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Reviewing “The Social Network” – Constructing Grand Narrative

The debate has begun.  Many who know Mark Zuckerberg and his company are upset about the inaccuracies in The Social Network.  Movie critics on the other hand love the movie.  Few, though, are reflecting on what these two sets of reactions tell us about the moment we are living in.

We live in the midst of a social revolution and this movie represents the effort of mass media to make sense of the changes going on around them.  Facts are not important.  It is about symbols, metaphors and mythologies. It is about constructing grand narratives to shape our understanding of why things are happening.

And in this corner of the ring . . .

Let’s start by addressing at face value the two sides.  The Social Network is full of inaccuracies according to those who are close to the personalities and the companies.  David Kirkpatrick, author of the now definitive book on Zuckerberg’s company, does a great job of summarizing the major inaccuracies that underlie the entire film in his commentary here.

The response of the movie creators is that this is not a documentary and not meant to be accurate in all dimensions. Entertainment must be served first and foremost.  This strikes me as a bit disingenuous, although all too common of Hollywood, given that the movie purports to be about real people and real historical events, down to the final trailers telling us what happened to each of the major characters. In fact, none of the key players in the making of this film has ever met Mark Zuckerberg, the subject of the movie.  And neither the Director nor the scriptwriter has ever participated in his online social network.  As we will see, though, the core inaccuracy of the film is key to supporting the mainstream media view of what is going on.

On the other side of the fence, we have the movie reviewers in the mainstream media who have, almost without exception, been ecstatic about the movie.  In fact, the website Metacritic indicates that the movie now has a metascore of 97, based on 40 movie reviewers, the highest score of any movie currently showing.  In fact, this metascore puts it into the top 20 of movies of all time, along with The Godfather and Lawrence of Arabia.

Roger Ebert calls it “the film of the year…so far” and gives an ecstatic review here. David Denby calls it “brilliantly entertaining.”  Peter Travers  gushes “The Social Network lights up a dim movie sky with flares of startling brilliance” and “it gets you drunk on movies again.”

Now, admittedly, this is a very good movie.  It is well acted, the dialogue is wonderful and fast-paced, visually it captures and holds the attention, the music score reinforces the dramatic arc – all in all, it is well constructed and deeply entertaining. Everyone should see the movie as a compelling and beautiful example of story- telling.  But is it really up there with The Godfather and Lawrence of Arabia?

Who's got status?

Clearly this movie is speaking powerfully to these mainstream media reviewers.  But what is it saying?  It is ultimately about the tragedy of the social revolution that is playing out around us.
I don’t think it is accidental that the movie is called “The Social Network”.  From the outset, this movie is not really about Zuckerberg’s company (which it only describes in the most fragmented way), but about the evolution or, rather, revolution in social networks.  More specifically, it is about redefining status within social networks.

The movie reeks of obsession with status.  It is set largely on the Harvard campus where, for many, status is everything.  Of course, simply being a student at Harvard is a mark of status. This becomes clear from the first scene when Mark Zuckerberg’s girlfriend from Boston University is made painfully aware that Harvard is better. But Harvard students are themselves made aware that there is a deeper hierarchy even at this pinnacle – real status is being “punched” to join one of the elite and very private social clubs at Harvard, and there is a pronounced hierarchy even among and within these clubs.

As an aside, the focus on status perhaps helps to explain the appalling presentation of women in the movie.  With few exceptions, women are portrayed as drunken and drug addled pursuers of men with status, whether it is the buses of women from a lowlier college pulling up for a party at a Harvard social club or the women hanging out as Facebook groupies in Silicon Valley.  Apparently, while the sources of male status may change, women remain second class participants in these social networks, desperately seeking to be around males with status. It is clearly a man’s world under either regime.

The mainstream media, especially Hollywood, is all about status, so it can relate in a visceral and powerful way to this theme.  But the movie is ultimately about new technology platforms that are undermining traditional forms of status and creating global foundations for new forms of status. And mainstream media can really relate to this. As the mainstream media crumbles, wrestling with loss of audience, corresponding loss of advertisers and never-ending rounds of layoffs of creative talent, people in this industry are deeply aware of the revolution playing out around them.

Constructing a narrative of the revolution

What to make of this revolution?  To accept it as profound and enriching would be too difficult.  On a deeply personal level, it is tragic.  A way of life that mainstream media participants were brought up to admire and aspire to is dissolving. But the narrative of The Social Network is not that it is tragic for those who achieved status the old way.  Rather, it is tragic for the revolutionaries.  They are achieving what they wanted, but finding it empty.  This is the real message of the movie and deeply satisfying to those on the mainstream media ramparts watching the hordes gather for the final assault on the old regime.

But to construct this narrative, some license with the truth would be required.  David Kirkpatrick informs us that Zuckerberg was uninterested in joining the Harvard social clubs.  The movie on the other hand suggests from the first scene that he very much wanted to get in and was deeply resentful of those, including his best friend, who did get in. In fact, Zuckerberg was driven by a very different motivation – a desire to catalyze a very different kind of social network, one defined by sharing and transparency, rather than hiding behind brick walls and conducting humiliating rituals and holding drunken orgies.

The tragic hero

Motivation is one thing, character is another.  It is particularly hard to admire the revolutionary that is breaching the walls.  So a little more license with the facts is in order.  The movie portrays Zuckerberg as a person incapable of forming deep relationships with others and as someone who would in fact betray many of those he dealt with.  The key point in the movie is that the relationships he developed were not deep or meaningful, but superficial and calculating, much like the caricature of the online social network world held by those who view the virtual as the enemy of the physical. The last scene of the movie is particularly poignant, showing Zuckerberg trying to “friend” on his social network platform the woman who dumped him in the opening scene of the movie and checking back repeatedly to see if she had accepted.

In fact, as David Kirkpatrick and others who know Zuckerberg well, point out, Zuckerberg is shy and reserved (I like him already) but also has little insecurity, anger or resentment. He has a rich network of personal relationships, including a woman he started dating shortly before launching Thefacebook (as it was known then) and with whom he now lives.

But these facts don’t support the story that the movie wants to tell.  Of course, they could have made Zuckerberg evil, but they didn’t.  They made him a deeply tragic and flawed character who was simply trying to connect with the social networks around him and, as an outsider, ended up creating a new order that also was deeply flawed.  True, his social network platform has 500 million plus participants and is still growing rapidly.  True, Zuckerberg is the youngest self-made billionaire in history, but he could never create more than superficial relationships while pining for the real relationships that were beyond his grasp. And the real tragedy, according to the movie, is that the social network catalyzed by Zuckerberg is replacing real relationships with superficial relationships for everyone.

In case this message is not clear enough to the audience, the movie reviewers hammer it home.  Here is Peter Travers: “Fincher and Sorkin . . . define the dark irony of the past decade. The final image of solitary Mark at his computer has to resonate for a generation of users (the drug term seems apt) sitting in front of a glowing screen pretending not to be alone.” A key part of the grand narrative is to explain the large and growing following of social networks in terms of addiction.  In fact, one of the characters in the movie, observing the rapid adoption of Facebook exclaims:  "1,000 people overnight?  If I was a drug dealer I couldn't give away drugs to that many people!"

Or, here is David Denby: “ After all, Facebook, like Zuckerberg, is a paradox: a Web site that celebrates the aura of intimacy while providing the relief of distance, substituting bodiless sharing and the thrills of self-created celebrityhood for close encounters of the first kind.”

An historical tragedy of epic proportions

There it is in a nutshell.  The revolutionary is winning but the victory will be empty.  He has taken something good and transformed it into something shallow. The narcissists have won and distracted everyone from the depth and substance that we, in the mainstream media, have been providing.  The world will be worse off, defined by alienation and loneliness.  It is a tragedy of global and historic proportions. 

Seen through this lens, the distortions in the movie are not simply there to create a more engaging story; they are there to help construct a narrative of the revolution that helps to reassure the ancien regime that they were on the side of humanity.  It is no wonder that the mainstream movie reviewers are jumping out of their seats and offering standing ovations.

Addendum:

The mainstream media continues to gush over this movie –

"Once in a generation  . . . a tour de force." – Stephen Holden

"A brilliant movie" – Frank Rich

"It sends you out of the theater buzzing, breathless and eager to tell all of your friends . . . that you've just seen what might end up being the best picture of the year." – Bob Mondello

"Devastating and dazzling.  It lifts you to a state of exhilaration." – Joe Morgenstern

"Truly great." – Lou Lumenick

"Exhilarating." – Ann Hornaday

The Great Reset

Here’s a paradox.  Silicon Valley’s success hinges on an explosive mix of people and place.  Yet, when most Silicon Valley denizens gather to discuss opportunities, conversation quickly narrows to a discussion of data flows and virtual platforms. People and place rarely are front and center, unless of course the entrepreneur is trying to configure the right management team to go make a pitch to a VC firm on Sandhill Road.

Richard Florida, on the other hand, is all about people and place.  Better than anyone, he deeply understands that people and place shape outcomes in profound ways. In a number of previous works, including The Rise of the Creative Class, The Flight of the Creative Class and Who's Your City?, Richard has focused attention on the ability of specific places to attract and retain certain kinds of people.  He makes a compelling case that the right diversity of people in certain places will determine whether the place will prosper or decline.

In particular, Richard has emerged as an articulate contrarian to the prevailing view that “the world is flat.”  In fact, he convincingly demonstrates that the world is becoming increasingly spiky – people are moving at an increasing rate into densely populated cities, even with all the benefits of digital infrastructures that supposedly make geographic location irrelevant. Richard is relentless in his view that people and places matter more than ever.

