Categories
Authenticity

The Illusion of One-Way Bargains

How the larger narratives in our lives, such as the American Dream, drive our expectations from life.

I’ve been reflecting upon how we got here, in this terrible mess, not just looking at the events of yesterday, but with the events that have been building up to this moment over the past couple of decades. Without a doubt, one thing I keep hearing, regardless of who is saying it, is that “you can’t ignore” the millions of people who are openly supporting these aggressive, reactionary views that have culminated in this moment yesterday.

People are in pain. And they have been for some time. They’ve been slowly watching their world, that they know and love, crumble and collapse around them for a while now. The pandemic, if anything, has sped up this crisis and made it even more evident, making them feel like they have almost completely lost control of their world and even themselves, their identity. They don’t know how to live in this scary, uncertain New World that is emerging and all they want to do is return to the safety and certainty of the Old World that they once knew.

I think what people need to realize right now is that what they are experiencing, this feeling of a loss of control, is completely normal. It will feel like the ground has been pulled out from under you and you no longer have an external reference point to directionally ground and stabilize yourself and your life because you’re navigating newer, rougher waters that seem completely foreign, unfamiliar, and uncertain to you, thus things won’t make any sense. Again this is a completely normal feeling to have, especially when one is facing a major life challenge that will dramatically change their view of the world and themselves as well.

Now in a world that had prepared us for these epic challenges as a normal experience of life, we would then openly share these experiences with each other and try to work and “walk through them” together, making the transition and learning to make sense of our new world and our new selves in a healthy, constructive way. Unfortunately we don’t live in that kind of world but one in which we’ve been misguided into believing that reality is permanent and stable. It’s not. Life is constant change. Therefore we often have to grieve at realizing the impermanence of our world, undergoing stages of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance, and meaning to finally make this transition and grow beyond it.

While I could probably talk about the feelings around this all day, I specifically want to talk about the initial stages of denial, anger, and bargaining which cause people to naturally regress inwardly when they encounter major life challenges and changes. Specifically I’d like to refer to something Robert Fritz called One-Way Bargains within his book The Path of Least Resistance that really gets to the heart of why people become so angry and feel like they’ve been “cheated” by life (or more specifically in their mind, by some external force that they can then point their finger at and blame for the troubles in their life).

One-Way Bargains

In order to have the return of the prodigal complete and whole, the two sons needed to reconcile. However, there was a twist in the story. In the beginning of the parable the father and the son who stayed at home were aligned whereas the prodigal son was misaligned. When the prodigal returned home, however, he and his father became aligned, but the good son became misaligned. How did this change come about?

The good son had made what may be called a “one-way bargain” with the father. In a typically reactive-responsive way, he assumed that if he did all of the “right things” and adhered to the “right standards” and followed the “right precepts,” he would be rewarded by his father. He was shocked to see his brother, who had not followed the “right path,” being welcomed, honored, and celebrated.

Many people make similar one-way bargains. Typically in this unilateral bargain, one person assumes that if he or she follows certain practices, others (or perhaps even the universe itself) must reciprocate in some way.

In a one-way bargain the other party never really agrees to the bargain and often does not even know of it.

A classic example of a one-way bargain is found in the early stages of many relationships, when one person unilaterally decides not to date any other people, with the implicit demand that the other person in the relationship do likewise. This is a one-way bargain if the other person never makes that agreement.

There are those who attempt to live “good” lives as a one-way bargain with the universe. They decide that if they are “good,” the universe must reciprocate and be good to them.

The trouble is, the universe did not make that agreement with them. In the parable of the prodigal son, the good son’s actions were part of a one-way bargain, tied to the rewards he expected from his father. But that was not an agreement the father had made with him.

If the good son had been righteous because he wanted to be, rather than for the reward he expected from his father, his actions would have been their own reward. The parable implies, however, that the good son was good for an ulterior motive. In a typically reactive-responsive way, the good son did what he thought he had to do, not what he truly wanted to do.

