“In 1610 Galileo announced to the world that by observing the heavens through a new instrument – what we would call a telescope – he had discovered that the universe consists of more than meets the eye. The five hundred copies of the pamphlet announcing his results sold out immediately; when a pack­age containing a copy arrived in Florence, a crowd quickly gathered around the recipient and demanded to hear every word. For as long as members of our species had been lying on our backs, looking up at the night sky, we had assumed that what we saw was all there was. But then Galileo found mountains on the Moon, satellites of Jupiter, hun­dreds of stars. Suddenly we had a new universe to explore, one to which astronomers would add, over the next four centuries, new moons around other planets, new planets around our Sun, hundreds of planets around other stars, a hundred billion stars in our galaxy, hundreds of billions of galaxies beyond our own.

“By the first decade of the twenty-first century, however, astrono­mers had concluded that even this extravagant census of the universe might be as out-of-date as the five-planet cosmos that Galileo inher­ited from the ancients. The new universe consists of only a minuscule fraction of what we had always assumed it did – the material that makes up you and me and my laptop and all those moons and planets and stars and galaxies. The rest – the overwhelming majority of the universe – is … who knows?

” ‘Dark,’ cosmologists call it, in what could go down in history as the ultimate semantic surrender. This is not ‘dark’ as in distant or invisible. This is not “dark” as in black holes or deep space. This is ‘dark’ as in unknown for now, and possibly forever: 23 percent something mysterious that they call dark matter, 73 percent some­thing even more mysterious that they call dark energy. Which leaves only 4 percent the stuff of us. As one theorist likes to say at public lectures, ‘We’re just a bit of pollution.’ Get rid of us and of every­thing else we’ve ever thought of as the universe, and very little would change. ‘We’re completely irrelevant,’ he adds, cheerfully.

“The ‘ultimate Copernican revolu­tion,’ as [astronomers] often call it, is taking place right now. It’s happening in underground mines, where ultrasensitive detectors wait for the ping of a hypothetical particle that might already have arrived or might never come, and it’s happening in ivory towers, where coffee-break conversations conjure multiverses out of espresso steam. It’s happen­ing at the South Pole, where telescopes monitor the relic radiation from the Big Bang; in Stockholm, where Nobelists have already be­gun to receive recognition for their encounters with the dark side; on the laptops of postdocs around the world, as they observe the real­time self-annihilations of stars, billions of light-years distant, from the comfort of a living room couch. It’s happening in healthy collabora­tions and, the universe being the intrinsically Darwinian place it is, in career-threatening competitions.

“The astronomers who have found themselves leading this revolu­tion didn’t set out to do so. Like Galileo, they had no reason to expect that they would discover new phenomena. They weren’t looking for dark matter. They weren’t looking for dark energy. And when they found the evidence for dark matter and dark energy, they didn’t be­lieve it. But as more and better evidence accumulated, they and their peers reached a consensus that the universe we thought we knew, for as long as civilization had been looking at the night sky, is only a shadow of what’s out there. That we have been blind to the actual universe because it consists of less than meets the eye. And that that universe is our universe – one we are only beginning to explore.

“It’s 1610 all over again.”

Author: Richard Panek

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Margaret Heffernan’s new book — Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril — couldn’t be timelier. It tackles a phenomenon that underlies many of the most outrageous disasters of recent years, from Enron to the massive fraud perpetrated by Bernie Madoff: The refusal face facts.

Heffernan nicely blends personal stories, headline events, and scientific research to paint a richly textured portrait of the ways we succumb to willful ignorance. Fortunately, we’re not hostages of our propensity to ignore reality. We can do something about it. Here are four ways to keep your head out of the sand.

1. Actively seek disconfirmation. ” Outsiders – whether you call them Cassandras, devil’s advocates, dissidents, mentors, troublemakers, fools, or coaches – are essential to any leader’s ability to see,” Heffernan writes.
2. Get some sleep. Tired people make mistakes – bad ones.  “Companies that measure work by hours could make themselves smarter by the simple act of measuring contribution by output and rewarding those who go home.”
3. Acknowledge your own biases and pursue diversity. “Diversity, in this context,” Heffernan writes, “isn’t a form of political correctness but an insurance against…blindness.”
4. Beware easy answers to complex problems. “The best decisions require testing, painful discussion, dialogue, thinking without banisters.”

“When we confront facts and fears,” says Heffernan, “we achieve real power and unleash our capacity to change.” Check out more of Margaret Heffernan’s work on her web site.

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PURPOSE

Warren Bennis, in his book On Becoming a Leader, states that all of the leaders he interviewed agreed on the following points:

They all agree that leaders are made, not born, and made more by themselves than by any external means. . . They agree that no leader sets out to be a leader per se, but rather to express him/herself freely and fully. . . Becoming a leader is synonymous with becoming yourself. It is precisely that simple, and it’s also that difficult. . . First and foremost, find out what it is you’re about, and be that.

The ongoing discovery and exploration of our sense of purpose is the central discipline of the outcome-creating stance. It is the starting place for true leadership development.

The power to create what matters in the face of sometimes difficult circumstances comes from within. It comes from passion and conviction. Passion is the energizing force of creative tension and the outcome-creating stance. Passion has its source in knowing what our purpose is, in knowing what we are here to learn, become, and do with our lives. Most people are unfamiliar with a deep and abiding sense of purpose, not because they don’t have one, but because they have not integrated a discipline of spiritual attention into their life.
My favorite description of what the process of discovering purpose is like is found in Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. The young poet of the title wrote to Rilke and enclosed samples of his work for critique. Rather than critique the poems, Rilke responded with some advice about the whole issue of why one would write poetry in the first place— and in so doing, gave a crystal clear description of personal purpose:
You ask whether your verses are good. You ask me. You have asked others before. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you are disturbed when certain editors reject your efforts. Now (since you have asked me to advise you) I beg you to give up all that. You are looking outward, and that above all you should not do now. Nobody can counsel and help you, nobody. There is only one single way. Go into yourself. Search for the reason that bids you write; find out whether it is spreading out its roots in the deepest places of your heart, acknowledge to yourself whether you would have to die if it were denied you to write. This above all—ask yourself in the stillest hour of your night: Must I write? Delve into yourself for a deep answer. And if this should be affirmative, if you may meet this earnest question with a strong and simple “I must,” then build your life according to this necessity; your life even into its most indifferent and slightest hour must be a sign of this urge and a testimony to it.
How many of us have inquired that deeply into ourselves? How many know what we “must” do or be? I submit that this kind of deep conviction and passion is uncommon, and as long as it is, genuine leadership will also remain uncommon.
Each of us is a unique spiritual entity. With that, comes our own unique longings and gifts for expressing that uniqueness in the world. We also have a host of experiences and waves of conditioning that make our uniqueness difficult to identify and take seriously. We are acculturated and taught to define our identity and safety upon getting ahead, winning, gaining approval, and meeting others’ expectations. When pursuing our purpose conflicts with these maps of identity, it is easy to lose sight of our own deeper longings. Our soul is then, in effect, held captive by our well-conditioned problem-reacting strategies. It’s very hard to even begin the search for true purpose when we are in the habit of reacting to stay safe. And so, we come back to the original dilemma presented earlier; we cannot pursue both safety and purpose simultaneously. We must make a choice. The soul is not interested in safety. The soul knows what it longs for and it is unwilling to compromise. This is the most important choice we make in life. It also determines the nature and quality of our leadership.
Our life has been speaking to us for a long time about what matters most. It has been leaving clues. It remains for us to have the courage to maintain a discipline of attention to the subtle way our soul calls to us. I frequently work with people on a simple process I call “life listening.” It involves reflecting on times in our lives when we felt most alive and also identifying times when life was as bad as it gets. When people compare these two sets of experiences, and abstract from them the elements that seemed to be present in the former and absent in the latter, they often begin to notice themes and patterns. In these life experiences lie the clues to our purpose, and for most of us clues are all we get. Paying attention to these clues, letting them point the way to our deeper longings, and defining which of these longings are “musts” is the work of this discipline.
We can find out a lot by being open to what our life experiences are trying to tell us. Some of what we find is confirming, some of it we might rather not know. Perhaps we have a deep sense of something unfinished in our lives, despite being outwardly successful. Perhaps we discover that what seems to satisfy us most is not what people want to pay us for. Perhaps we keep finding ourselves thinking about a different kind of work or about something we’ve always wanted to pursue but never have. Perhaps we are pained and plagued by the feeling that what we are doing is not what we were meant to do. I believe that we are continually trying to tell ourselves something about purpose, and that we have only to pay attention to learn something profoundly important.
I believe that the task of life, in a nutshell, is to discover our purpose and to build a life upon it. Sound simple? There are a number of complications: There are plenty of pressures around to distract us from these feelings and insights, even to tell us to “be realistic” and “get back to the real world.” In addition, life gives us plenty of clues, but for most of us only clues. It’s real work to make sense of the clues, and just when we think we’ve got it figured out, the clues keep on coming. Discovering purpose is not an event, it’s a lifelong process. The essential discipline of life and leadership is to continually pursue an understanding of our personal purpose and its meaning for the direction of our lives.
There is another complication. All of this takes courage. Just as creative tension brings with it an opportunity to react to anxiety, the pursuit of purpose can bring us face to face with our greatest fears. It’s not unusual to discover what really matters to us and be terrified. As the poet David Whyte put it in his poem, Out On The Ocean:
And the spark behind fear
recognized as life leaps into flame
always this energy smolders inside
when it remains unlit the body fills with dense smoke.
The spark is often behind fear. The love and passion we would like to discover when we encounter our purpose are accompanied by all kinds of fears related to the change required of our lives if we pursue a new direction, our perceived inadequacy to pursue it, the possibility of failure, or the conflicts we see with what others expect of us or what we have learned to expect of ourselves. Once again, we have the opportunity to move toward the problem-reacting stance in order to reduce these unpleasant or uncomfortable feelings. If we let go of purpose in this situation, we are left in a trap of our own devising—one in which we trade who we are for temporary safety––”and the body fills with dense smoke.” This is spiritual death.
The soul knows where it wants to go, and it will not accept a compromise. Leadership requires the discipline to let go and to be led by our higher purpose. It is essentially a spiritual discipline. I believe that this is the only way to achieve the staying power required to transform ourselves and our organizations—in spite of political risks, self-doubt, fear, and possible failure. Only commitment to a deep longing can sustain us, because it matters enough. Unless the results we are pursuing are connected with something deep within us, creative tension is too easily compromised and we find ourselves back where we started. The leader’s task is not only to cultivate and sustain purpose and creative tension within herself or himself but also to cultivate and sustain these things for the whole organization. There is no safe or risk-free way to do that. There is no formula for success. But there is power in it—the power that lies at the source of genuine leadership.

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Lesson #12: Open up to fear unconditionally.
“There’s nothing wrong with feeling anxious, ever, over anything at all. Fear and anxiety are part of who we are. Once we drop the pointless, wrongheaded routine about needing to get rid of them, we can carry fear and anxiety around with us through life like friendly companions. Instead of battling fear, we just let it happen, and when the fight against it dissolves, so does the torment. We slowly learn to live in harmony with fear, anxiety, and stress, expecting them to show up and welcoming them when they do.”

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Lesson #11: Keep your eyes on a guiding principle.
“Fear, anxiety, and stress can make the universe seem chaotic and bewildering, so it’s always helpful to have a compass to steer you through the maelstrom…devotion to personal values is a crucial part of learning to live with anxiety and stress…our emotional pain helps highlight what’s really important to us…’If you flip anxiety over, it tells you what you care about, what your values are’…”

“He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how.”-Friedrich Nietzsche

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Lesson #10: Build faith in yourself.
“…developing confidence that you can handle intense fear and stressful predicaments is absolutely vital…remember, worry research shows that people handle worst-case scenarios far better than they ever expected, and therapists like David Barlow like to plunge their clients into deep terror to show them reserves of strength they didn’t know they had. And in addition to building confidence through fear exposure, we can also do it through the ways that we talk to ourselves and handle worrisome visions of the future. Here’s a useful practice: next time you imagine something you fear coming to pass, visualize yourself not enduring it miserably or falling apart but coping with it well, demonstrating grit and resilience.”

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Lesson #9: Joke around.
“…thinking playfully or joking in a stressful situation helps us break out of a negative point of view…by poking fun at life’s occasional grimness, we neutralize its venom and lift ourselves above it.”

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It turns out that a brain area known as the nucleus accumbens is VERY active in teens and is the area of the brain associated with the processing of rewards aka sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. On the flip side, the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that helps us resist such temptations & is essential in our ability to make rational choices, is less developed in teens. In fact it has been shown that kids with ADHD have an immature prefrontal cortex (studies have shown that this immature prefrontal cortex eventually catches up to its peers with about a 3 year lag time).

So teens nucleus accumbens is more active than their prefrontal cortex, but as they develop into their early 20’s, there prefrontal cortex (usually & hopefully) becomes more active than their nucleus accumbens. Thus we see what we call maturity. We also see more rational choices, less car accidents, less impulsive & risky behavior.

You see, son, science can be helpful & fun…

(information based on a book: How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer)

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Lesson #8: Reframe the situation.
“when the procession of negative biases and anxious thoughts starts marching through our heads, we always have an important choice to make: do we buy into a falsely pessimistic interpretation of what’s going on, or do we learn to see things differently? ‘I like to say you can make an emotional molehill into an emotional mountain, which is what people do all the time’..according to psychologist Kevin Ochsner…he stresses the importance of recontextualizing: staying grounded in reason and reminding ourselves of the doubtlessly more positive reality of our situation…’When you change the way you appraise a situation, you change your emotional response to it.'”

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