Reality is Sharing #11 #cong23 #reality

Synopsis:

The article discusses the idea that reality is shaped by our social connections and the influence of others. It argues that we don’t view the world objectively but through the lens of our biases and experiences. Our lives are largely habitual, and change is resisted by our brains, leading to a limited sense of reality. The author suggests that science and technology can manipulate the world but often see it as separate from us. They emphasize the importance of social bonds and shared knowledge in shaping our perception of reality. The article concludes that our experience of reality is ever-evolving, requiring us to adapt to changes in our socially connected world.

Total Words

1,240

Reading Time in Minutes

5

Key Takeaways:

  1. There is no individual sense of reality.  Our perceptions are all based on those that have been had by others and shared with us.
  2. Experience is important, but even more so when put into a social context.
  3. We cannot possibly know everything therefore our knowledge is bounded.
  4. Our sense of reality changes as our information about reality changes. It is Darwinian in the sense that we either adapt or die as we become aware of new knowledge.

About Tom Murphy:

Classics and Philosophy student at NUI Galway.

Contacting Tom Murphy:

You can follow Tom on Twitter

By Tom Murphy

Reality is sharing. Without connection to others and left to yourself in not so short a time you will go doolallly.  You will disconnect from the normal disposition that anchors your perception of reality – how you view and relate to the events going on around you in the environment in which you operate. This new reality is not a different reality in kind. It is something that has come loose and unhinged from normal day activity. We need other brains to make sense of the world.

Without the input of others the world soon becomes nonsensical.

The real world could be defined in materialist terms as the things that exist in our notion of time and space as being objects open to examination by scalpel of the reductionist mindset. A conglomerate of things that are further reducible to their individual parts layer by layer until we get into the quantum world where it seems all bets are off.

This approach of making sense of the world by analysis and reason has served us well over the last five hundred years. It is hard to argue that the advances in technology and medicine have been in the overall sense a good thing. But it is not how we, ourselves, operate. We don’t see the world through an objective lens and we don’t live our lives that way. We live our lives through what we perceive of the world through education and experience. To save energy reliving every event as though it was the first time we apply rules of thumb, heuristics if you will, that serve as a shorthand way to inform us on how to act and react. This means that after a certain age we no longer see the world fresh and new but through a series of preconceptions and assumptions that, while helpful most of the time, are riddled with biases.

We live our lives in a largely habitual manner. We are heavily routinized in our thoughts, actions and feelings. To escape that requires change which is a huge load to be placed on the brain and the brain doesn’t like to do extra work unless it absolutely has to. This narrowness of behaviour leaves us with the lives we lead every day – our reality.

This sense of reality, which is inherently limited, leaves us with the feeling that there has to be more to life. Which in an absolute sense is true. If our perception of the world is limited by our biases, experience and education, then there has to be more.

Science and technology can dissect and utilise the world in myriad ways – sometimes positive and sometimes negative. But the there is always a sense that these two forces are working on and transmuting a world ‘out there.’

We are born as individuals but share many, many faculties with those around us. Curiosity, learning capacity, fear of falling, and so on. This leads to the relative ease of assimilation into our families and culture. While this is highly beneficial in a practical sense it means that we automatically discount or ignore information that does not fit easily into the world view that is being created as we grow up. Therefore, our sense of reality is limited. We don’t know yet, and I doubt that we ever will, all that goes on the scientifically observable universe but what we do know is how to behave in a functional way.

This sense of functionality works to supply us with our sense of reality. Our everyday lives consist of complying with and negotiating with the boundaries that have been set up by other brains. While we might always like the way the world is set up we have to acknowledge that the world as we experience was set up by other people with brains just like ours.

We could argue that Mother Nature is the supreme arbiter of what is real and what is not. Most of us dropped without supplies or a support structure into a barren wilderness would not last very long at all. The world in its natural state is quite deadly to humans. That we have survived thus far is some kind of miracle. But what made that survival possible. It wasn’t the genius of particular individuals, though that didn’t hurt, but the codified knowledge and experience that comes from the tribal mind. We all know that we are highly sociable creatures and need the presence of others around us or life can become exceedingly difficult. This need for others manifests itself in our needs to form ourselves into families and the beyond that tribalism.

