Book of the Week: A Whole New Mind
12 Oct 2014
A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink is about the world shifting from being knowledge worker centered to creatives. Abundance, Asia and Automation Traditional workers are screwed, because of abundance, asian and automation. There are more goods than we know what to do with. Before if you wanted a car, it meant a Ford Model T in black. Now there are a multitude of choices. As things get more abundant, they get cheaper and accessible to a larger proportion of the population. Asia is producing more workers who are willing to do higher skill jobs for cheaper, like reading tax returns, legal research, reading CAT scans, computer programming, financial analysis, etc. If people in Asia aren’t taking your job, then machines will. This paints a bleak picture of the future of workers, but I remember hearing about programming jobs being outsources to Indian after the dotcom bust, yet we have Google, Twitter, Facebook, Dropbox still hiring programmers in these here United States. My stance is that if you need combine both the left brain thinking of the knowledge worker and the right brain thinking of the creatives, you can achieve more. It is not enough for something to work, it must work well in human terms. The Six Senses
Leadership is about empathy. It is about having the ability to relate and to connect people for the purpose of inspiring and empowering their lives - Oprah Winfrey
To be ready for the new world, we need to hone our six senses.
- Design - create something that is engaging
- Story - people remember stories
- Symphony - ability to put together pieces. synthesize, rather than analyze
- Empathy - need to understand people in order to forge relationships
- Play - leads to health and professional benefits
- Meaning - what people live for
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. (What doesn’t seem to matter much at all, according to the research, are making more money, getting lots of education, or living in a pleasant climate.)
The book mentions a bunch of things you can do to hone your six senses at the end of each chapter. If I were to concoct an exercise that trained all senses, it would be to draw an engaging comic with a story that expresses gratitude and give it to another person.