Categories
Television

Impossible Peace

I’ve been watching this series on Amazon Prime Video recently and I highly recommend it, as it definitely relates to the times we are living in with history almost repeating itself.

One such example is the Tariff Act of 1930, signed by President Herbert Hoover which “prompted retaliatory tariffs by many other countries” (mirroring President Donald Trump’s tariffs on Canada and Mexico which spurred retaliatory tariffs in return).

Categories
General

My Experience

In light of some recent research that has verified a higher level perspective of the creative process that I’ve been intuiting for some time, I thought it important to relay an experience that occurred to me back in the early 1990s. Why it is important to do so is because aspects of this experience seem to closely mirror the descriptions I’ve recently read in a research paper. In effect, my life seems to be coming full circle and this experience seems to be a foundational moment to it.

Back in the early 1990s, I was living with my wife in Vancouver, having been together at least two or three years. While going to sleep one night, I feel asleep in an unusual sort of way compared to normal. I was lying on my back with my arms crossed in front of me and my legs and feet next to each other touching firmly. As I drifted off to sleep, I thought to myself that I felt like I was lying like an ancient Egyptian pharaoh being buried and passing on to the afterlife. 

As I drifted off to sleep though, I also noticed my breathing was very deep and rhythmic. The blankets on the bed had been pulled up enough that they were close to my face and mouth but not close enough to be touching. So there was this gap, a space, where my breathing was channeled and focused, making it more noticeable. As I breathed and listened to myself breathing, this sense of being in between this space amplified. So I was not thinking of myself in bed, nor thinking of the room around me. I was in a sort of in between empty space between both.

When I finally drifted off to sleep, the locations within my dream seemed very apocalyptic. I was on an abandoned highway that was climbing higher and higher into the hills and into a mountain range (reminiscent of the California hills used in the TV series MASH). Destroyed cars and school buses lay strewn alongside the roadside. In front of me, an overpass lay broken and crumbled on the roadway, as I continued to slowly climb up and up. 

Imagine being able to feel every single atom in your body and every single atom floating around you.

Eventually I neared the top of the hilly mountain range and stepped up and onto its peak. When I did, something shifted profoundly in the experience. It’s like I was no longer in a dream but what was happening to me was now very real and vivid. As I stepped up onto the top of the hilly mountain range, my body just lifted up into the air and I began to float forward off the edge of the mountain. My gaze shifted to what was in front of me and what I felt was so vivid it is hard to describe. 

Imagine being able to feel every single atom in your body and every single atom floating around you. That’s what it felt like. I felt completely naked, being able to feel everything at the tiniest detail. I could feel the air around me…the space, the emptiness, the environment, the flow (reminiscent of the Amy Adams scene in Arrival shown above, where her hair is flowing as she floats). In the background, I could still hear my breathing but it became a rhythmic part of the breath of this space. Small chimes could be heard in the distance as well. 

After the feeling of the space, I looked up and experienced the visual grandeur of it. It was like seeing nothing and everything at the same time. Around me, the black emptiness of space engulfed me. It was enormous, beyond comprehension. And yet in front of me in the far distance was a light, so great it was blinding. So there I floated, between a space of infinite emptiness and infinite light. I remember someone telling me it must have been scary, yet I felt completely safe, like I was floating within my mother’s womb. 

It was like seeing nothing and everything at the same time.

And then I “awoke”, if it can be called that. I opened my eyes and I felt like I was both back in my bed but also still in the space I envisioned at the same time. I could feel every cell in my body, hear the rhythmic breathing and chimes fading as I slowly looked around my bed room. 

I can’t remember if I told my wife of the experience after it happened the next day. I don’t think I did until years later. Where it gets really interesting though is that I tried to replicate entering this “altered state” again later, lying and breathing in the same way. I always came close to it, to the edge of it, but failed to fully cross over though because of one primary thing. A fear of losing myself in the crossover.

It was like when I opened this space in between spaces, I felt like the stability of who I was started to vanish. In effect, to enter into this space, this state, I had to fully let go of who I was. I had to be nothing and everything at the same time. The fear that arose in doing this was never the fear of letting go, which I thought it was at first, but the fear of never coming back to what I was. So this fear of being lost in this void with no sense of self, no solid, stable sense of identity. That was the fear that prevented me from crossing over and experiencing this experience again.

Categories
General

Shifting & Aligning to 21st Century Work

Fast Company has an article entitled LinkedIn’s Top Three Secrets To Getting Hired In 2016 by Eddie Vivas, Head of Product at LinkedIn’s Talent Solutions. What I found interesting about it is that it does show where things are headed in terms of The Future of Work but at the same time shows how most companies (even those at the forefront like LinkedIn) are still missing what’s under their very noses, thus hampering the very change they are looking for.

