Tagged: Technology
On Hopkins, Seth Godin and depression
I treated myself to Seth Godin‘s newish book The Icarus Deception recently. It is both dense and light, profound and easy to read. Usually I put it down crying.
The premise of the book is that the old industrial model of working and living (you go to school, get qualifications, then do a job like millions of others) is over. In its place is the ‘connection economy’ where, thanks to advances in technology, individuals now have an unrivalled opportunity to connect with each other across the globe. The shorthand he uses for this is ‘being an artist’ and ‘making art’.
The book is called The Icarus Deception because the part of the Icarus myth we forget is that he was also warned by his father not to fly too low.
I have just got to the bit where he talks about the mindset necessary to make art that connects with people: resilience, detachment, passion, commitment and vulnerability. And somehow this got me thinking about one of my first poetic heroes, Gerard Manley Hopkins. I studied Hopkins at A level and then at university, in a kind of rapt but puzzled delight.
We learned on day one that his poems were radically different from what others were publishing at the time; most were not accepted for publication during his lifetime. We learned that he was a Jesuit priest and loved to find God in nature. We also learned that he had one friend, Robert Bridges, famous in his lifetime but whose chief claim to fame now rests on his promotion of Hopkins’s poetry after his death.
His religious faith seemed to cause him anxiety as much as it did delight. Were he alive now we would probably say he was bipolar.
It seems inconceivable to me that any poet starting out now in contemporary Britain would opt for the conditions Hopkins lived under, namely: solitude verging on loneliness; periods of intense depression; and, worst of all, complete lack of recognition for his art.
Think of all the things we take for granted in the connection economy, the prizes, the mentoring schemes, the festivals, the networking on Facebook and Twitter, the blogs (!), and now think of a life without any of that save one man you occasionally dare to send your poems to, your champion and curator of your reputation, which in any case you will not live to see. It is insane, isn’t it?
If anyone obeyed the instructions spoken at the end of Seamus Heaney’s ‘North’, it was Hopkins:
Compose in darkness.
Expect aurora borealis
in the long foray
but no cascade of light. (North, 1975)
I am a great believer in the ‘power of the group’ theory of creativity, which says that creative artefacts, including those in the fields of science, politics and sport, are usually made by individuals who are connected to others with similar passions and concerns. Yes, I know in order to get my work done as a poet I need to sit alone and walk and mutter and face down that proverbial empty notebook, but I also know that to get it out there and start connecting and evaluating what I have made, what Godin calls shipping, I need to have a group of like-minded people around me, even if they are far away.
The evidence seems to show that Hopkins lived most of his artistic life without that kind of connection. The amateur psychologist in me (you know you do this too) wants to say that ‘No worst there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief’ is the inevitable product of living in deep isolation. The realist in me wants to say Hopkins would have written it anyway, whatever anyone thought.
You can read ‘No worst there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief’ at the Poetry Foundation website
You can find links to other poems in the Lifesaving Poems series here.
On Twitter
I have published a new poem in the style of Kenneth Koch, On Twitter, at Ink Sweat & Tears.
Whether or not you use Twitter, I hope you enjoy it. (As Mark Robinson says, Koch would have loved Twitter.)
Transforming the Way We Work by Tony Schwartz in Harvard Business Review
I arrived in Davos several hours ago, amid daunting traffic, driving snow, and intense security, to participate in my first World Economic Forum.
Honestly, I’m kind of amazed to be here.
Nine years ago, when I launched The Energy Project during an economic boom, it was nearly impossible to find senior leaders open to the idea that demand was exceeding people’s capacity, and that it was critical to the bottom line to teach employees new ways to manage their energy more skillfully.
Today, there is a dawning recognition among leaders I meet across the corporate world — as well as in schools and hospitals and government — that we’re in an accelerating energy crisis, both personal and organizational.
The way we’re working isn’t working.
Employees around the world are working longer hours, hunkering down at their desks answering emails, or attending back to back meetings, and spending less time thinking deeply, taking care of themselves and living the rest of their lives.
Across organizations, nearly every survey suggests that the vast majority of employees don’t feel fully engaged at work, valued for their contributions, or freed and trusted to do what they do best. Instead, they feel weighed down by multiple demands and distractions and they often don’t derive much meaning or satisfaction from their work.
That’s a tragedy for millions of people and a huge lost opportunity for organizations.
What excites me is that we may have reached a turning point. It’s not so surprising when the most progressive and forward-thinking companies lead the way. Our pioneering clients include Silicon Valley companies such as Google, Apple, Intel, and Ebay. But more recently, we’ve also begun to work with more traditional companies such as Coke and Bristol Meyers Squibb.
The fact that I got invited to Davos is perhaps the most important indicator that the mainstream is ready to address these issues.
Tomorrow, for example, I’ll be facilitating a workshop that asks the question “How can organizations build more creative, engaging and energizing workplaces?” I’ll be joined by five CEOs, among them George Halvorson, who heads the health care provider Kaiser Permanente, Vincent Forlenza who runs Becton Dickinson, the pharmaceutical company, and Tim Brown, the CEO of IDEO, the design and innovation firm.
Over the course of the rest of this week, there are a dozen other panels on similar topics. Dan Goleman, for example, is leading a panel on emotional intelligence, and Mehmet Oz is running one called “Preventing Burnout,” which includes two leading experts on meditation.
