the good life
Anyone who has visited this blog more than a couple of times may have sensed my tremendous reverence for Sir Ken Robinson’s speech at the TED 2006 conference in California. A few months ago, JK Rowling delivered another wonderfully inspiring speech at a graduation ceremony at Harvard. This address by the Harry Potteress, if you will, comes extremely close to evoking the resonance created in me by Robinson.
Their themes are similar in part. The overlap lies in their descriptions of how people are typically held back from finding their talents. Robinson talks of how kids are often pushed in to doing things that they are not designed to do. This detracts from their uniqueness and leads to the feeling of having failed from within – no matter how successful they may appear to be from the outside.
JK Rowling speaks of her own experience as a mother in a financially dire situation who finally found the courage required to live her life with authenticity: She said: “So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.”
Robinson gave the example of Gillian Lynne, now a British ballerina, who was taken to a doctor when she was still in school for being miserable at her studies. The doctor was wise enough to tell her mother that her child didn’t have ADHD but that she did have the fidgetiness of a dancer. He encouraged her mother to enroll her in a dance school. In Robinson’s words: “Gillian was eventually auditioned for the Royal Ballet school. She became a soloist and had a wonderful career there. She founded her own dance company. She met Andrew Lloyd Webber. She has been responsible for some of the most successful theater productions in history. She has given pleasure to millions. And she’s a multi-millionaire. Somebody else might have put her on medication and told her to calm down.”
Bravo to both speakers!
Rowling took the idea a step ahead. She spoke of how getting in touch with ourselves then helps us to get in touch with others. She talked about how it enables us to use our power of imagination to empathize with those less fortunate than us. That, most beautifully, is her definition of a good life – which is what she eventually wished upon the graduating class of 2008.
I have always thought that “the good life” is not one in which you have acquired material things and been a conventional success, but one in which you have been true to yourself; it is the only way in which you can be true to others. Believe me, I know how tough it is. But I also deeply feel how vital it is, not just for our own wellbeing but also for that of those around us; for our children, our spouses, our families, our employers, our employees, our countries, our world – whether strangers or friends.
Finally, Rowling had an important point to make for the youth of ’superpower’ America – which figures in this moving excerpt from her speech.
“Amnesty International mobilises thousands of people who have never been tortured or imprisoned for their beliefs to act on behalf of those who have. The power of human empathy, leading to collective action, saves lives, and frees prisoners. Ordinary people, whose personal well-being and security are assured, join together in huge numbers to save people they do not know, and will never meet. My small participation in that process was one of the most humbling and inspiring experiences of my life.
Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people’s minds, imagine themselves into other people’s places.
Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand or sympathise.
And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.
I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces can lead to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.
What is more, those who choose not to empathise may enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy.
One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.
That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people’s lives simply by existing.
But how much more are you, Harvard graduates of 2008, likely to touch other people’s lives? Your intelligence, your capacity for hard work, the education you have earned and received, give you unique status, and unique responsibilities. Even your nationality sets you apart. The great majority of you belong to the world’s only remaining superpower. The way you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the pressure you bring to bear on your government, has an impact way beyond your borders. That is your privilege, and your burden.
If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped transform for the better. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.”
Hear hear! Powerful thoughts and words indeed.
tell the story
I’ve been reading about writing, if only to procrastinate.
I find it hard to actually sit down and begin to write a story. Except for a short one I wrote in Austin, which was fun but not particularly good if I may add, and the odd composition in school, I have not delved in to fiction very much. You see the scientificist ( 
) in me won’t allow it.
Excuses, excuses.
So I came across a tips-for-amateur-storytellers type website out there. It said: Open a book at random. Write down the first sentence you see. Now tell the story from there.
Here goes then.
The loneliness was still there, but it was getting louder and easier to dance to.
Wow.
making it work
Back to work culture like I said I would.
I think one of the most important qualities to engage in the work place is flatness. By that I mean – a strong check on hierarchical behavior. Everyone has contributions to make and worrying about what the boss might say/think/feel is the best way to bring about clamming up of employees, or even worse – them expressing thoughts they believe will be favored by those “in power.” This creates a space where people are motivated by fear, leads to a fake consensus, and culminates in a non-progressive environment. What we need are work cultures in which people are intrinsically motivated. Every job is a self-portrait of the person who does it. Autograph your work with excellence. Sucking up is not conducive to this kind of sentiment.
A facet related to the first is this: companies must be very careful to inculcate an atmosphere that is not idea-killing. The role of two-way communication needs to be deeply underscored. It’s easy to be dismissive of thoughts that are not articulate enough or stated confidently enough or are perhaps slightly tangential to the topic at hand. But true respect is always due to input offered – so value all that is said, dig a bit deeper to get at the essence, certainly don’t discount anyone. Someone once said: The paradox of innovation is this: CEOs often complain about lack of innovation, while employees often say that leaders are hostile to new ideas.