The Path of Least Resistance, Robert Fritz

For anyone who is familiar with Robert Kegan’s work on psychological development, the difference between the good son and the prodigal son within the above parable perfectly describes the difference between the Socialized Mind and the Self-Authoring Mind (and the father could even be seen as the more evolved Self-Transforming Mind). The key emphasis here is how the good son (as a representation of the Socialized Mind) perfectly embodies how most people are feeling right now (since Socialized Minds comprise most of the population). They feel cheated by life because in their minds, they’ve followed all of the rules of the American Dream but life isn’t keeping its “part of the bargain” and thus it’s cheating them (or least someone out there is).

In reality though, people with Socialized Minds are cheating themselves. Why? Because they’re believing in a narrative that, while once it may have been true, is no longer the case. But they don’t question the narrative or their reality, they just defend them. They will most definitely question and attack anyone who threatens the stability of their reality though. Why? Because they believe their reality is true and will always be true because they accept the truth of what they’ve been told by a higher authority and do what they’re told. That’s why Social Minds are good followers because when you mobilize them (especially against an external threat, such as in World War II when American values were threatened), they can put their heads down, get to work, and achieve amazing things.

In comparison though, people with Self-Authoring Minds continually strive to question the assumptions and beliefs of their reality to further help clarify and crystallize who they are within it, so as to transform and change themselves externally. So they go beyond just trying to fit in and strive to understand how they stand out uniquely, thus individuating themselves psychologically speaking. But to do so, they need to question the authority of others and therefore must self-author the authority of their own life, a sort of self-governance if you will. This is why Self-Authoring Minds (who form a smaller portion of the population) often make good leaders because they help others see a different and larger, empowering vision of the world beyond what they are currently seeing (and by “empowering”, I mean it can’t be a negative, fearful vision that emphasizes blame on others but one that instead focuses on taking responsibility for oneself).

The reason the world seems to be “going to hell in a hand basket” right now, as the expression goes, is because the world is changing at a pace we’ve never experienced or comprehended before in our lifetimes or even in the lifetimes of previously known generations. Thus the stability and certainty of the follower-leader relationship between Socialized Minds and Self-Authoring Minds, which worked in overcoming simple and even complicated problems in our past, is no longer equipped to handle the emerging complexity of our world today. Therefore, all of us, not just people with Socialized Minds, need to evolve, grow, and adapt psychologically to the changing world around us, because a greater, more complex follower-leader relationship, comprised mainly of Self-Authoring Minds as followers and Self-Transforming Minds as leaders, is needed for us to be able to survive the complex wicked problems emerging before us.

Simply put, we need to help people “level up”, transforming their minds and their perception of reality, so that we can responsibly embrace change together, seeing possibilities and potential both around us and within us, rather than defensively fearing it. To do so though, we need to see these challenges in our lives, such as the epic ones were facing now, as an opportunity for growth and development, thus rising to the occasion, rather than running and regressing from them into the safety and reality of our past which no longer exists today, no matter how much we wish it or dream it.

To put this another way, we need to be like our parents and grandparents before us, who faced major challenges in their own times. But even though today we now known with some certainty what they went through back then because we are able to reflectively look back upon that time and make sense of it, we must realize that at that time they only saw the uncertain unknown before them in that moment, just as today we must face the uncertain unknown before us in this moment. Even more so because we can’t use their thinking that solved their complicated problems in their time, since we are dealing with exceedingly more complex problems that are emerging only now within our time. Therefore, we must not only use different thinking and different actions today, we must see ourselves in a much larger capacity and potential than we’ve ever imagined before.

Categories
Creativity

The Need for Conspiracy Theories

Empathizing with the psychological need for conspiracies.

Over the last year, especially with the coronavirus turning our world upside down, I’ve noticed family members buying into conspiracy theories more and more. Yesterday, having had enough of it, I tried to call them out on it. Afterwards, feeling somewhat smug with myself, I thought that would make them think twice about “sharing this crap again with me”.

