personal purpose | The Fourth Revolution Blog

Why Following Your Passion is not (Necessarily) the Solution

At last a contrarian book about the general advise “Follow Your Passion”! – and I do love all things contrarian in particular when they are well argued. In the book ‘So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love‘ (which I highly recommend), Cal Newport argues that it is not useful and even possibly a dangerous piece of advice.

Cal argues that you need to earn career capital before you can really concentrate on what you like best, and that most people actually discover their passion by developing their skills (and not the reverse where people develop skills to fit their passion).

Hence his conclusion that skills and ability trump passion, and that you need first to be so good at something that you basically can then carve out a freedom space to specialize further in what you particularly like.

An interesting career consequence for young people is that the advice is then to first develop a career in a conventional way to learn and enhance skills up to the point of becoming indispensable, where it is then possible to gain freedom and do new creative stuff.

I found this book enjoyable and useful, so in a few next posts I will continue to comment some of its ideas.

How We Underestimate What We Can Do in Ten Years

“People always underestimate what they can do in ten years and overestimate what they can do in a week” says Hugh MacLeod of Gapingvoid (great daily cartoons and inspiration!). For the ten year time-frame, the cause is easy to find: it is clearly another effect of the ‘Exponential Deception‘.

A great approach to time, from day to decades! — A great approach to time and life, from day to decades!

I can confirm personally and in my project execution experience that people do for sure overestimate what they can achieve in a day or week, and have difficulty figuring out what they can really achieve in a year.

The decade is an interesting timeframe for further contemplation. In reality, trying to look in hindsight we can probably do so much in a decade that we can change our life and our worldview completely…

Ask yourself right now: what did you think you would become ten years ago? What did you think you would do?

If you are like me, what happened is vastly different from what I could just even envisage ten years ago (from civil service in France to expat consultant-entrepreneur in Singapore!).

And the thing is, achieving a transformation in a decade (just 3653 days) does not require to work harder or to improve much more on a daily basis – the power of the exponential secures dramatic changes even for minimum daily and weekly improvements.

Come on, what will you do in ten years? What do you want to do? Don’t limit yourself, the sky is the limit!

Why Overcoming our Fear of Freedom is Key to Success in the Collaborative Age

Seth Godin states in his excellent post ‘the Fear of Freedom‘ that: “We live in an extraordinary moment, with countless degrees of freedom. The instant and effortless connection to a billion people changes everything, but instead, we’re paralyzed with fear, a fear so widespread that you might not even notice it. We have more choices, more options and more resources than any generation, ever”

Our individual freedom has never been so great, never since the Agricultural Age have we had so many hours of leisure and never have we had so many resources at the touch of the fingers. It will only increase with the Fourth Revolution into the Collaborative Age. What do we do of this freedom? What do we do of that knowledge? What do we do of these possibilities?

Most of us have not found the answer yet. Most of us are paralyzed and even dream to come back the 1950’s where life seemed much simpler and straightforward – albeit with much less possibilities than today for the average person.

The ability to overcome our fear of freedom is key to our success in the world that opens to us. Going beyond our habits, connecting beyond our circles, broadcasting on the web, reaching out to the world with our own voice. That is what will distinguish those that will succeed in the new world.

Do you fear freedom, uncertainty? Let’s practice freedom. It is possible to do it in small doses, and it is necessary.

When do you start practicing your freedom?

How Important Decisions Really Get Taken in a Negotiation

“No matter how many people are involved in a negotiation, important decisions are typically made when no more than two people are in the room” say Fisher and Ury in the basic book on negotiation ‘Getting to Yes‘.

Important international negotiations always have to conclude locking together the relevant leaders

Preparation with a wide team is important, even essential in complicated subjects so as to make sure that the key decision points are properly identified and their real consequences properly assessed and understood by each party.

Still, when difficult, the final decision is always most efficiently determined in an eye-to-eye meeting between the two leaders.

