May 10
2010
Two recent events, the Eyjaffallajokull volcano eruption and the BP oil spill, have, for many people, shaken their thinking around agency, intervention, design, power and humility.
What is the last thing that humbled you, and why?
John gave the final word
As an entrepreneur, I’m used to facing long odds on things, and good at convincing myself that with creativity, resourcefulness, focus, and force of will I can overcome the odds. But the real truth is that success in most, if not all, things comes down to human relationships. Relationships take attention, care, time, sensitivity, investment…. you can’t manufacture new ones through sheer will and you can’t expect existing ones to endure starvation for very long.
No matter how superhuman you get in your productivity or efficiency at certain work-related activities, relationships continue to move at human speed. In that sense relationships are the great humbler — they remind us all that we’re just ordinary human beings dependent on other human beings to stay alive, in the fullest sense of it.
Monday, May 10 at 4:34pm
A humbling from the ordinary: Last night my flight from Seattle was delayed (no ash cloud, just good old San Francisco fog) and I decided to do a little work on my netbook, using Gmail, instead of my typical email client. Today I woke up and see, in my horror, that a message I wrote to my colleagues ABOUT a prospective client was instead sent TO that prospective client. While it wasn’t slanderous, it was critical and had other content than sunshine and lollipops. I’m horrified and nauseated and definitely humbled: humbled because I have expectations of perfection for myself and for those around me, because gaffes can damage relationships and impact business success. Because I am critical of my team when they make these mistakes, and here I go doing exactly that mistake. Second, while I’m pretty sure I can blame the design of Gmail (which threads messages together by subject line perhaps independent of recipient/addressee) the fact is that as the user, I must also blame myself because I caused this awkwardness by my own actions. Feeling like the “users” we study who blame themselves for failures in the product is also humbling.
Monday, May 10 at 12:17pm
I’ll add my humbling nature experience: not waves but sand dunes and red rocks, in the Atacama desert a few years ago or the Grand Canyon last year (I know soooo cliché, but it works). I even thought that an annual trip to the desert should be a mandatory vacation for the peace of our souls, especially those New York minds and souls who get all worked up about nothing: one feels so tiny, so unimportant in these settings. It is a healthy rite of passage, and I cannot imagine any man-made object creating such a strong impression. Perhaps human dignity “at stake” would be another possible option to humble our minds, or the sheer genius of a Shakespeare (went to see ‘Hamlet’ last night)… in the end it’s all about a nature-made, not a man-made humbling process.
Monday, May 10 at 12:20pm
I took a train ride up to Albany for a political event I helped organize, that gorgeous ride that follows the Hudson all the way up. For huge portions of the ride, it’s like I’m Henry Hudson. The wilderness is pristine, I see no civilization. Every now and then an industrial revolution era structure pops up – a factory right on the river. A power plant. “Sing Sing” prison. And AT&T is completely malfunctioning, so I have no emails or tweets or anything to follow up on. I am humbled at what life was like before we kind of messed everything up in pursuit of things like innovation, technology growth, and scalability. I wonder about my role in all of this, as a business person, a teacher, a writer.
Monday, May 10 at 3:06pm
My dear Allan. Yes, I am humbled by the forces of nature. But I am equally angry at the weakness of man. You were stuck in Milan for a week away from your family. I was stuck in London away from mine. Europe lost billions every hour. Airlines were going bankrupt. But only days later, most of us home safely, news was back to normal and we were again obsessing over the excesses of Greece. Who cared only four or five days later?
How did the plight of the thousands stranded disappear overnight? I know my flight, the first from London to Rome, was shockingly empty. But my story of being abused by American Express aside (http://williamdrenttel.posterous.com/returning-home-from-heathrow-on-empty-plane-c), what of the thousands truly stranded? How do airlines and governments fail so easily.
Tonight, I have friends trapped in Dublin enroute to Rome. Again, only weeks later, by volcanic dust. Again, weeks later by nature that will not be tamed.
But the failures of government, the failures airlines (and oil companies), should not make us feel humbled before power. They should make us angry.
Monday, May 10 at 3:18pm
I am a bit with William.
I was going to say something like ‘music.’ I find music really humbling. Not this or that piece which when it shuffles on without my realizing it suddenly does amazing things to my body that I quite simply do not understand. But rather, music in general; the fact that all around me, everywhere, through more or less badly designed devices that get caught up with all the other crap in our bags, people are listening to music, going to great lengths to soundtrack their lives. I am repeatedly humbled by the fact that in these depressingly economically materialist times, one of the great mostly unnoticed facts about humans is that they are deeply committed in terms of time and money and general psychology to that weirdly immaterial phenomenon called music. Even if the guy next to you on the subway has terrible taste in the latest pop, the ticks that he is broadcasting out of his horrible little earphones declare repeatedly – what really matters is pleasure, this strange and difficult to pin down pleasure that is music.