The history of Great Resets

He has just written a compelling new book, The Great Reset, that takes a longer term historical view of changing patterns in the settlement of people and places. In fact, he makes a strong case that we are entering a third major reset .  From his perspective, Great Resets are precipitated by economic crises and set into motion a remaking of the economy in ways that allow it to recover and begin growing again. So far, the US has had three major resets over the past 150 years, once in the 1870s, once in the 1930s and now today.

As Richard explains it:

A true Reset transforms into simply the way we innovate and produce but also ushers in a whole new economic landscape.  As it takes shape around new infrastructure and systems of transportation, it gives rise to new housing patterns, realigning where and how we live and work.  Eventually it ushers in a whole new way of life . . . 

He goes on to emphasize that

Economic systems do not exist in the abstract; they are embedded within the geographic fabric of the society – the way land is used, the locations of homes and businesses, the infrastructure that ties people, places and commerce together . . . . A reconfiguration of this economic landscape is the real distinguishing characteristic of a Great Reset.

For Richard, economic landscape is not just a metaphor, it is quite literally the way we organize ourselves across the land. “Every major economic era gives rise to a new, distinctive geography of its own.” He further elaborates:

Great Resets are defined not just by innovation but by massive movements of people. . . . These are times when talent flows out of some places and into others. . . . These talent Resets thus shift the balance of power among cities and regions as well as among nations. Locations rise or fall based on their ability to attract, retain and productively use talent of all sorts – from brilliant innovators to unskilled laborers.

The first Great Reset in the 1870s was defined by a revolution in transportation technology and energy systems which in turn led to a fundamental shift in the organization of production, known as the “American system of manufacture.” As result, industrial cities grew bigger and more complex, segmenting into specialized neighborhoods and business areas.

The second Great Reset in the 1930s was similarly fueled by the deployment of new transportation and communication infrastructures. The introduction of modern assembly lines combined with much more efficient wholesale and retail distribution channels led to even more scale in business activities. As companies moved production activity to new locations outside the urban center, residents followed suit, moving farther and farther out into suburban sprawls, prompted by government subsidies to home ownership. The Sunbelt also emerged as an area of great population growth. 

Richard draws on the work of David Harvey to make the case that Great Resets result in “spatial fixes” that ultimately help to resolve economic crises through large-scale movement of people and channel capital into more productive uses. But these spatial fixes tend to be temporary, ultimately leading to further spatial fixes down the road.

Where we are now

The current economic crisis is precipitating the third Great Reset, as the growing imbalance between the movement of manufacturing offshore and suburban mass consumption supported by growing consumer debt became too precarious to sustain. Richard notes that we are in the midst of yet another major economic transition, driven by new infrastructures and global competition:

Our own collapse, in the early years of the twenty-first century, is the crisis of the latest economic revolution – the rise of an idea-driven knowledge economy that runs more on brains than brawn. It reflects the limits of the suburban model of development to channel the full innovation and productive capabilities of the creative economy.  The places that thrive today are those with the highest velocity of ideas, the highest density of talented and creative people, and the highest rate of metabolism. “Velocity” and “density” are not words that many people use when describing suburbia.

Sound familiar?  As knowledge flows trump knowledge stocks, we are once again rearranging people and places to support a new wave of innovation and economic growth.  What will this new economic landscape look like?

Here are some of Richard’s observations. We will need to be even more welcoming of talent born outside of the United States since these people already account for a significant portion of the innovation occurring within our borders.  We will need to move away from finance capitalism to renew our focus on the “real economy”, especially investing in technology, human capital and infrastructures that can support builders rather than traders. In parallel, “we need to grow more jobs that are high in analytical and social skills, but we also need to increase the analytical and social skills of the jobs we have.”  He discusses an unprecedented “geographic sorting of people by ability and educational attainment” as some cities prove far more effective in attracting and retaining creative talent,
sucking in talent from much less successful cities. Many cities are growing dumber as others grow ever smarter.

And cities overall continue to grow, morphing into megaregions – “the concentrations of population that encompass several cities and their surrounding suburban rings – that have grown swiftly in recent years.”  The hub cities of these megaregions represent a significant magnet for young, mobile, well-educated people. Richard notes:

Across the board, [Gen Y members] said that the ability to meet people and make friends was of paramount importance. These young people intuitively understand what economic sociologists have documented: that vibrant social networks are key to landing jobs, moving forward in your career, and securing personal happiness.

Following in the path of Jane Jacobs and Robert Lucas, Richard also focuses on cities as key engines of economic growth. He cites research showing that large cities boast high rates of innovation and wealth creation and that “metabolisms” (the ability to transform inputs into economic outputs) of large cities actually accelerate as cities become bigger. In part, this is because large cities are more adept at reabsorbing talented workers – helping to explain why unemployment rates in the very largest cities in the US were actually lower than the national average during the current downturn.  Surprisingly, research suggests that densely populated cities are also greener than more distributed populations and that the rate of carbon emission growth less rapidly than the population growth of a large city.

If the Great Reset involves a massive restructuring of the economy as a means to drive new growth, any government policies designed to support and reward the old way of doing things runs a severe risk of prolonging the economic downturn. He is deeply critical of much of the government policy response to the economic crisis: “. . . we need to spend less time and effort bailing out and stimulating the old economy and a lot more on building the new.” He observes that:

The notion that only manufacturing or high-tech jobs are the source of innovation and growth is precisely what put and currently keeps the economy in its current job-creating rut.  From where I sit, service jobs offer lots of potential for innovation, entrepreneurship, and the upgrading of employment opportunities.

The ability to move ever more rapidly is a key theme of The Great Reset.  In that context, Richard suggests that we will see a significant shift away from home ownership to home rental, representing a major reversal of trends over the past decades. As he points out, “mobility and flexibility are key principles of the modern economy. Home ownership limits both.”

Comparing the Great Reset and the Big Shift

In reflecting on Richard Florida’s wonderful and provocative book, I am struck by its complementarity with the Big Shift framework we developed in The Power of Pull. That’s not surprising, given that his previous work very much influenced our perspective.  We also believe that we are in the midst of a longer-term profound shift in the economy, although we would date the shift much earlier than the current financial crisis. We would also place far more emphasis on the role of new generations of technology infrastructure, especially the Internet, in driving these changes than Richard does (the Index of his book has no reference at all to the Internet and the only infrastructure it references, true to the emphasis on people and place, is transportation infrastructure). 

Yet we agree that people and place are becoming more and more important at the same time. The increasing spikiness of our world is driven at least in part by the growing importance of flows of tacit knowledge that typically flourish with physical proximity.  Densely settled cities are becoming more central to innovation and economic growth, rather than less. In this light, Richard Florida’s book is essential reading – it describes yet another stage in the unfolding economic and social geography that will shape our transition from a diminishing returns world to an increasing returns world.

Passion and Flow

As I dive deeper into passion, I’m frequently asked: “isn’t this just another term for Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi’s concept of “flow?” Indulge me with a brief detour before I answer this question more directly.

Leaving rules behind - exploring the edge in extreme sports

Since the 1980s, a feud has raged between skiers and snowboarders, resulting in apartheid on slopes all over the world. In the US, Alta Ski Area, Deer Valley and Mad River Glen in Vermont snowboarding has been banned altogether.

Douglas Rushkoff’s 2006 book Screenagers: Lessons in Chaos from Digital Kids boils the hostility down to etiquette:

They don’t even take lessons. They wear weird clothes, talk like surfers, and represent a complete break from the time-honored tradition of skiing. And if that weren’t enough, they seek out the bumps and avoid the smooth straightaways.

Rushkoff points out that “boarding” had become endemic in sporting subcultures in a digital age. He calls surfers “children of chaos,” as athletes whose chosen field is not subject to the measure, manicure and temperature control enjoyed by almost any other sport.  The ocean is complex and unpredictable (dynamical to use Rushkoff’s term), and the surfers who ride it do not have the pretence of “taming” it. They prefer the unpredictability of the edge.

Surfing may have started the trend, but young people everywhere have embraced its chaos-ethics, as with snowboarders who prefer the lawless mountains, and skateboarders who similarly challenge themselves to “make the most of a particular set of surfaces”—in this case the contours of the urban landscape. The key distinction between extreme and traditional sports involves the place of “rules.” For young athletes today, there are none. Their practices push them to the edges of a society who deems them “punks”—uncomprehending of the staggeringly high level of skill these so-called punks develop.

Because the ethics of board sports are so rooted in pushing limits and breaking rules, theirs is a culture of one-upmanship, where athletes attempt to outdo one another and set the bar ever higher for others. In skateboarding, there is a thriving culture of both underground and sponsored low-budget videos where kids film one another attempting perilous stunts in urban environments, spreading the footage virally through the skating community and establishing a DIY catalog of tricks for others to master and emulate. The 2002 video, “PJ Ladd’s Horrible Wonderful Life,” (today one of the most well-known skate videos in history), is a classic example of amateurs who can become underground cult heroes and innovators of technique: 

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Ladd’s technique in this video has been considered by many to be “visionary.” One reviewer writes, “This video is essential viewing for anybody that wants to see where skating is going.” (Emphasis mine).

Now try to imagine a similar thing being said of traditional team sports. Though athletes of incredible talent and super-human skill may command a mythos within different sports cultures (Michael Jordan in basketball, Babe Ruth in baseball and Roger Federer in tennis, to name a few), they are considered more than anything masters of their craft—innovators within it perhaps—but they were all ultimately confined by the pre-made rules of their sport. Jordan, Ruth and Federer, unlike Ladd, didn’t exactly take their sport anywhere.

Similarities between passion and flow in the moment

Having made this detour, let me now more directly respond to the question about the similarities and differences between passion and Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi’s theory of “flow.” There are certainly many similarities between Csíkszentmihályi’s concept and my own.