Later that evening though, I was drawn to understanding why people are drawn to conspiracy theories in the first place and after reading a variety of articles, what I found rocked my world and made me have a much deeper sense of empathy for them. It turns out that people are drawn to conspiracy theories because they help them address their basic psychological needs of control, understanding, and belonging, thus helping them to create a coping mechanism that actually protects their mental health.

Why this is mind blowing to me is because this directly relates with my life’s work which is about “levelling up” to creatively adapt to the times we’re living within. What I’m talking about here is our psychological development and increasing our level of consciousness which directly correlates with our ability to go beyond just our lower level needs and begin to address our higher level ones. When we are able to achieve this, we’re more and more able to let go of our fears and thrive within a “wilderness” of change that previously seemed scary and uncertain to us but with a broader perspective can hold newer possibilities and potentials for us.

So what my family members are going through right now is similar to what I experienced two decades ago when my world was shattered by the Dot-com Bubble bursting, leaving me unemployed and angry at the world for what it had did to me as a victim of it. In their case though, their experience is amplified even more so because their basic ability to feel safe and connected with others physically (especially if you’re extroverted) has been ripped away which is why they’re effectively grasping at anything to try to make sense of it and give them back a sense of control in their lives. In this case, feeling like they are at least controlling the narrative by communicating how they are being victimized by “outside forces intent on doing harm to them”.

While I find this all amazingly remarkable and gives me another reason to try to package everything I’m learning and sharing it with others in a simpler way that can actually make sense to them from their perspective and level of consciousness, what still perplexes me about this all is why haven’t there been any external signs of extreme psychological duress from them prior to this? I mean my one sister did indicates stresses before but nothing that seemed extreme from the way she was describing them. In comparison, I’m quite vivid in describing the experiences of stress on my own journey, as they can feel like you’re “being torn apart from the inside” (because your identity is metaphorically “dying and being born again” in a larger sense, often referred to as creative destruction).

Is this just another way our culture and society puts expectations on us to just carry through and persevere, keeping a stiff upper lip and not complaining about the stresses we’re going through? If so, it’s a bullshit expectation. People need to express what their going through and be able to share their experiences, describing the feelings they’re going through, so that they can work and “walk through” these experiences, making sense of them in a positive way. If they just bury them, it doesn’t help. It just makes things much worse in the long run, as years of progressing and regressing, back and forth, have proven in my own life because I rarely had someone to talk to who could actually relate and help me understand the experiences I was going through in my own life.

In fact, if you look at the patterns and why people are attracted to conspiracy theories, my life follows a very similar path that rides the razors edge of this. For example, if I tell someone I just met that “they don’t see reality but instead a mental map of it”, they’re going to think I’m crazy because their perceived reality, based upon their beliefs, is going to seem very real to them. That’s because people don’t start realizing most of what they consider their reality is actually a social construct until they evolve to a high enough level of consciousness to realize it. Science is even proving this now via neuroscience, explaining that we don’t see reality directly.

And that I can show someone a bunch of facts to prove this makes no difference to the person. The individual themselves needs to be psychologically ready and primed before they can actually make that developmental leap and make sense of what this means in their own life and how it transforms it as a whole, especially their identity. And reflecting upon this, if you look at Robert Kegan’s perspective on this, as the individual evolves from a Socialized Mind to a Self-Authoring Mind, they are effectively crafting their own narrative for their life which is exactly what a conspiracy theorist is trying to do to overcome the challenges in their life. But in their case with conspiracies, their narrative is a negative one of victimhood and outward blame at others for “enslaving” them, instead of a positive narrative of empowerment, independent growth, and autonomy.

Categories
Creativity

Play Becomes Developmental Work

We are often so focused on trying to meet our basic survival, belonging, and self-esteem needs to try to fit into society, that we rarely get the opportunity in our lives to go beyond them and explore our higher level needs of autonomy and creativity to truly figure out how we want to stand out in our lives in a unique way.