So I was going to say that, but then I thought – enough already with this outdated quietest romanticism. The correct reaction, the one we so desperately need right now, is not the humbled response, the one that sits back in passive wonder; but rather, the instantly mobilizing response, the one that demands that you find others who love that thing to, so that you can all band together and begin to shout down the borings who want to drill holes in which they can hide their uninteresting economically rational heads in.
We need to NOT be humbled by the belching of risks-realized by too-thinly-insured-in-order-to-maximize-profits energy or financial systems. We need instead to be excited at the amazing agility of people to self-organize in response to what airlines and oil companies and governments refuse to even contemplate is possible. We need to not be humbled, nor to forget so quickly, as William says, that we can change; that radical social change is not just possible (or tediously necessary), but desirable.
Down with being-humbled. (written to the soundtrack of Nik Baertsch’s Ronin)
Monday, May 10 at 4:54pm
John gave the Final Word
Allan, what a great question. As an entrepreneur, I’m used to facing long odds on things, and good at convincing myself that with creativity, resourcefulness, focus, and force of will I can overcome the odds. But the real truth is that success in most, if not all, things comes down to human relationships. Relationships take attention, care, time, sensitivity, investment…. you can’t manufacture new ones through sheer will and you can’t expect existing ones to endure starvation for very long.
No matter how superhuman you get in your productivity or efficiency at certain work-related activities, relationships continue to move at human speed. In that sense relationships are the great humbler — they remind us all that we’re just ordinary human beings dependent on other human beings to stay alive, in the fullest sense of it.
Monday, May 10 at 4:34pm
My humbling moment hit me like a freight train this past Saturday, after having spent 10 weeks on the road for our (Project H’s) cross-country Design Revolution Road Show, which was both invigorating and exhausting. On Saturday, I went to see my grandmother, the most amazing 90-year old force-of-nature, who after decades of ballet and race walking and opera singing, is now in a wheelchair and struggles with daily mobility, vision, and communication. While on the road, I took up long-distance running to combat stress and stay in shape amidst the thousands of miles of fast-food-only Middle America, and didn’t realize just how lucky I was to be on a crazy adventure, running on healthy(ish) legs, until I saw my grandmother that day. I was humbled by her spirit and life, despite her physical limitations. It bothers me that it takes a moment like that to make me shut up and be grateful, and also to remember why I do what I do, and why (and for whom) it matters. In humility, however, comes the kick-in-the-ass to make change and get back to work (with grandma in mind).
Monday, May 10 at 7:41pm
On the global/environmental level, the last thing that humbled me was probably the Mojave Desert. Spending the day driving through it really reoriented my sense of scale—the vastness of that single desert being nothing compared to the enormity of the state, the country, and so on.
But at a level closer to home, I’ve recently been humbled by a new media project I launched with a small team two weeks ago today (or I should say by the response to the project), which brought the power of social networks and the strength of collective creativity into beautiful, overwhelming focus. I was humbled first by the speed with which word of the project spread over Twitter, fueled by wild enthusiasm. I was humbled next by the number of submissions we received from all over the world. Most of all it’s been humbling to see how an idea gains strength when it’s open, collaborative, and flexible. Creative motivation multiplied by the power of the internet is a genuinely humbling force.
Tuesday, May 11 at 3:26pm
I don’t know about the last thing or the first thing, but I know that what humbles me everytime I have gone into the field has been the joy, the spirit, the generosity, kindness and willingness to share, with a stranger, of those who live in conditions we would consider as harsh, uncertain and disturbing.
The resilience, cooperation and sense of community of those whom we call “bottom of the pyramid”, their entrepreneurial approach to opportunity and their commitment to making a better life for their children.
All of these and more humble me.
Tuesday, May 11 at 5:12pm
Chalk mine up to the nature column as well. My most humbling moment is also attributable to tectonics – but of the other variety: earthquakes. Back in ’89 I was on a long lost weekend in San Francisco when the Loma Prieta quake struck. I was in the old SF library main branch prepping for an interview at Grey advertising. As a native New Yorker it took a few beats to discern what was happening but eventually it clicked in. What was humbling was the sheer helplessness and the irrefutable realization that we – with all the schemes we construct to make meaning and sense of the world – are here at the invitation of chance. Truth be told, the planet is indifferent to our existence, which is ironic because on the one hand we have the power to destroy it and on the other it gives not a whit about us. That experience bestowed upon me a wide range of unlikely gifts but chief among them has been a deep if fickle sense of perspective. As designers we’re empowered by our ability to passionately care about the activities we engage in, but all that we’re engaged in can often seem petty – if not downright absurd. I guess I’ve learned to care about what I do but never to be so precious about it that I cannot turn on a dime if the occasion demands it.
Who knows – you might not have a tomorrow to get it right.