The top two hottest skills in 2016—cloud computing and data mining—didn’t even exist a few short years ago. The world is simply changing too quickly for even young professionals to rely on the hard-won skills from their college years. You may choose a well-researched major or what looks to be a stable career path, but there’s no guarantee those skills will be in demand in 10 years’ time—sorry!

In such a world, it’s difficult to predict which industries and jobs will face decline and which will be the next wave. How many companies employed a chief data scientist or an economist in 2011? Now some companies (LinkedIn included) have both.

For employees, that means everyone should be thinking about developing new skills right now in order to keep up, or how they could adapt their existing skills to a new specialty. Job seekers who will come out on top will be those who stay curious and are lifelong learners. For companies, it’ll mean arming existing workforces with new knowledge, getting creative with job requirements, and keeping an eye out for skills that could transfer well into newly imagined roles.

Eddie Vivas

Leaping Into The Future

For anyone who has read JobShift by William Bridges, they’ll know that what’s described above is a clear marker and waypoint to a future without jobs (something which Mr. Bridges foresaw back in 1995). To grasp this leap of logic though, one needs to first understand that a future without jobs isn’t everyone being unemployed but rather a future with bountiful, “unpackaged” work. In effect, just as organizations are beginning to break down the borders and silos within themselves, so too will the borders of work itself—a “job” as a rigidly defined package of work—be broken down as well.

The second leap of logic that one needs to understand to embrace and understand this emerging future is that it’s about going beyond adapting your existing skills to a new speciality and instead understanding how your skills can be adapted to multiple specialities at once. In effect, what’s being described above in the article is nothing more than a stepping stone to something bigger. In other words, to deal with the ever increasing change before us, organizations will need individuals that aren’t just capable of adapting their skills to something new every few years but are capable of adapting their skills in the moment, as the need arises. By doing so, this allows both the individual and organization to not only cope with change but to creatively embrace its complexities as well.

These types of individuals and organizations are so creatively adaptable, they are often referred to as being fluid.

These types of individuals and organizations are so creatively adaptable, they are often referred to as being fluid. They’ve achieved this state because they have let go of the outdated structural limitations of a job and evolved to a more expansive social structure of passion and purpose which allows them to easily flow between seemingly diverse work. In effect, instead of a future of scarcity focused on the problem of finding their next job, individuals are focused on a future of abundance with unlimited work opportunities before them, thus finally truly releasing their creative potential in the process.

The third and final leap of logic is understanding how work will shift away from being centered around jobs and instead centered around passion and purpose. This mirrors the noted shift, mentioned in the article above, from you having to push out to an organization to find work as a job and instead the pull of your passion and purpose (integrated together as your life’s work) gravitating and aligning the organization to you. This is achieved when individuals begin to see what unifies their skills at a deeper core level which in turn emerges as their passion and understand their own deeper values as their purpose.

Conventional Lenses Limit Our Vision

As I noted above though, many organizations, even those at the forefront of this change like LinkedIn, are actually impeding this change rather than embracing it. The reason for this can be revealed by looking further at the article, in particular the following quote below.

That suggests many companies are holding out for “A” players with all the right skills at the same time that more and more professionals are looking to change employers. But they don’t seem to be finding each other—which means we may need smarter ways to get connected.

Eddie Vivas

In effect, it’s not that they aren’t finding each other but rather they aren’t seeing each other. That’s because they are still looking at each other through a job lens which limits them to what they are seeing. Thus the company doesn’t see the potential of the individual and the individual doesn’t see the potential of themselves for the work because both are trying to achieve an alignment through job titles rather than aligning through transferable skills (which reveal and define the individual’s unifying passion). Thus no matter how often they look, there’s always this disconnect because of the method or lens of comparison.

New Lenses, New Vision

When both individuals and organizations start looking through a lens of passion and purpose though, suddenly there is an abundance of potential people for the work, even to the point that the organization starts seeing potential people within their own organization, thus avoiding the need to look externally. To put this metaphorically, many individuals and organizations are often blind to what is under their very noses. By shifting or reframing their perspective, suddenly they awaken to a whole new world of possibilities that were previously hidden and invisible to them before. In effect, nothing’s changed. We’re still the same people. But we’re looking at ourselves and our potential in a much greater, inclusive, and empowering way.

Last but not least, with this new vision, did you notice the universal pattern between finding people and finding your passion? Just as we are now finding more and more connections and relationships between people below the surface, so too are we seeing these connections and relationships within ourselves. In effect, look beyond and below the direct visible links, both within and without, and start understanding how these weaker invisible links are allowing not only organizations to become much more dynamic and complex but individuals as well.

