About technology, visionaries, and being blind of our own sh**. An excerpt from the newsletter. Sign up here to get them all.
Outward, Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, April 2007
From the back of the t-shirt I saw recently:
Pirates never get hangovers cause they never stop drinking.
… which got me thinking about why we develop blindspots to our own sh**, and why we fail to look up from our daily concerns and take a big picture view of what we’re doing and where we’re going.
Jonathan Harris’ friend Kyla, talking about SXSW:
Everyone’s really smart and friendly and nice,” she said, “so it’s not that. And everyone seems to be having a really good time, but it’s like everyone is so smart and logical and ambitious, but no one is wise. I think that’s it. In all this stuff they’re building, there doesn’t seem to be any wisdom. It’s like everyone is just leaping ahead trying to build the next best gadget to get a lot of users and make a lot of money, but no one’s really asking why, or what it’s all really doing to us as humans.
True. * But that’s natural, not surprising, and definitely not new. As humans, we’re attuned to focus on the obvious, immediate, the interesting, the new, the measurable, and the fun, for reasons good and bad. The obvious is easy to explain to people, the interesting excites our minds and motivates us, the new creates a biological surge of energy, the measurable creates feedback loops and easy ways to benchmark and justify our actions, and the fun is a natural human draw.
The harder parts? The opaque, the mundane, the usual, the immeasurable, the hard, for obvious reasons. It’s harder to find the motivation, it’s harder to create the two-steps-ahead-the-immediate vision, it’s harder to build than it is to start, it’s harder to be wise than intelligent.
And this isn’t just today; these are human traits that have embedded in our behavior for years. We were wary of (and reveled) “the new” and “the disruptive” in 1200, 1700 and 1900 just like today: there’s always something we don’t understand, the only thing that changes is *what* we don’t understand.
I can guarantee you that something we’ve been taught or something we’ve never questioned will eventually be proven to be wrong. The sun revolves around the earth, smoking isn’t bad for you, etc.: the lesson is not that people were wrong about something in the past, but that we’re always blind to *something* in the moment.
Wisdom is hard. Vision is hard. Doing something different than everyone else is hard. And that’s ok, not everyone can be wise, or visionary, or different; but we can all ask why, we can all ask ourselves what “the new” is really doing to our lives. We can all ask the questions, even if we don’t know the answers.
In fact, to truly support and celebrate the visionary, we have to ask those questions. We have to ask those questions for use to evolve. We have to ask stop what we’re doing sometimes to create the space to think about what we *should* be doing. We have to be diligently aware to find and remember our blindspots.
And by asking those questions, and listening for the answers, that’s how we support those of us that help us think, remember, and do.
Stop drinking from time to time. Embrace the hangover. And ask why.
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* True: not about SXSW specifically, but people in general.
