Excerpt from Gandhi's Invisible Hands by Ian Desai

The very presence of such a substantial collection of books in proximity to Gandhi—who famously espoused a philosophy of non-possession—suggested that the image of simplicity and detachment long associated with the Mahatma, or “Great Soul,” was misleading: There was clearly a hidden degree of complexity to Gandhi’s life.

From the heart of this library, I began to learn that the common conception of Gandhi as a solitary, saintly hero who stood up to the British Empire and led India toward independence was incomplete. Gandhi was actually an energetic and effective director of one of the 20th century’s most innovative social enterprises. He was, in essence, an exceptional entrepreneur who relied on a tight-knit community of coworkers—and an extensive store of intellectual resources—to support him and his work.

....

Accustomed to respectful race relations from his time in London, Gandhi was startled and outraged by the racial discrimination he experienced and witnessed while living in South Africa. He resolved to fight the racial injustices around him, and by the time he finally moved back to India in 1915, two decades later, he had transformed himself from a relatively unknown provincial barrister into a political powerhouse and social reformer with an international reputation.

It was during a campaign for the rights of the Indian community in South Africa that Gandhi first came to rely on the support of a cohort of eccentric and talented men and women. Most of these collaborators—who were of both Indian and European backgrounds—were volunteers, and were housed at Gandhi’s two experimental communities in South Africa, the Phoenix Settlement and Tolstoy Farm. These institutions, loosely based on ancient Indian religious communities called ashrams, became the headquarters for Gandhi’s activism, which was based on his philosophy of Satyagraha, or “truth force,” and its attendant practice of civil disobedience.

Gandhi’s collaborators not only assisted him with the practical elements of his political campaigns and residential communities; they also served as his intellectual companions and introduced him to the writings of a variety of authors. Although he was busy juggling his legal career and increasingly high-profile political work, Gandhi took advantage of his frequent travels around South Africa to immerse himself in books on religious history, literature, politics, and other subjects of interest to him.

Though philosophically he disavowed material possessions, Gandhi became a savvy and serial collector of books and people. When he returned to India, he brought a number of his coworkers from South Africa with him as well as almost 10,000 books and pamphlets. Once in India, he chose a secluded spot outside Ahmedabad on the banks of the Sabarmati River as the site of a new ashram. The Satyagraha Ashram quickly became the focal point of Gandhi’s social and political endeavors around India and a hub for his burgeoning community of coworkers.

...

Desai officially joined Gandhi in 1917, fulfilling the vision of his future he had first shared with Narahari Parikh on their walk by the Sabarmati River. From the outset, Desai’s daily routine was grueling. He woke before Gandhi arose at 4 am in order to work on the Mahatma’s schedule and make other preparations. He was by Gandhi’s side throughout the day, taking notes on his meetings and various activities and helping him draft correspondence and articles. (Desai’s son Narayan, who grew up working with Gandhi and his father, recalled a number of occasions when Gandhi had only one change to make to Desai’s articles: He replaced Desai’s authorial initials, M.D., with his own, M.K.G.) Finally, after Gandhi had retired, Desai wrote a diary account of the Mahatma’s day so that no important detail went unrecorded.

In addition to Desai, who performed his role under the title of personal secretary, and Gandhi’s family members—especially his wife, Kasturbai—the Mahatma’s inner circle in India came to include a second secretary named Pyarelal; an English admiral’s daughter who abandoned life in Britain to live in the austere environment of Gandhi’s community after reading a biography of the Mahatma; and Columbia University–trained economist J. C. Kumarappa, among others. As many as 200 people lived with Gandhi at the Satyagraha Ashram at the institution’s zenith.

...

Of all the political events in Gandhi’s life, perhaps none is more famous than the Salt March of 1930. That theatrical act of defiance—in protest of the heavy tax on salt imposed by the British in India—catapulted Gandhi to new heights in his political career, as the image of this frail individual challenging a mighty empire captured the hearts and imaginations of millions of people around the world.

Yet like many popular conceptions of Gandhi, this image is incomplete. Absent are the 78 members of the Satyagraha Ashram who accompanied him on his march, as well as numerous aides, lieutenants, and volunteers who worked behind the scenes to stage the historic event. There would have been no Salt March, no iconic Gandhi images, without them.

A month before the march, Gandhi’s colleague Vallabhbhai Patel led a team that canvassed arid Gujarat Province to determine the best route. Chief among their considerations were the route’s proximity to salt deposits and to towns where local government officials would be likely to resign their posts on Gandhi’s arrival in support of the protest, as well as easy access for the news media so that it could report on the march’s progress. Gandhi had become a master of employing media coverage to make his efforts successful, and he and his team orchestrated the march so that it would be a sustained media event. They plotted a trail for a three-week trek from Gandhi’s ashram in Ahmedabad south toward the Arabian Sea, paralleling the railway line, which would be the primary means for maintaining communication—by both post and messengers—between the marchers and the ashram headquarters, as well as the conduit for the media covering the march.

