How - Dov Seidman [33]
It takes courage to keep going, and more courage still to descend into the Valley of Confusion and wrestle with what lies there. Most of us have experienced this before, unintentionally, when we set out to truly master something. We found ourselves in the Valley of C but didn’t understand why we were confused. Some of us struggled on, and some got demoralized and gave up. You might experience this again as you read this book. To get from the Hill of B to the Hill of A, you need more than directions and you need more than rules; you need bravery, tenacity, and emotional intelligence. You need to struggle and be confused so when clarity comes, the knowledge is deep. The only thing wrong with the Valley of Confusion would be to get stuck there. Zen Buddhist scholar Daisetz T. Suzuki said, “If one really wishes to be master of an art, technical knowledge of it is not enough. One has to transcend technique so that the art becomes an ‘artless art’ growing out of the Unconscious.”1
Power in a world of HOW is not power over something, but power through something, like a network, or a synapse, or a circuit; a power that connects, not a power that commands. I want to lead you to the Hill of A, and, as the Chinese philosopher Lao-Tzu said, “A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.”2 Change, progress, and personal growth require a journey, and I use that word consciously throughout the book. To be on a journey means to focus on process not product, on HOW not WHAT, and on the road not the destination. Journeys are by their nature curvilinear; they have highs and lows and require more effort for the climb than the descent. From this point on, then, I will use this two-hill model to illustrate the journey from old to new, from getting it to mastering it, and from knowledge to understanding. Since that wavy line picture I first drew seems a little less than inspirational, I’ve created Figure II.2 to illustrate these ideas. The point, of course, is exactly the same.
So let’s briefly summarize the first three chapters of this book, putting the knowledge and behaviors that are easily attained or widely known on the Hill of B, and our newer concepts we have discussed on the Hill of A.
FIGURE II.2 How We Have Been, How We Have Changed
The shifts in society and business over the past decade—from hoarding to sharing, from fortress to ecosystem, from spread-out and easily hidden to hyperconnected and hypertransparent—combine to put new emphasis on the HOWs of human behavior, the way we fill the synapses between us and others. In this second part, we begin our journey to understand and command these HOWs and to put them to work in everything we do. The first step leads us inward, to the thought processes and understandings that shape our decisions and actions toward others. A little biology, a little sociology, a little linguistics, and a little golf: This section is called “How We Think,” and in it, we’re going to begin to build a new framework for understanding a world of HOW.
CHAPTER 4
Playing to Your Strengths
We can’t solve problems by
using the same kind of thinking we
used when we created them.
—Albert Einstein
In the movie Cast Away, actor Tom Hanks plays Chuck Noland, a fictional FedEx employee marooned on a deserted island for four years after the delivery plane on which he has hitched a ride plummets into the ocean.1 He survives armed with nothing but his wits, what he can scrounge on the island, and the contents of several FedEx packages that float ashore after the crash. If you ask most people what the film is about, they will typically mention mankind’s heroic struggle to survive or—propelled as Noland is by the desire to reunite with his fiancée—the power of