Flow describes an “optimal experience,” which is frequently felt by those pursuing their passion. When someone is in flow, they concentrate deeply on “the moment,” caught up in the pleasure and challenge of an immediate task; they clear their minds of all else. Both flow and passion welcome this state because it offers intrinsic satisfaction and enjoyment in our everyday lives.  However, the differences become apparent as soon as one moves beyond the moment itself and attempts to identify the factors that lead up to “optimal experience.”

Differences between passion and flow – the context

Csíkszentmihályi emphasizes that in order to achieve flow, we must pick goals that have meaning (in either our personal or professional lives), determine the structure it sets out for us (the terms of both games and work), and then play by rules. In other words, Csíkszentmihályi prefers we stay in-bounds and are well-behaved on the courts, slopes and fields.

Csíkszentmihályi writes: 

One finds more occasions of [flow] on the job than in free time . . . this finding is not that surprising. What often passes unnoticed is that work is much more like a game than most other things we do during the day. It usually has clear goals and rules of performance. . . Thus, work tends to have the structure of other intrinsically rewarding activities that provide flow, such as games, sports, music, and art. (59, Finding Flow.)

And elsewhere he writes:

Flow tends to occur when a person faces a clear set of goals that require appropriate response. It is easy to enter flow in games such as chess, tennis, or poker, because they have goals and rules for action that make possible for the player to act without questioning what should be done, and how.   (29, Finding Flow) 

An example of this sporting mindset appears in Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, where Csíkszentmihályi cites the example of a factory worker named Rico Medellin. Csíkszentmihályi explains, “The task he has to perform on each unit that passes in from of his station should take forty-three seconds to perform—the same exact operation almost six hundred times in a working day” (Flow, 39). Rico manages to enjoy this laborious and monotonous work 5 years into the job because he approaches it like a game—attempting daily to beat his own record. Playing by the rules of the game is cited time and again as a key access point for achieving flow—and Rico has certainly mastered this. 

Csíkszentmihályi tends to focus on the problem of psychic disorder, the chaos of psychic entropy and, in this context, views flow as an effective way to bring order to the natural state of psychic entropy – it is about imposing order to make progress. MC defines the autotelic personality as “the ability to create flow experience even in the most barren environment” (149, Flow), where, “In theory, any job could be changed as to make it more enjoyable by following the prescriptions of the flow model” (154, Flow).

To say, then, that Rico actually enjoys his job is misleading. Rico has merely managed to make his job bearable by ordering his consciousness through rule-making and goal-setting, which makes it possible for him to forget, in the moment, everything else (in Rico’s case, I imagine that would include working on an assembly line for 5+ years). Rico’s process may be an exemplar of Csíkszentmihályi’s “optimal experience,” but he as the antithesis of the passionate one. To mistake the two is to mistake “coping,” with “thriving.”

Passion is not about finding work bearable. It is the process by which people get in touch with their true loves in life and fearlessly pursue them, motivated by the opportunities and spaces for development, which often require that they ignore any rules that get in their way of achieving that potential. It is about love.

Like flow, increasing “complexity” and seeking challenge is typical of pursuing passion but the motivation behind these endeavors have crucial differences: where Csíkszentmihályi would have us tame chaos and uncertainty, passion energizes us to embrace dynamic systems and explore the unknown. How can we take ourselves where we are going?

Back to the edge

The emergent star of the 2010 Olympics was surely snowboarder Shaun White for his daring move, the “Double McTwist 1260.” What astonished viewers and boarders alike was the fact that no one had done this before (at least at the level of international exposure). White had already secured the gold before this drastic stunt—a fact that might have  prompted others to “play it safe.” But White dared to push the boundaries nevertheless. Accepting medals on podiums may be reward enough for some, but for a boarder as dedicated as White, the passionate drive to explore new possibilities was far too tempting. Watch the White’s great Olympic moment here. 

We shouldn’t be too surprised after this display that a number of snowboarders were already showing off their own versions of the Double McTwist 1260 at the U.S. Open Snowboarding Championships only about a month after White made set the bar. White, however, was conspicuously absent from the event. As the New York Times reports, he’s taking it to the streets—setting plans for a competitive skateboard season where he plans to develop some new tricks. Among them the 1080, “a maneuver that has never been landed in a skateboarding competition.”

Economic Recovery? Don’t Count On It.

You can’t open a newspaper these days without reading some headline about the economic recovery.  Hopes are rising that we may actually be turning the corner – consumer demand is growing, factory orders are increasing and the unemployment rate seems to have stabilized if not significantly dropped. Each day brings a new index number that we eagerly cluster around and struggle to interpret, much like tea leaves that are open to multiple interpretations.

While understandable, these efforts to read near-term indices also present very significant risks.  We continue to be seduced by near-term news, while losing any perspective on longer-term trends. These longer terms trends tell a very different story and suggest that we may be lulled into complacency by the short-term news of recovery.

Long-term performance deterioration

In our new book, The Power of Pull, we summarize the metrics that we developed for the Shift Index – the first attempt to quantify the longer-term trends that have been re-shaping the business landscape over the past four decades.  Of the 25 metrics in the Shift Index, one metric in particular stands out: return on assets for all public companies in the US.  Since 1965, return on assets has collapsed by 75% – it has been a sustained and substantial erosion in performance.  There is no evidence of any flattening of this trend, much less turning it around.

What does this mean?  It provides strong evidence that any “recovery” is merely a short-term relaxation of pressure and that there will be no “back to normal”. We often hear executives talk about the Red Queen effect where they feel they are running faster and faster to stay in the same place.  The actual situation is far worse: we are running faster and faster and falling farther and farther behind. There is absolutely no reason to believe that the long-term performance erosion will not continue.

The key question is what to do about it?  Market economies are generally successful in spawning innovative new approaches to overcome existing performance pressures.  That has not yet happened here. The fact that this trend has continued over such a long period suggests that the causes of the performance erosion are deeply embedded in our current management practices and institutions.

Shifts in the source of value creation 

The Power of Pull suggests that we are going through a fundamental shift in the source of economic value creation.  In the past, economic value creation depended on proprietary knowledge stocks.  The challenge for any company was to acquire some proprietary knowledge, rigorously protect it to make sure no one else had access to it, and then as efficiently as possible extract the economic value from this proprietary knowledge stock for as long as possible.  As change accelerates and uncertainty grows, though, knowledge stocks depreciate at a more rapid rate.  In this kind of environment, the key to economic value creation shifts to the ability to participate in a growing number of diverse knowledge flows to more rapidly refresh our knowledge stocks.

This shift calls into question our most basic assumptions about where and how economic value gets created.  Perhaps that is why firms have had such a difficult time responding to the deteriorating performance trends. Even more challenging, responding to this shift requires developing a whole new set of management practices and institutional arrangements.

Mastering the techniques of pull

We discuss these management practices under the broad rubric of pull.  Rather than trying to forecast demand and design push programs to ensure that the right people and resources are in the right place at the right time, a new approach is emerging.  This pull approach seeks to develop scalable pull platforms that amplify our ability to draw out the people and resources when we need them and where we need them. The pull techniques developed in lean manufacturing approaches are a promising first step, but they have only worked when there are a very limited number of participants. The leaders of a new generation of pull techniques are demonstrating the feasibility of aggregating thousands and even millions of independent and very diverse participants on global pull platforms.

As we begin to better understand these pull techniques and how they work, something interesting begins to happen.  For the first time, we have the potential to shift from our current pattern of diminishing returns performance improvement (as documented in the well-known experience curve) to a business environment where we can begin to unleash increasing returns performance improvement. We are already beginning to see some of the early indications of this potential on the edges of our economy, in such diverse areas as extreme sports, online gaming and software development networks.

The good news is that there is a pragmatic migration path that can move us from where we are today to where we need to be in a world of pull.  Small moves, smartly made, can in fact set big things in motion. To pursue this path, though, we will need a sense of direction, harness different forms of leverage and deploy platforms that can accelerate the pace of change.

Bottom line

Economic recovery?  Don’t count on it. We are just beginning to understand the challenges ahead. True recovery – in other words, sustainable, long-term recovery – will only come when we pull back from the near-term events that today consume our attention and re-focus on the less visible, longer term trends playing out around us. Those who refuse to be blinded by  short-term trends and focus on the longer term shift playing out in our global economy will begin to understand that the game is changing in fundamental ways. By harnessing the power of pull, they will create enormous wealth and leave those still struggling to read the tea leaves of short-term indices in the dust.

The Power of Pull Has Finally Arrived

When you write a book, there comes a point when you begin to believe it will never see the light of day. Well, today my new book, co-authored with John Seely Brown and Lang Davison is officially released by Basic Books—The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion. We began writing it more than a year ago, and the direct research started even further back. In some ways, however, the three of us have been working on this book in various permutations since 1996.

Power shift

That’s when Net Gain (Hagel and Davison) was written around a foundational insight:  that digital technology was setting in motion a shift in market power from the makers of goods and services to the people that buy them, and to talented employees from the institutions that employ them.  We developed that theme even further in a subsequent book, Net Worth (Hagel and Davison).

While we may have had this insight fourteen years ago, what we didn’t yet have in clear focus was the mechanism by which this shift in power from institutions to individuals would take place. That mechanism is pull.

Pull allows each of us to find and access people and resources when we need them, while attracting to us the people and resources that are relevant and valuable, even if we were not even aware before that they existed. Finally, in a world of mounting pressure and unforeseen opportunities, pull gives us the ability to draw from within ourselves the insight and performance required to more effectively achieve our potential.