You do not have to travel very far in the world to see that there are great many fully bought in world views. Some of these world views are openly hostile the possibility that their world view could be wrong. Fundamental religions are one example. Other world views are open to the possibility of change and development. But even then there is a trade off in the hope that the benefits of new discoveries may improve our experience of reality but not change it in any way beyond the superficial. But most of the people who inhabit these world views accept them as reality – the way the world is. They have their rules for behaviour and for the most part it has worked over generations so why mess with it?

Our reality is human bound and our sense of it changes as we change. But change can be perceived as bad in the sense that it will expose us to new risks, many of them borne out of unintended consequences.

Reality, or more importantly, our experience of reality as formed by our social, familial, and cultural ties is always changing and we will always have to adapt our thinking and the thinking of others so we can, as a social concern, can adapt to the inevitable changes that will occur. In that sense reality is the product of our socially connected reality to deal with reality itself.

November 3, 2023 2023 Reality No comments yet

Purpose #15 #cong22

Synopsis:

Purpose is a  multi-faceted idea but a large part of it can be made concrete through the use of psychometric testing. These tests don’t resolve the question of what purpose you may have but they provide a bedrock of self-knowledge from which additional information and self-knowledge can be derived.

Total Words

1,010

Reading Time in Minutes

4

Key Takeaways:

  1. A sense of purpose can be derived from self-knowledge
  2. One isn’t obliged to follow one’s purpose
  3. Psychometric testing can reveal insights into the personality
  4. One can intuit one’s purpose or once can derived it from self-observation

About Tom Murphy

Classics and Philosophy student at NUI Galway.

Contacting Tom Murphy

You can follow Tom on Twitter

By Tom Murphy

The word purpose has a good few meanings, and many connotations. Fit for purpose, for instance, is a way of expressing appropriateness while the word ‘purpose’ itself can have the stand alone meaning of a proposed destiny. It is this latter meaning that I want to devote the rest of this essay.

Purpose in the conventional sense of pre-ordained function – the purpose of a car is to transport you somewhere – gives us a sense of potential completion. It doesn’t automatically follow that because something has a purpose it will be fulfilled. We see this most clearly in others. We all know people who have great potential but fail to take the appropriate steps for the realisation of their apparent purpose.

One’s life purpose, if indeed there is one, is the outcome of a conglomeration of personality traits which are well understood in the psychological community. These professional psychometric tests have the potential, in the absence of self-knowledge, of providing insight into one’s personality and one’s motives. They can provide the means from which a purpose in life can be derived.

Determining what one’s purpose in life is a bit like hitting a moving target. In many cases what would suit us best is determined not only by our natural proclivities but also our circumstances and life experiences. But at the back of it all most of us have the feeling that there is something that we should be doing and that we won’t be truly happy until we are acting in congruence with it.

In many ways having a purpose in life is a luxury. I often think of the Irish men who went to be navigators in Victorian London. Many of them had beautiful minds and hands capable of great artistry but their potential to fulfil their purpose was thwarted by the circumstances that they found themselves in.

So having the time and ability to fulfil one’s purpose is a great thing. Of course, only a few of us are ever going to devote ourselves to our life purpose come what may. We have families, jobs, responsibilities, and obligations. But for the lucky few we do live in times when many things are possible.

I would suggest that purpose is not fulfilled in the completion of specific achievements, but that success is a by-product of purposeful activity.

However, purpose is not about worldly achievement. For instance, while more than one Formula driver has claimed that it is his purpose to drive fast one could also argue there is no need for grown men to race cars around fast tracks for millions of dollars. The fulfilment of purpose must exist outside the worldly realm. One can have the good fortune to be able to race fast cars through personal disposition and opportunity, but it can only ever be when our personality traits match the circumstances.

In many ways, purpose can equal destiny but that is based on having a good understanding of oneself. A deep dive into one’s character and granular knowledge of the facets of that  character such as derived from self-examination protocols such as the NEO-4 allows one to determine how one faces and deals with life. Such an exploration can reveal new things about oneself as well as act as confirmation for other attributes of character that one is already familiar with.

The attempts to attend to and adhere to one’s purpose can act like a unifying force on the personality. If you are good at certain things, then doing those certain things can have a reinforcing effect on the pursuit of one’s purpose.

I am not suggesting that we form our perceptions of ourselves or of the world through the wonders of psychometric testing alone. We all have pluses and minuses in life. What I am suggesting is that a modicum of self-examination can produce illuminating results.

When dealing with the concept of purpose these insights from the field of psychology can tell you whether you are on the right track or acting on a misperception of who you really are and what you are really about.