It is important to recognize this mechanism and invest in the personal relationship beforehand at leader level so as to make this final moment of the negotiation easier. It also helps when it is part of a series of negotiations where both parties could appreciate if the other party was interested in building a long term relationship.

If you are the leader, don’t be afraid once the issues have been exposed and all the easy points agreed, to close yourself up with the leader of the other party to take the final decisions. It might take some guts to support whatever final position you will take together, but it is the only way to be effective and reach a decision.

Two people face to face. It is how all successful tough negotiations end up. Don’t be scared. Go for it!

How Crisis Moments in Our Life Define Ourselves

I am always amazed at how moderately or acute crisis situations define our lives and define ourselves. Our life is but a succession of relatively quiet and stable moment with transitions or difficult situations in between. It is actually quite similar to nature’s behavior where short, catastrophic events shape the world, which otherwise is relatively quiet and stable (and denotes that we live in a complex system).

Crisis and difficult situations define ourselves by the way we respond to them. Those key moments are turning points defining our future life and therefore in many aspects our future selves.

And there is no way we can escape from these turning points. We can try to keep the stable moments we crave as long as possible, but life is such that at some point, disaster or other types of crisis will strike.

Like we can find out true self by identifying what we dislike in others, we shape our true identity by the way we respond to crisis situations.

Faced with a crisis, a profound change in your life conditions, the way we respond reveal and shapes what we are. Crisis moments are not nice, they are a necessary evil we can’t avoid. We can just respond the way we want to be. We can, and we must shape our response, even when the world seems to be crumbling around us.

How to Get in Touch with Your True Self

Getting in touch with our true Self is very important to determine who we are and be grounded in driving our life. How can we achieve this?

“One of the best ways to get in touch with your real self is to notice those things that you tend to passionately dislike in others” say James and Claudia Altucher in ‘The Power of No‘.

Thus, instead of trying to find a mirror to reflect who we are, we should maybe rather seek to identify what repulses us to really identify what makes us unique.

This method is quite powerful but requires certainly some subtlety. First it is not recommended to hand around too long with people you dislike. Second, some aspects that we dislike in others might not always be that obvious, and might require some research and further getting to know the person.

Situations where we have to be with people we moderately or passionately dislike, like some social or professional situations, are thus great opportunities to define ourselves better! By defining ourselves as the contrary of some behavior that we do not like, our own identity gets better defined every time it happens.

The next time you react negatively to some other person behavior, think about how this defines yourself better.

What People Will Remember from You

I love that quote: “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel”- Maya Angelou.

This is true in all sorts of settings, so let’s review a few areas where it is applicable:

When doing public talks or presentations, the real important experience lies at the emotional level. This requires physical comfort, and creating strong emotions in the audience, either through stunning experiences and images, or by referring to people’s own emotional-laden issues.

When creating art, paintings, writing a book or cutting a movie, the emotions that will be created in the viewer is what will make the creation memorable on the long term.

When working with people in a team, what people will remember is any emotions, good or bad, you’ve created during that time. This also applies to one-off interviews.

The list is long. My points was to emphasize how this quote, which is most often used in the field of romantic relationships, can be applied throughout our lives.

You want to be remembered? Create emotions.

How Real Relationships Induce Change and Cannot Remain Static

“Real relationships tend to change rather than to remain static” says Carl Rogers in his famous book ‘On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy‘.

Real relationships are relationships that go beyond the superficial into real giving and receiving. They are relationships in which we are authentic and were we discover ourselves.

Thus, necessarily, this quality of relationships will tend to create change in ourselves and the relationship equally needs to change to adapt to these new circumstances.

Following the same idea, Carl Rogers, notes, in his practice of psychotherapy, “If I can provide a certain type of relationship, the other person will discover within himself the capacity to use that relationship for growth, and change and personal development will occur.”