So while I wouldn’t downplay the value of a first-degree connection as a valuable “in,” it’s important to pay close attention to that second layer if you’re in the market for a new opportunity…

Eddie Vivas

We’re still the same people. But we’re looking at ourselves and our potential in a much greater, inclusive, and empowering way.

Video footage by Sticks & Drones

Categories
Creativity

The Individual as a Complex System

Petro Poutanen has a fascinating academic paper entitled Complexity and Collaboration in Creative Group Work which strives to show how creativity in groups differs from creativity in individuals. In reading his paper so far though, I’m seeing nothing but comparisons to my own research on creativity within individuals though. In effect, the process and results are very similar.

How can this be so though when a group has multiple people to interact with each other, whereas an individual is just alone? The key is understanding creativity within the individual as though the individual is a complex system as well, a multitude. Thus creativity with an individual is not only a dialogue and conversation with oneself but an integration of the conflicting parts of oneself. One begins to trust oneself over time and even believe in oneself, solidifying ones purpose and vision in life.

The key is understanding creativity within the individual as though the individual is a complex system as well, a multitude.

It is the following quote that really grabbed my attention though because it perfectly describes the creative process an individual goes through in understanding oneself in a much greater context beyond conventional means. To do so, the individual has to not just look at their life from a technical perspective, seeing the jobs they’ve done, but also from a social perspective, seeing how these jobs relate, revealing a connection to something deeper within oneself that goes beyond a job to something universal within their life.

First of all, both empirical articles (III and IV) highlight the importance of dialogue, which means that a discussion between participants is most productive when it has the characteristics of reflexivity and criticality; when there is no need to refrain from criticality, as is commonly thought, probably due to widespread ideation guidelines, such as brainstorming. The point here is that ideas are in conflict, not people, and from the conflicts of ideas emerge new ones. Therefore, communication that fosters the criticality and reflexivity of both their own and other’s ideas was found to be important.

Secondly, it was observed that the knowledge people shared had a dual role: on the one hand, it was the information and expertise that people could bring to the situation that allowed them to contribute to the common pool of knowledge through their experiences and background knowledge. On the other hand, it was the ability to build knowledge, i.e. to integrate and build novel constructions of what has been said that was of importance. This finding suggests two important but different group roles and ways of communicating: informants or content-experts who communicate their ideas as clearly as possible and, secondly, creativity experts, who have possibly no content- related information but who are skilful in connecting different pieces of information together to form new ideas and suggest novel frames of references for the reinterpretation of existing knowledge. For the latter group the ability to unambiguously communicate one’s idea is perhaps not as important as the ability to ask questions and make critical remarks and use nonverbal techniques. Of course, there is no reason why the same person cannot occupy both roles in a group.

Petro Poutanen

The last sentence in the second quote (bolded for emphasis) is the critical one that made me have a leap of understanding in what I was reading. So to become a truly creative individual, not only does the individual have to look at oneself as both a (technical) content expert and a (social) creativity expert but the individual has to begin to start seeing themselves as a multitude, understanding that the conflicts within oneself are actually creative tension that one has an opportunity to act upon and understand better to integrate oneself holistically as a complex system.

BTW another more common name people are calling these creative individuals by is polymaths. In effect, individuals who are cross-disciplinary in nature. But it is more than just being multidisciplinary, it is evolving and becoming interdisciplinary and eventually transdisciplinary. When one reaches these higher states of integration with ones disciplines, one finally begins to understand the greater narrative and relationship that is connecting these disciplines together. More common names for these integrative forces are what people call passion and purpose.

Video: Stars Wars The Last Jedi Clip (Rey in cave)

Categories
General

Man of Steel

What if a child dreamed of becoming something other
than what society had intended.
What if a child aspired to something greater.

I have to believe that you
were sent here for a reason.
And even if it takes the rest of your life,
you owe it to yourself to find out what that reason is.

You will give the people of earth
an ideal to strive towards.

They will race behind you, they will stumble, they will fall.
But in time, they will join you in the sun.
In time, you will help them accomplish wonders.

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General

Star Trek: Into Darkness

I have no idea what I’m supposed to do.
I only know what I can do.

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General

X-Men: First Class

You have the chance to become
a part of something
much bigger than yourself.

What do you know about me?
Everything.
A new species is being born.
Help me guide it,
shape it,
lead it.

You have no idea what I’d give
to feel… normal.

You want society to accept you
but you can’t even accept yourself.

Should we have to hide?

You ready for this?
Let’s find out.

Categories
General

The Avengers

The world has changed.

We are hopelessly outgunned.

It’s time.

I still believe in heroes.

Categories
General

Ludvig Franzén, Live Part (PressPausePlay)

Categories
General

PressPausePlay

Life is creative interaction.