Getting the Big Picture

/

Without some grasp of the meaning of their relationship to the whole, it is not easy for individuals to retain a vivid sense of their own capacity to act as individuals, a sure sense of their own dignity and an awareness of their roles and responsibilities. They tend to accept the spectator role and to sink into passivity.

John Gardner, Self-Renewal

Inconvenient Conclusions

/

Conspiracy theories may be deployed as a rhetorical tool to escape inconvenient conclusions. People selectively appeal to a conspiracy among scientists to explain away a scientific consensus when their political ideology compels them to do so—but not when the scientific consensus is of no relevance to their politics.

Stephan Lewandowsky & John Cook, The Conspiracy Theory Handbook

The creative spirit

/

Children are naturally creative, playful, and experimental. If you ask me, we were the most human when we were young kids. We "worked" on our art. Sometimes for hours at a time without a break, because it was in us, though we did intellectualize it. As we got older, fears crept in, and doubts, and self-censoring, and over-thinking. The creative spirit is in us now, it’s who we are. We just need to look at the kids around us to be reminded of that. And whether you are 28 or 88 today, it’s never too late, because the child is still in you. 

Garr Reynolds, Presentation Zen

Guilt v Shame Culture

/

In a guilt culture you know you are good or bad by what your conscience feels. In a shame culture you know you are good or bad by what your community says about you, by whether it honors or excludes you. In a guilt culture people sometimes feel they do bad things; in a shame culture social exclusion makes people feel they are bad. 

David Brooks writing in the New York Times

Mummies in the audience

/

“Keep on growing,” the commencement speakers say. “Don’t go to seed. Let this be a beginning, not an ending.” It is a good theme. Yet a high proportion of the young people who hear the speeches pay no heed, and by the time they are middle-aged they are absolutely mummified. Even some of the people who make the speeches are mummified. Why?

The thing that is really blocking self-development – the individual’s own intricately designed, self-constructed prison, or to put it another way, the individual’s incapacity for self-renewal.

John Gardner, Self-Renewal