Translator: Leonardo Silva Reviewer: Mile Živković
Hello.
Today, we live in a very complex world.
So, today, I'd like to speak
about what I think are the capacities of the mind,
that will help us deal with this complex world.
Today, almost everything is not made of one piece, we could say.
Everything is made up of a mixture of many things,
of cashmere and sawdust,
of love and hate,
of good and bad,
of this and that,
and the question is how to make sense of it all.
Of course, every generation has lived their own experience
and thought about that as complex,
and they were right, I think,
but today I think there's an added ingredient to complexity.
And perhaps two ingredients.
One is the speed of change,
and the other is we have access to so much information now.
As I travel around the world, one thing I hear from people is they say,
"We're burdened with information,"
because a lot of times - in fact, most times, I would say -,
the information is in the form of data points,
or facts, or simple statements,
and the question still remains: how do you connect those things?
How do you connect those things to make sense?
How do you connect those things to define the context
in which those things make sense?
This is the task of the present world we live in today,
the task that we have to face.
And, as I travel around the world,
I ask people a simple question, first of all,
"What is your life like, nowadays?"
And, of course, people have many things to say about that,
but there are two stories that everyone says.
I could be in Brooklyn, I could be in Bahia,
I could be in Beijing, or everywhere in between.
I hear two stories, always.
One story is, "How do I deal with the tension
between the past and the ever approaching future?"
Put in other way, how do I deal with the tension
between tradition and modernity?
Difficult.
It's difficult because the mature response is not to throw out one or the other,
but to see how they can be integrated into something new.
That's the great task.
The other story I hear from people I call "the world of 'too'"
meaning excessive amount.
And wherever I go,
- again, it could be Port Moresby, New Guinea, or the middle of Manhattan -
I hear the same "too":
the world is too fast, too competitive, too complex.
How do we deal with it?
Well,
a typical way of dealing with it now, particularly in business,
or maybe in all institutions,
be they educational, healthcare, political, whatever,
is, "Let's collect a lot of data."
And we have this expression in the language now, "Big Data,"
meaning a lot of data.
Well, Big Data, I'm here to say,
doesn't necessarily mean big ideas or big insights.
We are still faced with, how do we deal with the big questions of life?
Not like, "OK, where is that person? We can locate them. GPS."
Or, "What is their blood pressure? We could really give them that."
And that's not trivial,
but it doesn't address the real big issues of the world today,
and of our life.
I'm going to give you one example of what I hear from people,
that's representative of a lot of sentiment.
Here's one person talking,
"In terms of the response to this question,
what's your life like nowadays?"
And this person says,
"Nowadays, things are always advancing, getting better,
sometimes for the worse."
So, it's not that things are getting better,
They're both together,
better and worse.
Difficult.
That's why we need an imaginative mind to deal with it.
Another way people have of dealing with complexity
is they focus on one thing and leave out everything else.
Most of times, that's not very productive, although it makes us feel good.
I like a better attitude than that,
expressed by Bruce Springsteen.
After all, he's called "the boss," so maybe he knows something.
He's said something, I think, quite good.
He said,
"If you could keep alive in your head and in your heart
two contradictory ideas at the same time,
if it doesn't make you crazy, it will make you strong."
So, the question is how to do that,
and I think we need to do that
because my idea about the present complexity of the world
is, I think, best summed up by saying:
if Shakespeare was alive today,
he would have to rewrite his famous soliloquy of to be "or" not to be.
The world of "or" is done with.
That's a fairly simple world. It's a choice: this or that.
Now, we don't live in the world of "or," for the most part, anymore.
We live in the world of "and,"
and that's a highly complex world.
What I'm suggesting is there are five capacities of the human mind,
that help us deal with this complexity.
So, let me begin by just naming them, and then I'll say a few words about each.
Live a "sensual" life.
Two: be curious.
Three: be open.
Four: allow your mind to make metaphor.
And address paradox in integrative ways, not in "either-or" ways.
Those, I think, are the keys to being imaginative
in how we deal with this complexity of the world.
So, let me say a few words about each.
"Sensuality."
I mean simply by that:
register your own experience of your own experience.
What I like to say is, live "in" feeling.
It's a very strange sentence,
but I'm trying to focus on the idea of it.
Live in feeling.
Feeling is like an environment.
Feeling is like your house, your apartment,
and you go walk around in it,
and you could look around, and you could see what's up.
And that's hard to do nowadays, of course, because everything is so fast!
"I've got to do this,"
"I've got to go there," "I've got to be there."
And, when we take a moment or have a moment,
we take out the cell phone
see what's happening in social media.
In fact,
there's research that shows
people are actually becoming uncomfortable with being with their own feelings,
even for a few minutes.
That has huge implications.
