Honesty

Take a moment and try a little thought experiment: look around you, right in our own immediate environment. Take a good look. Now expand your view to include more like the town in which you live or country. Then think about the world.

OK, and now make a list (either mentally or write it down) of all the things that really function well. A rather short list, isn't it?

If your list is long, I'm going to suspect that you didn't take a very honest look. All the news we hear is bad news, so nothing's working there. We have social, financial, political, and technological problems. To be perfectly honest, paying very much attention to it all is rather depressing. It's really enough to get you down, and I'm not surprised at all to hear about the rates of heart disease and depression we've got.

So, now, the second task as part of our experiment: be honest, but how much do you think you personally can do about any of it? Give it some serious thought and make a list (either mentally or write it down) of all the things you can do to make things better. A even shorter list than the first one, eh?

For all of you that ended up with long lists, I'd appreciate if you'd get in touch and let me know how you manage, and, of course, to give me some suggestions about what I can pass on to others to help them get started turning things around.

Don't think it can be done? Oh, I think it can, but it'll demand of you the absolutely most courage you've ever been able to muster. I'm serious. You are going to have to find the courage to change not just what you do, but you have to change how you think. You've got to re-evaluate your priorities and put then in an order that doesn't favor just you, but favors the most of everybody you know.

Oh, I know what you're thinking: why should I be the only one? You know very well that none of your friends are going to go through with it, don't you? And now for the last demand of honesty: what does that tell you about your friends? And that's why things are as they are: not because of those big, bad others. No, things as they are because we are as we are.

Turning the tanker

At a recent project meeting, we had a presentation on what things looked like employment-wise in the high-tech sector. Yes, there were the usual sad statistics about how few young people were looking for jobs in technology and engineering, and how difficult it was to get kids interestend in math and science. That's nothing new. What was sort of new -- at least in a way -- was the presenter's plea for a broader-based education. It seems one of the most common complaints of employers is that their new-hires are seriously lacking in interpersonal skills. In other words, they know very little about anything other than what they know technically, and they have as good as no idea about how to get along, let alone work, with others. Isn't that surprising? I thought so.

OK, I'm not surprised like "yikes! where did that come from?" No, in light of the persistent pleas for employability somebody apparently overlooked the fact that understanding other people and communicating clearly and effectively are just as essential in the workplace as knowing what you are doing on the job. The question that popped into my mind, of course, was why were these skills no longer part of the curriculum.

When I went to school (granted quite some time ago), those were precisely the things our English (or fill-in-you-own-native-language) instruction. We read stories that were about how people did or didn't get along, about what made life worth living and we learned (or at least our teachers tried to teach us) how to form a coherent thought in a sentence and to take just a little bit of pride in being able to spell correctly.

The last thing I want to do is turn back the clock, but I do think it's time we re-thought some of the things we have decided aren't so important in the meantime. To many, art, literature, and music may have seemed like a waste of time, but they were anything but. We saw that there were multiple ways of expression, that words, pictures and tones could stir feelings ... right, feelings. Not just sensibilities that are too easily offended, but feelings that we had ourselves and that others had as well. We at least had the chance to learn that others weren't really all that different from us.

Even in that hard, cold world of work and business, it would seem that there is recognition that we really can't just make everything about money.

Terminal blindness

OK, what can any one of us really do? It's a legitimate question, and it deserves an honest answer: not a lot ... if it's only about us individually. Most of the problems with which we are confronted these days are bigger than any one of us, but they are not bigger than all of us. And therein lies the rub.

In order to do certain things ... big things, for sure ... we need to get together and work together with others. We have to give up just a little part of ourselves in order to get along with and cooperate with others. This is the real secret to success. Nobody -- regardless of what the propagandists may tell you -- makes it on his or her own. Everybody had help, everybody got support, everybody who ever became anybody became that somebody because others helped them get there. The fact of the matter is that without others, we are nothing. But that's the lie we've chosen to live.

It never ceases to amaze me how selectively blind we are. We love to just blot out things that we don't want to fit. It was Steve Jobs who made Apple, even though thousands of folks like you and me did all the right things to make him successful. It was Edison who invented the light bulb, even though he had tens of assistants working with him day and night. It was ... well, the list goes on and on. What applies in small, applies in the world at large as well.

The easiest examples to find are in the area of business and economics because this is where we have decided to place our focus any way. There it is the individual who climbs to the top and most of them will be damned if they're taking anyone with them. When things go awry in the neighborhood, like after a natural disaster, it is the community who binds together to make sure things work again. That's what a society is about.

It is not too late to decide, once again, that the society is more important than the economy. These are not mutually exclusive choices, rather it is simply a matter of priorities. If we choose to remain selectively blind to the fact that together we are capable of much more -- and much more economically -- than if only a few get all the credit, we can turn from the road to perdition and head off somewhere else. If not, we'll just continue down the road we're on, and our blindness will become terminal.

The road to perdition

For those of you who have been paying attention, you will have noticed that the theme of the last few posts was about selfishness. Many of the problems with which we are confronted, either as an economy or a society (should we still have one), are because of what some think they should have and who we believe should be able to have what. It's all about having, nothing more.

It's so simple when you get right down to it, but it's having that is going to be our undoing. When we are born, we have nothing. We hope we have at least a mother, because if we don't, we're not capable of living on our own, but we have absolutely nothing. When we die, we take nothing with us; nothing physical that is. We may have amassed a huge fortune, but we can't take it with us. We just go. We have nothing at the start and nothing at the end, and that makes me wonder why having plays such an important role between those two points. Does what we have say anything at all about who we are? I don't think so.

As long as we buy into the illusion that having is more important than anything else, we're going to continue having the problems that are plaguing us right now. By making having the be-all and end-all of existence, we have created this illusion, however. We feed it every time we think we have to buy something and that buying things will make us happy. But they don't. I saw a statistic yesterday about how many things the average person (and we're talking about people here in the industrialized West) has/owns: 60,000. Yes, I was amazed, too, but we have all these things and we're as unhappy as we've ever been, so we're going to go out and buy some more ... but for what?

What you have says absolutely nothing about who you are. This applies whether you are just a single person or whether you are a company, a community, a society, an economy, or a country. What is important is who you are, and who you are is determined by what you do.

So, what are you doing to stop us all from going to Hell in a handbasket? Consuming? Talking? Complaining? Or are you really doing something?