Meanwhile, at the Satyagraha Ashram, Gandhi’s secretariat was busy marshaling evidence demonstrating the link between the salt tax and the degradation of Indian society, and publishing it in Gandhi’s weekly journalsYoung India and Navajivan, where the arguments could be picked up by mainstream media outlets. Parikh and Desai scoured the vast print resources in the ashram—not only Desai’s personal library, but the main library, which housed the thousands of books that Gandhi had brought back from South Africa—for statistics about salt and the Salt Act. Desai used these figures in articles in Young India as well as in Gandhi’s communications with the imperial government and the speeches he helped Gandhi draft. Gandhi himself contributed to the information-gathering efforts, urging associates to send him publications and other sources of information on salt and related subjects.

Gandhi’s personal accounts and other articles from the Salt March and Desai’s pieces in Young India andNavajivan detailing the narrative drama of the march, along with reports and photographs in the mainstream news media,put the Mahatma and his cause before a growing audience in India and around the world. Yet the organizational sophistication behind Gandhi’s dramatic march never got a mention in the headlines the enterprise worked so hard to produce. Its invisibility was partly by design: By effacing their own efforts, Gandhi’s associates reinforced his image as a simple and self-reliant crusader.

Ben Casnocha's Post

One interpretation of the image and caption is that it reinforces how some folks perceive the progression from novice to expert:

Stage 1: You suck.
Stage 2: You're an expert.

In fact, mastering a skill involves hundreds of stages of incremental improvement over a very long period of time.

I believe a key reason so many people on the road to mastery call it quits is not because drawing a beautiful owl in pencil is superhumanly hard. It's because they thought it would be easy.

#

Another interpretation of the image is that it's showing that step one is always "start," and step two is always "keep going and going and going until you've nailed it."

(image hat tip to Alexia Tsotsis)

"We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about."

-Charles Kingsley

Original post here.

Jay Kirk's good travel essay on Rwanda last year in GQcaptured one hard-to-describe benefit of traveling:

...There is no other place on earth where you can visit mountain gorillas one day, discover the true cosmic dimensions of the banana the next, feel haunted and overwhelmed and harrowed to your very brink, and for the same price of admission,feel more awake than you have ever felt.

Maybe it’s the cold bucket of history over the head. Maybe it’s the collective effort of everyone around you to stay conscious, the shocked look of so many people who are still just waking up from the worst nightmare of their lives to realize that, yes, it was all for real. And while it’s true that you may question whether or not you were fully awake before you got here, you will also probably spend an inordinate amount of time trying to lull yourself back to sleep, wherever you can find alcohol, because part of you will realize that being awake, really awake—well, it’s just not in your nature. That is, if you’re like me and you hail from the land of the Xbox, and you’ve become accustomed to—even begun to desire—the substitution of the virtual for the real, you probably prefer the dream to the directly experienced. But no matter how stuck you are in your digital simulator, however “experientially avoidant” you may be (as I was recently diagnosed by a cognitive-behavioral therapist), you will not remain immune to this odd sensation of waking up in Rwanda to discover, however disconcertingly at first, that not only do you have hair growing out of your arms, but your body also appears to possess these extra dimensions you had not taken into account of late. That you have been going around for some time a mere half-awake version of yourself. Just as you now realize that all along you’ve been eating these things that bear only a half-awake resemblance to a banana. And this is because, in Rwanda, a banana possesses at least seven dimensions, whereas in America, like most everything else, you get two at best.

The reason why travel is exhausting is because hyperawareness of surroundings and self is exhausting -- and that's the mode you fall into when traversing foreign lands.

Forbes India Interview: Gurcharan Das, author and former P&G India chairman

How did our society treat merchants and traders?
Merchants have not been highly regarded in India’s history. There were periods and geographies like Gujarat and coastal areas where they were. But by and large they were not so well respected in the society. They are often depicted as people who get rich by robbing the poor and this isn’t just true about India. Perhaps people did not understand how if merchants prospered, the society prospered too. What they see is the glitter — the big luxurious house that the Ambani is building. But in the process they don’t realise that people like the Ambanis contribute significantly to the social well being. This is what Adam Smith called the “invisible hands”.

What about the nexus between business and rulers?
That relationship has always been there. Buddhist monks would go to merchants to collect money and merchants would extract their pound of flesh even then. Rulers of Rajput states depended on Marwaris to fight the battles. If kings lost the battle, [the] merchant lost the money. If they won they would get different kinds of favours. Smart merchants did not give too much. Business was always scared of those with political powers. They are still scared.

Have things changed now?
After 1991, for the first time business is acquiring respect in the society. Industrial revolution began in Europe and the US, 200 years back. Their businesses are in second, third generation. And you see the philanthropic side to it with people like Bill Gates now.

Typically, when money has been there for several generations, when children are sent to the best of schools, they become genteel and are no longer hungry for money. It’s a common saying — first generation makes money, second generation wants prestige and power and it is the third generation that wants art, culture, status and aspires for respect. History reveals that money for long makes you comfortable and complacent.

Newyorker article.

Modern medicine is good at staving off death with aggressive interventions—and bad at knowing when to focus, instead, on improving the days that terminal patients have left.

...
For all but our most recent history, dying was typically a brief process. Whether the cause was childhood infection, difficult childbirth, heart attack, or pneumonia, the interval between recognizing that you had a life-threatening ailment and death was often just a matter of days or weeks.

...
There is no single way to take people with terminal illness through the process, but, there are some rules. You sit down. You make time. You’re not determining whether they want treatment X versus Y. You’re trying to learn what’s most important to them under the circumstances—so that you can provide information and advice on the approach that gives them the best chance of achieving it. This requires as much listening as talking. If you are talking more than half of the time, you’re talking too much.