One implication is less creativity,
because feelings are a wellspring of stimulation for ideas.
The other thing, quite important also,
is, the less you're able to feel your own feelings,
the less able you are to feel other people's feelings.
So, in a sense, it makes the world more dangerous, I'd suggest.
So, live in feeling.
And why do I say that?
Because meaning arises from feeling.
That's a big sentence.
Meaning arises from feeling.
I once had the event
of hearing Norman Mailer,
the Pulitzer Prize-winning author,
say something that I thought it was quite profound,
and related to this idea of feeling.
He says,
"You can't get to an emotional truth through a truth,
though a fact, through a piece of data."
You can't get to an emotional truth through a truth.
You could only get to a truth through an emotional truth.
That's the paramount admonition, if you would,
about why to live in feeling.
So, feel, don't flatline, don't get numb.
Don't just live in the world of, "I've got to do this,"
"I'm doing that," "I'm doing this," "I'm doing that,"
and forget who you are, and what you're feeling,
and what you're sensing, and what your being,
as opposed to what you're doing.
Next is, be curious.
Open up that hood of life.
See what's underneath.
Not what you're told is underneath; what you discover is underneath,
meaning: explore,
see what you could discover,
see what seems interesting,
see what seems repulsive.
And of course you do that through feeling.
Get our of your comfort zone.
Take a little risk.
The big risk is not taking a risk,
because then you just exist in the status quo.
That doesn't do you or the world any good, really,
except for a momentary sense of leisure or comfort.
Third is, be open.
I have a very simple idea about being open,
which is you don't have to know the end at the beginning.
OK?
You leave yourself open to be surprised.
It's not just serendipity,
it's not, "OK, let everything be chaotic and see what happens."
It's what I like to call "directed serendipity,"
which means, "I have a plan,
but I know, as soon as I start enacting a plan
and the plan meets up with the world,
all hell is going to break loose, and that's what I love.
It's not all pre-scripted.
It's not all linear, sequential, logical, factual.
It's emotional.
And I'm not here to argue,
"Emotion, emotion, emotion. Forget logic. Forget objectivity."
I'm saying "and!"
You've got to have both! Seamlessly!
Not, "I'll do some of this," and, "I'll do some of that."
I've got do it altogether, at one time.
Openness.
Next is what I call "metaphor making."
We have an emblem up there, or was up there, or we've seen it:
"Connecting Ideas."
That's really the essence of metaphor making.
You make connections, you make associations,
you make linkages between things
that logically don't necessarily go together.
But, in your experience, in your "sensuality",
in your consciousness and in your unconscious,
somehow there's a link between the two,
and that gives ideas a little more room to play in,
when things that are seemingly unrelated get hooked up together,
and you see how one can help inform the other
and what evolves from the joining.
So, that's the importance.
And the gift, really, of the mind is it's capable of metaphor.
And lastly, paradox.
I'm saying, things can be or seem contradictory,
and we just say, "Oh, well, that's just too complex, or too contradictory.
I've got to put one aside."
No! You don't have to.
Check it out first.
See what underlies, if anything underlies,
the commonality that could exist between seemingly contradictory ideas.
See what the dynamics of each are.
See what the assumptions of each are.
See what the connections and theories underneath each are.
And maybe they're things that support each other.
Some things don't. Fine!
But some things might,
and they'll give you an idea of something new.
This idea of...
I like to call it "living an artistic life."
Not that we all are artists. I'm not an artist. For me, OK?
But, if I'm engaged in these five processes,
I could still live an artful life,
at my own scale, in my own way, in my own life.
I could never be a Picasso, I could never be Mahatma Gandhi,
or these great geniuses touched by the gift,
but I could be the most imaginative Bob,
and whatever that is, that's OK.
That's good, as matter of fact.
So, what I'm suggesting is - let's go back to the beginning -
it all starts with feeling.
Don't numb out.
Don't just enter into a day as a routine.
Every day should be a discovery, a look inside.
See what's up with you and how you feel about the world.
And, as I'm saying, that generates the beginning
of imaginative ideas,
and most of these ideas do not come out to you
as direct and as a big trumpet.
Some do, but most don't.
And I've heard Steven Spielberg say something lovely
about this idea.
He says,
"When you're living a life that's your present to yourself in,
you have to listen for the whispers."
Listen for the whispers,
and use that to help you understand and engage with yourself and with others
to address the big, complex questions of life,
and in that way, you'll become more vital,
your vitality becomes contagious and infectious with others,
and now we're on our way.
As a beginning, it's difficult dealing with complexity,
but, once you engage in these five essential capacities
- I've seen it so many times -,
it becomes addictive,
it's fun, it makes you feel alive,
and it's necessary in this world today.
So, live in feeling.
I wish you many imaginative ideas.
Thank you.
(Applause)