Poor relationships foster defensiveness, passivity, and prostration. Real relationships, on the contrary, foster growth and expansion. Their potential can be unlimited.

Review your relationships and ask yourself which are those that change and mature over time. These might be much deeper relationships than the others.

How to Avoid Despair – a Choice that is the Greatest Responsibility of Man

In his book On Becoming a Person, Carl Rogers refers to Kierkegaard. “He points out that the most common despair is to be in despair at not choosing, or willing, to be oneself; but that the deepest form of despair is to choose ‘to be another than himself‘. On the other hand ‘to will to be that self which one truly is, is indeed the opposite of despair‘, and this choice is the deepest responsibility of man“.

Who are you really? Who do you want to look like really? Is that you?

As I often observe, this tension is indeed a very critical element of people’s well being. Many dysfunctions of individuals can be explained by this gap between who they are and who they want to be.

And it is a choice for each of us. We can choose to stay the way we’ve been raised when other people were shaping us and maybe transferring their expectations upon ourselves. We can choose to try to fit so completely in society’s expectations. Or we can choose to be ourselves, which has some advantages regarding the congruence of our actions; avoids deep despair; but can be quite stressful in a social context.

Indeed it could be our deepest responsibility to make this fundamental choice: do we choose to be ourselves?

Ponder this choice for a moment. Be honest with yourself.

What did you choose?

How to Listen to the Language Of Our Physical Reactions

“Physical reactions are often the language through which we express painful feelings, especially when it isn’t safe to say them to the people we’re upset with. We often say with our bodies what we can’t or won’t say with our mouths.” – writes the psychologist Susan Forward in Toxic Parents.

And these repressed feelings translate into various conditions of chronic pain, tension, insomnia and other symptoms. Just because we can’t say it with our mouth, it endures in our body.

In the particular case of toxic or even abusive parents, Susan Forward’s approach is to enable to talk to the person. Granted it cannot always be a dialogue but the therapeutic impact of just being able to express one’s feelings on a difficult subject, in a calm manner, makes a lot of physical symptoms disappear (it might take quite a lot of time though to reach the stage when this single expression is possible).

If you suffer from some chronic pain that can’t be directly linked to a physical condition, consider whether you would not have some deep feelings repressed somewhere. Then consider how you could express these feelings, calmly, to the person concerned.

Why We Should Take More Time to Enjoy Where We Are

“We’re so busy watching out for what’s just ahead of us that we don’t take time to enjoy where we are“. This quote is quite accurate I find (I am not sure about the attribution, it seems to be another internet wisdom pieces). Although I struggle too often to take the time.

The interesting twist in this quote is that I probably don’t take enough time to enjoy the present moment because I am watching our for what is just ahead of me, but because I am looking to far away in the future (self-test shows that I am very future oriented from the time perspective).

So it is not quite what is just ahead of me, but what is on the horizon that makes me move forward too fast.

And you? Do you take enough time to enjoy where you are right now?

Who is Wiser – Our Mind or our Body?

A lot of modern writings focus on the power of the ‘gut feeling‘, and intuition, and how following body perception and emotions can often be more effective than following our rational mind.

In a similar approach, in the excellent novel around golf, ‘the Legend of Bagger Vance‘, Steven Pressfield writes: “Intelligence, I have told you, does not reside in the brain but in the hands. Let them do the thinking, they’re far wiser than you are“.

Is our body really wiser than we are? Have we outgrown with our mind our body’s self-balance, and its ability to integrate experience to foster our decision-making?

I think we always need to remember that there are instances where we need to respond – where we have to positively exercise the choice to respond to what is happening, instead of reacting. And that requires our mind at work. It might be rare. It might not be in these situations where we have trained and repeated movements thousands, millions of times – situations where we’d better follow what our body wants to do without interfering. But as the body is wise in most instances, so is our mind the wisest overall even if it should interfere much less than it does usually. Even if it chooses only once in a while to decide against our body.

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