The words you use matter. According to experts, you shouldn’t say, “I’m sorry things turned out this way,” for example. It can sound like pity. You should say, “I wish things were different.” You don’t ask, “What do you want when you are dying?” You ask, “If time becomes short, what is most important to you?”

Block has a list of items that she aims to cover with terminal patients in the time before decisions have to be made: what they understand their prognosis to be; what their concerns are about what lies ahead; whom they want to make decisions when they can’t; how they want to spend their time as options become limited; what kinds of trade-offs they are willing to make.
...
All-out treatment, we tell the terminally ill, is a train you can get off at any time—just say when. But for most patients and their families this is asking too much. They remain riven by doubt and fear and desperation; some are deluded by a fantasy of what medical science can achieve. But our responsibility, in medicine, is to deal with human beings as they are. People die only once. They have no experience to draw upon. They need doctors and nurses who are willing to have the hard discussions and say what they have seen, who will help people prepare for what is to come—and to escape a warehoused oblivion that few really want.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/02/100802fa_fact_gawande

Original Post here.

When we do things we’ve never done before, there’s an instant and automatic internal shift. Expectations, emotions, attitudes and beliefs (about what’s possible for us) change. The internal shift is simply a byproduct of a new experience. Of doing something we’ve never done before.

Change comes from doing. For the most part, we don’t ‘think’ ourselves different; we ‘do’ ourselves different. So to speak. We need to ‘action’ our way to internal transformation. Which is why the theory of personal development is worthless until it becomes a practical reality. Until the concepts and ideas are turned into behaviours. Some people are theoretical geniuses but practical idiots. They talk a lot but do very little.

Change comes from doing. Which is why an article like this can be transformational or worthless – it all depends on you.

The Runner

For the forty-five year-old woman who runs a half-marathon for the first time in her life, the transformation will be more emotional and psychological (internal), than it will be physical (external). She finishes her event and without focusing on anything other than the physical process, she has gained more confidence, her standards and expectations have changed, she’s less fearful and she’s more excited about her future possibilities. Her new experience has created internal shift.

The Traveller

There’s the woe-is-me guy who visits a third world country. He instantly realises that his horrible life in the USA is actually fantastic. And that his lifestyle is actually one of privilege, not disadvantage. He identifies that his self-pitying, negative attitude has always been his problem. Without even looking for it, his experience in another part of the world teaches him to acknowledge, value and appreciate what he has (which is plenty). Nothing changes but everything changes.

Source: http://stanmed.stanford.edu/2005summer/drugs-metoo.html

It’s expensive to produce an innovative drug. On average, the bill runs to more than $400 million. So drug companies often take a less costly route to create a new product. They chemically rejigger an oldie but goodie, craft a new name, mount a massive advertising campaign and sell the retread as the latest innovative breakthrough.

This strategy has shown great success for turning profits. Nexium, a “me-too” drug for stomach acid, has earned $3.9 billion for its maker, AstraZeneca, since it went on the market in 2001. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration classified three-fourths of the 119 drugs it approved last year as similar to existing ones in chemical makeup or therapeutic value.

Though there are hints that consumers are more aware of drug marketing ploys, many fall for the sales hype, despite an absence of evidence that the new drug is better than the tried-and-true remedy. In 2003, the industry spent $25.3 billion marketing drugs, according to the industry trade group Pharmaceutical Researchers and Manufacurers of America.

Nexium illustrates the drug makers’ strategy. Many chemicals come in two versions, each a mirror image of the other: an L-isomer and an R-isomer. (The “L” is for left, the “R” is for right.) Nexium’s predecessor Prilosec is a mixture of both isomers. When Prilosec’s patent expired in 2001, the drug maker was ready with Nexium, which contains only the L-isomer.

Is Nexium better? So far, there’s no convincing evidence that it is, says Stanford drug industry watcher Randall Stafford, MD, PhD.

“Newer isn’t always better, when it comes to drugs,” says Stafford, associate professor of medicine with the Stanford Prevention Research Center.

“The FDA approves drugs on the basis of their superiority to placebo, not their superiority to existing drugs,” Stafford says. “I think people misunderstand the nature of FDA approval and the criteria used to allow drugs to enter the market.”

Original Article here.

First, fictional people tend to be wittier and more clever than friends and family, and their adventures are usually much more interesting. I have contact with the lives of people around me, but this is a small slice of humanity, and perhaps not the most interesting slice. My real world doesn't include an emotionally wounded cop tracking down a serial killer, a hooker with a heart of gold, or a wisecracking vampire. As best I know, none of my friends has killed his father and married his mother. But I can meet all of those people in imaginary worlds.

Second, life just creeps along, with long spans where nothing much happens. The O.J. Simpson trial lasted months, and much of it was deadly dull. Stories solve this problem—as the critic Clive James once put it, "Fiction is life with the dull bits left out." This is one reason why Friends is more interesting than your friends.

Finally, the technologies of the imagination provide stimulation of a sort that is impossible to get in the real world. A novel can span birth to death and can show you how the person behaves in situations that you could never otherwise observe. In reality you can never truly know what a person is thinking; in a story, the writer can tell you.

