Self-regulation, a growth mindset, resilience, passion, empathy, conscientiousness, openness to experience, and social skills can all help you define success in your own life and drive your career (or business).
Robert Pirsig, the author of Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance, died aged 88. I’ve owned this copy of his most well known book for almost twenty years, read it many times, and been greatly affected by it. In fact, I’d say it’s the one book that has changed my life the most.
I spent most of day in a room with fifty other people who make up the project team for a large project that is kicking off. It’s a very technical project that will have an impact on almost every area of the business, and as I sat there listening to the presentations and watching how the leaders of each of the teams interacted I realised that how smoothly this project is rolled out will depend more on the personalities of the people involved than on how detailed the requirements document is or whether the project plan is achievable in the time scales.
As we move into the solution design phase of the project and all those personalities have to interact in a different way and with different objectives to the previous phase, I wonder whether they are going to be able to change their mindset and complete this phase in a more collaborative way and not let personality clashes get in the way.
With artificial intelligence being such a hot topic this year there are all kinds of opinion articles about the possible risks of AI. What most of these seem to do is not consider the alternatives to AI. What will we use instead of AI if the singularity isn’t reached any time soon.
Of course, we would continue to use humans. Humans whose brains haven’t evolved substantially for the last hundred thousand years or so. Humans whose brains aren’t wired to be able to cope with the complexity of the world we live in today, let alone the world of tomorrow. Humans whose stupidity knows no bounds. Humans, who struggle to maintain concentration for more than a few minutes, get easily distracted, make poor decisions, and let emotion interfere with those decisions, versus a hive of AI cars, satellite navigation and smart roads that could make road travel much safer than it currently is and coordinate traffic flow with such accuracy that traffic jams would almost never happen.
Artificial intelligence doesn’t scare me. Real stupidity does.
This is my ‘helping impact graph’ to help me understand ‘helping’ as an activity in its own right. The y axis is the number of people helped. And along the x axis is the amount of help provided, with further to the right being more help.
The bottom left corner is small number of people helped in a small way. Although it says in my sketch ‘Don’t want to be here’, it is actually ok to help a single person in a small way, so ignore that. This is the kind of helping we all do every day. It’s holding the door open for someone or telling someone they dropped their purse. This is also the kind of helping charities rely on. They have systems in place to aggregate and amalgamate the small amount of help from lots of people (whether it’s donations, fundraising, volunteering, etc) to increase the impact helping.
Drawing a line from the top left corner to the bottom right corner gives us the median line of impact. This is the balance between helping lots of people in a small way or helping fewer people or one person in a big way. I think my four ‘programmes of helping’ sit along this line.
The top right quadrant is where an act of helping that helps lots of people in a big way is placed. This is high impact helping. It’s a difficult thing to achieve. I guess an example of a single person providing high impact helping might be a millionaire donating lots of money to a worthy cause, or perhaps the Buddha who has had a big positive impact on lots of people (although not directly which calls into question whether the graph should show direct and/or indirect impact).
In trying to understand helping and the impact of helping it brings up the twenty year old question of ‘the evangelist or the monk’. The evangelist goes out into the world to take an active approach to helping, whilst the monk retreats from the world to avoid having a negative impact. Neither is any more right or wrong than the other, but which has the highest impact?