Wednesday, May 12 at 1:13am
Lately I am regularly humbled by 20-something American social entrepreneurs. I am blown away by their energy, action and the drive with which they are creating change and working to address systemic issues and generate new forms of value. My partner on a large social innovation initiative at the moment, Jerri Chou, founder of The Feast Social Innovation conference, is illustrative of this breed that humble me so. She humbles me daily.
This breed, they are ‘digital natives’; they are highly collaborative, they work fluidly and have the leadership and connections to galvanize the power of many others to fund, build or distribute the ventures/solutions they/we/us are working with. They are infecting others; and indirectly challenging the current mechanized and proprietary workings of business and institutions.
I’ve been writing about the Generative Paradigm recently; at the heart of this is the potential of humanity to address the world’s pressing issues but also to thrive and flourish in equilibrium. I see a convergence of sustainability/climate change, beyond growth economics and the social web happening. At the heart of this convergence is a recognition of the potential of humanity to drive change and flourish: in essence, highly empowered, autonomous, collaborative, empathic and engaged citizens, working from the point of view of abundance and civic sharing versus fear. Communication technology has been the key enabler for the emergence of the Generative Paradigm.
This generative breed humble me; but mainly they give me a vision of a future that I did not see before. A future where humanity can better serve the problems it faces because society and economics are designed to do exactly this.
Friday, May 14 at 1:36pm
Now THAT is humbling… Kind words you never expected to hear. The recognition of serendipitous moments from the past that have changed your life’s course completely. The knowledge that it’s but for the grace and chance of life (or maybe something larger) that you’re doing the work you’re doing. And the love and support of friends. If we’re talking about the most recent moment in time, I guess this one would take the cake :)
Friday, May 14 at 1:49pm
Feeling like an outsider in my native culture and country after a recent repatriation from Asia. While, in many ways, being an outsider is an absolute privilege as it gives one the chance to see and experience with fresh senses, it also exposes the tenuous threads of self-identity and relationships. Both sides of this experience are extraordinarily humbling.
Friday, May 14 at 5:13pm
My visit to Laoshan, the cradle of Taoism.
I should backtrack to mention that I had just spent a week with a client in Beijing. I won’t entertain you with visions of a dystopian future, but you get the idea. We escaped to the coastal town of Qingdao, which turned out to be more “Beijing by the Sea” than the quaint seaside fishing village I had imagined. Longing to catch a glimpse of blue sky, we decided to get the hell out of dodge, and as fate would have it, we found a very rare English speaking cab driver and clung to her like two drowning men clinging to a floating log. She merrily suggested a drive up the coast to Laoshan, and we thankfully took her lead, agreeing on a fare for the day.
The ride up the coast quickly revealed to me the underlying beauty of a land that is currently experiencing quite possibly the most unbridled effects of human development in history. As the layers of the city quickly peeled away from us, a drive reminiscent of the Amalfi coast in Italy unfolded before us. The frighteningly massive condo villages on the outskirts of Qingdao gave way to a tapestry of rich and lush green tea plantations carpeting the hillsides above coastal villages. We saw almost no other foreign tourists for the next several hours as we made our way up the coast to the Taoist temple in the mountains.
It was only upon wandering deeply into the layers of the wooded temple that I understood where we had found ourselves, and the intensity of the moment was palpable. Laoshan, which is both the name of the province and of the mountain, the tallest on the China coast, is widely considered to be the cradle of Taoism. For millennia, Chinese leaders and followers of the folk religions that form the basis of Taoism flocked to the area to encounter the spirits that live among the flowing waters, rock formations and trees of this beautiful enclave. Many of the cypresses, elms and ginko trees here have lived longer than entire nations, dating back to the Han, Tang and Song Dynasties (206BC-AD1279). Suffice to say, there’s some serious spiritual energy here.
The question posed is about being humbled. The primary tenets of Taoism are compassion, moderation, and humility. Taoist thought focuses upon nature, the relationship between humanity and the cosmos, health, longevity, and wu wei (action through inaction). Taoism is said to be concerned with “the flow of the universe, or the force behind the natural order, equating it with the influence that keeps the universe balanced and ordered.” Translated by Obi-Wan Kenobi for my generation: “It’s an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the galaxy together.”
Taoism also states that man may gain knowledge of the universe by understanding himself. In my journey and “career path” I have been focusing all of my energy on identifying ways that we as humans can design and re-design things for the greater good. While it didn’t quite sink in at the time, in retrospect my visit to the grounds of Laoshan temple was a physical reminder that, whether the intention is enlightenment or environmental protection or social good, we are bound together in a long and rich history of humans finding our place in the universe and in so doing finding ourselves.
Friday, May 14 at 7:56pm
Keywords
Selected list of words appearing in this and other conversations.
Phil Hamlett
Graduate Director, School of Graphic Design, Academy of Art University
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the last time i saw the pacific ocean (a few weeks ago). any trip to the water’s edge always serves to reset one’s sense of scale — but there’s something about the way the pacific pounds on relentlessly on the shore that makes me feel as though i am but a speck.
Monday, May 10 at 11:02am