So while reality has its special allure, the imaginative techniques of books, plays, movies, and television have their own power. The good thing is that we do not have to choose. We can get the best of both worlds by taking an event that people know is real and using the techniques of the imagination to transform it into an experience that is more interesting and powerful than the normal perception of reality could ever be. The best example of this is an art form that has been invented in my lifetime, one that is addictively powerful, as shown by the success of shows such as The Real World, Survivor, The Amazing Race, and Fear Factor. What could be better than reality television?

Original blog post here.

Evaluating whether an idea is good enough for a movie is a bit like an automobile expert saying a certain brand of car doesn't taste good. It's absurd. You can only hold the opinion that a particular movie concept is a good or bad idea if you don't understand what a movie is or what an idea is.

For example, here's the world's worst idea for a movie: Titanic. It did okay at the box office.

Movies are good or bad because of execution, not concept. Even outside of the movie realm, ideas generally have no economic value whatsoever, except in rare cases such as when a patent is issued. And even in those cases it's the patent law that creates the value, not the ideas.

The self-appointed movie critics went on to point out that Office Space was already a movie, so there was no room left in the universe for a Dilbert movie. That's a bit like saying there's no point in creating a romantic comedy because someone already did that one. It's a fundamental misunderstanding of what a movie is.

I've long been fascinated by the common human illusion that ideas can be sorted into good and bad, when all experience shows this not to be the case. We could play the game all day long where I describe a simply terrible idea and then tell you about the people who got rich implementing it just right. Let's try a few...

How about a comic strip that is literally a bunch of stick figures? It will be called XKCD and have no discernable characters. Done! It's the most viewed comic on the Internet.

How about a movie about two gay cowboys? Done! Academy Award!

How about a comedic TV show about a Nazi concentration camp? Done! It was called Hogan's Heroes and was a hit in its time.

How about a Broadway musical about a bunch of frickin' cats? Done!

You'd be hard pressed to come up with an idea so bad that it couldn't succeed with the right execution. And it would be even harder to imagine a great idea that couldn't fail if the execution were left to morons.

Ideas are worthless. Execution is everything.

Original article here.

The present is, as noted, characterized by lots of throwaway cultural artifacts, but the nice thing about throwaway material is that it gets thrown away. This issue isn't whether there's lots of dumb stuff online—there is, just as there is lots of dumb stuff in bookstores. The issue is whether there are any ideas so good today that they will survive into the future. Several early uses of our cognitive surplus, like open source software, look like they will pass that test.

The past was not as golden, nor is the present as tawdry, as the pessimists suggest, but the only thing really worth arguing about is the future. It is our misfortune, as a historical generation, to live through the largest expansion in expressive capability in human history, a misfortune because abundance breaks more things than scarcity. We are now witnessing the rapid stress of older institutions accompanied by the slow and fitful development of cultural alternatives. Just as required education was a response to print, using the Internet well will require new cultural institutions as well, not just new technologies.

It is tempting to want PatientsLikeMe without the dumb videos, just as we might want scientific journals without the erotic novels, but that's not how media works. Increased freedom to create means increased freedom to create throwaway material, as well as freedom to indulge in the experimentation that eventually makes the good new stuff possible. There is no easy way to get through a media revolution of this magnitude; the task before us now is to experiment with new ways of using a medium that is social, ubiquitous and cheap, a medium that changes the landscape by distributing freedom of the press and freedom of assembly as widely as freedom of speech.

-Clay Shirky's latest book is "Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age."

Guardian Article.

It is one of these events which – like the cloning of Dolly – change everything and nothing. As a proof of concept, the creation by Craig Venter et al of a bacterial cell controlled by a chemically synthesised genome is definitive. For the first time an organism exists that got its genome not from the direct replication of another organism's, but from a description of another organism's, stored in a computer – and slightly modified, at that, to include a distinguishing "watermark" that might as well be, and perhaps already is, a trademark. It's also a landmark. This is a moment in evolution, the origin of a new kingdom: the Synthetica, as artist Daisy Ginsberg has suggested we call it, supplementing nature's bacteria, eukarya, and archaea.

It's a tremendous achievement of human ingenuity and skill. And there's something wonderfully confirmatory of mechanistic materialism in the building of a genome from chemically synthesised molecules, that genome running a cell, and that cell replicating to a point where no trace of the original cell's cytoplasm is left in its descendants. This lays to rest, with a satisfying finality, the ghost of vitalism – the spooky, whiffy doctrine that there is some essence of life not captured by "reductionist" biochemistry.

On the other hand, vitalism isn't a doctrine of any major faith, besides new age theosophies and other forms of muddled thought. In my teens I caught the virus of vitalism from reading Arthur Koestler's The Ghost in the Machine – and was cured of it, ironically enough, by a creationist tract that extolled the wondrous complexity of cellular machinery: complex and wondrous enough, I realised, for life to need no other explanation. That tiny machine didn't need even the tiniest ghost.

Synthetic life, then, creates no problems even for creationists (after all, it's intelligently designed!) let alone more sophisticated theists. This won't, of course, spare us the usual TV studio parade of clergy (why them?) asked to comment – though they may find it easier than usual to give answers less stupid than the questions.

