Read A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future Page 20


  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

  We’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 (Harvar
d 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

  1. Drucker first discusses the broad concept of “knowledge work” in his 1959 book, The Landmarks of Tomorrow, though his first apparent use of the term is in Peter Drucker, “The Next Decade in Management,” Dun’s Review and Modern Industry 74 (December 1959). For the paragraph’s first quotation, I’ve relied on the always excellent work of Richard Donkin and his October 30, 2002, Financial Times article, “Employees as Investors.” The second and third quotations come from Peter Drucker, “The Age of Social Transformation,” Atlantic Monthly (November 1994). For some of Drucker’s latest thoughts on the subject, see Peter Drucker, “The Next Society,” The Economist (November 1, 2003), in which he defines knowledge workers as “people with considerable theoretical knowledge and learning: doctors, lawyers, accountants, chemical engineers.”

  2. Staples 2003 Annual Report; Staples Corporate Overview (available at www.corporate-ir.net/ireye/ir_site.zhtml?ticker=PR_96244&script=2100); “PETsMART Reports Second Quarter 2003 Results,” PetSmart 2003 Annual Report (August 28, 2003).

  3. Gregg Easterbrook, The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse (Random House, 2003), 6. Easterbrook’s smart book also contains a collection of other statistics that confirm the shift from scarcity to abundance.

  4. Data are from the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics’ 2001 National Household Travel Survey, available at www.bts.gov.

  5. John De Graaf, David Wann, and Thomas H. Naylor, Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., 2002), 32. See also data at www.selfstorage.org.

  6. Polly LaBarre, “How to Lead a Rich Life,” Fast Company (March 2003).

  7. Virginia Postrel, The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Culture, Commerce, and Consciousness (HarperCollins, 2003). More Postrel: “But, more important, aesthetics is also becoming more prominent relative to other goods. When we decide how next to spend our time or money, considering what we already have and the costs and benefits of various alternatives, ‘look and feel’ is likely to top our list. We don’t want more food, or even more restaurant meals—we’re already maxed out. Instead, we want tastier, more interesting food in an appealing environment. It’s a move from physical quantity to intangible, emotional quality.”

  8. Andrew Delbanco, The Real American Dream: A Meditation on Hope (Harvard University Press, 1999), 113.

  9. Robert William Fogel, The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism (University of Chicago Press, 2000), 3.

  10. “Wax Buildup,” American Demographics (March 2002).

  11. Rachel Konrad, “Job Exports May Imperil U.S. Programmers,” Associated Press ( July 13, 2003).

  12. Pankaj Mishra, “India: On the Downswing of Software Outsourcing,” Asia Computer Weekly ( January 13, 2003).

  13. Khozem Merchant, “GE Champions India’s World Class Services,” Financial Times ( June 3, 2003).

  14. Amy Waldman, “More ‘Can I Help You?’ Jobs Migrate from U.S. to India,” New York Times (May 11, 2003); Joanna Slater, “Calling India . . . Why Wall Street Is Dialing Overseas for Research,” Wall Street Journal (October 2, 2003).

  15. Pete Engardio, Aaron Bernstein, and Manjeet Kriplani, “Is Your Job Next?” Business Week (February 3, 2003); Merchant, “GE Champions”; “Sun Chief to Woo India in Software War,” Reuters (March 4, 2003); Eric Auchard, “One in 10 Tech Jobs May Move Overseas, Report Says,” Reuters ( July 30, 2003); Steven Greenhouse, “I.B.M. Explores Shift of White-Collar Jobs Overseas,” New York Times ( July 22, 2003); Bruce Einhorn, “High Tech in China,” Business Week (October 28, 2002).

  16. Engardio et al., “Is Your Job Next?”.

  17. Auchard, “One in 10 Tech Jobs”; “Outsourcing to Usurp More U.S. Jobs,” CNET News.com (August 31, 2003); Paul Taylor, “Outsourcing of IT Jobs Predicted to Continue,” Financial Times (March 17, 2004).