Obtaining accurate information about one’s character can tell one in great deal about what works for you and what doesn’t. I am assuming that a prerequisite for a life of purpose is greater knowledge of oneself. With greater knowledge comes the opportunity to focus one’s valuable time on what works for you and ameliorate what doesn’t. The sum of these facets of personality can add up to what, are very strong pointers, to having a purpose in life.

It may sound simplistic just to say, ‘do what you are good at’, but the point is to use this information as guidelines pointing in the direction of what your purpose may be. It is better to travel through life with better and more useful information than just noise.

What the psychometric tests reveal is that our brains are only wired together in so many ways but with a great deal of variance within those parameters. One doesn’t have to adhere to narrow definitions but are expandable to suit the needs of one’s circumstances.

Ultimately, psychometric testing can provide a valuable short cut to self-knowledge and the results can be incorporated into one’s sense of purpose to act more effectively in the world.

November 3, 2022 2022 Purpose No comments yet
Image supporting Tom Murphys leadership article illustrating a focus on legacy

Leadership – Its Affects and Legacies #9 #cong21

Synopsis:

 In the modern world successful leadership, as in the organisation of people and resources to get things done, is regarded by many as a solely laudable achievement. Sometimes it is good people doing good work but just as often there are bad actors at play. These latter types of leaders, despite outward signs of success, can have a wholly detrimental effect on the morale of their workforce. Despite any glory they may bring upon themselves their passing from their positions of power, or this life, will go unlamented.

Total Words

792

Reading Time in Minutes

3

Key Takeaways:

  1. The mood as well as mode of leadership matters
  2. Leadership has legacy effects that go beyond the nuts and bolts of business
  3. An organisation or an institution is like memory foam that is imprinted with the style of leadership
  4. The only thing worth commemorating on your gravestone is that you tried to make the world a better place.

About Tom Murphy:

Classics and Philosophy student at NUI Galway.

Contacting Tom Murphy

You can follow Tom on Twitter

Image supporting Tom Murphys leadership article illustrating a focus on legacy

By Tom Murphy

Anybody who has ever spent anytime with the military will know that the chain of command is really nothing more than authority expressed through the badge on one’s collar or sleeve. The same process is played out in the corporate world. Instead of personal regalia, one has a corner office or some other demonstrable display of one’s managerial perks to advertise one’s authority.

Hierarchies of leadership are really communication channels of varying sophistication. The real decisions are made by one person, or maybe just a handful of people – the rest is just a game of telephone.

However, the fact that power is so concentrated requires that those who are affected by it pay especial attention to the wielding and wielder. But it is not a neutral process. Along with the effects of power come the affects too. In a system that has a harsh boss then very shortly there emerges a harsh culture too. If it is OK for the top person to be rude an uncaring in their dealing with their co-workers, why should they not in their turn conduct themselves in a rude and uncaring way. These toxic work cultures are everywhere and are engendered by the conveyance through the system of the negative moods and wishes of the top brass. But people have bills and mortgages to pay, and they put up with the inconveniences and annoyances. After all it is just work, and nobody said work had to be fun.

People speak of leadership teams. Particularly in bureaucracies where individual responsibility is reduced as much as possible – for good reasons and bad. But within these teams there is always a leader and even though their power is in principle diffused amongst the many actors, the more politically able of them always get their way.

However, the cultural and corporate subjection to mishandled power could be alleviated if not eradicated if these words from Carl Buehner (often misattributed to Maya Angelou) were heeded: “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” If leaders were genuinely mindful of these words, then what a change there would be in our relationships.

In a way, we only exist in other people’s memories. This is certainly true when we are absent from a given social activity or dead. If we, as leaders, (we are always in charge of something even if it is only ourselves) took on board that our only true legacy was the way we made other people feel then surely, we would alter our behaviours accordingly. Knowing that we will forever be remembered for creating a kindly and supportive, workspace or institution that gave people confidence and hope would be a worthwhile thing to strive for.

And maybe, just maybe, the quality of our work would improve too. Maybe challenges could be handled more forthrightly, and difficulties processed with greater ease.

Organisations and institutions are like a kind of memory foam. They are imprinted with the thoughts and emotions of their leaders. One would hope that with enlightened self-interest that leaders would be more mindful of how they are remembered. That they won’t be remembered for shiny gongs, colourful ribbons, and all the other awards that go with what people normally associate with success. They will be remembered for how they made people feel. (Obviously, this sentiment is not shared by the psychopaths amongst us.) And with that lies the distinct choice and responsibility of how they should behave themselves. After all nobody wants, “Good Riddance, Nobody Liked You” written on their tombstone.

