dictator Hosni Mubarak, and then to Bahrain and Yemen. Eventually Libyan leader Muammar Gadhafi would be dead, and even today, Syrian protesters remain caught in a bloody battle with dictator Bashar al-Assad. Did social media enable and perhaps even spark these events?

3. European Disunion: Economic Crisis in the E.U.

The global economic downturn wreaked havoc in the European Union where austerity measures in Greece resulted in riots and protest, Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi was driven from office, and measures taken by Germany and France exacerbated an ongoing fissure between the E.U. and Britain. Meanwhile, disagreement about how to avoid a catastrophic meltdown flared across the Atlantic, as opinions about what to do remained as numerous as there are pundits and stakeholders.

4. Wanted Dead: American Operation Kills Osama Bin Laden

In May, American helicopters bearing a special operations team raided a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, killing the world’s most wanted terrorist, Osama Bin Laden, whose followers carried out the 9/11 attacks. Within hours his body was buried at sea, and images of the corpse suppressed. Instead, a powerful and now-famous image of White House personnel – including president Barack Obama and Secretary of state Hillary Clinton – remotely watching the mission was made public.

5. The Fruit of Invention: The World Mourns Loss of Apple Founder Steve Jobs

The world lost some great minds to cancer and health issues as 2011 wore on, including writer and polemicist Christopher Hitchens and Czech playwright, dissident and politician Vaclav Havel. But, despite the sense that “it was coming,” the loss that seemed to most deeply move our high-tech world was that of innovator, inventor and Apple Founder Steve Jobs. As news of his death spread across the internet in October – in part via millions of his own inventions – biographer Walter Isaccson’s iBio hit the presses, eventually to set new sales records.

6. From Wall Street to Main Street: Occupiers Take a Stand

Beginning with a September protest in a New York City park near Wall Street, what became known as the “Occupy” movement quickly spread to many major American cities and beyond. The “leaderless” protests are said to represent “the 99 percent” against the richest 1 percent of Americans, who benefit from corporate and political corruption and greed at the majority’s expense. In November, images of a campus police officer at the University of California Davis pepper-spraying students went viral over the internet, instantly becoming a rallying point for the movement.

7. Us vs. Them: Obstructionism Paralyzes Washington

Despite being fractured between party traditionalists and Tea Partiers, a Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives shackled the hands of Democratic President Barack Obama and the Democratic-led Senate. On issues ranging from the economy to the environment, American leaders reached a seemingly endless stream of stalemates. Most notably, the President unveiled a massive jobs bill that was labeled dead-on-arrival by members of both parties. The New York Times commented on the political gamesmanship, and EcoSalon presented the many rifts dividing America.

8. Weather, Weather Everywhere:  Climate Change Marches On

With drought in Texas, killer cyclones in the Philippines, and monster floods in South America and Thailand, 2011 was another year in what seems like an annual escalation of climate change and severe weather. Perhaps the most wrenching weather-related disaster was the return of drought to the Horn of Africa. Data continues to show the impact humans have on the world’s climate, yet deniers continue their war on science. In October, EcoSalon named names.

9. We are the World: All 7 Billion of Us

As the human population reached the 7 billion mark (with 3 billion more projected by the end of the century), debates about resources and birth control reheated. Can our planet sustain such exponential growth? In its inimitable way, National Geographic gave us the story in pictures.

10. Ask and Tell: End of Anti- Gay Military Policy in the American Armed Forces

After 18 years of controversy, the Pentagon repealed its “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy in September. After encouraging those who have been expelled under the policy to reenlist, President Barack Obama declared: “We are not a nation that says ‘don’t ask, don’t tell.’ We are a nation that says ‘out of many, we are one.'” An MSNBC story covered a historic kiss.

Images: TenSafeFrogs, Official U.S. Navy Imagery, S a l e e m – H o m s i, PIAZZA del POPOLO, bkusler, lwpkommunikacio, bogieharmond, Alex Barth, kevin dooley, woodleywonderworks, Beverly & Pack

The post The 10 News Stories of 2011 You Shouldn’t Have Missed appeared first on EcoSalon.

A celebration of Apple visionary Steve Jobs’ digital creations from 1976 to present day.

The other day we either went to sleep or woke up to the sad news of Steve Jobs’ passing. He was a maverick who ushered in a new digital age, a time that will prove as monumental and pivotal as the Renaissance and Scientific Revolution before us.

Sweeping obituaries of the man now abound, from the New York Times to Mashable. Holding true to their minimalist aesthetic, the splash page of Apple.com reads simply:

Steve Jobs, 1955 – 2011

Apple has lost a visionary and creative genius, and the world has lost an incredible human being. Those of us who have been fortunate enough to know and work with Steve have lost a dear friend and an inspiring mentor. Steve leaves behind a company that only he could have built, and his spirit will forever be the foundation of Apple.

Here’s a brief tribute from us to his Apple computer, from 1976 to present day.

The Apple I, 1976

The Apple II, 1977

The Apple III, 1980

Lisa

Meet the Macintosh, 1984 – Mid-90s

iMac, 1998

As it is today, in my living room…

…and the other morning on the iPad as I read about Jobs’ passing.

From the Powerbook, 1989 – 2006

To the iBook, 1999 – 2006

The MacBook Pro, 2006

….and Air, 2008

A lot can happen over the course of a lifetime. We are all blessed to have been a part of Steve Jobs’ during his. History will tell: he was the Johannes Gutenberg of our times.

via Díga(Mama)

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