The next thing I can think of is affirmation of who employees are – in a holistic sense. It is not often that people feel known/understood where they work. (There is plenty of research in organizational psychology showing that verifying people’s sense of self is greatly useful.) So, for example, let’s say you have an engineer who can paint, let it be known. Perhaps a showcasing of employee’s talents outside of their job descriptions is worthwhile. People are unique and should be seen as such; cliques should be avoided at all cost. A related aspect is of giving people autonomy. Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what needs to be done, and then let them surprise you with the results.
An openness to change is vital. A great quote speaking to it: To survive in the future, every organization must be prepared to abandon everything it does. The world is engulfed in a revolution, on a social and psychological level, and this must reflect at the organizational level as well. I’m obviously not saying the focus should be on abandoning everything, but that there should be a readiness to doing so, if need be.
Money is an unavoidable but surprising variable in creating a good work culture. Another neat quote that talks to the point: There is no contest between the company that buys the grudging compliance of its workforce and the company that enjoys the enterprising participation of its employees. You could pay people a ton of money and not have their faithfulness. (Employee turnover rates are not as muted by high salaries as one might like to think.) Or you could value an employee tremendously and have his loyalty forever, even if you couldn’t pay him the best that is out there.
Management must develop a clear ideology and let it be implemented by all – from the guy who wheels the coffee and croissants in to the conference room to the one who heads the table. It is more than vital! A powerful quote that I believe gets at it most thoroughly: A visionary company creates a total environment that envelops employees, bombarding them with signals so consistent and mutually reinforcing that it’s virtually impossible to misunderstand the company’s ideologies and ambitions. This ties in inextricably with giving meaning to the work employees do. A vision is exceedingly important.
Finally, a thoughtful and honest Corporate Responsibility policy is imperative today. When institutionalized right, it can cover almost all of the points touched upon above – and more! The idea of Corporate Responsibility is NOT anti-profit, as many like to believe; it is just a more long-term orientation than the short-term one to which we are accustomed. Ultimately, CR is about nothing but profit, actually. I will write about it some more in another post.
ditch it
I’ve grown certain that the root cause of lack of fulfillment – and the sense of futility that goes with it – is fear. (Needless to say, I’ve been in a contemplative phase for the last couple of weeks.) To live life with authenticity is tough, especially in the smoke-and-mirrors world this often is. And underneath the fear of being true to yourself lie the fears of failure and rejection. They make us give in to the status quo, to not speak our minds, and to not bring to any situation what we might uniquely bring, in their absence.
It is very early on in our lives that we become afraid of being wrong or looking stupid or feeling inferior. These are very real and very human fears, and once they set in, discovering who we really are becomes an uphill battle. We lie to ourselves and others, we hide and we hurt, we deny and we demean. We all do; it’s not a question of if but how much.
Now consider the flip side. Is courage the absence of fear? Seems to me it’s more like courage is simply the acknowledgment of fear. Once you admit to a fear, it tends to lose its bite, which is liberating. You gradually become free to be aware, free to not unthinkingly conform, free to be and believe in yourself. (One of my great fears is of being perceived as too idealistic and only very recently have I begun to confront it.)
I recently came across a related and rather neat quote by Nietzsche: Fear is the mother of morality. That got me thinking about how rarely we find ourselves doing what feels right – not what we are told is right, or what is generally considered right, but what intuitively feels right deep down to us. If we could make more of a habit of it, then we might have no use of the so-called morality that often leads to brashness towards ourselves and others. I deeply believe that being gentle is part of being brave, and requires even more of those proverbial guts. Think not just about us as individuals, but also about how we behave collectively – for example countries that are at war…
I know I am rambling, guess it’s because I’m not used to doing this. I tend to avoid getting too personal on this blahg – perhaps in the fear that I will be judged as childish and over-emotional or even worse as boring. (All this fear, my being a psychologist notwithstanding!) But this is how I feel and this subject is at my core. So hear hear then, here’s to facing fears. Slowly but surely, even if just a fraction of one at a time. Good night. =)
think like a kid!
We sometimes use a cool creative tool to brainstorm at work. Basically, you each pull one of a pack of cards. (Every card bears a different anecdote and an associated technique.) Then you play the role that the card suggests within the team for a bit, until it’s time to pull the next card. It’s a fun and remarkably useful exercise! Here is one I especially like…
godspeed
“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.” … Tennyson
in sight
I had the honour and pleasure of meeting Santosh Desai recently. He is one of India’s foremost account planners and a weekly columnist (typically in the role of a commentator on popular culture) for the Times of India. Chatting with him was uplifting for he is eloquent, down-to-earth, and has integrity. It gives me great hope that people like him (those with a holistic bent of mind) have a voice in advertising and media in India.