The power of pull puts each of us, individually and together, in a position to collaborate in a complete re-imagination of our biggest private-and public-sector institutions, one that may eventually remake society as a whole. As customers, we have more choices, and more information with which to make those choices, than ever before. As talented employees we have greater power too than before, since we create the lion’s share of today’s corporate profitability.  As each of us votes with our feet and allies ourselves with new generations of institutions, we’ll abandon the old ones, leaving them to drift into obsolescence and setting in motion a reshaping of broad arenas of economic and civic life.

The relationship economy

While this broad shift in power to individuals is one thread woven through our work, another has to do with how technology is amplifying and transforming relationships. That theme came into even sharper focus in the book Out of the Box (Hagel and JSB), which described the emergence of a new generation of technology architecture – service oriented architectures -  and placed it explicitly in the context of new relationships that this more flexible architecture enabled.

It’s a peculiar thing about technology: Many people seem to regard it as an end in itself. (Consider the companies that throw money at technology without thinking through commensurate changes in management practices or social relations necessary to create value from that investment.) Yet technology is revolutionary in its implications due to the changes it enables in how people find each other, interact, and collaborate to create and share knowledge.

That’s why the mantra in Net Gain was “community before commerce”: If you don’t handle the community aspect right you’re unlikely to get the commercial aspect right, either. Companies that put their own interests ahead of those of their customers would find their customers defecting to companies that treat them better.

Talent development as the only sustainable edge

In The Power of Pull we broaden the point to include employers that fail to provide sufficient professional development opportunities for their employees. These companies will lose their most talented workers to more magnetic organizations that provide better chances for learning and growth.

We began to explore the role of talent development as a competitive advantage in The Only Sustainable Edge (Hagel and JSB).  That book ventured out to the geographic edges of China and India to explore the ways in which entrepreneurial companies were developing new approaches to talent development that harnessed loosely coupled  business networks that provide scale without inertia.  We made the case in that book that the only sustainable edge in the future would come from accelerated capability building – creating the conditions to enable people to learn faster by working together.

Performance improvement and learning

Prior to The Only Sustainable Edge, JSB had been separately pursuing some of the same themes – in fact, our mutual passion for these themes led the three of us to meet and to develop a deeper collaboration over time.

In writings during the 1990’s, JSB explored new approaches to learning that broke the traditional educational model and depended deeply on situating learning within the context of relationships, as illustrated by his piece on “Stolen Knowledge” and “The University in the Digital Age.”  In his work as head of Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, JSB had become deeply engaged in the role of communities of practice in driving learning and performance improvement.  Once again, deep personal relationships were a key to driving capability building.  It was in fact through a shared interest in communities that I first met JSB.

In his introduction to the book, Seeing Differently, published in 1997, JSB highlighted the importance of people from diverse backgrounds coming together and, through the creative tension that often arises from confronting different points of view, increasing the potential for innovation. The Only Sustainable Edge developed this further by exploring the conditions necessary to generate productive friction.

Prior to that, JSB co-wrote  (with Paul Duguid) The Social Life of Information, a book that powerfully explored the role social networks play in providing necessary context for information.  In that book, he offered an extended analysis of how learning occurs in practice.  He also developed an important contrast between practice and process in the context of organizational activity. JSB particularly highlighted the vital role of practice, again rooted in the social context of communities of practice, in driving innovation and learning.

In many respects, The Power of Pull can be read as an attempt to reinstate the central role of socially embedded practice in driving knowledge creation and performance improvement relative to the recent emphasis in the management literature of process reengineering. The Power of Pull at one level seeks to refocus technology innovation on providing tools to amplify the efforts of communities of practice to drive performance improvement.

It was also in The Social Life of Information that JSB underscored the importance of tacit knowledge in the creation of new knowledge, a theme that became central to The Power of Pull. In an even more recent book, Storytelling in Organizations, JSB discussed the role of storytelling in helping to communicate tacit knowledge.  Once again, the need to engage in knowledge sharing and knowledge creation through social relationships remains a continuing theme.

Bringing it all together

So, there you have it.  In many respects, this book is simply a continuation of themes under development for a couple of decades.  We explore power shifts, evolving social contexts, scalable networks, and new modes of learning and performance improvement, as well as the development of technology infrastructures that continue to change the game in profound and pervasive ways – all themes that have focused our previous writing as well.  This time, though, we have brought it together into an integrated framework that bridges description and prescription, destination and migration path, and individual and institution.  We try also to mix it up with some stories of people who are making the most of the new world around us by turning challenge into opportunity. We hope you will find the book reflective of your own interests and passions.

Next steps

We had our first launch events last night in New York, and they were a huge success (thanks to everyone who showed up). There will be other launch events, including Silicon Valley on May 4 (hosted by The Churchill Club and Tim O’Reilly), San Francisco, Boston, Washington DC and Seattle.  For more details, visit our joint website and sign up for e-mail updates on the event plans and other developments regarding the book as they unfold.

The Power of Pull represents not an end point but one more step on a broader journey. Where will we go from here? In part that’s up to you. Let me know what you think we’ve gotten right—and what you think we’ve missed or where there might be the greatest potential to focus as we seek to build upon the perspectives in this book. Rather than identifying a single element and elevating it to represent the whole, we’ve tried to capture the whole itself. You’ll be the best judge of how well we’ve succeeded.

(This is an extended version of a more abbreviated blog posting that appeared a few days ago at the Harvard Business Review blog site)

Passion and Reason

As a child, I early on embraced reason as a safe haven from the deep and dangerous emotions that swirled around me and scarred me with memories that were impossible to forget.  Like many of us, I believed that reason and passion stand in opposition to each other. One had to choose one or the other or risk being pulled apart by the competing demands of each. Throughout history, we have seen many champion the need for choice – rationalists side with reason while the romantics and assorted others (often not quite so appealing) side with passion.

As I have grown older, I have come to challenge this basic assumption.  In fact, reason and passion need to be tightly integrated if we wish to achieve our full potential and make a difference in the world around us.  Far from undermining each other, they build on each other and powerfully reinforce each other. I would even go so far as to say they are essential for each other. In fact, in isolation, reason is a very shallow pool to swim in. From my perspective, that pool needs to be deepened with passion in order for the journey to be fruitful and satisfying.

Over my life, I have become deeply skeptical of efforts to force choices between apparent opposites – stability vs. change, freedom vs. discipline, stocks vs. flows, nature vs. nurture, risk vs. safety. Most of what makes life interesting are the tensions created by these contradictions.  Seeking to resolve these contradictions by picking one or the other side only creates the appearance of simplicity, while blinding us to the richness that makes life so damn interesting

Defining terms

So it is with reason and passion.  Both terms have a broad range of meanings, so a good place to start might be to explain what I mean by them. Reason is a process of observing the world around us, systematically applying rules of logic and experimentation and generating conclusions that others can follow. It often seek s to abstract from the particular so that general conclusions can be derived and defended. 

Passion is commonly used to refer to strong emotions of any type. When I use passion, I use it in a much more specific way to describe a particular blend of emotions – excitement, anticipation, curiosity, desire, love, joy and wonder and empathy – that motivate us to venture deeper and deeper into particular domains defined by the passion. These emotions motivate us to move beyond our comfort zone, provide us with the dedication and commitment to build capabilities in these fields over extended periods of time and help us ultimately to achieve the potential that resides within each of us. In particular, I focus on the passion of the explorer who is motivated by a desire to gain new insight into a particular domain by working with others to drive performance to new levels.

So, how do passion and reason reinforce each other?  Think of agency versus structure. Passion provides the first by generating energy and creating a sense of freedom.  Reason provides the latter by imposing constraint and discipline.  Without structure, agency becomes an aimless whirlwind of activity, constantly distracted by the bright lights, but unable to maintain forward movement. And, of course, without agency, structure remains an inert mass, sinking deeper and deeper into the ground below it, seeing but unable to explore the world around it.

Kahlil Gibran in his classic book, "The Prophet", put it eloquently:

Your reason and your passion are the rudder and the sails of your seafaring soul.
If either your sails or your rudder be broken, you can but toss and drift, or else be held at a standstill in mid-seas.
For reason, ruling alone, is a force confining; and passion, unattended, is a flame that burns to its own destruction.
Therefore let your soul exalt your reason to the height of passion, that it may sing;
And let it direct your passion with reason, that your passion may live through its own daily resurrection, and like the phoenix rise above its own ashes.

Closer to home, Ben Franklin, expressed similar views much more succinctly: “If passion drives you, let reason hold the reins.”

We can gain more insight into the tight relationship between passion and reason by looking at four attributes that need to come together for us to achieve our full potential: focus, action, relationships and friction

Focus

We need to be able to carve out specific domains that we can focus on to achieve world-class performance.   Spreading ourselves too thin risks that we remain superficially engaged in lots of areas without ever achieving world-class performance anywhere.  But, how to pick the domains that offer us the greatest opportunity to excel?

Passion provides the key.  If we are not passionately engaged in a particular domain, it is unlikely that we will invest the effort and energy required to achieve mastery and distinctiveness.  Malcolm Gladwell in his book, "Outliers", emphasizes that successful people generally invest considerable effort over time in mastering their domains – he estimates that 10,000 hours is the minimum investment made by these people to achieve mastery. In fact, in a world of constant change, one could make the case that 10,000 hours is just table stakes – sustained excellence demands continued investment.  It is very hard to sustain that kind of investment over a period of years without passion to provide the motivation.  If we rely solely on reason to select an appropriate domain, we may have a compelling logic but that alone is unlikely to sustain us as we begin to encounter obstacles and distractions along the way.

