The Future of Work is Being Yourself

Connecting, Empowering, and Inspiring Yourself

Tiago Forte has two recent posts that are profoundly important to understanding The Future of Work that is emerging right now but with which most companies are completely blind to seeing. The reason for this is because most companies are looking at iterative changes to the existing central landscape or curve, rather than seeing a whole new curve being peripherally created on the edge of society (which is how emergence works, as Margaret Wheatley highlights in her book So Far From Home).

Let’s look deeper at the main principles that Luhmann used in his work, which Ahrens has adapted to the modern age. The explosion of technology and connectivity has inundated us with an overabundance of information. These principles go a long way toward reestablishing the boundaries and constraints that creativity needs to thrive.

Tiago Forte, How To Take Smart Notes

How To Take Smart Notes: 10 Principles to Revolutionize Your Note-Taking and Writing provides us with insights into how The Future of Work will work from an individual perspective rather than than an organizational one. Yet by understanding how individuals will radically reframe how they work, we can also get a glimpse of how organizations (as a “body of people”) will radically reframe themselves collectively in turn to align with these principles as well.

We all hunger for a feeling of connection – to each other, to a community, and to a cause that is greater than ourselves. But that feeling – and it really is a feeling in the body – starts with being connected to ourselves. To every part of ourselves, not just the parts we approve of. Once we have that feeling like a treasure deep in our gut, it can grow and spread to every other part of our lives.

Tiago Forte, Groundbreakers

Groundbreakers: My Journey Healing Trauma, Unleashing Anger, and Awakening the Vagus Nerve provides us with insights as to why we need to radically shift how we’re currently working. To put it simply, our current culture and our current way of working (based off of this culture) is literally killing us from the inside out. The future isn’t about shutting down, deadening, and marginalizing inner aspects of ourselves to maximize our efficiency (becoming mindless, robotic “zombies” in the process) but rather an awakening and expression of our whole selves by connecting up and bridging all that we uniquely are to our work to maximize our humanity.

To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight.

E.E. Cummings

When we put these two posts together, we begin to realize that The Future of Work is something much more playful than we previously envisioned it was. It’s a quest, an adventurous exploration of who we truly are. This is why I’ve mentioned before that The Future of Work is about playing, learning, and working on simply being nobody-but-yourself. In effect, getting out of our own way and letting ourselves naturally unfold and emerge in the process.

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