259: Heisenberg, Hawthorne and Milan Kundera

Dear friends

First, a quick announcement, there won’t be a newsletter next week. I am freeing a little time to focus on some longer-form writing. Don’t ask what, it’s a secret.

Let’s get started — our last two letters – The Work of Leadership and Building Leadership Resilience – were on the chewy side, so today we’re going to be short and sharp; although on reflection, it may be even chewier.

So to offset the seriousness, here are a few things that have made me smile: a young leopard trying (and, thankfully, failing) to get his teeth into a pangolin, proving that sometimes the best strategy is defensive stillness; discovering single topic bookstores, like Sherlock and Pages in Somerset, stocking only conservation writing, New York’s Kitchen Arts and Letters, that, as you guessed, keeps books on food and drink, and Tunbridge Wells’ The Aviation Bookstore (no mystery there). Simplicity and focus have their own power.

/strategy

Heisenberg, the physicist, stated – as you might remember – “Since the measuring device has been constructed by the observer… we have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning”.

Read that again and expand from ‘measuring device’ to all the tools we use to make sense of our worlds – financial statements (and projections), process flows, even something as everyday as a job description – and remember that what they describe is not absolutely reality, but are representations shaped by our perspectives.

The world is more complex than our maps represent; it shouldn’t stop us from acting, do remember it.

//self

In the spirit of holding the complexity that our best tools are only ever approximations of reality, we turn to novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne – he of The Scarlet Letter – who, in The Blithedale Romance, wrote, “The greatest obstacle to being heroic is the doubt whether one may not be going to prove one’s self a fool; the truest heroism is to resist the doubt; and the profoundest wisdom to know when it ought to be resisted, and when to be obeyed”.   

Building our capacity for discernment is undoubtedly the biggest gift we can give ourselves.

///soul

And to close today, a thought from Milan Kundera’s The Art of the Novel: “There would seem to be nothing more obvious, more tangible and palpable, than the present moment. And yet it eludes us completely. All the sadness of life lies in that single fact. In the course of a single second, our senses of sight, of hearing, of smell, register (knowingly or not) a swarm of events, and a parade of sensations and ideas passes through our heads. Each instant represents a little universe, irrevocably forgotten in the next instant”.

We can’t even fully capture our own experience second by second; in that realisation perhaps is a graciousness we can extend when we are misunderstood.

That’s us for today: bite-sized, chewy, and, I hope, pleasurably provocative.

All the best

Karl