In a wonderful piece of perversity, the burnout session is being held from 8 to 10 p.m. on Friday night. Davos is notorious for days that begin early, end late, and don’t include much sleep.
I don’t kid myself that the super-charged CEOs and world leaders who attend this event are going to wake up overnight to the recognition that rest and renewal and doing one thing at a time are not only healthy practices, but also fuel more sustainable performance.
I’m convinced there is a potential win-win in all this for organizations and for the people they employ. It’s built around creating a new kind of value exchange.
Rather than trying to forever get more out of their employees, organizations are better served by investing in better meeting their people’s core needs — physical, emotional, mental and spiritual — so they’re freed, fueled, and inspired to bring more of themselves to work every day.
Put simply, more satisfied and engaged employees perform better. In a Towers Watson study of some 90,000 employees across eighteen countries, companies with the most engaged employees reported a 19 percent increase in operating income, and a 28 percent growth in earnings per share. Companies whose employees had the lowest level of engagement had a 32 percent decline in operating income, and an 11 percent drop in earnings.
My goal this week is to begin to collaborate with some of the world’s top influencers to launch a real conversation about transforming the workplace — and to win some converts.
I’ll be sharing my experience at Davos on our website , and I’ll report back here on what I’ve learned next week. In the meantime, please share your thoughts and insights. Together, let’s change the way the world works.
A Twitter addict, I had to detox from modern technology by Jenni Russell
I went to see a play recently, set in the early 20th century, where a man sat in his office with nothing but a pad of paper and a telephone on his desk. I kept being distracted from the plot by this incredible fact. How was it possible to know anything in the days when people worked alone in rooms, with nothing but long-outdated books, a newspaper and a small network of acquaintances to consult? How could people bear the endless frustrating of their curiosity in the era when facts and opinions were so hard to find? How was it possible to manage friendships, dates and work contacts when it was so hard to get to talk to anybody?
I grew up in that earlier time, and even though the techno transformation only began to happen 20 years ago, I can scarcely remember what it felt like. What it has left me with is the grateful sensation that we live in an age of magic. The fact that I can download a novel at three in the morning and be reading it 40 seconds later; the fact that I can exchange instant emails with my brother in Sri Lanka while walking in my local park; the fact that since the advent of Twitter it’s perfectly respectable to sit through any dull meeting being completely diverted by one’s phone.
These transformations have made the world permanently thrilling. When Michael Gove on Wednesday declared an end to “boring” ICT lessons in schools, he emphasised the need to embed technology’s uniquely collaborative and constantly self-renewing formula through every subject on the curriculum.
The shock of the new is available everywhere, all the time; websites, texts, emails, and the brilliant, absorbing complexity of Twitter. And it’s not only schoolchildren who need help to manage and build upon this disparate and often contradictory information avalanche. It’s like living in a sweetshop and being allowed to eat all the Mars bars whenever you please.
A few weeks ago, though, I began to behave like a sugar junkie, unable to resist the next high. I was in a permanently nervous, restless state, forever checking my phone or computer, never stopping to read a book or even watch a whole television programme. I was too hooked on the possibility of some excitement about to be revealed – be that a politician’s Twitter blurt or the latest from Leveson – to settle to anything demanding sustained concentration. But I was no longer enjoying it. Instead I was beginning to feel inadequate, and overwhelmed by the immensity of everything there was to know. Even Twitter, once a great joy, began to seem like a cacophony of voices shouting at me. It seemed I was the only person in the world who wasn’t simultaneously criticisingPaul Krugman’s columns, making witty comments about The X Factor and Newsnight, going to parties at Buckingham Palace and filing reports on the misery of being unemployed.
I wanted to stop feeling wired, but didn’t know how. My job meant I couldn’t afford to switch off. But this was no way to be. How were other people managing it? Towards the end of last year, a survey of 1,300 managers reported that half felt more stressed than 10 years ago, with two-thirds saying their workloads had increased, and almost a third wishing the BlackBerry had never been invented. My unscientific poll of people I came across showed that many were struggling to handle the ever-connected, on-show world.
A new graduate who has grown up displaying her life online says she and her friends are desperately conscious that they are their own brands, and fear the consequences of getting their messages wrong. There’s nothing casual or light-hearted about the composition of their posts or tweets. A well-regarded novelist under pressure from her publishers to up her profile detests posting; she doesn’t feel at home in this medium and doesn’t know what to say.
This isn’t just the phenomenon nicknamed Fomo last year for “fear of missing out”. For many of us it’s about not allowing the new, noisy world to create a permanent sense of anxiety and inadequacy. That requires creating a distance from it.
Julia Hobsbawm, who runs the networking business eI, says embracing technology means learning to unembrace it too. Public performance requires a degree of narcissism and a big ego; it doesn’t suit everyone and no one should feel compelled to do it. All of us need to switch it off sometimes, so that we don’t mentally overheat. Rather like the slow food movement, we need a change in the rhythm of how we consume. She now observes a “techno Shabbat” where she doesn’t do anything online from Friday evening to Saturday night.
I detoxed entirely when I went to see my mother in Africa for a week, and neither my phone nor her computer could connect to any networks. I read six novels. I woke up every day feeling calm. I came back remembering what it was like to fully engage in one’s own life, or fully disappear into a fictional one, rather than to be constantly interrupting mine or eavesdropping on everyone else’s. Like so many of us, I’m still an addict, but I’m learning to handle the craving for highs.
Twitter: @jennirsl