Only by truly playing in a deeper, meaningful, developmental sense can we go beyond that which is known to us and explore the unknown of ourselves, discovering and releasing the untapped potential within us that’s dying to be lived.

All too often we pass on what is unfinished in ourselves to be lived out by our children.

The psychological work lies in coming to terms with the ghosts of our unlived lives. Not our grief for what we wanted and have missed for ourselves. Not a laying to rest of adolescent ambitions. The mystery of the psyche is that we are haunted not by what we want out of life, but by what life wants out of us. We can never lay these unlived potentials to rest. Relentlessly they seek to be lived out, regardless of how deeply we bury them. Working nine to five may be an essential adaptation for working in an urban culture, but just how well does it suit us to the instinctual energies patterned in the psyche? Learning to live out only what our parents could tolerate may have been an essential relationship to our families growing up, but just how well does it suit us to the yearnings still waiting to be played out deep within?

What backs up is our unlived life—the life energy that is unspent, the possibilities left unexplored. That’s what haunts us. In the shadow of our daylight preoccupations, the ghosts of our unlived life huddle, caged like prisoners rattling their chains. They strain and push and clamor to be released. Not only the ghosts of what could have been in our life, but the spirit of what may be. And it’s inconvenient; inconvenient to always be making room for the ghosts, always to be making room for more. You settle into a career, only to confront a restless urge for pottery. You settle into a predictable attitude about life and what it’s about, only to find yourself pushed from every side to think again. You arrange the psychological furniture in your personality the way you want it, but wake up in the morning to find the ghosts have rearranged it yet again. Always something more wants to emerge.

What we’re encountering with these “ghosts” are patterns of psychic energy—patterns that want to be lived out, enacted, brought into life. “Everything in the unconscious seeks outward manifestation, and the personality too desires to evolve out of its unconscious conditions and to experience itself as a whole.” These patterns yearn to be set in motion and fulfilled.

It is the yearning for development, for evolution. What emerges in play wants to go somewhere. Play becomes developmental work.

Living Myth: Personal Meaning as a Way of Life
Categories
General

Foundation

The Empire will fall.
Order will vanish.
These massive events
rushing to meet us.

Only we can shorten the darkness.

Categories
Creativity

Alvin Toffler on Embracing Change

Below are some of the most notable quotes by Alvin Toffler, one of the world’s outstanding futurists and author of the books Futureshock in 1970 and the Third Wave in 1980.

What is apparent about these quotes is how relevant they are to our world today. We are undergoing increasingly rapid change and denying the reality of it only makes it hit us all the harder. Instead we need to learn to accept this reality which requires us to unlearn and untether ourselves from the foundations of our Old World, which are already breaking beneath our feet, and learn a new way of stabilizing ourselves within a much more fluid New World.

Only then will we be able to embrace this change, going more gently with the flow of it, rather than against it, thus allowing us to transition into this future less harshly than if we persist in ignoring the apparent reality of it.

The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.

Nobody knows the future with certainty. We can, however, identify ongoing patterns of change.

Change is the process by which the future invades our lives.

Change is not merely necessary to life – it is life.

A new civilization is emerging in our lives, and blind men everywhere are trying to suppress it.

The first rule of survival is clear: Nothing is more dangerous than yesterday’s success.

The responsibility for change…lies within us. We must begin with ourselves, teaching ourselves not to close our minds prematurely to the novel, the surprising, the seemingly radical.

Humanity faces a quantum leap forward. It faces the deepest social upheaval and creative restructuring of all time. Without clearly recognizing it, we are engaged in building a remarkable new civilization from the ground up. This is the meaning of the Third Wave.

Our moral responsibility is not to stop the future, but to shape it…to channel our destiny in humane directions and to ease the trauma of transition.