  18. John C. McCarthy, with Amy Dash, Heather Liddell, Christine Ferrusi Ross, and Bruce D. Temkin, “3.3 Million U.S. Services Jobs to Go Offshore,” Forrester Research Brief (November 11, 2002); Mark Gongloff, “U.S. Jobs Jumping Ship,” CNN/Money (March 13, 2003).

  19. George Monbiot, “The Flight to India,” Guardian (October 21, 2003); Moumita Bakshi, “Over 1 Million Jobs in Europe Moving Out,” The Hindu (Sept. 3, 2004).

  20. “Not So Smart,” Economist ( January 30, 2003).

  21. Rudy Chelminski, “This Time It’s Personal,” Wired (October 2001).

  22. Robert Rizzo, “Deep Junior and Kasparov Play to a Draw,” Chess Life ( June 2003).

  23. Steven Levy, “Man vs. Machine: Checkmate,” Newsweek ( July 21, 2003).

  24. A similar pattern occurred the year before when another chess champion, Vladimir Kramnik, played another computer, Deep Fritz, in a Persian Gulf contest that promoters dubbed “Brains in Bahrain.” Kramnik went into the sixth game with a lead, but at a critical juncture, instead of playing a conventional move, Kramnik attempted one that he felt was more creative and aesthetic. The fool. It cost him the game—and ultimately the match. Said Kramnik of his loss, “At least I played like a man.” Daniel King, “Kramnik and Fritz Play to a Standoff,” Chess Life (February 2003).

  25. Chelminski, “This Time It’s Personal.”

  26. Paul Hoffman, “Who’s Best at Chess? For Now, It’s Neither Man Nor Machine,” New York Times (February 8, 2003).

  27. “The Best and the Brightest,” Esquire (December 2002).

  28. “Software That Writes Software,” Futurist Update (March 2003).

  29. Laura Landro, “Going Online to Make Life-and-Death Decisions,” Wall Street Journal (October 10, 2002).

  30. Laura Landro, “Please Get the Doctor Online Now,” Wall Street Journal (May 22, 2003); “Patient, Heal Thyself,” Wired (April 2001).

  31. Jennifer 8. Lee, “Dot-Com, Esquire: Legal Guidance, Lawyer Optional,” New York Times (February 22, 2001).

  CHAPTER 3: HIGH CONCEPT, HIGH TOUCH

  1. As I explained in the Introduction, I believe John Naisbitt coined the term “high touch,” though he used it to describe a different phenomenon.

  2. Hilary Waldman, “Art & Arteries: Examining Paintings, Medical Students Learn to Be More Observant Doctors,” Hartford Courant (March 1, 2000); Mike Anton, “Adding a Dose of Fine Arts,” Los Angeles Times (May 24, 2003).

  3. Yumiko Ono, “Rethinking How Japanese Should Think,” Wall Street Journal (March 25, 2002); Anthony Faiola, “Japan’s Empire of Cool,” Washington Post (December 27, 2003); Geoffrey A. Fowler, “AstroBoy Flies Again,” Wall Street Journal ( January 15, 2004).

  4. Danny Hakim, “An Artiste Invades Stodgy G.M.; Detroit Wonders if the ‘Ultimate Car Guy’ Can Fit In” New York Times (October 19, 2001); Danny Hakim, “G.M. Executive Preaches: Sweat the Smallest Details,” New York Times ( January 5, 2004)

  5. John Hawkins, The
Creative Economy: How People Make Money from Ideas (Allen Lane/The Penguin Press, 2001), 86. Virginia Postrel, The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Culture, Commerce, and Consciousness (HarperCollins, 2003), 17.

  6. “2002 National Cross-Industry Estimates of Employment and Mean Annual Wage for SOC Major Occupational Groups,” Occupational Employment Statistics Program, Bureau of Labor Statistics, available at www.bls.gov/oes/home.htm.

  7. Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community, and Everyday Life (Basic Books, 2002), 328. To his credit, Florida has reinvigorated the debate about urban planning in America. However, his appealing vision of economic development through brewpubs and loft apartments has also been roundly criticized. Some commentators score him for excluding large population segments, most notably racial minorities and couples with children. Others claim his data don’t support his arguments. My view is that he’s performed a valuable public service merely by sparking discussion on this topic.