SoloSuccess Quote: "The people I love the best..."

« The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shadows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.

The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real. »

-- Marge Piercy
(b. 1936) poet and social activist
(see the rest of the week's letter here)

What comes first: IQ or LQ?

Last week, Charles Murray, a societal researcher and the author of the book "The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life", published three articles in the Wall Street Journal on the importance of protecting and promoting the high-IQ members of society (part 1, part 2, part 3 )

His main thesis is that "Our future depends crucially on how we educate the next generation of people gifted with unusually high intelligence."

I can agree that our education system needs to make room for high-intelligence children - or, as I prefer to see it, high-awareness children. In my high schooling here in Quebec in the mid-1970s, students were grouped into three streams, enriched ("enrichi"), regular ("régulier") and remedial. I was in the enrichi group, which gave me more opportunities to discover and learn things that the régulier stream did not necessarily cover. I was also with classmates who also loved to learn. When my youngest brother started his high school, the streams were abolished in an attempt to "integrate" the classroom. My impression is that this had a negative effect on my brother - although I believe he is even more intelligent that me (I?), he simply lost his passion for learning, because there was little challenge there for him in that integrated environment.

Now, looking back, I wonder if I did better in school because of my "high intelligence" (I've never been tested...), or is it more because of my "high motivation"?

Have not read Dr. Murray's original book (which seems to be quite controversial itself), but I've read the three articles listed above. The major objection I have with the Dr. Murray's premise, is that if talent or intelligence were all that was needed to succeed, then we wouldn't be seeing the disasters around us that threaten our planet's very survival.

Developing analytical skills or providing a solid knowledge foundation seems to me to ignore the basic observation that all decisions come initially from emotion (the unconscious), then we search for the data to justify our decision (see previous post here)

All of the smarts in the world can't make things happen if there is no impulse to move into action. This is the power of leadership: the ability to change one's status quo into a new state that is an expression of Who You Really Are.

To me, leadership is independent of intelligence, and is a product of willing to go deep to find out the "who", "what" and "why" of life (one's mission, vision, and permission)

Do we want a society led by clones of Mr Spock? Or do we want a future shaped by "ordinary people doing extraordinary things"?

IQ gives one the ability to assimilate and use information. But IQ is simply a means... to what end? Developing one's "LQ" (Leadership Quotient), anchored by mission, vision and permission, provides the context to put the IQ to use.

An interesting demonstration about the power of LQ over IQ is here. The author of the article, Seth Roberts, doesn't call it such, but from the narrative, it's evident that once a person finds their passion, discovers a way to express Who They Really Are, then their productivity, focus, and impact... their Leadership Quotient, rises sharply.

Do they really want a faster horse?

Seen in an article in today's Globe and Mail business section:

"You rarely solve epochal challenges with conventional wisdom - a fact that recalls the words of Henry Ford, a radical innovator, who once said that if he had given people what they wanted, he would have given them faster horses."

- Neil Reynolds "Let's avoid ethanol's 'bridge to nowhere'"
The Globe and Mail, Wed 24 Jan 07, page B2
Link to article (subscription or payment required) (emphasis added by me)

Why this jumped out at me is that in this day and age of rapid evolution, those entrepreneurs who truly succeed are those who are one step ahead of what people want, positioned in such a way as to satisfy their true desires.

How to do this?

By first asking the question: "What do you want?"
Then following up with the question "If you had [what you want], how would life change for you?"

Stop giving people faster horses and start satisfying their true desires.

It's about learning how to listen to the "answer behind the answer" (ABA!)

Courage is rarely impulsive

"Courage, contrary to the common view, is rarely impulsive. It involves both preparation and consideration sometimes taking seconds, at other times years. True courage is not a foolhardy going against the grain coupled with a strident unwillingness to learn. It is an educated calculation of the odds backed by exceptional preparation aimed at achieving an admirable, highly salient goal."
-- Kathleen Reardon from her article on "The Huffington Post"

Read her full article called "Courage as a Skill" in the January 2007 Harvard Business Review.

Can happiness be taught?

Interesting article:
Happiness 101 - (by D.T. Max., New York Times Sunday Magazine, 7 January 2007)
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/07/magazine/07happiness.t.html

Can happiness be taught systematically as an academic discipline? Do happier students make better humans? It seems to be self-evident, but with the emphasis on teaching only the "fundamentals" (the 3R's) in school, and jettisonning all of the rest, it appears that our education system is crippling the next generation.

Favorite quote:

"All this interested Seligman’s students [Martin Seligman, one of the field’s founders, who heads the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania], but what Fredrickson [Barbara Fredrickson of the University of North Carolina] says always catches their attention most is a study Fredrickson did with a Brazilian workplace psychologist named Marcia Losada, who observed annual strategic-review meetings of employees through one-way mirrors. The data she collected showed that the most effective teams — the criteria were customer satisfaction, profitability and internal review — were the ones who had more positive meetings. There was even a number that corresponded to the minimum amount of positive to negative feedback necessary to encourage successful functioning. That number, Fredrickson told the class, was three positive comments to one negative comment. “The ratio lady,” one student called her." [emphasis and brackets added by me]

And the last word:

"Had they saved the world or themselves? I spoke to Brandon Rasmussen [a psychology student at George Mason University, where the course in Positive Psychology is taught], an easygoing student who seemed to me like a surfer dude washed up on some New Age shore. The class had energized him, and he had been a vigorous participant — earning an A. His final paper was about learning to really be with his friends, going into flow with them, something he had long had difficulty doing. “My personal satisfaction is the personal measure for me, and my personal satisfaction is great,” he explained. “I hate to say this, but really in the scheme of things we’re not going to change the war in Iraq.” Then he paused and thought how that sounded. “We can only fix the world one person at a time.” " [emphasis mine]

Free Will - Illusion or reality?

An enlightening New York Times article today discusses the nature of "free will" as the author is confronted with the choice of having chocolate cake (or not) for dessert...

Experiments show that we tend first to take action subconsciously, after which our conscious mind then creates a reasoning to justify it. We act on our urge then "make up stories about being in control".

However, if we wanted our conscious mind to first take a decision before we act, imagine the "analysis paralysis" as the conscious brain tries to figure out the millions of possibilities.

I believe our subconscious actions can be guided, by first integrating a strong "programming", such as a moral code (the Ten Commandments), or what I teach with "Mission - Vision - Permission" (Who am I? What do I want? Why do I want this?). This provides a coherence, an order, a kind of determinism, that simplifies and clarifies the "unconscious" urge to act. It also ensures that the subconscious actions lead toward an ultimate experience of life that we choose. So "free will", in this way of thinking, is more about creating a framework of action to consciously be in the moment instead of trying to figure out each single decision independently, to be a human "being" instead of a human "choosing".

But on the other hand, what determines the specific Mission or Vision that we are attracted to? Can we really live a conscious, deterministic life? Do we really have "free will"?

Maybe there is some truth in the Islamic idea of "Insh'allah" (God willing)

Favorite quote:

The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said, as Einstein paraphrased it, that “a human can very well do what he wants, but cannot will what he wants.” Einstein, among others, found that a comforting idea. “This knowledge of the non-freedom of the will protects me from losing my good humor and taking much too seriously myself and my fellow humans as acting and judging individuals,” he said.

See the New York Times article here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/02/science/02free.html

The tyranny of time (The Independent)

Stop all the clocks: Julian Baggini on the tyranny of time

The clock is ticking - 2006 is history and a new year has begun. Today we'll take stock, make resolutions and start planning the next 12 months. But why do we treat 1st January as such a milestone in our lives? After all, it's just another day, isn't it? The philosopher Julian Baggini explains the human obsession with the passage of time.

Published: 01 January 2007 in The Independent


Favorite idea:

Perhaps the most profound thinker on the importance of time to human existence was the Danish existentialist Soren Kierkegaard, who remarked that life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward. His thinking went far beyond such pithy, poignant aphorisms, however. It took Kant to point out the centrality of time for human experience, but it took Kierkegaard to point out the contradictions at the heart of temporal existence.

[...]

On the one hand, human beings belong in what he [Kierkegaard] called the aesthetic sphere. This has nothing to do with art or taste, but the way in which we are tied to the moment. The time is always now, never a minute ago or an hour in the future. We cannot escape the moment, which is why many have argued that the only way to live is to seize it. Yet Kierkegaard thought that the philosophy of carpe diem was self-defeating. You cannot seize something that is forever on the move. For the person who lives only for the instant, every new day, minute or second is a clean slate, and what has happened in the past counts for nothing. The aesthete is forever trying to drink from the font of life using a sieve.

Living in the moment doesn't work because, Kierkegaard argued, we are not only aesthetic creatures but ethical ones. Again the terminology is misleading, for the fundamental feature of the ethical sphere of existence is not that it introduces morality (though it does) but that it transcends the moment. While it is true in one sense that we are wedded to the present, it is also true that we are creatures with pasts and futures. That we have memories, make plans and promises, take on projects and have commitments is central to our humanity. A person who does none of these things is not a free spirit but barely human at all.

[...]

The challenge we face as individuals trying to live our finite lives is to locate the present properly in relation to the future and the past, in such a way as to do justice to all three. We need to understand the past in order to move forwards in the future, personally and politically. We also need to have a sense of future to make the present more than just a series of fleeting experiences - though those too have a place in well-rounded human life.

But, in addition to the mere present, we need projects, ambitions, dreams, as well as an awareness of the consequences of our actions. At the same time, we cannot be too fixated on either the future or the past, or else we lose the present. And since all moments past and future are experienced primarily as the present, if we lose that, we lose everything.

[...]

To make peace with time we need to accept what we cannot change about it. It is finite. We experience it in one direction only, always in the present but never totally disconnected from the past or future for more than fleeting moments. We make the most of it not by railing against these immutable facts but by living appropriately to them, and to our individual natures. Above all, we need to accept that the very thing that enables us to experience anything at all is that time constantly moves on, and so to complain that time is slipping away is to protest against the very thing that makes any kind of worthwhile existence possible in the first place.

We should therefore embrace the new year, accepting that it too will pass and this is the necessary consequence of life moving forwards as it should and must do. To say we must seize the day is only one-third of the truth: we must also seize the past and future, too.

Read the full article here:
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/article2114989.ece

Happy New Year!