See Stephen Speak about Goal-Free Living on PBS
Are you in the Mt. Pleasant, Michigan area?
If so, tune in to WCMU-TV Sunday night, February 3, at 11:30 PM. I am interviewed on the PBS television show, “Between the Lines.”
This 30 minute show is dedicated to “Goal-Free Living.”
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Quote of the Day
“Goals are for the future. Values are now. Goals are set. Values are lived. Goals change. Values are rocks you can count on.” From Gung Ho! by Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles
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Traits of a Great Leader
When you think of great leaders, what traits come to mind? Honest? Competent? Inspirational? Courageous? Fair? Looks like a leader?
Although that last one is typically not found on lists of leadership characteristics, looks may be related to one’s leadership style.
In an interesting article published in The Economist, researchers found that students could determine a person’s leadership traits just by looking at a photograph of them. Here are some excerpts (please note that British spellings have been retained):
Dr Ambady and Mr Rule showed 100 undergraduates the faces of the chief executives of the top 25 and the bottom 25 companies in the Fortune 1,000 list. Half the students were asked how good they thought the person they were looking at would be at leading a company and half were asked to rate five personality traits on the basis of the photograph. These traits were competence, dominance, likeability, facial maturity (in other words, did the individual have an adult-looking face or a baby-face) and trustworthiness.
The results of their study…show that both the students’ assessments of the leadership potential of the bosses and their ratings for the traits of competence, dominance and facial maturity were significantly related to a company’s profits.
Sadly, the characteristics of likeability and trustworthiness appear to have no link to company profits, suggesting that when it comes to business success, being warm and fuzzy does not matter much (though these traits are not harmful).
Be sure to read the entire Economist article. The article provides some fascinating insights into our perceptions of leaders and the qualities of good leaders.
How Important is Likability in Leadership?
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Want What You Have
I was just having a conversation with a good friend of mine. She’s currently in a bit of a funk because life is not turning out the way she expected. From an external perspective, she has an incredible life. But that doesn’t matter. She is still not happy. As we continued the conversation, we discovered that her expectations were the primary source of her disappointment.
Then, with her permission, I read her a brief passage from my Goal-Free Living book. It seemed to strike a chord with her and she requested that I start recording passages from the book for my blog.
Here is the first of many “5 minute motivational moments.” Today’s installment is from the chapter entitled, “Want What You Have.”
Click the play button to listen now or you can download the file to your computer using the link below.
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Download the mp3 (right click and “save target as” to download to your computer)
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Slowness + Purpose = Creativity
Christopher Richards, the author of an interesting article, suggests that the secret to creativity is slowing down. He implies that our best ideas emerge when we are in a relaxed state. In the article, Richards said that “Ex-Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan wrote most of his latest book while soaking in the bathtub.” Could be.
In my book, Goal-Free Living, I discussed ways of being more creative by tapping into something beyond the conscious mind. I wrote:
How do you shift your focus? How can you trust that the path you are on is the right one for you? There is no easy answer, but there are ways to help hear your inner voice. The word Mushin is used extensively in Japan. It means silent mind, empty mind. A mind that is void of thought patterns and mental chatter. The ability to listen to that inner voice is critical on the journey to self-awareness. It is said that Aristotle used to lie in bed with a ball in his hand so that when he would fall asleep the ball would drop and bang a copper plate below. The noise would wake him up, keeping him in a quasi state of sleep and consciousness. This is where he generated his best ideas and insights.
One of the people I interviewed during my travels, Doug Stevenson from Chicago, Illinois, told me of a similar situation he once personally encountered. “One night in college I was agonizing over a paper I was writing about Norman Mailer and Truman Capote. I wanted to describe a new type of writing that was a hybrid of journalism and fiction. I struggled for hours, thinking it through, but could not put anything coherent or interesting on paper. Then, I remember having this flash of insight at 3 a.m. I had been working on it for so long, that my logical left brain went to sleep. That’s when my creative right brain woke up—or at least it started to speak loud enough to be heard. My mind exploded and I wrote the perfect paragraph that summed up the entire paper. From there, the paper was born quickly and effortlessly. Once my rational self left the room, everything came together quickly.”
One “creative free-thinker” I know in England likes to take his team to Stonehenge as a way of relaxing and expanding their mind.
Purposeful Creativity
Although creativity can’t be forced, it must be purposeful. This is comically demonstrated in the IBM Ideating commercial above. Sitting on your butt does not get you new ideas. It is a process.
In the article, Richards describes how during that incubation stage of an idea, slowness is key. He gives a nice example of this “goal-free” approach in action. He said, “Our founder gets a vague idea, a gut feeling or intuition. Once the ‘half-baked’ idea surfaces, she mulls it over. This stage is necessarily purposeless. It’s more about discovery than goal orientation. The idea may even be forgotten, but there are underlying processes going on all the time.”
Richards says this stage is “necessarily purposeless.” I’m not sure I agree with that. Although the purpose is not to give birth to a specific idea, the purpose is incubation. The intention of something creative must be there. If not, the IBM ad was scarily accurate. The best ideas are generated while “meandering with a purpose” – moving in a non-linear, unforced manner, while making forward progress.
Or, as Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Inc, once said, “Creativity is just having enough dots to connect… connect experiences and synthesize new things. The reason creative people are able to do that is that they’ve had more experiences or have thought more about their experiences than other people.”
I couldn’t have said it better myself.
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