More significant than the clerics are their secular successors, the ethicists – paid to worry so we don't have to. They're already on the case. Some conjure a scenario where synthetic organisms to which there's "no natural resistance" run amok. This seems misconceived. The biosphere comes up with natural resistance to entirely new organisms every day. Unless deliberately designed for survival, synthetic organisms that are released or escape into the wild will shortly be another organism's lunch. Then there's the "playing God" objection. Professor Julian Savulescu of Oxford talks darkly about "creating artificial life that could never have existed naturally". He says that like it's a bad thing. For Venter, of course, it's the whole point.

But there are no new ethical problems here. Humanity has been playing God with animals and plants since the invention of agriculture, and our domesticated species are already the most prevalent (of their kind) on the planet. Venter has, in a neat reverse application of the precautionary principle, promoted bioethical debate about each step of his programme well before he carried them out. The dangers – of bio-error or bio-terror – may be great, but not in principle greater than those posed by natural organisms put to evil or casual use. The potential benefits, by contrast, are greater in principle. This at least is the conclusion that the United States regulatory authorities have reached. Their reasoning should not be taken uncritically, but neither should it be dismissed with a "They would say that, wouldn't they?"

Just as this synthetic bacterium is the first of a new kingdom, synthetic biology is a new way of dealing with the natural world, as radical an invention as those of agriculture or machine industry. In time it could replace both. The potential goes way beyond bacteria that can synthesise fuel or vaccines, or eat up oil spills – applications, useful though they would be, that all sound like what someone thought of off the top their head. Every foodstuff we eat could be produced by organisms designed from scratch for the purpose – as could every fibre we wear, every floor we walk on and roof we shelter under. The possibilities outstrip our imagination.

I have a big interest in education, and I think we all do. We have a huge vested interest in it, partly because it's education that's meant to take us into this future that we can't grasp. If you think of it, children starting school this year will be retiring in 2065. Nobody has a clue -- despite all the expertise that's been on parade for the past four days -- what the world will look like in five years' time. And yet we're meant to be educating them for it.

My contention is, all kids have tremendous talents. And we squander them, pretty ruthlessly. So I want to talk about education and I want to talk about creativity. My contention is that creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status. (Applause) Thank you. That was it, by the way. Thank you very much. (Laughter) So, 15 minutes left. Well, I was born ... no. (Laughter)

Kids will take a chance. If they don't know, they'll have a go. Am I right? They're not frightened of being wrong. Now, I don't mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. What we do know is, if you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original. If you're not prepared to be wrong. And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong. And we run our companies like this, by the way. We stigmatize mistakes. And we're now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. And the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities. Picasso once said this. He said that all children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up. I believe this passionately, that we don't grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather, we get educated out if it. So why is this?

Now our education system is predicated on the idea of academic ability. And there's a reason. The whole system was invented -- around the world, there were no public systems of education, really, before the 19th century. They all came into being to meet the needs of industrialism. So the hierarchy is rooted on two ideas. Number one, that the most useful subjects for work are at the top. So you were probably steered benignly away from things at school when you were a kid, things you liked, on the grounds that you would never get a job doing that. Is that right? Don't do music, you're not going to be a musician; don't do art, you won't be an artist. Benign advice -- now, profoundly mistaken. The whole world is engulfed in a revolution. And the second is academic ability, which has really come to dominate our view of intelligence, because the universities designed the system in their image. If you think of it, the whole system of public education around the world is a protracted process of university entrance. And the consequence is that many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they're not, because the thing they were good at at school wasn't valued, or was actually stigmatized. And I think we can't afford to go on that way.

Source.

Question: what are God’s views on affirmative action, the death penalty and same-sex marriage? Answer: whatever you want them to be.

That’s according to a recent study by Nicholas Epley, Benjamin Converse, Alexa Delbosc, George Monteleone and John Cacioppo, found that we tend to ascribe our own views to God.

When the researchers compared participants’ personal views with the participants’ estimates of others’ views, they found one significant pattern: there was a correlation between participants’ personal views and their estimates of God’s view. For example, participants who said they were for same-sex marriage tended to also say that God was for same-sex marriage. And participants who said they were against same-sex marriage tended to also say that God was against same-sex marriage.

Overall these results suggest that God is a blank slate onto which we project whatever we choose to. We join religious communities that argue for our viewpoint and we interpret religious readings to support our personal positions.

Source.

Interview excerpts: Chip and Dan Heath, author of Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

The Quarterly: Could you please quickly summarize the core ideas in Switch for the benefit of those who have not yet read it?

Chip Heath: The core idea is that there are two sides to the way human beings think about any issue. There’s the rational, analytical, problem-solving side of our brains, which may think, “I need to eat less.” But there’s an emotional side that’s addicted to impulse or comfortable routines, and that side wants a cookie. At work, the rational side may say that the company needs to go in a different direction. But the emotional side is comfortable with the old ways of thinking and selling, and it has great anxiety about whether the company can change successfully.

My favorite metaphor for this dynamic comes from the psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who talks about a human riding atop an elephant.1 The Rider represents our analytical, planning side. The Rider decides, “I need to go somewhere, here’s the direction I want to go,” and sets off. But it’s the Elephant, the emotional side, that’s providing the power. The Rider can try to lead the Elephant, but in any direct contest of wills the Elephant is going to win—it has a six-ton advantage. So part of achieving change, in either our lives or in organizations, is aligning both sides of the brain by pointing out the direction for the Rider but also motivating the Elephant to undertake the journey. Of course, the Path the Elephant walks down matters too. High-ranking executives can shape that Path, that environment, and make the journey easier even when the Elephant is less motivated.

The Quarterly: In helping companies to work through these conflicts and smooth the road to change, how useful is a senior executive’s formal power?

Chip Heath: The Rider–Elephant conflict may be a reason not to press too hard on formal levers. It’s not enough for people to intellectually understand that an organization must start moving in a different strategic direction. People need to be motivated.

Our typical way of communicating speaks primarily—and in a lot of cases almost exclusively—to the Rider. It builds an intellectual case for change and relies on formal authority. In government, legislators have formal authority to change the rules of the system. The US Congress once changed the national speed limit to 55 miles an hour, for example. Did that automatically change behavior? As a parent, does formal power change the behavior of your teenagers?

It’s not enough to show intellectually that we need to change and then to decree what those changes will be. If it were, a lot more organizations would succeed in making strategic shifts. Formal power is tremendously useful, but if we start by wielding it we probably haven’t aligned the Rider and the Elephant. And if we rely only on the formal levers of power to lead, we may get too far ahead of people—they understand that they must change, but the motivation hasn’t kicked in.

The Quarterly: What’s an example of the kind of formal power you think executives mistakenly exercise and an alternative that might be more effective?

Chip Heath: Consider how change initiatives are typically rolled out. In many organizations, a change initiative consists of 35 slides in a PowerPoint deck analyzing the reasons for change. There’s nothing in the deck that helps employees believe that “We’re the kind of people who can successfully make this change.”

GE overcame this problem when they started talking about “ecomagination.” CEO Jeff Immelt said, “There’s a broad social trend toward finding more sustainable ways of doing business, and if we can take advantage of that, we will be well-positioned for the future.” GE did a green audit, looking for places where they already had industry-leading green products, and started highlighting those existing products for employees. One was an LED lighting system that produces great light with 10 percent of the electricity used by other systems. GE then said, “We’re the kind of people who can succeed in this new business environment that’s more and more focused on sustainability.” That motivates the Elephant.

The Quarterly: In Switch, you use the term “bright spots” to describe internal success stories like GE’s LED system. Could you say a bit more about the power of bright spots?

Chip Heath: Many companies try change themselves by benchmarking other organizations and borrowing their procedures or practices. The irony of benchmarking is that we’re essentially telling organizations to be more like GE or Apple or Nike. As Dev Patnaik, the author of Wired to Care,4 said to me one time, we know this doesn’t work on a personal level: we resist when members of our families say, “Be more like your brother.” The principle of bright spots is that you shouldn’t try to be more like Apple; you should try to be more like yourself at your best moments. Think about what you’ve done in the past, or what you’re doing now, that has worked tremendously well.

People have a tendency, especially in a change situation, to focus on the negative. Lots of research supports this negative focus—for example, if you ask sports fans what happened over the weekend, they dwell on the games their favorite teams lost. Companies too focus on the problems and not the bright spots.

I won’t say there’s no value in benchmarking. But if you believe that organizations differ in their cultures, capabilities, and structures, there’s something fundamentally odd about saying that you want to be more like another company that has a very different culture, structure, and set of capabilities. At the very least, the idea of looking to your own bright spots is a useful addition to your tool kit.

The Quarterly: What messages do you want to leave with senior executives who are seeking to catalyze change?

Chip Heath: Pay attention to creating an emotional case for change, not just an analytical one. Scale up bright-spot successes. And use your power as a top leader to smooth the path to change. Your people are ready to step up to the plate, but if systems or procedures are getting in the way of change, you are the one with the power to eliminate them.

TED Video.

Transcript:
We might be thinking of ourselves in terms of two selves.

There is an experiencing self, who lives in the present and knows the present, is capable of re-living the past, but basically it has only the present. It's the experiencing self that the doctor approaches -- you know, when the doctor asks, "Does it hurt now when I touch you here?"

And then there is a remembering self, and the remembering self is the one that keeps score, and maintains the story of our life, and it's the one that the doctor approaches in asking the question, "How have you been feeling lately?" or "How was your trip to Albania?" or something like that.

Those are two very different entities, the experiencing self and the remembering self and getting confused between them is part of the mess of the notion of happiness.

Now, the remembering self is a storyteller. And that really starts with a basic response of our memories -- it starts immediately. We don't only tell stories when we set out to tell stories. Our memory tells us stories, that is, what we get to keep from our experiences is a story. And let me begin with one example. This is an old study. Those are actual patients undergoing a painful procedure. I won't go into detail. It's no longer painful these days, but it was painful when this study was run in the 1990s. They were asked to report on their pain every 60 seconds. And here are two patients. Those are their recordings. And you are asked, "Who of them suffered more?" And it's a very easy question. Clearly, Patient B suffered more. His colonoscopy was longer, and every minute of pain that Patient A had Patient B had and more.

But now there is another question: "How much did these patients think they suffered?" And here is a surprise: And the surprise is that Patient A had a much worse memory of the colonoscopy than Patient B. The stories of the colonoscopies were different and because a very critical part of the story is how it ends -- and neither of these stories is very inspiring or great -- but one of them is this distinct ... but one of them is distinctly worse than the other. And the one that is worse was the one where pain was at its peak at the very end. It's a bad story. How do we know that? Because we asked these people after their colonoscopy, and much later, too, "How bad was the whole thing, in total?" and it was much worse for A than for B in memory.

Now this is a direct conflict between the experiencing self and the remembering self. From the point of view of the experiencing self, clearly, B had a worse time. Now, what you could do with patient A, and we actually ran clinical experiments, and it has been done, and it does work, you could actually extend the colonoscopy of Patient A by just keeping the tube in without jiggling it too much. That will cause the patient to suffer, but just a little and much less than before. And if you do that for a couple of minutes, you have made the experiencing self of Patient A worse off, and you have the remembering self of Patient A and lot better off, because now you have endowed Patient A with a better story about his experience. What defines a story? And that is true of the stories that memory delivers for us, and it's also true of the stories that we make up. What defines a story are changes, significant moments and endings. Endings are very, very important and, in this case, the ending dominated.

Now, the experiencing self lives its life continuously. It has moments of experience, one after the other. And you ask: What happens to these moments? And the answer is really straightforward. They are lost forever. I mean, most of the moments of our life -- and I calculated -- you know, the psychological present is said to be about three seconds long. Which means that, you know, in a life there, are about 600 million of them. In a month, there are about 600,000. Most of them don't leave a trace. Most of them are completely ignored by the remembering self. And yet, some how you get the sense that they should count, that what happens during these moments of experience is our life. It's the finite resource that we're spending while we're on this earth. And how to spend it, would seem to be relevant, but that is not the story that the remembering self keeps for us.

So we have the remembering self and the experiencing self, and they're really quite distinct. The biggest difference between them is in the handling of time. From the point of view of the experiencing self, if you have a vacation, and the second week is just as good as the first, then the two week vacation is twice as good as the one week vacation. That's not the way it works at all for the remembering self. For the remembering self, a two week vacation is barely better than the one week vacation because there are no new memories added. You have not changed the story. And in this way, time is actually the critical variable that distinguishes a remembering self from an experiencing self. Time has very little impact on this story.

Now, the remembering self does more than remember and tell stories. It is actually the one that makes decisions because, if you have a patient who has had, say, two colonoscopies with two different surgeons and is deciding which of them to choose, then the one that chooses is the one that has the memory that is less bad, and that's the surgeon that will be chosen. The experiencing self has no voice in this choice. We actually don't choose between experiences. we choose between memories of experiences. And, even when we think about the future, we don't think of our future normally as experiences. We think of our future as anticipated memories. And basically you can look at this, you know, as a tyranny of the remembering self, and you can think of the remembering self sort of dragging the experiencing self through experiences that the experiencing self doesn't need.



Why do we put so much weight on memory relative to the weight that we put on experiences?

So I want you to think about a thought experiment. Imagine that your next vacation you know that at the end of the vacation all your pictures will be destroyed, and you'll get an amnesic drug so that you won't remember anything. Now, would you choose the same vacation? (Laughter) And if you would choose a different vacation, there is a conflict between your two selves, and you need to think about how to adjudicate that conflict, and it's actually not at all obvious because, if you think in terms of time, then you get one answer. And if you think in terms of memories, you might get another answer. Why do we pick the vacations we do, is a problem that confronts us with a choice between the two selves.

Now, the two selves bring up two notions of happiness. There are really two concepts of happiness that we can apply, one per self. So you can ask: How happy is the experiencing self? And then you would ask: How happy are the moments in the experiencing self's life? And they're all -- happiness for moments is a fairly complicated process. What are the emotions that can be measured? And, by the way, now we are capable of getting a pretty good idea of the happiness of the experiencing self over time. If you ask for the happiness of the remembering self, it's a completely different thing. This is not about how happily a person lives. It is about how satisfied or pleased the person is when that person thinks about her life. Very different notion. Anyone who doesn't distinguish those notions, is going to mess up the study of happiness, and I belong to a crowd of students of well-being, who've been messing up the study of happiness for a long time in precisely this way.

We know something about what controls satisfaction of the happiness self. We know that money is very important, goals are very important. We know that happiness is mainly being satisfied with people that we like, spending time with people that we like. There are other pleasures, but this is dominant. So if you want to maximize the happiness of the two selves, you are going to end up doing very different things. The bottom line of what I've said here is that we really should not think of happiness as a substitute for well-being. It is a completely different notion.

It is very difficult to think straight about well-being, and I hope I have given you a sense of how difficult it is.

I think the most interesting result that we found in the Gallup survey is a number, which we absolutely did not expect to find. We found that with respect to the happiness of the experiencing self. When we looked at how feelings vary with income. And it turns out that, below an income of 60,000 dollars a year, for Americans, and that's a very large sample of Americans, like 600,000, but it's a large representative sample, below an income of 60,000 dollars a year, people are unhappy, and they get progressively unhappier the poorer they get. Above that, we get an absolutely flat line. I mean I've rarely seen lines so flat. Clearly, what is happening is money does not buy you experiential happiness, but lack of money certainly buys you misery, and we can measure that misery very, very clearly. In terms of the other self, the remembering self, you get a different story. The more money you earn the more satisfied you are. That does not hold for emotions.

