LinkedIn and CommonCraft recently LinkedUP to create two videos that explain LinkedIn in plain english. Video Part 1 offers a big picture view of LinkedIn:
Here is Part 2 which goes into a little detail about how LinkedIn works and how you can use it:
Are you happier today than yesterday? Do you think the world has gotten happier? Do you think happiness and creativity are linked? Our we more creative or less? Let’s find out.
RESULTS OF THE STUDY
Once again, my good friend sent me a link today about a recent study indicating that people have been getting happier over the last two decades. Results of the study reveal the following claims:
Happiness increased in 40 countries in the last 17 years
Happiness decreased in 12 countries during the same period
Measures of happiness aren’t stable; in fact they rocketed
Wealthier countries enjoy more happiness than poor countries
Baby boomers appear to be relatively the most miserable generationd
What conclusion did the researchers make about what drives happiness upward around the world? Essentially, they determined that our freedom of choice about lifestyle enhances our chances at happier lives. That’s intuitive. So is the idea that wealth contributes more happiness positively, while poverty promotes misery.
BUT: IS THAT ALL?
Scientists have worked hard for years to put happiness under the rigorous scope of rational inquiry. Perhaps the most successful and famous is University of Chicago professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s (Cheek-sent-mee-hi-y) work on Flow Theory. Leo Babauta over at Zen Habits has a great post about Flow which you can read here after the jump.
In summary Flow is a state of optimal psychological condition in which you feel at one with the drive of life, immersed in the activities that you engage with and increasingly get better at doing. And Flow improves as you take on more challenges.
But perhaps the most important finding of Dr. Csíkszentmihályi’s work is the importance of creativity. Because creativity, like happiness, is an ongoing process, it’s something that only you can drive. It requires you to be involved. Although it may seem that our most creative moments occur spontaneously, they do not happen outside of ourselves. Creativity is and intrinsic expression of our connection with the extrinsic world around us.
Temporary happiness can be achieved through external surrogates (money, sex, power). But because everything is impermanent, that kind of happiness always fades. The kind of happiness, however, that requires the same kind of effort as creativity lasts. It’s always dynamic, ongoing, shifting, improving as you improve.
Happiness happens (look at the root word there). But it also happens to leave us. Happiness only stays as long as we recognize the we are in a relationship with a state of mind and the rest of the world. For us to be truly happy, we need to put effort into it. We need something else, because happiness isn’t enough by itself. Happenstance is not dependable.
CREATIVITY, INTELLIGENCE AND AWARENESS
So: what does creativity have to do with happiness? Creativity is the fuel that drives happy minds. It awakens us. It ramifies our lives with novel vistas. It demolishes prejudices and advances the soul’s journey into the difficult truths of life.
Creativity is an intelligence. But we use a narrow appreciation for intelligence. Sir Rob Ken Robinson offers remarkable insight into the fundamental intelligence that defines creativity. You can view the video embedded here or just read my summary of his comments.
He points out that intelligence has three characteristics:
It’s diverse
It’s kinetic
It’s dynamic
He discusses the global educational system and how schools have traditionally botched a lot of our collective and individual creativity. I think he has a very strong point. Our schools tend to overvalue academic studies at the expense of encouraging our natural tendency towards creativity. The traditional rank order of what’s valued in schools around the world is typically this:
Mathematics
Humanities
Arts
Being great at math and science are fundamentally important. They can in fact help shape careers that engender a comfortable standard of living. And that’s what we are seeing increasingly in the modern world: more wealth.
But in the long run, if we aren’t engaged in creative activities, we expose ourselves to happenstance, not happiness. There’s a difference.
If we want to be truly happy, we are going to have to immerse ourselves in the hard work of facing the difficult things in life. Getting through the Dips in life is 20% science and 80% creativity. The same is true of most of our problems. The more aware we are of the power of creativity in our lives, the happier we will be.
Our search for something beyond ourselves IS happiness. The sadness we feel is a message to look into places we fear to tread.
And it’s an endless search, the search for meaning.
A HAPPY CONCLUSION…MOSTLY
I’m happy that there are researchers around interested enough in global happiness. But I’m not all sold on the idea that true happiness is actually increasing in the world.
Rather, I think that what we are seeing are the marginal returns that come from lifting people out of poverty into lifestyles that meet basic needs, like shelter and clothing and food. But marginal returns eventually start to diminish. Going from $20,000 a year to $100,000 will make most people happier. But going from $100,000 to $120,000 won’t make as much of a difference. (You’ll owe more in taxes, so maybe your government’s happiness will increase.)
So I do think Sir Robinson is spot-on about creativity. World happiness will truly increase as more of us are encouraged and engaged in creative activities. And that requires a totally revamped educational system.
What about yourself. Are you happier today than yesterday? When you think of your happiest moments do they involve creativity? When life gets hard and miserable, can you get creative? Try it, do what you love, love what you do.
Believe in the search for something greater than yourself. In the process you’ll fall into happiness. And that lasts a lot longer than when happiness falls onto you.
A good friend of mine sent me this link today about the future of the work world, asking me if I thought that the predictions would come true. The executive recruiting firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas has peered into its crystal ball to predict the future of our work environments. According to the Information Week Blog, the recruiting firm expects:
More employees will work from home
Cubicles will be phased out by shared communities via wireless devices
Free agency will flourish
The US will increasingly target recruiting efforts oversees
Companies will offer more of their own educational programs
A four day work week will become more common
Companies will provide less health benefits to employees
A lot of these predictions make sense. In light of the proliferation of novel productivity tools, they actually are very reasonable expectations. But will these predictions actually bear out?