October 18, 2021 2021 Leadership No comments yet

The Effect of Technology on Society #3 #cong20

Synopsis:

The society we live in is, seemingly, a dynamic and ever-changing entity. It is tempting to say that social structures have a life of their own. But I would argue that the single most identifying characteristic of a society, any society, is inertia. Society, left to its own devices fosters change at a glacial pace. What does move the needle is the effect of technology and the advantages that it brings. As we adapt to innovation the way we relate to each other alters in myriad ways, both socially and politically.

Total Words

1,177

Reading Time in Minutes

5

Key Takeaways:

  1. Technology is the active force in the changing of society.
  2. Society has a great deal of inertia towards change
  3. Because technology is unevenly distributed so is societal change.
  4. We are more than capable to adapting to change

About Tom Murphy

Classics and Philosophy student at NUI Galway.

Contacting Tom Murphy:

You can follow Tom on Twitter

By Tom Murphy

Society is the collectivised version of ourselves. No matter where we live, we are either living in sync or out of sync with the world of people that surrounds us. While we are never truly apart from our social selves, even in the social groupings we find most harmonious, we can also have the sense of a feeling of otherness, of outsider-ness. At times we are so submersed in our social functions that we can find it hard to separate our personal, social functions from our tribal, collective functions.

We are born into our social structures and have no say in the matter. We are ‘thrown’ into this existence as the philosopher, Heidegger, would have put it. But this does not mean society’s standards and mores are immutable. In fact, society is changing at an exponential rate. The world of my children is very different from the world I grew up in. Likewise, the world that I was exposed to was very different from my grandfather’s. However, the world of my grandfather would have been very similar to his own grandfather and the similarity in lifestyle would have gone on back through the generations until feudal times and the advent of the Enlightenment. Before that, to see a similar moment of transition in Irish culture one would have to go back another seven hundred odd years to the arrival of Christianity on our island. And even that was a gradual process, taking some two hundred years to complete.

In contrast to the glacial movement of societal change over the centuries the world around us is now changing its nature at an ever-increasing rate.  Changes in our lifestyle brought about technology and enforced by the current pandemic means that remote working has gone from being a nice notion to an essential means to keeping our society functioning.

This throws up two observations: It is clear that we are a very adaptable species and that change is caused by stimuli external to society. While I will never have the digital adeptness of my children I still manage my electronic and informational world in a manner pretty much to my liking. Like most people, I go with what works for me and leave the rest. I adapt as best I can.

Secondly, The drivers of change in our lifetime have been technological in its essence. As we have seen across the millennia, society, left to its own devices, will barely change at all. It is a conservative (not in the political sense) institution, not budging an inch unless it absolutely has to.

As technology throws up new possibilities and new wealth there is, in consequence, space for new ideas to grow into and from the new opportunities that are thrown up. This activity can inform our political thinking. Marx needed an industrial working class to exist for his own ideas to have any substance. Whatever you may think of Marx, his ideas were born out of the technological advances in industry that were happening during his time on earth.

Societies, like the technologies and ideas that form them, are amoral on their own account. They may judge each other harshly or admire each other wholeheartedly. They may cherry pick each other’s best attributes while remaining separate and distinct from each other. For societies to have survived to this present day suggests a strength in how the human coalition of minds and activities coalesce and operate together to form something greater than the sum of its parts. However, this ongoing symbiosis can be threatened by uneven technological development. This can exacerbate the differences between societies (and within them) leading to unequal development and its consequences.

Individuals are products of their culture and some cultures value the role of the individual more than others. In more individualistic societies the power to make changes rests with the individual. While it is true that individuals can act as the embodiment of society changing ideas they, nevertheless, have to have on board a significant number of other people to have an affect.

This is where we find ourselves in our Western cultures – susceptible to the effects of technological developments, yet clear enough in our own minds that we operate under the assumption that we can be the change we seek.

The sense of personal empowerment that we have is not universal across all societies, everywhere. It is not even fully developed within our own societies. If it were, we would not have instances of racism, classism, sexism, ageism and so on. That inequality exists in our society at all allows for the possibility and potentiality for change. But as I have noted there is a great deal of intrinsic inertia to be overcome. A given society will not change on its own. It has to be given a push. A force of some sort has to be exerted upon it.

