We are compelled to share our ideas; that is how they come to life. And when we share ideas they multiply and grow, forming a powerfully reinforcing circle. You are not defined simply by what you own. You are also what you share. That should be our credo for the century to come.
It is not the brightest who succeed... Nor is success simply the sum of the decisions and efforts we make on our own behalf. It is, rather, a gift. Outliers are those who have been given opportunities - and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them.
We-Think will not spread far nor sustain itself if it is confined to tasks for which people are prepared to volunteer. People must find a way to make their livings from these collaboratives and invest in them. We-think entrepreneurs are consequently desperately searching for viable business models that will allow them to earn some money without turning their backs on community values, while traditional companies are searching for ways to become more open and collaborative. The We-Think gift economy needs to find an accommodation with the market economy in which goods and services have to be paid for. The most exciting business models of the future will be hybrids that blend elements of the company and the community, of commerce and collaboration: open in some respects, closed in others; giving some content away and charging for some services; serving people as consumers and encouraging them, when it is relevant, to become participants.We -Think will gradually change find fundamental aspects of economic life: how we work, consume, innovate, lead and own productive endeavours.
The best way to achieve the insulational state of numbness is to be swamped by routine activities. The old-fashioned superficiality of routine blends seamlessly with the new superficiality, the surface quality of ubiquitous representation -- and this hybrid accelerates constantly, as you take on more and more. Adult busyness is constituted, as we all know, by innumberable things we "have to do." People we have to be nice to, meetings we have to go to, events we have to attend, and, above all, deadlines we have to meet. And, of course, by little interventions of chance, glitches in the flow that you have to deal with as you move from one thing you have to do to the next thing you have to do. The result is a simulation of reality convincing enough to pass for the original, for most of us, most of the time. It is only when the ultimately real descends upon us in the form of tragic accident, illness, death, or a miraculous recovery, the birth of a child -- only then does that simulation stand revealed for what it is.
In a golden period in the 1970s Illich set about dissecting the failings of modern institutions, the professionals who organise them and the systems they design, in a series of short polemics:
Deschooling Society, Limits to Medicine, Disabling Professions and Tools for Conviviality. He argued that as people become dependent on the expert knowledge of professionals they lose faith in their capacity to act. His solution was that people should spend less time as consumers, more as producers of their own well-being. And for that to be possible they need more convivial, easy-to-use tools.
Illich's most optimistic book, Tools for Conviviality, which inspired Felsenstein and others in the hacker community in the 1970s, put the challenge this way:
I believe a desirable future depends on our deliberately choosing a life of action over a life of consumption, on our engendering a lifestyle which will enable us to be spontaneous, independent, yet related to each other, rather than maintaining a lifestyle which only allows us to produce and consume.Convivial institutions work through conversation rather than instruction, through co-creation between users and producers, learners and teachers, rather than delivery from professionals to clients; and through mutual support among peers as much as by means of professional service.
Last night I attend Pecha-Kucha Night at the Powerhouse Arts Centre/Museum in Brisbane. The basic concept is that a series of presenters discuss their topic in the format of 20 slides x 20 seconds each. Last night I saw some joyful kinetic art, the launch of the Park(ing) Space project for Brisbane, a stonemason/architect who creates modern art headstones, a furniture designer who works with bamboo, and a number of other ideas and artists that I most probably wouldn't have been exposed to.
I'm looking forward to checking out these evenings when I get back to Shanghai. Pecha-Kucha nights are held in cities all over the world, and they're a fantastic opportunity to be exposed to creative and innovative thinking and people.
Check out the ever-expanding list of cities/events at the Pecha-Kucha website.
Chin-Ning Chu, author of The Asian Mind Game, offers up some advice on those who'd steal your serenity in Thick Face, Black Heart.