Individuals need life structure. A life lacking in comprehensible structure is an aimless wreck. The absence of structure breeds breakdown. Structure provides the relatively fixed points of reference we need. That is why, for many people, a job is crucial psychologically, over and above the paycheck. By making clear demands on their time and energy, it provides an element of structure around which the rest of their lives can be organized. The absolute demands imposed on a parent by an infant, the responsibility to care for an invalid, the tight discipline demanded by membership in a church or, in some countries, a political party — all these may also impose a simple structure on life.

To survive, to avert what we have termed future shock, the individual must become infinitely more adaptable and capable than ever before. We must search out totally new ways to anchor ourselves, for all the old roots – religion, nation, community, family, or profession – are now shaking under the hurricane impact of the accelerative thrust.

The most important thing is to understand the general outlines of where we’re going.

Categories
Authenticity

Be Real Creative: The Quest(ion)

Yesterday while reading a series of quotes by Alvin Toffler and noticing how they resonated with quotes from Richard Barrett’s book The New Leadership Paradigm, something dawned on me. For the longest time, I’ve been wanting to initiate the culmination of my life’s work under my Be Real Creative mantra as a transformative creative agency itself but no matter how I approached it, it always felt wrong…that is until today.

Today I realized that all of my previous attempts always felt wrong because I felt like I had to have everything figured out first, to have “all of the answers” if you will to sound like an “expert”. Yet life doesn’t work this way. Only through doing first, do we reflectively make sense of our lives looking back upon it. Therefore in going forward, I need to embody this same approach.

Therefore Be Real Creative isn’t so much the answer to everything, rather it is the question to everything that will lead me on my quest. And that question is “Can role playing game techniques combined with the symbolism of Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey be used as metaphorical visual aids to better understand the psychological development framework within Richard Barrett’s work, particularly the mapping and exploration of our inner terrain, as well as the fearful demons that we must face there?”

At the same time, in trying to tackle this question as a quest, I realize that it not only communicates what I’m doing with my life’s work but how I’m doing it differently from others. In effect, just communicating an understanding of a psychological developmental framework as something new to people doesn’t interest me. I want to communicate it in such a way and with an existing metaphorical language, that it seems immediately old and recognizable to those who are familiar with this language (which also reveals that they are apparently my tribe and audience I’m trying to reach as well).

Categories
Creativity

Shore Watching

Helping weary immigrants out of the waves of change.

I’ve recently realized something fairly profound and it ties into a metaphor that I’ve been using over the years to try to make sense of my life as a whole. All of us are effectively immigrants now and are travelling to a New World, whether we like it or not. I’ve been fortunate, if you want to even call it that, in that I’ve been introduced to these changes far sooner than others have and thus I’ve become aware of these bigger changes that are profoundly affecting all of our lives but for the most part are invisible to most people.

The more I understood these changes and how we had to adapt to them, changing the way we not only perceive our society but our very selves, the more invigorated I felt because I felt like I could truly help people on a massive scale. There was only one obstacle in my way though. How do you communicate and persuade people of these massive changes occurring invisibly all around them, so that they can initiate their journey and be more capable of adapting to them?

For the longest time, I envisioned in my mind two worlds, our Old World which most of us still live within and our New World, of which few have found its shores. I have been to this New World and for the most part have travelled across it, visiting different places to try to understand its culture and its language, which is paradoxically different than our Old World.

Travelling back to the Old World with this knowledge of the New World, I have for the most part been accepted with confusion or derision at what I communicate of it. Even more so, I often get uncomfortable and somewhat angry stares at explaining the shortcomings of our Old World and how they can be alleviated in the New World.

So for the longest time, I’ve felt stuck between these two worlds, since people within the Old World, who I want to help, are evidently not ready to leave it. So no matter what you say, you are not going to get them to accept or believe in what you have to say…until they are ready and primed for this shift and change themselves.

Thus the feeling I’ve had for myself (and actually the change agent community online as a whole) is one in which we are continually travelling back and forth between these worlds but we haven’t been very successful in helping ferry people across to it, so as to help them avoid a painful journey.

