Disease is dis-ease, a negative force that brings out of being at ease.
According to Ayurveda there would be main 3 causes of dis-ease:
This creates a negative feedback loop that would lead into disease.
How do you fare on these 3 dimensions?
From Cate Stillman ‘Body Thrive: Uplevel Your Body and Your Life with 10 Habits from Ayurveda and Yoga‘
I like this quote “We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we already have done“. – Longfellow.
I find it so true both on a professional and a personal level. Because we are often judged by others on our past track record, it is extremely difficult to explain that we have decided to change, and that we intend to change. And even more to explain what we feel capable of doing in the future if it looks vastly different from what we have done in the past.
As a personal note, the most salient occasion where I have observed this was when I was an expatriate. The home office was still judging me on the basis of what I was doing before departing a few years earlier, while of course by experience grew tremendously from the exposure (hence, a divorce to be expected with my employer).
When we face this issue, explanation is one way, but action is probably the most effective way to demonstrate commitment and that we take a new orientation seriously, based on what we believe we can achieve. It may involve some significant initiative-taking. But that’s worth it!
Creative work is tough and it takes a lot of time to reach the point of true creativity. Most of all we need to overcome our taste.
I like very much this quote from Ira Glass. It is very deep about our taste and the work required to overcome it: “Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you.
A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have.
We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story.
It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
Yes it will take lots of time and work to really become creative, and so many people drop it before. What about you?
It seems that there is a trend for people to increasingly buy experience and not just things as part of their luxury expenditures.
“In a 2014 report the Boston Consulting Group says that nearly $1 trillion of the $1.8 trillion spent on “luxuries” in 2013 was spent on experiences — 55 percent.” quotes Valeria Maltoni in her excellent post ‘Seeking Experiences Where the Product is a Better Self‘
“When we buy experiences, those purchases make us happier than when we buy things,” says Joseph Pine, the co-author of The Experience Economy. “Some large part of that trillion is luxury transformations—people looking to recharge, revitalize or to improve well-being in some way.”
And it is true that in the quest for the meaningful, minimalism and avoidance of excessive tangible ‘stuff’ is quite a trend.
What about you? Do you increasingly buy and offer experiences instead of things?
Having travelled in the US on and off in the last 20 years, I had been struck that American people seemed to have increasingly grown roots. The “hometown” is now a well established concept, and I do not remember that was so much the case in the 1990s. At the same time in the world, nomadism increases dramatically.
This feeling is confirmed by the Atlantic article ‘How America Lost Its Mojo‘: “Between the 1970s and 2010, the rate of Americans moving between states fell by more than half—from 3.5 percent per year to 1.4 percent“. Nobody knows exactly why. The article proposes the expensive price of housing to be the main cause of this sudden sedentarism. This might come together with the fact that more young people are staying in their parent’s home.
As I write this article I am in Abu Dhabi. Here less than 10% of the population is local. The rest is constituted by immigrants – Indians, Pakistani, Omanis, Yemenites, Syrians… Walking in the streets at night, one feels in a melting pot. All those people who have migrated to find better conditions and contribute to the emergence of the local economy. Maybe not with the best working conditions, but they come and seek the means to provide for their families.
With the Fourth Revolution, the nomads are again in power. At the same time the US settles down. Is that a sign that in spite of being at the source of new technology, the social setup of America does not follow suit?
I like this quote: “Advances are made by answering questions. Discoveries are made by questioning answers” —Bernard Haisch.
Questioning answers is a great tool in many instances in life, and it is true that it sometimes leads to deep insights. It is too easy to be led by the soothing sound of answers delivered with assurance. Answers reflect the common knowledge, the knowledge that the person talking wants you to share.
Question answers more often. It will lead you to discover new areas of thought. It is a great skill. It is a great creative tool too!
Lieutenant General Goodpaster protested to Secretary McNamara in the fall of 1964 about Vietnam, “Sir, you are trying to program the enemy and that is one thing we must never try to do. We can’t do his thinking for him.” He was not listened to as the US believed that increasing military pressure on North Vietnam would lead it to fold. Exactly the opposite happened.
It is one important aspect of any conflict or any relationship, and a key driver of complexity, that it is always contemptuous to think that one can anticipate the other’s reactions. Still, this mistake is done too often in when developing strategies in all ranges of life. It is also why developing strategies too far into the future can’t work.
