A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future (29 page)

Flow
by Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi—“
Flow,” when you’re so absorbed and enthralled in an activity that you lose your sense of time and place, is an important component of the aptitude of Meaning. This book is your guide.

What Should I Do with My Life?
by Po Bronson—
That’s a question all of us have asked ourselves—and it’s one that Bronson got hundreds of people around the United States to ask themselves. He returned with a trove of moving, inspiring, and insightful stories.

Mindfulness
by Ellen Langer—
Too many of us stumble through life mindlessly, says Harvard professor Langer. We’re stuck in routines and unaware of our surroundings. Breaking out of that mindset, she says, can be the pathway to creativity and meaning.

The Art of Happiness
by His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Howard C. Cutler, M.D.—
The Dalai Lama visits with physician Cutler—and in a series of interviews explains his philosophy of life and expands on his idea that “the very purpose of life is to seek happiness.” Two related books are also excellent:
The Art of Happiness at Work,
another Dalai Lama–Cutler collaboration, extends Buddhist happiness principles into the office.
Destructive Emotions
is a fascinating “scientific dialogue” with the Dalai Lama that Daniel Goleman conducted during a Mind and Life conference in 2000.

Visit a Labyrinth.

I’ve tried meditating—and did a pretty bad job of it. I’ve considered yoga, but (physically at least) I’m not very flexible. However, I’ve found labyrinths to be surprisingly addicting—so much so that I’d consider installing one in some future backyard. The advantage to me—short attention span, inability to sit still—is that labyrinths require movement. And moving meditation can be calming and centering. To find a labyrinth, start with these Web sites:

The Worldwide Labyrinth Locator

wwll.veriditas.labyrinthsociety.org

Here you can type in your city and country—and find the labyrinths nearest to you.

The Labyrinth Society

www.labyrinthsociety.org

Known as TLS, this group operates a site with a wealth of information on labyrinths. The site also has its own, shorter list of labyrinths as well as a few nifty virtual labyrinths.

Labyrinthos

www.labyrinthos.net

A British resource center for all things labyrinthine and a good source for labyrinths in the United Kingdom.

To learn more about labyrinths, two books are worth perusing:
Walking a Sacred Path
by Lauren Artress and the photo-heavy
Labyrinths and Mazes
by German photographer Jurgen Hohmuth.

If you end up catching the labyrinth bug, you can find all sorts of portable labyrinths and labyrinth construction kits. One of the best Web sites for such products is the Labyrinth Company
(
www.labyrinthcompany.com
,)
which designed the labyrinth I walked at Johns Hopkins. If you’re not ready to plow a unicircular pathway into your lawn, consider a wooden “finger labyrinth”—a palm or lap-sized item in which you “walk” the labyrinth by tracing the grooved paths with your finger. They’re oddly soothing and don’t require leaving your home or office.
(More info:
www.relax4life.com
)

Check Your Time.

Most of us can rattle off the things we consider most important. But does the reality of our daily lives match the rhetoric of our deepest aspirations? Find out with this exercise, a favorite of life coaches and time management gurus. First, make a short list of what is most important to you: the people, the activities, and the values. Pare the list to ten or fewer items. Next, take your PDA, day planner, or that free calendar from your insurance guy—and examine how you’ve spent your time in the past week and month. How many hours can you assign to each of the life priorities you identified? Where have you successfully aligned your values with your time? Where do you find gaps between what you preach and what you actually practice? This exercise can keep you honest and help you steer your days toward a more meaningful life.

Dedicate Your Work.

Look at the page immediately before the Table of Contents in this book. (Go on. I’ll wait. ) You’ll find, as you will in many other books, a dedication. But why should authors have all the fun? Why can’t everyone—managers, salespeople, nurses, even accountants—dedicate their work to someone else?

I got this idea from Naomi Epel’s
The Observation Deck,
which was also the source of a Portfolio item in Chapter 7. Epel writes, “I once heard Danny Glover say that he dedicates every performance to someone—it might be Nelson Mandela or the old man who guards the stage door—but he is always working for someone other than himself. This focus gives his acting purpose and makes his work rich.”

You can do the same. Dedicate your own work—a presentation, a sales call, a report—to someone you admire or who matters in your life. You can infuse your work with purpose and meaning when you think of it as a gift.

Picture Yourself at Ninety.

Longevity is increasing—and many of us will now live into our nineties. Set aside a half hour to picture yourself at age ninety and to put yourself in the mind of ninety-year-old you. What does your life look like when you view it from that vantage point? What have you accomplished? What have you contributed? What are your regrets? This isn’t an easy exercise—neither intellectually nor emotionally. But it can be enormously valuable. And it can help you satisfy one of Viktor Frankl’s most powerful imperatives: “Live as if you were living for the second time and had acted as wrongly the first time as you are about to act now.”

AFTERWORD

W
e’ve covered a lot of ground together. And I hope your experience reading
A Whole New Mind
has been as enjoyable as mine writing it. As you prepare to step into the Conceptual Age, let me leave you with some parting thoughts.

As I explained in Chapter 3, your future will depend on your answers to three questions. In this new era each of us must look carefully at what we do and ask ourselves:

1.
Can someone overseas do it cheaper?

2.
Can a computer do it faster?

3.
Am I offering something that satisfies the nonmaterial, transcendent desires of an abundant age?

These three questions will mark the fault line between who gets ahead and who gets left behind. Individuals and organizations that focus their efforts on doing what foreign knowledge workers can’t do cheaper and computers can’t do faster, as well as on meeting the aesthetic, emotional, and spiritual demands of a prosperous time, will thrive. Those who ignore these three questions will struggle.