NOT SO FAST
Well that depends on many factors, including:
Global economic conditions
Geopolitical catastrophes
The degree of corporate allegiance to 20th Century industrial mechanics (e.g. The Short Snout)
The willingness of businesses to adopt distributed collaboration over centralized command
The advancement of entrepreneurial deployment along the Long Tail
I’m not so sure that the Short Snout is all too willing to hand it over to the Long Tail. Chris Anderson has the right idea about the general trend of inventories becoming freer. But those Short Snouts clustered around the Small Head don’t give up the bone easily. Swiss Bank Socialists: they will cry Mommyafter dropping the ball on their own foot.
(Incidentally, there’s now some controversial evidence out of Harvard Business School that sort of challenges Chris’ theory, of which his analysis you can read about here).
Although these predictions were made a decade ago and still have yet to become major trends, I do believe the technological and cultural changes that are taking place right now will in fact bring some of them true within another decade.
It just doesn’t make sense for businesses to ignore Moore’s Law, nor for people not to exploit the benefits of sleeker means of community inter-reach. Moore’s Law is making tools increasingly more powerful and robust while diminishing their relative and absolute costs.
No, the problem, as I see it, is that the changes are themselves changing so fast that it’s hard to keep up. Businesses, less and less, can project with a straight line. Their vision has be be curved through the space-time warping that is Moore’s Law.
HIKING
If you’ve ever hiked up Mount Rainier or Half-Dome in Yosemite, you know that the beginning trek is a pleasent stroll. You’re excited about your journey. You hike for hours and you feel great. You enjoy the views as you stop for a break.
But then a curious thing happens. Your feet feel a bit heavier. And pretty soon your huffing up steep edges, rough woods, through cold air. The view is spectacular, but you wonder if you’ll get to the top. It seems much farther now that you’ve gotten closer.
That feeling that things are getting rough… Well that’s the feeling of hitting the inflection points along the metaphorical curve of Moore’s Law. And if you don’t know that you’re climbing up a mountain, and not just a small hill, you’re less likely to make it. You’ll be psychologically blown down. At that point, businesses will either have to get huffing very fast, or they’ll just stop in their tracks and be done.
VISION and CLEAR FOG
Even the smartest of large enterprises sometimes vastly underestimate the Tao of Change. Years or decades of financial boom and comparative advantage tend to make the Short Snouts blurry-eyed with reverie. When startled awake, gluttony seizes everything around.
A 13,500 ton ship is no way to sail down the river of change.
We can all predict wonderful things as our technologies become increasingly refined, more potent and cheaper. But if millions of people continue to work in organizations that see the world through clear fog then we’ll continue to see much of the same as we see today: cubicle on cubicle, cog-job after cog-job and clinical depression to accompany the economic malaise that follows dysfunctional social traditions.
Overall, I’m optimistic about our opportunity along the expanding Long Tail. As should you. Optimism breeds itself.
For perhaps the first time in history, we all have the chance to manifest our entrepreneurial visions on the side. Moonlight Entrepreneurship might be in the cards for those who can’t yet quit their cubes. Which means that those predictions which Challenger is making might come true only if individuals take the initiative to make them come true. It could be a nice future, the brightest ever.
…But: never take your eyes of the Short Snouts. History has a long tail of them ruining promising things.
Of the billions of bloggers out there (albeit most with an average readership of 1), how many talented ones would be willing to volunteer their time to help out a community hospital with its blogging?
As I’ve discussed in the last post, hospital blogging can be a costly project. The opportunity costs of blogging can be huge (time spent on research or improving operations). But: the opportunity costs of not blogging can be even bigger (not showing off your knowledge base and expertise or establishing community trust and authority).
So to help the community of hospitals (large and small), one possible route is to solicit help from the community of bloggers. The blogosphere a disparate and often talented community. It includes soccer moms, engineers, web designers, doctors, politicians, forest rangers, comics, and a whole assortment of other resourceful individuals. Many of them also have other skills pertinent to business and process management.
I’m willing to bet that there are plenty of bloggers (some amateur, others experienced pros) who would be delighted to offer their services to community hospitals. There’s really no University of Blogging per se. And no one company that stands out to fill the role of uber-consultant. So hospitals interested in looking into blogging or other Web 2.0 projects could reap handsome rewards by reaching out to the blogging community.
Why would bloggers volunteer their time, even it would be for an hour per week? Here are some off-the-cuff benefits to volunteer hospital-blogging:
1. Boost traffic (slightly) to their own site (as appropriate)
2. Help enhance their reputation and authority
3. Develop another blogging “voice”
4. Build their brand (or resume if that’s what they want)
5. Expand their horizons
6. Offer a chance to become evangelists for healthcare technology on the web
7. Enhance their value to other bloggers
8. Network with other bloggers
9. Change the mix of their daily grind
10. Gain a sense of participating in a noble cause.
I hear people laugh and offer a lot of (understandable) sarcasm at the idea of bringing blogging and other social media to hospitals. That’s fine with me. As long as they have ideas for improving healthcare. And understand what it is that I’m driving at.
Cynicism is not skepticism.
Cynics put down the truth. Skeptics lift it up.
For you folks who find it a nutty proposition, please argue with any of the ten items I listed above. If you reject them all, would you just do me a favor and offer your own lists for improving healthcare. People are suffering. They could use your help. You’re brighter than me, so radiate your brilliance!
For those of you who believe in the values of hospital blogging let me know why you think volunteer blogging makes sense. Do you think it’s a realistic proposition?
My name is Phil Baumann. I'm a registered nurse with a background in critical care, drug safety, corporate accountancy, finance, treasury operations, and recruiting. Different, huh?
I'm currently interested in how individuals and organizations use social media tools to improve the way things get done. And this is primarily what this weblog explores.