The right approach is to experiment and see what is the reaction of the other so as to be able to determine roughly what will be its reaction to certain stimuli. And people are notoriously tough to predict as to their reaction, which often seem deeply irrational to our own rationality.
Quote from H. R. McMaster’s book ‘Dereliction of Duty‘ about how the US were progressively brought in the Vietnam war.
Following our post on the need to break patterns to create value, the example of Airbnb is quite interesting.
At the core, the concept is about breaking a basic survival pattern, repeated from generation to generation: don’t let unknown strangers in your house!
It was only by providing sufficient assurance that things will turn out fine that this pattern could be broken (thanks to the inter-mediation provided by the platform). However basically the value released by the platform is at the core, breaking a deeply ingrained pattern.
It is a bit the same with the more advanced Uber applications (survival pattern: don’t enter the car of an unknown stranger and be driven somewhere!) and most of the disruptive, successful companies that have emerged recently (for Google, the survival pattern was: don’t give all your personal information to an external company!).
Breaking patterns can thus release great value if properly done and with the assurance that safety is still provided. When do you start your own disruption?
One of the most interesting changes brought by the Fourth Revolution is that we are evolving from a typical world of problems to be solved (typical of the Industrial Age) to a world of dilemmas where we have to choose between options.
The reasons for this change are numerous. One is that we all have much more choice than before and so, there are many possible solutions for a situation. This forces us to make choices. The other is that because of our increased interconnectedness, our decisions can’t be independent of the decisions of others. We are thus forced to take into account others’ actions and reactions in our analysis, and this creates dilemmas.
Knowing how to resolve problems is thus not any more the key competency. Knowing how to manage dilemmas is, with all the issues related to possible regrets, and making choices in an uncertain and changing world.
Let us learn to face dilemmas better to thrive in the Collaborative Age!
In this interesting paper ‘Uberization: will the empire strike back?‘ the authors analyze the fear of getting disrupted (also know as getting ‘uberized’) that stress many traditional actors. They show however that it is generally a trend in a new type of intermediation (brokering), and not the disappearance of intermediation per se: “The market – like the nature of yore – abhors a vacuum. Very often, de-intermediation is just a phase of re-intermediation.”
Many consider the emergence of services like Uber as a kind of de-intermediation between consumers and providers. But in reality, it is about providing a new, upgraded intermediation capability that creates much value – it will include powerful algorithms and sometimes Artifical Intelligence to best suit our needs to what can be provided. Already Amazon is a model of an upgraded intermediation with its recommendations. Uber creates a new intermediation capability in the field of personal mobility. In both cases it gives a way for certain marginal providers to make their product available to a wider public, while under the previous infrastructure they were not sufficiently interesting to be considered by the intermediation system.
Nothing new under the sun then – the Fourth Revolution just gives us a new distributed power and communication system that allows a much more powerful intermediation to be implemented between consumers and promoters. It does disrupt traditional actors, only if they do not recognize that monopolies are here to be broken.
Talk about disruption of whole industries by the internet is everywhere. Yet that does not work out all the time. The dabbawalas are a famous organization in Mumbai delivering every day to workers in town-center meals prepared by their family in the outskirts – all with a very low percentage of error. As reported by Bloomberg ‘Startups Haven’t Replaced India’s 19th Century Food Delivery Service‘, many start-ups have attempted to displace them in the past years and they have all failed.
This goes to show that it is not so easy to disrupt traditional processes even in the area of distribution, in particular when cultural aspects need to be taken into account (Indian workers seem to largely prefer home-made meals, possibly on hygiene grounds and/or family pressure! – and they appear reluctant to order meals from restaurants).
As a hypothesis for this interesting failure, the fact that those startups have tried to replace at the same time the distribution system and the sourcing of the product. This might have worked in some instances (Uber, Airbnb) but that remains a very rare occurrence.
This reminds us that we need to always remain very humble when it comes to disrupting any kind of industry or process!
I like very much that quote: “Failure is where success likes to hide in plain sight. Everything you want out of life is in that huge, bubbling vat of failure. The trick is to get the good stuff out” writes Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) in the excellent book ‘How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life‘.
If we try new things and get out of our comfort zone we’ll be confronted by failure more than once. It is tough psychologically and practically to overcome failure. Still we always need to dig further to discover what is worth saving, or what nugget of success lies there in the rubbles.
Scott Adams concludes, “Failure always brings something valuable with it. I don’t let it leave until I extract that value.”. Do you have the discipline to do that?