On the other hand, having chosen a domain to focus on, reason provides a valuable way to frame questions and test the experiences that we accumulate as we explore the domain. It helps us to choose the most productive directions to pursue as we venture into the domain and helps us to solve the difficult puzzles that we encounter.

Action

It is not enough to choose the domain – we must engage with it and explore its farthest reaches (dare I say edges?).  It is not enough to sit in an easy chair and contemplate; we must roll up our sleeves and dive in to really experience the textures and particulars that help us to gain insight into what is really going on.

Leaving that easy chair and venturing forth into unknown territory presents real risks and can be very scary.  Reason alone rarely helps us to overcome those fears.  In fact, it can deceive us into believing that we can process information about the domain at a distance, keeping our attention focused on the forest, without the distraction of all those trees.

Passion will have none of that – it demands our engagement and will settle for nothing less.  It propels us forward, giving us both the energy and courage to welcome any challenge as an opportunity to test ourselves, regardless of the risk.

Once again, though, reason provides a welcome companion on the journey.  It helps us to reflect on our experiences and to begin to discern patterns emerging from seemingly unique encounters. We start to see the themes that make the particulars less particular and part of a more coherent whole. It provides us with powerful tools to make sense of rapidly evolving landscapes and to begin to zero in on the underlying forces driving and shaping this evolution.

On a related note, Antonio Damasio in his book, “Descartes’ Error”, provides an intriguing perspective, arguing that “emotions are not a luxury, they are essential to rational thinking” and that “the absence of emotion and feeling can break down rationality and make wise decision making almost impossible.”

Relationships

Experiencing a domain requires engaging with people in ways that go beneath the surface of a casual conversation and help us to see the domain through different lenses.  We will need to form relationships that transcend short encounters and begin to build shared understanding of the domain. Relationships involve connecting on a personal level and passion helps to form a common bond.  As I discussed in an earlier post, passion inherently drives us to connect with others who share our passion and who can help us to improve our performance.  The passion of an explorer provides a capacity for empathy that can be very powerful in forging deep and lasting bonds.  Passion also draws out the stories from all participants that are the first and often the most powerful way to express the new knowledge emerging on the fertile edges of any domain.

Our Shift Index research showed a clear relationship between level of passion and degree of connection with others through a variety of avenues, including conferences and social media. Those who are motivated purely by reason are likely to find themselves less connected and therefore at a disadvantage relative to those who are connected through shared passion.

At the same time, reason helps to forge a common bond in relationships with others. A shared commitment to reason can help people to overcome deep differences in experiences, assumptions and perspectives.  It can help build a shared understanding that will make it easier to access tacit knowledge that each participant brings to the table.  It also provides a powerful framework to reflect on experiences and to begin to sift through the idle distractions and zero in on the elements that are most distinctively shaping these experiences.

Productive friction

I have written about productive friction elsewhere.  It is an essential ingredient in any sustained effort to engage with diverse participants in order to deliver significant improvements in performance. 

Passion provides a firm foundation for productive friction to emerge and flourish.  Shared passion creates a deep emotional bond that encourages people with different backgrounds and experiences to continue to engage with each other even though some of their most cherished assumptions are being challenged. They are all on a shared quest to find the most creative ways to drive performance to new levels and they are constantly on a search for new approaches that offer the potential to deliver performance breakthroughs.

Reason, on the other hand, also provides a useful toolkit for addressing and resolving potentially deeply held differences.  It offers some common ground for debating and resolving alternative approaches to a shared problem.

Framing questions and framing answers

Passion frames the most powerful questions and reason frames the most convincing answers – this is another way to express the reinforcing effect of integrating passion and reason.

As Claude Helvetius, a French philosphe during the Enlightenment,  observed: “. . . it is the strong passions alone that prompt men to the execution of  . . . heroic actions, and give birth to those grand ideas, which are the astonishment and admiration of all ages.”  It was Helvetius who  entitled one of the chapters in his book, “The superiority of the mind in men of strong passions above the men of sense.”  He asserted that “it is , in effect, only a strong passion, which, being more perspicuous (sic) than good sense, can teach us to distinguish the extraordinary from the impossible, which men of sense are ever confounding; because, not being animated by strong passions, these sensible persons never rise above mediocrity . . .” Perhaps it is not surprising that this book, "De l’Esprit", was publicly condemned as heretical and burned by the Catholic Church.

In short, passion prompts us to ask the really difficult and creative questions that “sensible” people would never think of asking.  The more I learn, the more I see the insight in John Seely Brown’s observation that framing the right question is the most powerful aspect of learning.  With the right question, reason can help us to generate powerful answers but it is the question which focuses the tool of reason and ultimately provides its power.

Bottom line

I held on to the rationalist position for a very long time.  It provided me a welcome refuge from the messy world of emotions. But something changed – I moved to Silicon Valley, drawn in part by the rationality of technology.  What I had not fully realized until I moved here was the central role that passion played in the evolution of this amazing place. It has quite literally changed my life and taught me that reason becomes even more powerful when amplified by passion.

Silicon Valley is a living example of the power of passion and reason woven together into a fabric that adorns every achievement emerging from this fertile valley.  People are drawn here from all over the world by the passion to make a difference, to quite literally change the world, by exploring new frontiers of technology.  On the other hand, many of the people driving the most awe-inspiring innovations are engineers, deeply trained in the disciplined rationality that brings forth amazing power from more and more circuits painstakingly arranged on small silicon chips and lines of software code carefully designed to deliver the most functionality in the fewest instructions.

Every day, I see the power of passion and reason coming together. It literally has changed the world, and it has changed me.

Passion Versus Obsession

When I was a little boy, I was obsessed with chemistry.  I had a chemistry lab in my home and I could not wait to retreat to my little lab and conduct the most amazing experiments, exploring all kinds of permutations of chemical mixtures. When I was not in my lab, I was devouring chemistry textbooks.  People said I was passionate about chemistry, but they were wrong – I was obsessed.  I was using chemistry as an escape from a very difficult childhood. It was a survival mechanism, not a means to achieve my full potential.

We are all familiar with cautionary tales of people so consumed by their passions that they lose their social standing, meaningful relationships, and—ultimately—their mind. Their professional and social lives fall apart as obsession grips their every waking hour, crowding everything else out. It’s no wonder people fear passion.

In a previous blog post, I asked the open question, “When does passion become obsession?” [link], touching upon the possibility of destructive passion – when passion leads to fixation and dysfunction. Having thought about this more, I think I was asking the wrong question.

To say passion becomes obsession is to make a distinction of degree. It implies that obsession is a more passionate form of passion—too much of a good thing. However, I’m now convinced that passion and obsession do not vary in degree, but in kind. In fact, in many ways they are opposite. 

What makes this distinction confusing is that passion and obsession exhibit very similar behaviors.

Both passion and obsession are generated within and manifest in outward action or pursuit, which can provide purpose and direction. Passions and obsessions are powerful motivators to take risks, to make sacrifices and step outside of conventional norms to achieve what we desire. Most importantly, passion and obsession burn within us irrespective of extrinsic encouragement or rewards. This can lead to what traditional institutions perceive to be subversive or rebellious behavior, driving passionate and obsessive people to the edges of organizations and society.

It is on the edge that the crucial distinctions between passion and obsession become clear.

Pulled to the edge versus pushed to the edge

The first significant difference between passion and obsession is the role free will plays in each disposition: passionate people fight their way willingly to the edge to find places where they can pursue their passions more freely, while obsessive people (at best) passively drift there or (at worst) are exiled there.

The degree to which free will plays a role in determining who winds up on the edge,will greatly determine their capacity to succeed in this challenging environment.

Sense of self: Achieving potential versus compensating for inadequacy

Passionate people find edges exciting because they have a rooted sense of self. As I discussed in a previous post, passion inspires creation.

Creators have a strong and meaningful sense of identity—defined not by what they consume (which has little or false expressive potential) but by what they make (total self-expression).

When I say that they have a “rooted sense of self,” however, I don’t mean to imply that their identity is fixed. On the contrary, as creators, passionate people are invested in constant personal, professional and creative growth. They want to develop and diversify their talents in order to keep their creations innovative and their passion dynamic, sustainable and alive.

Through the challenge of creation, and the innovative disposition demanded by the ever-shifting edge, passionate people expand their personal boundaries, helping them to more effectively achieve their potential. In other words: passion gives us the energy and motivation to work hard—and joyfully.

When I consider the drive of passionate creatives, I’m reminded of this observation by Ortega y Gasset:

The most radical division that is possible to make of humanity is that which splits it into two classes of creatures: those who make great demands of themselves, piling up difficulties and duties; and those who demand nothing special of themselves, but for whom to live is to be every moment what they already are; without imposing on themselves any effort toward perfection; mere buoys that float on the waves….The few individuals we have come across who are capable of a spontaneous and joyous effort stand out isolated….These are the select men, the noble ones, the only ones who are active and not merely reactive, for whom life is a perpetual striving.

It requires a passionate person to generate the strength and enthusiasm to apply the effort needed to achieve and create, which requires they “make great demands of themselves.” Whatever the subject of passion and creation, it is the capacity to direct that energy into actions that reinforce personal growth, which makes the passionate people thrive on the edge. 

An obsessive person is what Gasset would call a “buoy on the water.” Obsessives have a very weak sense of identity because they displace their sense of self into the very object of their obsession (this becomes a strange form of self-obsession, which is why obsessive tendencies are frequently associated with narcissism). Obsession, far from the joyful effort and striving inspired by passion, is a strategy of escape. In conflating their identity with an object of fascination, obsessives are not only able to forget their inner-self, they are able to insulate from the challenging world around them.

