My name is Mark Kenny. I write this blog, but then you probably already knew that. I am currently doing the second year of the Leadership Academy at Hope City Church.

I am 25 years old (as I write this) and am having the most delicious quarter-life crisis. I’m quite enjoying it though. Doing a lot of brain-storming and soul searching, and trying not to disappear into the realms of self-obsession.

Passions

I love ideas. I like developing them and communicating them. I think ideas are where life begins. I also really enjoy good design and good writing. For me, the most important thing about writing is what you’re writing about. Style and skill come after that, and they’re both really important too.

I love reading. Mostly blogs, webcomics, novels and books about wisdom (can’t quite bring myself to put “self-help”). I eat words. I devour them. I take in words like a hoover would take in bathwater (if you ever used a hoover to drain your bath, which I don’t recommend). I love reading.

I love design, in whatever form that might take. Interior design and web design especially, but also print, motion (especially those cool typography videos that are springing up all over the place) and lighting. I love typography by the way, I am totally obsessed with 20s and 30s era lettering.

I also love a well designed system. There is beauty and elegance in a simple, efficient workflow.

I dream about leading a successful business. For me that would be something that creates something truly and genuinely worthwhile, which has a great culture where people feel valued, built up and connected to each other, as well as empowered to be creative and make bold decisions and changes. And also returns a healthy profit. I think wealth should never be a primary goal, but I really believe that after you put first things first, it is entirely sane and altogether laudable to put second things second.

I love leadership, which is a new passion in me. I think leadership is fundamentally about being a positive influence on people’s lives. Control, therefore, is not leadership but self-indulgence. Good leadership inspires independence as well as healthy connectivity.

I love problem-solving and positivity. I love thrusting a positive statement into the middle of a horrible situation. I love development, of the “self”-prefixed kind and the promotion of it in others.

Personality

I am deceptively quiet. I’m slightly shy and introspective, but I’m easily fascinated by things or by people. I find I’m drawn to people’s flaws. I don’t believe flaws should be prized, but I do find them attractive, which is probably motivated by compassion and a desire to heal.

I can be really funny. I love dry, subtle humour the best.

I really appreciate honesty. I love bluntness, but I think people can be lazy with it. There’s no point in pointing out a flaw if you don’t also offer hope and encouragement with it. It’s easy just to tear down, not so easy to build up.

I love-hate difficult things. I’m very stubborn. I play devil’s advocate, to the point of conflicting myself thinking sometimes. I very quickly identify with people and their point of view.

I love the idea of letting things happen naturally but as a strategy this rarely works, and I’m growing to love the idea of making things happen.

I hate small-mindedness and black-and-white thinking. I get irritated by domineering people. I generally find something to like or admire about everyone I meet, as a matter of course. It’s one of my core beliefs that everyone has something of incredible value, and that everyone is better at something than I am. I am most drawn to bright, funny, energetic people. I love it when people pay me undivided attention, and I love compliments.

I get bored of music very quickly, unless I’m listening to it with other people. What I love in music is emotion, especially hope, melancholy, nostalgia or passion for the future. I love the insight music gives into a person’s character. For example, I love Kate Bush’s Mrs Bartolozzi, even though it’s totally mad.

Contact me

If you want to contact me, you can leave a comment on of my posts, or send email to mark@beingmrkenny.co.uk. Or use the form below: