The future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind - creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers, and meaning maker.
High concept(aptitude) involves the capacity to detect patterns and opportunities, to create artistic and emotional beauty, to craft a satisfying narrative, and to combine seemingly unrelated ideas into something new. High tough involves the ability to empathize with others, to understand the subtleties of human interaction, to fond joy in one's self and elicit it in others, and to stretch beyond the quotidian in pursuit of purpose and meaning.
This view grudgingly acknowledges the right hemisphere's legitimacy, but believes that emphasizing so-called right-brain thinking risks sabotaging the economic and social progress we've made by applying the force of logic to our lives. All that stuff that the right hemisphere does-interpreting emotional content, intuiting answers, perceiving things holistically-is lovely. But it's a side dish to the main course of true intelligence.
The left hemisphere controls the right side of the body; the right hemisphere controls the left side of the body.
The left hemisphere is sequential; the right hemisphere is simultaneous.
The left hemisphere specializes in text; the right hemisphere specializes in context.
The left hemisphere analyzes the details; the right hemisphere synthesizes the big picture.
Analysis and synthesis are perhaps the two most fundamental ways of interpreting information. You can break the whole into its components. Or you can weave the components into a whole. Both are essential to human reasoning.
Human beings somehow seem naturally inclined to see life in contrasting pairs. East versus West. Mars versus Venus. Logic versus emotion. Left versus right.
This is precisely what happened to routine mass production jobs, which moved across the oceans in the second half of the twentieth century. And just as those factory workers had to master a new set of skills and learn how to bend pixels instead of steel, many of today's knowledge workers will likewise have to command a new set of aptitudes.
They'll need to do what workers abroad cannot do equally well for much less money-using R-Directed abilities such as forging relationships rather than executing transactions, tackling novel challenges instead of solving routine problems, and synthesizing the big picture rather than analyzing a single component.
After all, before the Indian programmers have something to fabricate, maintain, test, or upgrade, that something first must be imagined or invented.
Cultural Creatives 'insist on seeing the big picture,' the authors write. 'They are good at synthesizing.' And they 'see women's ways of knowing as valid: feeling empathy and sympathy for others, taking the viewpoint of the one who speaks, seeing personal experiences and first-person stories as important ways of learning, and embracing an ethic of caring.'
We must perform work that overseas knowledge workers can't do cheaper, that computers can't do faster, and that satisfies the aesthetic, emotional, and spiritual demands of a prosperous time.
Design. Story. Symphony. Empathy. Play. Meaning. These six senses increasingly will guide our lives and shape our world.
Good design is a renaissance attitude that combines technology, cognitive science, human need, and beauty to produce something that the world didn't know it was missing.
No matter what path these students pursue, their experience at this school will enhance their ability to solve problems, understand others, and appreciate the world around them-essential abilities in the Conceptual Age.
Never say 'I could have done that' because you didn't.
There are three types of beings-those who create culture, those who buy culture, and those who don't give a shit about culture. Move between the first two.
Robin Williams (no, not that one) is one of today's best design writers. Her book, The Non-Designer's Design Book: Design and Typographic Principles for the Visual Novice, is a gem, in no small measure because she spells out
the four basics of effective graphic design: 1. Contrast. 'If the elements (type, color, size, line thicknesses, shape,
space, etc.) are not the same, then make them very different.' 2. Repetition. Repeating visual elements "helps develop the organization and strengthens the unity" of your brochure, newsletter, or letterhead. 3. Alignment. "Nothing should be placed on the page arbitrarily. Every element should have some visual connection with another element on the page.' 4. Proximity. 'Items relating to each other should be grouped close together.'
People who hope to thrive in the Conceptual Age must understand the connections between diverse, and seemingly separate, disciplines. They must know how to link apparently unconnected elements to create something new. And they must become adept at analogy-at seeing one thing in terms of another. There are ample opportunities, in other words, for three types of people: the boundary crosser, the inventor, and the metaphor maker.