In the time since I completed my manuscript, two sets of economists have produced studies that support this book’s central idea. W. Michael Cox and Richard Alm, of the Federal Reserve Bank in Dallas, have examined ten years of employment data and discovered that the largest gains have been in jobs that require “people skills and emotional intelligence” (for example, registered nurses) and “imagination and creativity” (for example, designers). Frank Levy, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Richard Murnane, of Harvard University, have published an excellent book,
The New Division of Labor: How Computers Are Creating the Next Job Market,
in which they argue that computers are in the process of obliterating routine work. The arrival of desktop PCs and the automation of business processes, they say, have heightened the value of two categories of human skills. The first is what they call “expert thinking—solving new problems for which there are no routine solutions.” The other is “complex communication—persuading, explaining, and in other ways conveying a particular interpretation of information.”

It seems clear, then, that the Conceptual Age is dawning and that those who hope to survive in it must master the high-concept, high-touch abilities I’ve described. This situation presents both promise and peril. The promise is that Conceptual Age jobs are exceedingly democratic. You don’t need to design the next cell phone or discover a new source of renewable energy. There will be plenty of work not just for inventors, artists, and entrepreneurs but also for an array of imaginative, emotionally intelligent, right-brain professionals, from counselors to massage therapists to schoolteachers to stylists to talented salespeople. What’s more, as I’ve tried to make clear, the abilities you’ll need—Design, Story, Symphony, Empathy, Play, and Meaning—are fundamentally human attributes. They are things we do out of a sense of intrinsic motivation. They reside in all of us, and need only be nurtured into being.

The peril is that our world moves at a furious pace. Computers and networks grow faster and more interconnected each day. China and India are becoming economic behemoths. Material abundance in the advanced world continues to grow. That means that the greatest rewards will go to those who move fast. The first group of people who develop a whole new mind, who master high-concept and high-touch abilities, will do extremely well. The rest—those who move slowly or not at all—may miss out or, worse, suffer.

The choice is yours. This new age fairly glitters with opportunity, but it is as unkind to the slow of foot as it is to the rigid of mind. I hope this book provides you with the inspiration and the tools you’ll need to make your journey. I’d like to hear about your experiences. If you have a story to tell or an exercise to recommend, let me know. You can reach me at
[email protected].

Meantime, thanks for reading. Good luck in the age of art and heart.

DANIEL H. PINK

Washington, D.C., U.S.A.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1. To my knowledge, the originator of the term “high touch” is John Naisbitt, who first used it in his 1982 book,
Megatrends,
to describe the common historic reaction to technological advances. “Whenever new technology is introduced into society,” Naisbitt wrote, “there must be a counterbalancing human response—that is, high touch—or the technology is rejected.” Although I’m using the term in a different sense, I want to make clear that I did not coin the term and that I’m indebted to Naisbitt for adding it to the world’s cultural vocabulary.

CHAPTER1: RIGHT BRAIN RISING

1. As it turned out, the task of clicking the buttons and matching the expressions was not central to the actual research. Those exercises were designed mostly to ensure that subjects were paying attention to the photos.

2. Floyd E. Bloom, M.D., M. Flint Beal, M.D., David J. Kupfer, M.D.,
The Dana Guide to Brain Health
(Free Press, 2003), 14, 28, 85; Susan Greenfield,
The Human Brain: A Guided Tour
(Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1997), 28.

3. Nicholas Wade, “Roger Sperry, a Nobel Winner for Brain Studies, Dies at 80,”
New York Times
(April 20, 1994).

4. Betty Edwards,
The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain
(Tarcher/ Putnam, 1999), 4.

5. Robert Ornstein,
The Right Mind: Making Sense of the Hemispheres
(Harcourt Brace & Company, 1997), 2.

6. Bloom et al., 8.

7. Eric A. Havelock,
The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present
(Yale University Press, 1988), 110–117.

8. Neil R. Carlson,
Physiology of Behavior,
Eighth Edition (Allyn and Bacon, 2004), 84–85.

9. Ibid., 48.

10. Chris McManus,
Right Hand Left Hand: The Origins of Asymmetry in Brains, Bodies, Atoms and Cultures
(Harvard University Press, 2002), 181.

11. See Ornstein, 37. Another example: “Japanese use both a phonetic script (kana) and a pictographic script (kanji). Research shows that kana is better processed in the left hemisphere, while kanji is better handled by the right.” See Ornstein, 41.

12. Ornstein, 140.

13. Carlson, 84–85.

14. Jerre Levy-Agresti and R. W. Sperry, “Differential Perceptual Capacities in Major and Minor Hemispheres,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
(vol. 61, 1968).

15. This metaphor is not mine. I’ve heard it from neuroscientists but none of them seems to know who came up with this delicious phrase.

16. Ahmad Hariri et al., “The Amygdala Response to Emotional Stimuli: A Comparison of Faces and Scenes,”
NeuroImage
17 (2002), 217–223. See also Elizabeth A. Phelps et al., “Activation of the Left Amygdala to a Cognitive Representation of Fear,”
Nature Neuroscience
(April 2001).

17. Paul Ekman,
Emotions Revealed: Recognizing Faces and Feelings to Improve Communication and Emotional Life
(Times Books, 2003), 13.

18. McManus, 183–84.

CHAPTER 2: ABUNDANCE, ASIA, AND AUTOMATION