However, if we depend on internal change we come very quickly to a point where an unstoppable force, in the need for change, meets an immovable object, societies entrenched traditions.

The resolution for this impasse is to take note of history and the economic drivers of technological innovation. But add to that our very human ability to adapt to circumstances and opportunities, even if they come in the guise of universal pandemics.

Remote working, for those that can do it, (which is far more than was once thought possible,) could be a boon to the planet just in terms of reduced pollution and the saving of our most precious personal resource, time lost in commuting.

Societal change in the modern world is brought about by technological development. As our capabilities change we adapt to the new world that is being shaped, sometimes with vigour, and sometimes by dragging our feet. But adapt and change we must. The society that emerges may not be the one which we envisaged but it will be different from what went before. Hopefully, it will be different in a way that we can all engage with and appreciate.

September 8, 2020 2020 Society 3.0 No comments yet

Communities in Space and Time #40 #cong19

Synopsis:

Eventually, when we voyage to the stars we will be sending, in effect, small communities. The questions are, what sort of communities will they be?  And how will they be constituted? Also, what kind of belief systems will they have to subscribe to that will bind together a multi-generational mission.

4 Key Takeaways:

  1. Can a community be designed from near enough scratch?
  2. If so, then who gets to do the designing?
  3. Human bonds go beyond present relationships and travel across time.
  4. Human meaning is possible, even in the void.

About Tom Murphy:

Classics and Philosophy student at NUI Galway

Contacting Tom Murphy:

You can follow Tom on Twitter.

By Tom Murphy

The nearest star to us in the galaxy, Proxima Centauri, is thought to have orbiting planets that contain the possibility for human habitation and colonisation. The only problem is that with the current state of space engineering it will take 6,300 years to get there. Therefore, an expedition to Proxima Centauri will have to be a multi-generational project. Mathematically, there exists a possibility that more people will die getting there than will actually arrive. The interesting idea is; how many people do you have at the start? The second interesting idea is; what sort of community they will form?

To answer the first question, Frédéric Marin and Camille Beluffi, both of whom are based in France, crunched some numbers. Allowing for possible disasters that might afflict the crew along the way, they came up with the result that, at the minimum, 98 unrelated breeding partners would be needed to initialise the expedition. This number takes into account the avoidance of the hazards of in-breeding and allows for natural catastrophes such as plagues that may occur.

At the beginning this would make for a quite unnatural community of human beings. There would not be anyone involved in the first part of the endeavour who would be too young to breed nor too old to actively reproduce and care for children. But this would change in just two generations. The first generation would have the young to care for, and the second generation would have the elderly to care for. Forty or fifty years into the project we would have a community that would look like just any human community back on earth that has ever naturally existed.

The children born in space, unlike the initial cohort of adults, will never not know what it is like not to be in space. The spaceship will have to serve as a microcosm of planet Earth.  But with a difference; the community will have to have a framework for its fabrication. This is the opportunity offered to the mission designers whose it is to decide what constitutes a community.

This community will not emerge naturally as the original communities did on the savannah and in the rain forests. They will have to construct from the ground up a community that will operate on what has been known to work best for communities and to avoid factionalisation and other self-destructive behaviours. It is a design issue with manifold implications for whether the mission will arrive at its goal intact and in a coherent form or fail dejectedly in the void of space.

The goal of the mission for most of the participants is for their far flung offspring to reach a, hopefully, inhabitable planet in Proxima Centauri. But will that be enough of a motivating force adhering to the goal or provide a deep enough existential reason for existing?

One could easily reduce these astronaut’s roles to that of reproductive automatons. But you can imagine a young voyager coming to the age of reason and asking themselves in a very human way; is that it? Is this all there is to my life?

So, how would the designers of the community constitute the mission’s values so that the negative consequences of nihilistic thinking could be avoided? How could they make the over-riding purpose of the mission so powerful a motivating force, and so compelling an idea, that legions of the yet unborn will buy into it?

It is to our present communities that the nominal designers of this notional mission will have to look. Albeit, that while we reside on planet Earth we are still travellers through space and time.

The first consideration they ought to make is to observe that we are very much our history. We know from Greek and Roman thinkers that our own present day mind-sets and dispositions are barely different from theirs, if in fact, they differ at all. There is a direct line of communication through time to our forebears. Not only biological information but traditions, rites and folklore too.