What's the most prevalent, and perhaps most important, prefix of our times? Multi. Our jobs require multitasking. Our communities are multicultural. Our entertainment is multimedia. While detailed knowledge of a single area once guaranteed success, today the top rewards go to those who can operate with equal aplomb in starkly different realms. I call these people "boundary crossers.
Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, the University of Chicago psychologist who wrote the classic book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience as well as Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, has studied the lives of creative people and found that "creativity generally involves crossing the boundaries of domains.
Designer Clement Mok says, "The next 10 years will require people to think and work across boundaries into new zones that are totally different from their areas of expertise. They will not only have to cross those boundaries, but they will also have to identify opportunities and make connections between them.
Seeing the big picture is fast becoming a killer app in business. While knowledge workers of the past typically performed piecemeal assignments and spent their days tending their own patch of a larger garden, such work is now moving overseas or being reduced to instructions in powerful software. As a result, what has become more valuable is what fast computers and low-paid overseas specialists cannot do nearly as well: integrating and imagining how the pieces fit together. This has become increasingly evident among entrepreneurs and other successful businesspeople.
The guy who invented the wheel was an idiot. The guy who invented the other three, he was a genius.
If you're stymied on how to solve a problem, or just want to freshen your own thinking, visit the largest newsstand you can find. Spend twenty minutes browsing-and select ten publications that you've never read and would likely never buy. That's the key: buy magazines you never noticed before. Then take some time to look through them. You don't have to read every page of every magazine. But get a sense of what the magazine is about and what its readers have on their minds. Then look for connections to your own work or life.
In their lively and engaging book, Why Not?: How to Use Everyday Ingenuity to Solve Problems Big and Small, Yale professors Barry Nalebuff and Ian Ayres suggest we examine existing solutions and ask two questions: Where else would it work? Would flipping it work?
If you want a creative life, do what you can't and experience the beauty of the mistakes you make. The above from Marcel Wanders, designer and self-described 'professional amateur.' (More info: www.marcelwanders.com)
Leadership is about empathy. It is about having the ability to relate and to connect
with people for the purpose of inspiring and empowering their lives.
In the IDEO universe, great design doesn't begin with a cool drawing or a nifty gadget. It begins with a deep and empathic understanding of people.
Play is becoming an important part of work, business, and personal well-being, its importance manifesting itself in three ways: games, humor, and joyfulness.
Humor is showing itself to be an accurate marker for managerial effectiveness, emotional intelligence, and the thinking style characteristic of the brain's right hemisphere. And joyfulness, as exemplified by unconditional laughter, is demonstrating its power to make us more productive and fulfilled.
The ideal hire, says one game-industry recruiter, is someone who can "bridge that left brain-right brain divide." 19 Companies resist segregating the disciplines of art, programming, math, and cognitive psychology and instead look for those who can piece together patches of many disciplines and weave them together into a larger tapestry.
The University of Southern California's renowned School of Cinema-Television now offers a master of fine arts degree in game studies.
Carnegie Mellon offers an entirely new degree: a master's in entertainment technology, which it bills as 'a graduate program for the left and right brain.' Students study everything from programming to business to improvisational theater-and earn neither an arts degree nor a science degree but an interdisciplinary degree that the school says is 'the academic pinnacle of studies in this field, thus having greater significance than the M.A. or M.S., and the equivalent academic weight of the M.F.A. and/or M.B.A. degree.'
Shammi and Stuss maintain that humor represents one of the highest forms of human intelligence.
Happiness is conditional; joyfulness is unconditional.
His words echo Frankl's a half-century earlier: 'People have enough to live, but nothing to live for; they have the means but no meaning.'
Rich Karlgaard, the savvy publisher of Forbes, says this is the next cycle of business. First came the quality revolution of the 1990s. Then came what Karlgaard calls 'the cheap revolution,' which dramatically reduced the cost of goods and allowed people around the world to have cell phones and Internet access. 'So what's next?' he asks. 'Meaning. Purpose. Deep life experience.'