Here is one of his columns from the TOI. I think it nicely demonstrates how his unique brand of acute observation, unapologetic introspection, and nuanced articulation might generate deep insights in to why we feel and do the things we feel and do. (How this sort of thinking might be relevant to understanding consumer behavior is perhaps easy to see, but more on it later.)
THE FEAR OF GIVING
Old ladies begging in winter nights get me. I am always shaken, disturbed and moved in a way that goes beyond sympathy or pity. It seems colossally unfair that one should be so vulnerable, so shrivelled by penury at this stage of one’s life. Of course the sight of poverty always induces guilt pangs, the homeless make one uncomfortable, the idea of street children failing to find avenues to channelise their obvious energies is difficult to live with but, for some reason, the idea of old ladies in winter wearing smudged glasses held up by strings has the most powerful emotional impact on me. And yet, for all the trauma this sight induces in me, I find it impossible to actually reach into my pocket and give her anything.
I think about it with increasing desperation and then the light turns green and I am free to go. I dream of making a grand gesture, of emptying out my pockets on an impulse or going round the city distributing blankets but of course I do nothing. And I don’t think I am alone in this. While a large part of our attitude towards the economically underprivileged is made up of indifference, there is a small but significant part that is unable to take the step from concern to giving. What explains this inability, this paralysis that stymies good intentions?
And I am not talking about the rational arguments against giving charity to people who beg on the streets. There are those argue that begging is a nuisance and giving only encourages dependence. You frequently hear accounts of how when meaningful work was offered to the people who were begging, it was almost always turned down. Without getting into the argument for or against encouraging begging, let us focus instead on those situations when we have no conceptual problems with giving something but find ourselves unable to bring ourselves to do so.
Perhaps, what prevents us from giving is that it appears to be a cheap way to buy absolution. It seems too easy, to rid oneself of guilt by offloading some money into an outstretched hand. Are we merely purchasing a cheap ticket to heaven, finding a way to postpone facing up to some deep sense of guilt at our relative good fortune?
The other possible reason is that the problem seems too vast for one small gesture to make any real difference. The sense of “so what will it really change’’ might stop us from taking that small step.
The enormity of the problem mocks at the futility of our gesture and makes it appear to be an act of indulgence aimed at making us, rather than the person begging, feel better. The feeling that there is no symbolic way of shouldering responsibility, that once we cross the threshold and take any action then we somehow become responsible for the problem in its entirety. And if we are not ready for that, then it is perhaps better to do nothing at all.
In some deep-rooted way, we are afraid of playing God with other people’s destinies. The act of giving seems laden with arrogance; we attribute superiority to ourselves based on material comfort and somehow this feels wrong. It feels wrong that one should be in a position to make such a difference to someone else’s life.
The transaction is too naked, the difference too palpable for comfort. Also, there is this other problem with playing God—we need to be completely fair and impartial.
Who is to say who needs our charity the most—is it the shrivelled old woman or the urchin without a leg? Do we give on the basis of an internal pathos-meter that measures the relative direness of the need? Do we then end up summing up human beings by the size of their afflictions?
And hence the irony of doing nothing for those in need not out of callousness, but out of some form of respect for them as people.
Perhaps this too is only a way to rationalise indifference. Perhaps this whole debate is too self-indulgent in the first place. And it certainly changes nothing.
The next time an old lady raps on my car window, I will still be a deer in her headlights, trapped between my fear of arrogance and a need to do something.
Read more from him here. (Search for ‘Santosh Desai’ or ‘City City Bang Bang’ on this link.)
tower of song
well my friends are gone and my hair is grey
i ache in the places where i used to play
i’m crazy for love but i’m not coming home
i’m just paying my rent every day in the tower of song
i said to hank williams how lonely does it get
hank williams hasn’t answered yet
but i hear him coughing all night long
oh a hundred floors above me in the tower of song
This is how the ‘Tower of Song’ unfurls. I find myself listening to it often. In it, Leonard Cohen intertwines the ideas of aging humbly, acknowledging our jadedness, accepting our craziness (“you see you hear these funny voices in the tower of song“… great line tucked away towards the end), embracing our genius, of dwelling on lost or unrequited love, of how it all is, and how we deal with it.
His Jewish sensibility shines through as he creates this vivid picture of a man “born with the gift of a golden voice”, trapped in his lonely tower of song by the tracks, from where there seems to be no escape from confronting his reality. How he evokes feelings of depression and upliftment so concurrently is beyond me. I suspect his enviable gift of nuance and his unapologetic honesty have something do with it.
Watch him perform the song with U2 in this video.