Photo by K. Mitch Hodge on Unsplash

Today I realized why. Today I realized that the obstacle isn’t out there, it’s within me. I’m the obstacle. Trying to persuade and convince people to change doesn’t solve anything. All it does is make them more resistant and adverse to change. So my actions are not only not helping others, they are not helping myself in trying to achieve my life’s work.

So what’s the answer to my dilemma then? It’s obvious, isn’t it, now that I actually see it. If I just stop rushing around and trying to “convert and save people” in the Old World, sounding like some “The End of the World is Here!” crazy person on the street, I’d see that over in the New World, if I just remain patient and observant, there are already people washing up upon its shores confused and alone.

These are the people I need to be helping because they don’t need convincing or persuading. There lives have already changed and are already still changing and they know it. They just can’t figure out what to do next because the common sense that they used within the Old World no longer works and makes sense within this New World. In effect, they now have to go through an arduous sense making process of figuring out how this New World works, just like I did.

So I need to be the very person that I was looking for when I first washed up upon the shores of this New World confused and alone so many years ago myself. What help and answers was I looking for then? What reassurances was I looking for? “No, you haven’t gone crazy. Yes, the world has changed. Yes, most people aren’t aware that it has changed. Yes, what you’re experiencing is completely normal even though it feels completely abnormal.”

So all said and done, it’s not about being in the Old World and trying to aggressively push people through The Portal to this New World. It’s about being patient within the New World and helping to pull people out of the waters upon the shores of it. In effect, I really don’t have to do anything. I just need to let nature takes its course and be aware of the signs of when someone “arrives” on its shores.

Categories
General

Why Politics Are Failing People

Damon Linker over at The Week has an article entitled Why Obama Still Drives Republicans Nuts which pretty much articulates why politics are failing so many people today. First he indicates what politics used to be.

The politics of democracy is a contest to win the greatest number of votes — a plurality; or even better, a bare majority; and best of all, an overwhelming majority. This aim is what drove politics in this country through most of the 20th century. In the primaries, candidates sought out the sweet spot within their own parties, whether through winning support from party insiders — or, with the reforms that began after 1968, through winning the votes of party members in state primary and caucus elections. But in the general election, the two sides competed to find the center of public opinion in the country as a whole.

Each party’s presidential ticket did this by making a pitch for the whole: This is how I see America. This is what I think of our ideals, our history, our actions in the past and present, and our destiny moving forward into the future. The candidate who got the most people to endorse his comprehensive vision of the nation would win the presidency, with the victor usually earning a majority of the popular vote, and sometimes an overwhelming majority, as happened in 1964, 1972, and 1984.

And then he articulates what politics has become.

But as the GOP vote share in national elections has declined (since 1988, the Republican nominee has won a majority of the popular vote in a presidential contest only once, in 2004, and then with just 50.7 percent), the party has moved away from trying to win the presidency by receiving the most votes in favor of trying to generate incredibly intense support among its own party members, dividing the opposition, and prevailing through a counter-majoritarian outcome in the Electoral College. George W. Bush experimented with this approach in his re-election bid, but it is Trump who deployed it to greatest effect in 2016, and who has governed that way since taking office.

It’s the politics of populism that provides the rationale and playbook here. Populism differs from democratic majoritarianism in treating only some of the people — one’s own supporters — as the real people. Those who vote for the Republican are the true Americans. Those who oppose the Republican are false or fake Americans.

In effect, there is little interest in trying to understand the needs and perspective of those different from you. “It’s our way or the highway.” “You’re either with us or against us.”

But one “side” isn’t to “blame” for this. Politics as a whole has regressed to this level.

If I could alter future elections, I’d love it for political debates to be centred around the ability of candidates to be able to clearly articulate the needs of the opposing parties. And the better they could do this, the more they would show their leadership capabilities overall.

I think it would radically change politics.