Among the things that contribute to happiness, according to Seligman, are engaging in satisfying work, avoiding negative events and emotions, being married, and having a rich social network. Also important are gratitude, forgiveness, and optimism.
There's a third form of happiness that is ineluctably pursued by humans, and that's the pursuit of meaning... knowing
what your highest strengths are and deploying them in the service of something larger than you are,
7 HABITS OF HIGHLY EFFECTIVE PEOPLE by Stephen R. Covey
HABITs
Be Proactive -- Principles of Personal Vision
Begin with the End in MindTM
Put First Things FirstTM -- Principles of Personal Management
Think Win-WinTM -- Principles of Interpersonal Leadership
Seek First to Understand, Then to Be UnderstoodTM
SynergizeTM
Sharpen the SawTM
I valued the opinion those parents had of me more than the growth and development of my child and our relationship together.
I've learned that once children gain a sense of real possession, they share very naturally, freely, and spontaneously.
Between stimulus and response, man has the freedom to choose. Reactive people are driven by feelings, by circumstances, by conditions, by their environment. Proactive people are driven by values -- carefully thought about, selected and internalized values.
I am what I am today because of the choice I made yesterday.
In the great literature in the progressive societies, love is verb. Reactive people make it a feeling.
Proactive people make love a verb. Love is something you do: the sacrifices you make, the giving of self, like a mother bringing a newborn into the world.
Consider the words of Joseph Addison: When I look upon the tombs ofo the great, every emotion of envy dies in me; when I read the epitaphs of the beautiful, every inordinate desire goes out: when I meet with the grief of parents upon a tombstone, my heart melts with compassion; when I see the tomb of parents themselves, I consider the vanity of grieving for those whom we must quickly follow: when I see kings lying by those who deposed them, I consider rival wits placed side by side, or the holy men that divided the world with their contests and disputes, I reflect with sorrow and astonishment on the little competitions, factions, and debates of mankind. When I read the several dates of the tomb, of some that died yesterday, and some six hundred years ago, I consider that great Day when we shall all of us be Contemporaries, and make our appearance
together.
The additional unique human endowments that enable us to expand our proactivity(the first endowment) and to exercise personal leadership in our lives are imagination and conscience.
Whatever is at the center of our life will be the source of our security, guidance, wisdom, and power.
The pleasure-centered person, too soon bored with each succeeding level of 'fun,' constantly cries for more and more. So the next new pleasure has to be bigger and better, more exciting, with a bigger 'high.'
Remember, frustration is a function of our expectations, and our expectations are often a reflection of the social mirror rather than our own values and priorities.
One of the most important ways to manifest integrity is to be loyal to those who are not present. In doing so, we build the trust of those who are present. When you defend those who are absent, you retain the trust of those present.
Leo Roskin taught, 'It is the weak who are cruel. Gentleness can only be expected from the strong.' Many interactions change from transactional to transformational, and strong bonds of love and trust are created as children sense the value parents give to their problems and to them as individuals.
(seeking win-win solution) First, see the problem from the other point of view. Really seek to understand and give expression to the needs and concerns of the other party as well as or better than they can themselves. Second, identify the key issues and concerns (not a position) involved. Third, determine what the results would constitute a fully acceptable solution. And fourth, identify possible new options to achieve those results.
If your life runs hot and cold, if you are both caustic and kind, and, above all, if your private performance doesn't square with your public performance, it is very hard for me to open up with you.
The person who doesn't read is no better off than the person who can't read.
The Lord works from the inside out. The world works from the outside in. The world would take people out of the slums. Christ takes the slums out of people, and then they take themselves out of the slums. The world would mold men by changing their environment. Christ changes men, who then change their environment. The world would shape human behavior, but Christ can change human nature.