The obsessive person’s focus is narrow because they are less interested in complex growth than singular direction. Obsessive personalities may be driven to create, but the inner growth needed to be a sustained creator is undermined by their lack of determination to grow as people. As a result, rather than realizing their potential, they are concerned with finding a way to stay focused and compensate for inadequacy.

Breadth of focus: Narrow objects versus broad subjects

It’s not an accident that we speak of an “object of obsession,” but the “subject of passion.” That’s because obsession tends towards highly specific focal points or goals, whereas passion is oriented toward networked, diversified spaces. Objects of obsession are often quite narrow, for example using a specific photo editing tool, developing enhancements to a specific product or developing new art around a specific pop culture character or icon. 

Subjects of passion, on the other hand, are broad, for example involving digital photography, innovating within a broader category of technology or experimenting with a certain genre of pop culture. Given this broader focus, passionate people thrive on knowledge flows to stimulate innovation, achievement and growth. The subjects of passion invite and even demand connections with others who share the passion.

Relationships: Expanding versus contracting 

Because passionate people are driven to create as a way to grow and achieve their potential, they are constantly seeking out others who share their passion in a quest for collaboration, friction and inspiration.  Because they have a strong sense of self, passionate people are well-equipped to form relationships.  They present themselves in ways that invite trust – they have little time for pretense and they are willing to express vulnerability and need in order to receive the help they need in achieving their own potential.  Because they are passionate, they are willing to share their own knowledge and experience when they encounter someone sharing their passion. They are also intensely curious, seeking to understand the other passionate people they encounter in order to better see where and how they can collaborate to get better faster.

In contrast, obsessive people hide behind their objects of obsession.  The objects are what are important, not others or even themselves. As a result, obsessive people are hard to get to know and trust – they share little of themselves and they exhibit minimal interest or curiosity regarding the needs or feelings of others. One of the hallmarks of obsessive people is that they tend to talk endlessly and often repetitively about the same thing, rarely inviting commentary or reaction from others, and ultimately pushing others away with their obsessive rants.

The key difference between passion and obsession is fundamentally social: passion helps build relationships and obsession inhibits them. This becomes a key marker to differentiate between passion and obsession: is the person developing richer and broader relationships or is the person undermining existing relationships and finding it difficult to form new relationships?

A final note: Passion and neurosis

Passion creates options while obsession closes options.  Passion reaches outward while obsession pulls inward. Passion positions us to pursue the opportunities created by the Big Shift while obsession makes us oblivious to the expanding opportunities around us.

I was inspired to expand upon this passion vs. obsession distinction because many people object  to my advocacy of passion by citing examples of great scientists, artists and thinkers who, while certainly passionate, appear to have been reclusive, neurotic and unhappy.

Lionel Trilling does an admirable job of addressing this issue in his essay, “Art and Neurosis.” Crudely put, Trilling argues that all of us have “issues,” and it is only because great men and women are visible to the public that theirs are on display, creating the illusion that they have more than most of us (this, of course, rests on the second myth that there is such a thing as “normal people” without problems).

But far from being inundated with neurosis or “issues,” what sets these great men and women apart is their ability to transform shortcomings into strengths, or compensate for them by excelling in other areas.

Trilling cites a short essay by Charles Lamb, called “The Sanity of True Genius.” Lamb points out that what we call genius or excellence, “manifests itself in the admirable balance of all the faculties,” while unhealthy psychological behavior (in Lamb’s words, “madness”) is characterized by the “disproportionate straining or excess of any one of them.”
 
Lamb goes on to point out that those who can’t master their inner demons,

do not create, which implies shaping and consistency. Their imaginations are not active — for to be active is to call something into act and form — but passive, as men in sick dreams.

Agreeing with this, Trilling concludes,

Of the artist we must say that whatever elements of neurosis he has in common with his fellow mortals, the one part of him that is healthy, by any conceivable definition of health, is that which gives him the power to conceive, to plan, to work, and to bring his work to a conclusion (“Art and Neurosis, ”The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent, p. 103).

Over the years, as I moved into more supportive environments, my obsession with chemistry dissipated.  I began to discover a passion for technology and business. That passion in turn led me to reach out to others, at first through writing and then through weaving an ever richer network of personal relationships.  It has been a long journey and it is far from over, but it has taught me that obsession confines while passion liberates.

To cultivate passion, to channel its energy into self-determination, inter-personal connections and regenerative curiosity, and finally to find the balance needed to sustain creativity on the edge, is much more than health—it is happiness.   

Reinventing the Sacred

When I was a young boy, I grew up with parents who were disillusioned with organized religion. As the first people to go to college, not to mention graduate school, in either of their families, they chose reason over religion.  In spite of this, I early on developed a fascination with spirituality, but the concept of the sacred eluded me until recently.  As I became more deeply immersed in studying and understanding the Big Shift that is playing out around us, I began to see elements of a very different kind of sacred. Until recently, though, I had a hard time verbalizing what I was encountering. With the help of the writings of two men that I deeply respect, this post seeks to put into words something quite remarkable that I see emerging from the Big Shift.

The Big Shift will play out in many domains, in ways that we may not be able to imagine today.  For example, the concept of the sacred has been criticized by rationalists for centuries, but it may be slated for rehabilitation from a very unlikely direction.

Certainly, fundamentalists of all stripes have engaged in a crusade to revive the sacred over the century.  At the risk of over-simplification, their notion of the sacred is a defensive, static one.  The sacred has already been revealed and our job is to protect it from attack.

A different form of the sacred is taking shape, one resulting in the unlikely collaboration of an experimental and theoretical biologist and a professor of divinity, both with the surname of Kauffman (albeit spelled slightly differently).  These two individuals – Stuart Kauffman and Gordon Kaufman – have been pursuing a mission to reinvent the sacred by focusing on the theme of creativity.

In my previous post, I discussed the shift our identity from consumer to networked creator. As this shift plays out, we will likely find this rehabilitation of the sacred very appealing. It will help not just to connect us with each other in richer and deeper ways, but will begin to reveal that our connection with the universe may have creative or sacred foundations that have been part of the human story for millions of years.

Stuart Kauffman

Stuart Kauffman’s book “Reinventing the Sacred” really got me thinking about creativity and the sacred. The book is an impressive stroll by a deeply thoughtful scientist through many domains from the microscopic to the cosmic, with a particular focus on the common patterns emerging in the universe, the biosphere and human culture. Kauffman observes:

“We live in a universe, biosphere, and human culture that are not only emergent but radically creative. We live in a world whose unfolding we often cannot prevision, prestate, or predict – a world of explosive creativity on all sides.  This is a central part of the new scientific worldview.”

Throughout the book he offers a sustained critique of reductionism. Instead, he stresses the importance of emergence as a way to begin to understand the dynamics that we shape – and that in turn shape us. He is also deeply skeptical of universal laws, focusing instead on understanding the situatedness of the objects under discussion.  I found it refreshing that, in discussing situatedness, he puts equal emphasis on context, the surroundings at any point in time, and history, the trajectories that have been traveled by the object.

Kauffman also highlights the central role of agency in emergence, observing that  “  . . .we are co-creators of a universe, biosphere, and culture of endlessly novel creativity.” He argues that agency helps to define meaning and in turn gives rise to values. His book is an ambitious attempt to overcome four “injuries” splitting humanity apart at the seams – the divisions between science and the humanities, facts and values, secularism and spirituality and divisions across diverse value systems.

Kauffman follows the admonition of Scott Momaday, a Kiowa poet, to “reinvent the sacred.” Kauffman seeks to demonstrate that “in this ceaseless creativity in the universe, biosphere, and human culture and history we can reinvent the sacred, and find a new view of God as the fully natural, awesome, creativity that surrounds us.”

Kauffman later clarifies what he means by sacred:  “The word sacred is, for many, tied inextricably with the concept of the divine, but in many instances it is used to express an immense respect or reverence. . . . .  if we are the authors of what is to be held sacred then we will engage in mature reasoning about what is sacred.  Might it be the case, then that at this stage in human cultural evolution we are, at last, ready to assume responsibility for our own choices of what is to be sacred?”

Kauffman goes further and asks: “Do we use the word God meaning that God is the natural creativity in the universe? . . . How dare we use the word God to stand for the natural creativity in the universe? Yet I say yes, we can and should choose to do so, knowing full well that we make this choice. . . .This sense of God enlarges Western humanism for those who do not believe in a Creator God. It invites those who hold to a supernatural Creator God to sustain that faith, but to allow the creativity in the universe to be a further source of meaning and membership.  I hope this sense of God and the sacred can be a safe, spiritual space we can all share.”

Gordon Kaufman

In this effort to reinvent the sacred, Kauffman treads a similar path that Gordon Kaufman has been following for at least the past fifteen years.  Gordon Kaufman announces early in his book “In the beginning . . . Creativity” that “for a good many years I have been speaking and writing of God as creativity rather than creator . . .” A great interview with Gordon can be found here.

Kaufman, a professor of divinity emeritus at Harvard University, offers a similar perspective to Stuart Kauffman: “The metaphor of creativity, as I have been suggesting, is appropriate for naming God because (1) it preserves and indeed emphasizes the ultimacy of the mystery that God is, even while (2) it connects God directly with the coming into being – in time – of the new and the novel.”

Kaufman amplifies this theme: “. . . God should be thought of as creativity; creativity is the only proper object for worship, devotion and faith today . . . . Everything other than the ultimate mystery of creativity is a finite created reality that may indeed be valued and appreciated within certain limits, but which is itself always subject to distortion, corruption, and disintegration and thus must be relativized by the creativity manifest in the coming into being and the ultimate dissolution of all finite realities – that which alone may be characterized as ‘ultimate.’”