Keep a respectful distance from those who would steal your peace and serenity. In your daily life, you will run into this type of person around every corner. These people are not necessarily cunning or ruthless, nor are they a real threat to your career or personal objectives, but they are eternally annoying.They operate by thriving on their own inferiority. Their actions and words are very cutting, even though people are nice to them. They also are gutless. On the one hand, they play up to the ruthless and cunning types who treat them like dirt, and yet they are mean to people who are decent and kind to them. These serenity stealers are people to be avoided. Life put them in a place that they resent because they feel it is beneath them. To get even with life, they react by attacking those who are nice to them, while being very agreeable to those who abuse them.They cannot help themselves; their actions are involuntary. The serenity stealers steal into your heart and confidence with their sweet, charming exteriors. But after you allow them to get close to you, they will snap at you in order to diminish you in their eyes. They try to temporarily elevate their own inner power and feel good for a moment, but are useful remorseful afterward. They can't help themselves, and so the pattern continues.It is important not to interact with them in a similar manner. If you do, they will make a lifetime career of attacking you. These people are masters of "death by a thousand cuts." You should always keep them at arm's length. They will make a lifetime career of attacking you. Then they will eternally respect you and solicit your friendship. They will then transfer their troublesome energy to someone else.
Andrew Kibbe's wonderfully useful blog, Tools for Thought, has once again grabbed my attention with Uncommon Sense on Managing Priorities, which suggests that low-priority tasks are not necessarily tasks to be ignored. Aside from the fact that Kibbe reminds us that any task on a to-do list is worthy of attention, I particularly appreciated the idea that 'low priority' tasks can actually function as gateway tasks to get us psychologically primed (ie. motivated) to attack those looming, dreaded high priority tasks that need to be completed.
Try this experiment: the next time you find yourself procrastinating on an important task, find the easiest thing on your list that can be completed in a few minutes, do it, and see if you feel more capable of handling the important task or less. Some people call this productive procrastination. I call it productivity. After all, any action you decide to do is procrastination of everything else that, by default, you’ve decided not to do.
Krashen and Brown recently published this research paper in the Singapore Tertiary English Teachers Society journal: What is Academic Language Proficiency? [download PDF]
After a few weeks, her students rebelled, and told her that "Metacognition was interfering with the reading zone ... (it) disrupted the flow of a great story; ate up precious hours that could have been devoted to living inside another great story, and wasted their time as readers ... not one student could name a positive effect of the strategies on his or her reading performance".
...some strategies are teachable and useful to learn. Others are less useful, limited only to conscious language learning and deliberate memorization. Still others, those that all humans naturally possess and use, may be counterproductive to teach.
People say that what we are seeking is a meaning of life. I don't think this is what we're really seeking. I think what we're seeking is an experience of being alive.
Just because something has been a lot of work or consumed a lot of time doesn't make it productive or worthwhile.Just because you are embarrassed to admit that you're still living the consequences of bad decisions made 5, 10, or 20 years ago shouldn't stop you from making good decisions now. if you let pride stop you, you will hate life 5, 10, and 20 years from now for the same reasons....Pride is stupid.Being able to quit things that don't work is integral to being a winner. Going into a project or job without defining when worthwhile becomes wasteful is like going into a casino without a cap on what you will gamble: dangerous and foolish."But you don't understand my situation. It's complicated!" But is it really? Don't confuse the complex with the difficult. Most situations are simple -- many are just emotionally difficult to act upon. The problem and the solution are usually obvious and siimple. it's not that you don't know what to do. Of course you do. you are just terrified that you might end up worse off than you are now.I'll tell you right now: If you're at this point, you won't be worse off. Revisit fear-setting and cut the cord.
A person who derives all his instruction from teachers or books, even if he escape the besetting temptation of contenting himself with cram, is under no compulsion to hear both sides; accordingly it is far from a frequent accomplishment, even among thinkers, to know both sides; and the weakest part of what everybody says in defence of his opinion, is what he intends as a reply to antagonists. It is the fashion of the present time to disparage negative logic - that which points out weaknesses in theory or errors in practice, without establishing positive truths. Such negative criticism would indeed be poor enough as an ultimate result; but as a means to attaining any positive knowledge or conviction worthy the name, it cannot be valued too highly; and until people are again systematically trained to it, there will be few great thinkers, and a low general average of intellect, in any but the mathematical and physical departments of speculation. On any other subject no one's opinions deserve the name of knowledge, except so far as he has either had forced on him by others, or gone through of himself, the same mental process which would have been required of him in carrying on an active controversy with opponents. That, therefore, which when absent, it is so indispensable, but so difficult, to create, how worse than absurd it is to forego, when spontaneously offering itself! If there are any persons who contest a received opinion, or who will do so if law or opinion will let them, let us thank them for it, open our minds and listen to them, and rejoice that there is some one to do for us what we otherwise ought, if we have any regard for either the certainty or vitality of our convictions, to do with much greater labor for ourselves.