So, the designers will have to make sure that materials are present on the ship that will educate little ones across thousands of generations of who they are and where they came from. Hopefully, the knowledge that they are continuing the human race, if in very unique circumstances, will give them a background of understanding that will situate them properly in the context of human history.

Care would be the next idea that I would advocate to the design committee. In a normal human life there is really very little time between being someone who is cared for to being someone who does the caring. One would hope that caring would come naturally to our galactic voyagers. But in the reductionist, atomistic world of a major engineering project one can see how something so elemental could either be taken for granted or over-looked completely.

As humans we all hope for better things for our children than we had ourselves. Progress is contingent on the belief that what we have now is better than what we had before and that things will inevitably get better in the future. But on a mission that is designed to last thousands of years the major resource is the ship itself. There can only be so much progress without self-cannibalisation. That is an argument that sounds familiar when assessing the resources of our own planet.

If the human race is to become a space-faring community it is going to have to think long and hard about what constitutes a valid, healthy association of beings that can live together harmoniously over almost unimaginable periods of times. Those of our descendants that will cast off the bonds of earth and who will depart for distant stars and far off planets will have to be more like us than we are ourselves.

October 30, 2019 2019 Community 1 comment

Evolving Ideas #49 #cong18

Synopsis:

The world moves inexorably on its own course with or without our cooperation. Through constant change it can dash our best made plans. The only solution is to use our imagination to have the ideas that counter balance this effect and allow us to thrive and flourish.

4 Key Takeaways:

  1. New, original ideas are hard to come by but good ideas aren’t.
  2. If we didn’t have good ideas we would have been done away by evolution.
  3. Good ideas come from correctly identifying the problem.
  4. All you need is a modicum of imagination to have ideas.

About Tom Murphy:

Ex-Journalist and occasional writer.

Contacting Tom Murphy:

You can contact Tom by email.

By Tom Murphy

Ideas are the very lifeblood of the technological and creative industries. As the cultural environment changes structures have to adapt or die. This is a fundamental law of nature. Another fundamental law is that change is constant whether we like it or not. To adapt to new ways of doing things we have to have ideas about how we are going to map and execute the changes. We have to have good ideas that we can implement occur to us at a faster rate (if only marginally faster) than the pace of evolution.

So, ideas are more than nice things to have they are necessary for our survival and our salvation. In the economic arena a good idea, executed properly, can mean all the difference between success and failure. It is a good thing if ideas are ten a penny and that most of them are worthless. You only need a handful of good ideas to last a life time.

Most good ideas come in the shape of a solution to a problem. So that is probably the best place to look for them. To be inspired by the muses is probably best left to the poets and fiction novelists. You can tell that inspiration in the creative writing fields is rare as so few writers are worth reading.

Technologists, especially those running small businesses, are constantly obliged to address the friction involved in their everyday affairs. The solutions to the challenges with which they are posed are the very source of their ideas.  Time will inevitably tell whether the idea or ideas were any good or not.

But if we want to survive in the world we have to face up to the problems and challenges that the world presents us with we will have to dig deep to find the right ideas that will provide the right solutions.

For sure, ideas are fickle things. There seems to be no sure fire way generating them. The good ones anyway. But still any creative process is better than none at all which is a good thing. Although, being genuinely creative – that is, coming up with new, original ideas – is extremely difficult for most mortals. There are still lots of ways that we can come up with good ideas without having to reinvent the wheel.  One has to only check out the other submissions to this publication for that to be evident.

On one level we are constantly having ideas; about what to have for supper, about what to wear, where to go on holiday, how the back bedroom should be decorated and so on. So maybe it is not our ability to have ideas that should be questioned but our ability to correctly identify the problem. Providing we face up to the problem in the first place.

Identifying the point of pain is an art form in itself. It is not at all obvious that what you think is the problem is the real problem at all. Very often the perceived or imagined problem is symptomatic of something that lies a lot deeper. But the very fact that it is an art form means that as a craft it can be mastered. Which is good news.

Even if we think we are bad at having ideas and that we are not creative at all we will always have the wheels of evolution, the market of constant change, to prompt us into action. But in conclusion we don’t have a choice about it. We have been given the gift of imagination to counter balance the relentlessness of change. And with a strong enough imagination we can do almost anything.

November 5, 2018 2018 Ideas No comments yet