I especially like Kaufman’s emphasis on serendipitous creativity: “This whole vast cosmic process, I suggest, displays (in varying degrees) serendipitous creativity: the coming into being through time of new modes of reality. It is a process that has frequently produced much more than would have been expected or seemed possible, given previously prevailing circumstances . . .” He further clarifies:  “But mere change is not what we mean by the word ‘creativity,’ for changes can generally be understood and often explained, and they do not involve the coming into being of something truly novel.”

Stuart Kauffman and Gordon Kaufman co-taught a course at Harvard Divinity School this past Spring – something I would have loved to attend.

The bottom line

So, why am I writing about this? Why should a hard-headed business strategist and management consultant be spending time on God and the sacred? What does this have to do with the daily quest for profits?

Well, it all has to do with the Big Shift.  The Big Shift is not just about disruption and profits.  It is also about identity, meaning and values that are changing in profound ways. More than ever before, if we just focus narrowly on commercial quests, we will find ourselves blindsided by much broader changes playing out on the global stage.

As we shift our identity from consumers to networked creators, we will find that creativity plays a more and more central role in our lives, especially as our personal and professional identities knit together again. More and more of us will come to realize that creativity is indeed sacred, worthy of respect and reverence. By cultivating a view of creativity as sacred, we reinforce a sense of wonder, curiosity and, most of all, humility that will help us to become even more creative.  By honoring creativity and giving it a more central place in our worldview, we will find that it strengthens our perception of possibility, motivating us to create in ways that we previously never thought would be feasible. The focus on agency highlights the potential opportunity we all have to co-create the universe we live in – this is not (just) about watching others, it is us about us working together.

Even more importantly, this reinvention of the sacred represents a move from a static to a dynamic worldview.  Rather than the sacred representing perfection already achieved, the sacred emerges as a process of becoming without end.  This reinvention of the sacred is profoundly consistent with the broader movement of the Big Shift from a static world of knowledge stocks to a dynamic world continually re-shaped by ever evolving knowledge flows.

Embracing this new notion of the sacred will strengthen us in our quest to harness the forces of the Big Shift to create things never before imagined. Just as the Big Shift is changing our beliefs about ourselves, most certainly it will change our beliefs about the cosmos. Perhaps these new beliefs will provide a common ground where we can all come together – believers in a divine being and believers in a divine becoming – to heal the injuries that have separated us and helping all of us to more effectively achieve our potential.

Shifting Identities – From Consumer to Networked Creator

Who are you?  Your answer to that question will shape what you do and feel on a daily basis. We each have a unique personal identity, but underneath that are layers of identities that help us to connect with others based on communities, values and interests. These layers are undergoing profound and long-term shifts that will have profound impact in our personal and professional lives.

A few months ago, I wrote a manifesto for passionate creatives. In a later post, I explored what I meant by passion.  I chose “creative” because I believe that this identity will become increasingly widespread. In fact, I believe we are in the early stages of a significant shift in identity from “consumer” to “networked creator.”

20th century identities

In the 20th century we witnessed a deep split in our professional and personal identities.  The quest for scalable efficiency in all of our institutions required us to conform to highly standardized organizational routines.  To do this, we had to sacrifice much of our individuality, which was compartmentalized into “after hours” time.  While passions in this domain were certainly acceptable, we were increasingly encouraged to seek status and expression through consumption.  Scalable efficiency required mass markets. Mass marketing programs were all geared to reinforcing the message that our identity depended on a large home, a big car, lots of state of the art appliances and stylish clothing that changed with each new fashion season.

As a result, identity in the 20th century increasingly took two different forms – we were company men (and as the century progressed, company women) and consumers.  Since the professional identity offered little room for individual expression, we poured much of our energy into expressing individuality through our consumption – perhaps a sportier car or a fancier dress. Our status hinged on our ability to consume.

The big shift in identities

That is all changing now – our identities are shifting in ways that we are only beginning to understand. All around us, we see people engaging in creation of various forms, sharing these creations and deriving satisfaction, meaning and status from these activities.  Whether we look at the resurgence of crafts and hot rod cars, the rise of the “maker” movement, body hacking, social media or open source software, we find people who are investing more and more time and energy in the creation of things they are passionate about. 

What is behind this shift? Well, it is all part of the Big Shift. It is emerging because we face unprecedented opportunity and unparalleled pressure.

Pursuing opportunities. Let’s look at the opportunity side first. The tools of creation are being democratized.  Rather than remaining the province of the very wealthy, these tools are increasingly within the reach of far more people around the world.  Much of this is driven by the rise and dissemination of the digital technology infrastructure on a global basis. This certainly has been central to the proliferation of user generated media, whether it is video, music, photography or text. But there are other design and production tools emerging – more affordable 3D printers for example, that give us the ability to “print” all kinds of physical objects, ranging from ceramic art objects to architectural models. On another front, more sophisticated scientific tools ranging from powerful telescopes to advanced electron microscopes are becoming accessible on a shared basis to anyone with a passion for discovery.

As important as the tools of creation are, the tools of sharing may be even more central.  Digital infrastructures give us the opportunity to connect with others who share our interests, no matter how obscure or marginal they might be.  This capacity for connection matters on many levels.  First, we can derive encouragement for our efforts.  We can learn from others who may be more skillful than we are, both watching what they produce and having their feedback on what we produce.  In growing arenas, we can watch how others use our creations and gain insight into what works and what doesn’t work. We can create things that others build on and enhance, so that we collaboratively create new works that can then be shared with others.

But these are just tools and platforms.  They help us to give voice to what is inside of us.  We were born with passion but, over time, this passion was gradually suppressed as we learned that the institutions we spent most of our time in, starting with schools, viewed passion as somewhat suspect at best and deeply dangerous at worst. Sure, we were offered an outlet for our passion outside the institutions we studied and worked in, but even there we were encouraged to channel our passion into purchases.  Passion for food meant going to the finest restaurants, passion for clothing meant buying the latest and most expensive styles, passion for automobiles meant buying the most powerful and exclusive sports car models.

The problem was that this outlet for passion rarely satisfied.  The more we bought, the less satisfied we became. Many of us felt a deep seated need to achieve our potential, not by buying even more, but by discovering and developing our unique talents. We could apply these talents to creative activity that could then be shared with others. For some of us, the creations will be physical objects like crafts, robots or new ways to harness renewable energy. For others, it will be practices like the extreme sports enthusiasts who work together to push performance envelopes.  And for many, it will be ideas that generate debates and coalesce communities of interest.

This creative activity would help us to express our unique individuality rather than simply showcasing the mass produced designs of others.  The new tools and platforms provided us with ways to re-connect with the passion many of us lost from our youth and gave it new forms of expression as we sharpened the talent that many of us never even knew we had.

As our passions drive us to connect with others sharing our passion, we discover a powerful reinforcing loop that begins to play out.  The relationships that we build pull us into creating and sharing even more. Relationships thrive on reciprocity.  As we become the recipients of the creations of others, we feel a desire to create for them as well. The more we create and share, the more we draw out creations from others and the cycle begins to repeat.  Our identity becomes increasingly associated with what we have created but also what has been adopted and used by others that we care about.

As we slowly began to re-connect with our passion and connect more broadly with others who shared our passion for creation, many of us began to take the next step.  Rather than simply pursuing our passion as a hobby, we felt a growing need to make our passion our profession.  We simply could not compartmentalize our lives any more – our passion would not tolerate it. While institutions had a hard time accommodating this passion, we found that we could strike out on our own and once again leverage digital infrastructures to build revenue generating businesses based on the creations driven by our passion.  This began during prosperous times, but became even more pronounced in the current economic downturn. Many found themselves without a job and decided that this was a good time to make their passion their profession.

These trends have not played out evenly across the world.  Perhaps the group most immediately experiencing this passion to create is the younger generation just coming out of college or, in a growing number of cases, bypassing college entirely. They are the ones most comfortable with the digital infrastructures that can enable and amplify this passion. Gaming and other online habitats nurtured a questing disposition that gave them the confidence to explore their passion and talent outside the confines of traditional institutional boundaries. This questing disposition among the younger generation becomes particularly strong in developing economies like China and India where youth have a strong desire to seize upon the opportunities for talent development and growth that digital infrastructures offer.

At the other  end of the spectrum, many of the developed economies confront a rapidly aging population that is likely to live far longer than any previous generations.  This older generation in many cases has achieved a degree of affluence where the continued accumulation of consumer goods has diminishing appeal.  They are seeking more meaning in their lives and are hungry for an opportunity to discover, or re-connect with, passions that can define the next phase of their lives.  Unexpectedly, this older generation is the most rapidly growing segment of users embracing the digital infrastructure.

Responding to pressure. These are the opportunities drawing more and more of us into networked creation activity that increasingly shapes our identity.  But there’s another set of forces shaping this new identity as well. We are all under increasing pressure as a result of the Big Shift.  No matter how talented we are, we now find that we face competition from talent across the world.  And much of that talent is developing rapidly, driven by the opportunities described earlier.  The result for all of us is increasing stress as we wrestle with growing demands on our time and attention. 

This pressure and stress calls into question our choice to split our professional identity and our personal identity as consumers. We have long since learned that our employers are only as loyal to us as the latest quarterly financial results.  We run the risk of being let go as soon as financial pressures begin to mount.  Anyone who cultivates a professional identity as a company man or company woman runs a growing risk of having that identity shredded in very short order.

At the same time, we find it harder and harder to deal with the mounting pressure in our work.  Our recent Shift Index revealed that very few employees are passionate about their work.  We were conditioned from a very early age not to seek passion in our profession, but rather to view it as a paycheck that allowed us to pursue our passions in our spare time.  The problem is that, without passion, we have a hard time coping with growing pressure.  We have a much higher risk of burning out or becoming marginalized as we find it harder and harder to keep up. Our traditional identities of company man (woman) and consumer become more challenging to maintain.