A society that defends the ideals of free culture must preserve precisely the opportunity for new creativity to threaten the old.Lessig, Lawrence. Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity. New York: Penguin. 005.5
There are so many down-to-Earth suggestions on the Tools for Thought blog that I won't quote any directly in this space. Rather, I'll just point you in the right direction:
Stephen Hawking logically addresses some of those 'burning questions,' such as "Are we alone in the universe?" and "Should we support manned/personed space travel?"
I love it when fiction merges with non-fiction, and a book that was recently passed on to me by a friend in Beijing is a prime example of this. Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash is a hyperlinked mesh of references to science, mythology and linguistics.
There are two schools: relativists and universalists. As George Steiner summarizes it, relativists tend to believe that language is not the vehicle of thought but its determining medium. It is the framework of cognition. Our perceptions of everything are organized by the flux of sensations passing over that framework. Hence, the study of the evolution of the language is the study of the evolution of the human mind itself.
In the spirit of Tim Ferris's bestselling book The 4-Hour Workweek, I'll try to keep this post short, especially for those of you on a low information diet. Keep in mind that Ferris would actually like to disrupt the current trend of information overload, and to terminate our movement toward being an always on culture!
Pareto's Principle (the 80/20 principle):
20% of your actions will produce 80% of your results
Parkinson's Law:
Batching tasks - letting similar tasks accumulate, then batching them, eg. only emailing or responding several times a week.
Ferris's advice for trying to break non-productive cycles of using information technologies? Ask yourself this questions 3 times daily:
"Am I being productive, or am I being busy?"
As we spend our time scrambling for that job, salary, spouse, apartment or lifestyle, it's good to be able to shift to a more creative, optimistic perspective of life.
More succinct, evolved thinking from Rich Karlgaard at Forbes:
The World's Worst Disease
A tragedy of humankind today is that most people fall outrageously short of their potential. A principle of a great civilization ought to be that it focuses intensely on how to develop the capability latent in everybody. The more that is done, the more we all benefit from one another.
Deep wisdom about the meaning of the 21st century will be essential. A serious problem of our time is the gap between skill and wisdom. Science and technology are accelerating furiously, but wisdom is not. We are brilliant at creating new technology, but are not wise in learning how to cope with it. To succeed in today's world, people will need intricate skills in narrowly specialized areas. Skills need detailed, narrowly focused study of subjects that are rapidly increasing in complexity, whereas wisdom needs the synthesis of diverse ideas. Wisdom requires judgement, reflection about beliefs and thinking about events in terms of how they might be different.Martin, James (2006) The Meaning of the 21st Century: A Vital Blueprint for ensuring our Future. London: Transworld. (pp. 292, 293).
Today, deep reflection about our future circumstances is eclipsed by a frenzy of ever more complex techniques and gadgets and preoccupation with how to increase shareholder value. The skill/wisdom gap is made greater because skills offer the ways to get wealthy. Society's best brains are saturated with immediate issues that become ever more complex, rather than reflecting on why we are doing this and what the long-term consequences will be.
University education today is much more pressured than when I was at university. The curricula have become overstuffed, the subject matter intensely complex and the examinations frequent and demanding. The student sticks to the curriculum and can deal with little else. The professors stick to their discipline; they are judged by the papers they publish in the professional journal of that discipline. Most areas of education have almost no interdisciplinary scholarship. As disciplines become deeper and more complex, the brilliance expended on them is formidable, but we don't think much about its consequences or what impact it has in other areas. In specialized areas, computers will become vastly more intelligent than people, but such intelligence is not human wisdom. As computers become more intelligent, with intense self-improvement of non-human intelligence, the skill/wisdom gap will widen at a furious rate.
We have vast numbers of experts on how to make the train work better and faster, but almost nobody is concerned with where the train is headed or whether we'll like its destination.
Wisdom is essential and comes from the synthesis of a large amount of knowledge and experience that may take much of a lifetime to acquire. Not everyone can handle such synthesis. We must ask where the broad wisdom about the future will come from. The answer is, we must set out consciously to develop it. Wisdom, like advanced civilization, will come when we learn to relax. Our best brains need to stop chasing the most highly paid careers, the fastest boats and the smartest country clubs. A mature society should exhibit deep respect for deep wisdom.
We need to set out very consciously to foster and nurture the wisdom that the 21st century will require. This should be a task for our greatest universities.