Categories
Creativity

Thanking Our Self vs Fighting Our Self

This morning, while reading parts of Lisa Laskow Lahey and Robert Kegan’s Immunity to Change book, I was surprised by how it’s approach is remarkably similar to the Two Loops Model which is a theory of change by the Berkana Institute. What I mean by this is that there isn’t an emphasis on creating a conflict between the old and new system (i.e. seeing one as “bad” and the other “good”) but rather it’s about seeing each system as a natural part of a larger dynamic.

For example, in Immunity to Change, when one realizes that one’s “bad” behaviours are arising out a previous “good” (albeit now archaic) system which is trying defend and protect you (ie “save your life”), one’s perception suddenly changes towards these behaviours, recognizing and valuing them now for their previous “brilliant and highly effective” service.

So it’s not so much that we want to get rid of and discard the “valued service” of our previous identity and sense of self, which has helped us grow and evolve to where we are now, but rather we want to recode it, so it’s no longer working against us and impeding our further growth. Note that this directly correlates with what happens when one evolves to a higher stage of development. It’s not about getting rid of and discarding a previous stage but recoding it so that all attained stages to date can be maintained in a spectrum, allowing us to maintain different needs at different stages, while being open to further growth at the same time.

However, in some instances an immune system can threaten our continued good health. When it rejects new material, internal or external to the body, that the body needs to heal itself or to thrive, the immune system can put us in danger. In these instances the immune system is no less focused on protecting us. It is just making a mistake. It does not understand that it must alter its code. It does not understand that, ironically, in working to protect us, it is actually putting us at serious risk.

Immunity to Change

Actually now that I think about, this also remarkably reminds me of a Tiago Forte’s article on leveraging constraints, in particular this quote below.

The difficulty in applying this concept to individual learning is that, in this case, you are the system. It’s a little disconcerting being accelerated, turned inside out, and then sucked into an alternate dimension where everything you were sure was true is wrong. Or worse, irrelevant.

Tiago Forte, The Throughout of Learning

Categories
Creativity

From Finding Answers To Finding Questions

Finding the questionable source of our creative ocean within our streams of thought.

For many years, I’ve kept reiterating that what brings people purposefully together aren’t answers but questions. That’s because these questions are like quests that bring a “company“ of people together, all adventuring for the same thing.

While reading more of How To Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens, it’s becoming more and more evident to me that this intuition I’ve had about questions forms the basis of one’s research or work, as described in the book.

In effect, most of what we connect with in our daily lives usually ties into an open question in our life that we’re trying to answer. Thus, when we bump into something during our journey, we compare it with one of these overarching questions (as Richard Feynman describes) to see if what we’ve found is meaningful and matters in trying to answer this specific question.

If what we’ve found is meaningful then we collect it as a step in our larger journey of trying to answer this question. What I’ve just described here is described as a sequence in terms of note taking within Sönke Ahrens’ book. In effect, it’s a stream or clustering of notes that all relate to something meaningfully important to you.

But the thing that is becoming so very evident to me is that instead of just doing the obvious which is getting excited when we find new information and knowledge that we can add to this stream, we need to also step back and immediately go beyond this as well.

Why? Because the thing to realize is that more often than not, a lot of these things we’re connecting with and collecting aren’t completely self-evident to us at first. More often than not, especially within my own life, they’ve just been a feeling or an intuition to follow. It’s only after I’ve explored them for a while, which requires trusting myself that this feeling will lead somewhere, that they finally reveal themselves to me (i.e. I never fully realized I was researching creativity until almost a decade after research “it”).

So all said and done, more and more I’m realizing that instead of continually looking downstream of my thoughts to see and find what will emerge as an answer, the greater importance is more to look upstream at its source to see and find what is the question that is producing this stream of thought in the first place.

Because more and more it feels like when I collectively understand these key questions that are producing these creative flows within my life, it will in turn help me understand how all of these streams of thought are connecting up and becoming an empowering larger river that eventually leads to an inspiring ocean and a new world of possibilities beyond it.