The only way we will be able to cope with the mounting pressure is by making our passion our profession.  As this happens, we will find ourselves driven to create and to connect with others who share our passion for creation.  As discussed earlier, this will drive the definition of a new identity – the networked creator – which integrates at last our professional and personal identities into one primary source of meaning and fulfillment. This new identity will help us to drive the development of our talent as we begin to recognize that participation in diverse knowledge flows will help us enrich our creativity and that sharing our creations with others will accelerate our learning. It will provide us with a solid foundation to turn stress into stimulus as we begin to see and embrace new challenges as an opportunity to pursue our passion and more effectively achieve our potential.

Reshaping Relationships through Passion

I have always been shy. As a child, I learned to turn inward as a way to protect myself against an environment that I perceived to be very threatening.  I saw relationships as temporary at best and full of turmoil at worst, and would frequently retreat into a personal world with a good book rather than interact with new people. I had such a severe reaction to my first day at kindergarten, for example, that my parents decided to give me a reprieve until first grade. Shyness is a survival mechanism and it helped me to navigate through some very challenging times.

For shy people like me, the Big Shift can be deeply challenging. The Big Shift suggests we are moving away from a world where stocks of knowledge and short-lived transactions are the key to success. In its place, we find a world where participation in many, diverse flows of knowledge and long-term, trust-based relationships determine success. In this new world, shy people can be at a significant disadvantage. We run the risk of becoming increasingly stressed and marginalized by the extroverts who welcome the opportunity to broaden and deepen relationships. They thrive in crowded rooms while we are deeply uncomfortable with exposing and sharing.

The need to reshape relationships

For everyone, whether shy or not, the Big Shift poses other challenges.  We generally treat relationships as sources of stability in a confusing, complicated and rapidly changing world.  We seek out people who share our backgrounds and experiences, those who can make us comfortable and reassure us that our ways of viewing the world are valid and enduring. Once we find these people and connect with them, we develop relationships that comfort us rather than challenge us to achieve our full potential.

The strength of these relationships also becomes a vulnerability. Lulling us into complacency, they insulate us from new perspectives and practices far more appropriate to the changing world around us. 

In sharp contrast, passion holds the key to creating and shaping relationships that will help us thrive in a rapidly changing world. It motivates even the shyest of us to reach out and connect with others in ways that become catalysts for creativity and growth. Passion fosters a uniquely strong and productive bond that provides both the stability and stimulus needed to continue to grow and succeed in a constantly changing world.

1. Overcoming inhibitions

Though passionate people may be socially awkward or shy, their passion compels them to step outside of their social comfort zones to find others who share their passion and who may be able to help them reach new levels of performance.

Passion is a powerful driving force. The internal momentum it fosters gives passionate people the will and enthusiasm needed to overcome social inhibitions that otherwise discourage them from connecting with new people.

If there is any doubt about this, consider the area where the force of passion is best understood: love. The archetypal “laying it on the line” in pursuit of romantic connection is understood by even the shyest or most conservative of people. An uncomfortable or risky overture of some sort is necessary to the formation of virtually every new relationship. Each one of us has experienced the drive of passion in this way, which makes the analogy—while limited—a powerful illustration of how passion enables connection irrespective of social ability.

However, the key difference is a very important one: the relationship sought by a passionate creative (as opposed to a passionate romantic) is a means to a common end, and not an end in itself. When creatives form a productive connection based on shared passion, they feed each other’s energy and build momentum toward greater achievements than would have been possible independently—something that all talented individuals intuitively understand.

Passion plays another role here as well.  In addition to motivating us to seek out others who share our passion, it becomes a beacon attracting others to us.  Passionate people speak and write about their passion.  They share their passion with others. They can’t help it – it is their passion after all.  This makes others aware of our passion.  We soon find others approaching us because of something that we wrote or said.  Before we know it, even more connections are established and relationships built around these shared passions.

I found intriguing evidence of the role of passions in expanding our relationships in the Shift Index (pdf) that the Deloitte Center for the Edge published last year.  This research discovered a striking correlation between the degree of passion that employees have in their work and their participation in knowledge flows of various types – measured by such proxies as participation in conferences, professional associations or social media.  Passionate people are much more connected than those who indicate little passion in their work

Shy people can experience a virtuous cycle.  In overcoming their inhibitions to forge these energetic connections, they find that they are indeed able to pursue their passions more effectively than if they remain isolated in their own shells.  As they experience this success, they are motivated to reach out even more broadly to build expanding networks in search of new relationships with people who share their passion. Though their instincts may still encourage isolation, they yield instead to the much more powerful force of passion.

2. Come together, right now: The diversity of passionate communities

Through passion, the kind of people we connect with changes as well. Whether shy or not, we all have a tendency form bonds with people who look, believe and act as we do. Rather than helping us to overcome conventional geographic, demographic, ethnic and professional boundaries, our relationships often serve to harden and strengthen these boundaries.  Romeo and Juliet’s love was so taboo because it compelled them to transcend conventional social boundaries (note that, even here, it was romantic passion that gave rise to this inspiring exception).

In times of rapid change, this tendency becomes even more pronounced.  In a previous posting, I discussed the research of Bill Bishop, in his recent book, The Big Sort.  He documented a sustained and significant population shift in the United States as people increasingly congregate in neighborhoods with others who share their demographic attributes, lifestyles and values. Many have worried about the polarization of society occurring in the virtual world of the Internet, while remaining relatively oblivious to the much deeper polarization occurring in the physical world.

Passion, however, is blind to social background, political beliefs (unless the passion is related to politics), experiences or lifestyles.  As long as someone shares our passion and is actively engaged in pursuing it, we seek them out and welcome them into our fold. Passion brings together unlikely groupings and these communities have a tendency to create dynamic and innovative “creative spaces” not in spite of their member’s diversity, but because of it.

In Susan Sontag’s 1965 essay “On Culture and the New Sensibility,” she associates genius with the “personalities and music of the Beatles” (emphasis mine). Sontag is right in placing the cultural significance of John, Paul, George and Ringo’s personalities beside the music they made together. The individual characteristics and inter-group relations of these four passionate creatives are seared into cultural memory because of the dynamism of their distinction.

Relationships built on passion are extremely strong and often defy the incentives of traditional bond formation.  When they traveled to Hamburg Germany for one of their first big gigs, The Beatles’ line-up was John, Paul, George, Stewart and Pete. With a grueling performance schedule to maintain, only the most passionate—not necessarily the most popular—would remain. Stewart quit to follow new passions, Pete was replaced by the more talented and enthusiastic Ringo, and The Beatles, as we know them, were formed.

As an exemplary passionate community, The Beatles continued to seek edges. They constantly reinvented themselves through the influence and collaboration with other passionate creatives on the edge, people as diverse as Bob Dylan, Brian Wilson, Ravi Shankar and Yoko Ono. Though these influences had discernable impact on The Beatles as an artistic team, the most significant key to their success was the unlikely partnership between John Lennon and Paul McCartney—whose personalities, talents and sensibilities are extremely divergent and even at-odds. Yet together, they became one of the most important artistic teams of the twentieth century.

3. Growing through sustained relationships

Shared passion helps the relationships we build to strengthen and grow. While reaching out to others in expanding networks can be fruitful, one of the most important fixtures of a passion-based relationship is its want to become a rooted, stabilizing force, while at the same time challenging each of its members to “keep their end of the bargain” as an innovative contributor to the creative momentum of the bond.
In this way, passion-based relationships are not just resistant to the status quo—they are incompatible with it.

The Lennon-McCartney partnership held strong at the height of innovation throughout the tumultuous Sixties in large part because of the continuous challenge John and Paul posed to one another to grow as artists. This quasi-competitive dynamic is a fixture of most cultural, social, artistic, political and intellectual movements throughout history—where talented individuals continually set the bar higher for one another, making these relationships a source of forward-moving momentum for their passions and creativity.

But “movements” have another important characteristic: they are highly community oriented. Passionate creatives gather physically in neighborhoods, cities or districts (what Richard Florida calls “spikes” ), or maintain connection through correspondence in some form, to fortify connections with one another as community members. Think of the Harlem Renaissance, the High-Modernist Ex-Pats, the Berkeley New Left, Greenwich Village Beats and today, Silicon Valley’s digerati.

It had been the case up to very recently that this rootedness was typically imposed from without (as is the experience of many people “pushed” into the religious communities of their parents), which can be a stifling and repressive force. Conversely, passion provides a pull-based foundation for community building that liberates, for those who may feel alienated or different in traditional community settings.

In a constantly changing world of shift and flows, finding (or founding) a passion-based community may be one of the most significant factors to staying oriented, rooted, and poised to grow. 

The dynamics of passionate relationships are powerful elements of success in an era of continuous instability. Passion trumps inhibition in the service of new connections; shared passion provides a foundation for diverse relationships; and these relationships provide both stability and inspire growth for its members.

Lessons learned 

This is not just theory. This perspective is deeply informed by my own personal experience.  Connecting with my passion has helped me to overcome my shyness and to build a rapidly expanding network of deeply rewarding personal relationships, especially with people on a variety of edges, who have helped me to learn and grow continuously.

Over the years, I have learned that my shyness was a coping mechanism. It is not who I really am.  I have come to believe that we are all passionate and social beings, but we learn to become otherwise as a result of childhood experiences. Connecting with our passion can help us to recover our natural sociability, inspire us to connect with others and grow as individuals within the dynamic and nurturing bonds of passion-based relationships.