Source.

Do we take time to reflect on the events of our day — to add our own interpretation? When things strike us as unusual or lovely, do we take time to note them? These questions, I believe, are at the heart of the successful use of Twitter.

Individuals who are most skilled at using this peculiar 140-character medium are those who do notice the small details of life, who capture the moments that others of us miss, who slow down to watch and listen while most race on, and who personalize the events they see.

Source.

I’ve always thought that the next major technology disruption would come from the developing world. This could partly be just a bias on my part (most of my career has been developing computer businesses in emerging markets). The underlying logic behind this belief is that disruptive innovations are cheaper, easier to use, and bring some type of end user value that doesn’t exist in the current mainstream solution.

Emerging markets clearly require a more affordable solution. They also require something that is easy to use due to higher illiteracy rates and limited skills. Finally, in order for them to decide to use their hard-earned money on something, it has to be useful for them. Take a look at the PC. Even if someone gave PC’s away for free, you still wouldn’t see PC’s sales go through the roof. Sure, there’d be a big bump, but not to the penetration level you see with TV’s and other basic household appliances.

Even if a PC was made so easy to use (e.g. streamline and simplify the interface with large, logical icons) so someone that couldn’t read or had no computer skills could use the PC easily, they likely wouldn’t see that much value in it. The missing element is some unique value for consumers and micro-enterprises at the bottom of the pyramid. I don’t think this value exists in PC’s today.

Much has been written, by myself and others, on the tremendous growth of mobile phones in emerging markets. I’ve even considered whether it is the disruptive innovation for the PC. Mobile phones are relatively cheap (sub $100 vs. ~$300-$400 for a PC), easy to use, and provides a unique value (voice/text communication for personal and business use). I’m not all the way there yet, as the small size will always limit what can realistically be done with a mobile phone. Mobile phones also did not take off in emerging markets first.They first appeared in mature markets years before they started making their way into developing countries. So my premise that a disruptive innovation for the PC would come from emerging markets doesn’t hold for the mobile phone.

But there is one thing that is happening with mobile phones that has started first in emerging markets that has not yet fully appeared in the developed world. Mobile banking. I wrote an article last year about one of my favorite “disruptive leaders,” Safaricom (Kenya’s mobile operator), regarding their text-based payment service. Recently, I have seen several more examples of mobile banking and payment services.

The Great Equalizer, a recent blog article by Bill Barhdyt, discussed a good example of mobile banking in the Philippines, specifically the Microenterprise Access to Banking Services (MABS) program. Some highlights from the article:

In 1998 there were 23 million bank accounts and less than 500 thousand mobile phone users. Today there are 32 million bank accounts and more than 65 million mobile phone users. Through MABS, microloans, deposits, withdrawals, payments, etc. are all being executed via a mobile wallet based platform. The program provides wide network coverage including 700 rural banks with 2100 branches managing over $3.5 billion in assets with 6 million small deposit accounts. Of 1.5 million total borrowers 800,000 are micro-enterprise clients.

A friend and colleague, Janine Firpo, a microfinance “guru” that is currently in Indonesia on assignment for the World Bank to accelerate the development of mobile banking solutions posted an entry to her blog entitled Why Mobile Banking Matters. She talks about why mobile banking is perfect for the large rural populations of developing countries. In a nutshell, due to the lack of local bank branches, it takes too much time and money to use a traditional bank. She also references an article on how mobile banking is beginning in Cambodia. I’m sure I could find more examples of these type of services in the developing world.

But you will be hard pressed to find a comprehensive text-based mobile banking service in mature markets. Two of my banks, USAA and Chase, have excellent online banking capabilities. For example, I can deposit checks from home using my scanner. All my banking and payment transactions are done online. But what SMS/texting capabilities do they offer? Only one: checking your balance. Sure, smart phones are becoming more pervasive in mature markets, and will eventually increase the access to interactive banking services, whether through the internet or an application, but for the forseeable future, the majority of mobile phones in the developed world will only have basic voice and text capabilities.

My prediction: these disruptive mobile banking services will eventually make their way from the developing to the developed world.

BANKER TO THE POOR by Muhammad Yunus

Standing in front of the TajMahal in Agra, I caught our assistant headmaster, Quazi Sirajul Huq, a man beloved by his students, weeping silently. The tears were not for the monument, nor for the famous lovers who are buried there, nor for the poetry etched on the monument in white marble,no. He said he was weeping for our destiny, the burden of history that we were carrying and not knowing what to do with it.

I was only thirteen, but I was infected by his passionate imagination. Quazi Sahib electrified my imagination. He had a sublime moral influence on all of us in his care. He taught us always to aim high, and he channelled our passions and restlessness. He did not do this through preaching, but through deeds and heart-to-heart communication which had a lifelong effect on me.

In 1973, in the chaotic days following the Bangladesh Liberation war, I visited him with my father and my brother Ibrahim, and we discussed the turmoil and difficulties through which we were living. A month later, Quazi Sahib, then a frail old man, was brutally murdered in his sleep by his servant, just to rob him of a small sum of money. In those turbulent times, they never caught the murderer. Like everyone who knew him, I was devastated. In retrospect, I understood his tears at the Taj Mahal as prophetic of the suffering that fate had in store for him and his people.

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