#226: Not All Hills Are Equal
Dear Friends
If you’re visiting Cape Town soon, be sure to see Alexis Preller’s retrospective, Mythical Lexicon at the Norval Foundation.
Preller is one of South Africa’s greatest artists, his work an alchemy of the world’s mythologies, a demonstration of sensitivity and openness to the beauty of diverse cultures. You’ve got until 25 November to get there.
Incidentally, you won’t be sad if you have a meal at Matt Manning’s Grub & Vine. If you’re visiting South Africa, their wine list is a good way to get acquainted with lesser-known but spectacular producers.
/ strategy
Psychologist Dennis Proffitt’s Perception: How Our Bodies Shape Our Minds explores how perceptions shape our thoughts and actions.
His research shows that University of Virginia students, where he teaches, routinely overestimated how steep hills are – typically estimating a 20 percent grade when in reality they have only a 5 percent grade.
Members of UVA’s women’s soccer team were the exception – they estimated it correctly. Why? They were fitter than the average student population and so the hills looked easier to climb. They had more experience in using their bodies than the average student, so they could estimate better.
Proffitt repeats his research in multiple contexts.
People with heavy backpacks see steeper hills than people without backpacks. If they’ve just drunk an energy drink, they see gentler gradients. If they’ve listened to sad music, they see steeper hills.
In short, how we respond to challenges depends on our aptitude, our emotional state, and what we believe we’re capable of.
It may seem obvious, but it is a powerful reminder. We may all be looking at seemingly the same hill, but we aren’t.
The most experienced amongst us may not understand why others are fearful, maybe even frozen or are just slow. Remember, the less experienced see a completely different hill.
Communication experts, Chip and Dan Heath call this the “Curse of Knowledge”.
In, Made to Stick, they comment “The Curse of Knowledge is a worthy adversary, because in some sense it’s inevitable. Getting a message across has two stages: the Answer stage and the Telling Others stage.
In the Answer stage, you use your expertise to arrive at the idea that you want to share… Here’s the rub: The same factors that worked to your advantage in the Answer stage will backfire on you during the Telling Others stage.
To get the Answer, you need expertise, but you can’t dissociate expertise from the Curse of Knowledge. You know things that others don’t know, and you can’t remember what it was like not to know those things. So, when you get around to sharing the Answer, you’ll tend to communicate as if your audience were you.”
But, of course, they aren’t.
So, when you think your team ‘doesn’t get it’, they probably don’t. But there’s a teeny-tiny, huge, probability that the problem might just rest with you.
Budd and Rothstein, in You Are What You Say, remind us, “The cardinal sin of communication, which compromises all speech and relationship, is assuming that what was said is what was heard. To avoid this you must ask, observe, inquire, discuss, and listen for what the other person understands.”
Remember, we all see different hills.
(I first discovered Proffitt’s work in David Brooks’s How to Know a Person).
//self
Also running at Norval is an exhibition of Norman Seeff’s photography. You might not know Seeff. I didn’t. You will know this photograph of Steve Jobs, and this one of Tina Turner, and this one of Ray Charles, and this one of Wil.i.am, and this one of Michael Jackson and Diana Ross. You get the idea. Everyone.
Here’s the thing, Seeff came from a family of doctors. He started professional life as a South African emergency room doctor. The creator of some of the world’s most iconic photographs started work life as a doctor.
In a 2014 talk, Seeff explains he doesn’t view photography as his art but rather how it’s his engagement with his subjects that is his art, “The engagement is the artform, it’s about relationship, it’s about emotional honesty, it’s about being in the moment present with somebody… What I do is create this safe relationship with artists, who then feel in return the willingness to let go of defences and so we end up in a relationship, which is basically ‘how emotionally and honestly intimate, can we become in the three hours we have together?’”.
He reflects coming from the world of medicine he was ‘emotionally illiterate’ – “…in those day the unspoken idea was whatever you do, do not engage with your patients emotionally…”.
Slowly, he came to understand “real communication is emotion based” and to improve, he needed to know what he was feeling, feel it, and be vulnerable enough to express it.
He says, “I began to learn that if I wanted to create spontaneously real, authentic images and have a vitality about them, the challenge was to develop a vital relationship with people. The realisation was if I can create that kind of relationship and vitality, then all I’m doing is documenting the experience… so, that was the work. It was a surprise to me. It was not about learning the technique… if you’re going to be working with people, it’s about relationship skills, and the relationship skill is basically with yourself”.
True for photography. True for any profession.
///soul
On Sunday morning, False Bay’s quiet was shredded by a banshee shriek. Its howl flooded me with fearful anticipation. Seconds later silence returned. The gulls settled slowly back onto the ocean’s surface. The sparrows’ song returned, first tentative, then with characteristic confidence. In ways unseen, the air stitched itself back together, the universe’s fabric reconnecting, peace returning over the bay. It was a South African Air Force jet, the Hawk Mk120.
As my heart rate slowed, my thoughts flowed 11,000 km to my North. There the people of Lebanon and Gaza do not have the luxury of gull confetti and settling silence. There screams follow the banshee’s shriek. The screams of torn bodies and souls, of pain already echoing through generations. Children and grandchildren, yet unborn, already marked by this time’s terror.
Two weeks ago, celebrated author Arundhati Roy was awarded the Pen Pinter Prize. It is awarded for ‘outstanding literary merit’ to writers who tell ‘the real truth of our lives and our societies’ through ‘unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination’.
Her speech is one of solidarity with the Palestinian people. She donated her prize money to Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund.
Roy’s courage reminded me of Wole Soyinka’s 1986 Nobel prize acceptance speech, one he devoted to arguing for South Africa’s liberation and the freeing of Nelson Mandela.
Soyinka demanded, “Sever that cord. By any name, be it Total Sanction, Boycott, Disinvestment, or whatever, sever this umbilical cord and leave this monster of a birth to atrophy and die or to rebuild itself on long-denied humane foundations. Let it collapse, shorn of its external sustenance, let it collapse of its own social disequilibrium, its economic lopsidedness, its war of attrition on its most productive labour”.
At that point, Mandela had been in prison for 22 years. It was only in that year, that economic sanctions of any note were imposed on the apartheid state. Eight years later it was gone. South Africa and its people remained. We still, imperfectly, of course, work to repair the wounds, to find each other, to build a place of hope. It is not easy work. It is a better world.
Thank you for being here. I’ll see you next week.
Karl
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