Being Human or Life is Complex
I hope that you’re doing well. On Wednesday I dropped my cellphone, snapping the charger that it was plugged into. As I was writing to you today, I took a break to get something out of the freezer. The drawer crashed to the floor breaking into 5 different pieces. I looked at the scattered debris and for a moment felt overwhelmed.
I sighed, repacked the freezer, trudged back up the stairs and as I slowly returned to today’s purpose – writing to you – that grey, judging ‘you’re a clumsy fool’ fog lifted in its place a gentler observation that when I am tired, I am clumsy. Still true to the facts, but a little less condemnatory.
South African artist Phumelele Tshabalala currently has his New York debut underway at the Lyles and King (each link will take you to a different work). Neo Muyanga’s opera How Anansi Freed The Stories of the World premiered last week in Amsterdam with the Dutch National Ballet and Dutch National Opera, and London-based Zimbabwean artist Xanthe Somers is back home with a show entitled A Vocabulary for Ghosts at First Floor Gallery in Victoria Falls (again, each link takes you to a different work).
Well, that was fun. I feel a bit better. I hope that you do too. Let’s get to today’s letter.
Strategy
Ten days ago, what the Financial Times calls ‘The Oscars of Management Thinking’, the Thinkers50 released their 2021 global ranking of the world’s top management thinkers. In first place is Harvard Business School Professor, Amy Edmondson, whose work I introduced you to exactly a year ago in How Fear Causes Failure. In second place, is Professor Rita McGrath, of Columbia Business School, whose work I introduced you to in this June 2020 letter.
It feels good to know that what I share with you is indeed regarded as the very best in the world. As always, thank you for reading, for without you and the conversations that you initiate with me, the writing would have stopped a long time ago.
Self
Wednesday sees the start of December. The year is drawing to a close and 2022 is peeking over the horizon. Inevitably we are starting to wonder about next year’s goals. Yet, whilst we are often rigorous about our corporate strategy sessions, ensuring that we have done comprehensive research and reflection, we often don’t accord our own goal-setting the same care and respect. We should. After all, it is us that run those businesses. And, as you know, exceptional people and businesses are astute in identifying their strengths and weaknesses, their successes and their ‘well-that-could-have-been-a-whole-lot-better’ moments.
A lot of the year-end reviews out there are great, but they often feel overwhelming, so I thought that this quick guide might help you.
First, scrap the idea that you’re going to get this done in one sitting. Give yourself December. Memory is a funny thing. It is never exact; it is never immediately accessible. Memories take time to surface, so allow that.
In his much-loved TED Talk, Benedictine monk, Brother David Steindl-Rast, says, “if you’re grateful, you’re not fearful.” And as we know from Amy Edmondson’s work if you’re not fearful, you can be creative.
He asks how we could find a method for living gratefully, and answers, “It’s a very simple method… Stop. Look. Go. That’s all. But how often do we stop? We rush through life. We don’t stop. We miss the opportunity because we don’t stop. We have to stop. We have to get quiet. And we have to build stop signs into our lives.”
What better way to approach thinking about the next year? Stop. Get quiet. Reflect.
Turn your attention to the things that you are grateful for. These may be defining successes that sparkle in your mind. They might be more subtle, like the fact that you are here reading this letter means that you have maintained a curiosity about the world and a commitment to learning. They might have been fleeting, a warm interaction with a friend or a stranger. Or more soulful, a special meal with loved ones. Or the everyday joys, of the person who knows your coffee order, or the smile your partner gives you. List them all.
Inevitably, this year will have had pain and loss. Remember them too. The psychologist Stephen Grosz notes that “At one time or another, we all try to silence painful emotions. But when we succeed in feeling nothing, we lose the only means we have of knowing what hurts us, and why.” So, remember.
Holding the duality of joy and pain enables us to unlock a more authentic creativity. A creativity that is grounded in the complexity of life, our experience, and where we are.
This process may be enough for you. If you want to go deeper, I find it useful to then go back to the year month by month. I pull out my diary and my journals, I re-read them, and I do the same process for each month.
I am always amazed at how much I have forgotten. To be sure, the painful moments do rush back, and yet strangely even there is peace, the peace of knowing that I am living my life with intention and awareness.
And, as I deepen my connection to myself, so more possibilities emerge as I think about the future. As Carl Jung once put it, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
Soul
The joy of my work is that my world is always expanding. Never a week passes without a client telling me about something or someone I didn’t know about. Last year, a client of mine introduced me to the amazing animation of Hayao Miyakazi.
At 80, Miyakazi is releasing another movie and Ligaya Mishan of the New York Times got to spend an hour speaking with him. That conversation resulted in this beautiful article. If you feel the need to escape into beauty this morning, stop here, and read it.
Mishan describes the opportunity to interview Miyakazi as a gift. Her gratitude flows through her writing.
She teases out the complexity of Miyakazi’s work noting that it has a ‘curious mix of fatalism and hope.’ Strangely that phrase took me back to Lego chairman Jørgen Vig Knudstorp’s wish that he’d imbued his early years of leadership with more of a ‘rainy optimism.’ Perhaps a life well-lived requires both the hope of idealism and the caution of realism.
She describes Miyakazi as “a man of contradictions: a filmmaker who condemns the proliferation of images even as he contributes to it; an artist who has devoted his career to children but was rarely home to take care of his own; an environmentalist who can’t bear to give up his cigarettes or wheezing car; a professed Luddite who revels in the mechanics of modern vehicles but tries not to draw them in a fashion that further feeds an infatuation with power,’… a pacifist who loves warplanes; a brooder with a dark view of how civilization has squandered the gifts of the planet, who nevertheless makes films that affirm the urgency of human life.”
Aren’t we all contradictions? Perhaps we are richer when we know and live into the complexity.
The title of Miyakazi’s next film is “How Do You Live?” Mishan asks him if he has the answer.
He replies, “I am making this movie because I do not have the answer.” And then smiles.
I wish you a week filled with gratitude.
Karl
(This letter was first published on 28 November 2021)