"Our world has changed immensely in the last few weeks but amid the upheaval and distress, there are reasons to believe we can emerge from the crisis with some human qualities enhanced..."
In this recent article from the BBC, writer Matthew Syed frames the current global struggles caused by the pandemic in an optimistic light. How can we use this time to practice "assumption reversal," a thought experiment meant to hone creative skills? How can we reexamine our places in the world, and find true meaning in what we do for each other?
"[W]e may not be able to return to our familiar pre-crisis reality. Pandemics, wars, and other social crises often create new attitudes, needs, and behaviors, which need to be managed. We believe imagination — the capacity to create, evolve, and exploit mental models of things or situations that don’t yet exist — is the crucial factor in seizing and creating new opportunities, and finding new paths to growth."
The Harvard Business Review examines the importance of imagination in the climate of the pandemic, by contrasting how some businesses and society are adapting to changed circumstances, rather than shaping the future of the world. In this piece, the authors highlight seven imperatives an organization needs to adopt to improve its capacity for innovation that can be implemented now.
In a piece from 2019, writer Li Jin unpacks a concept called the Passion Economy. As opposed to the gig economy, which is increasingly based on "turnkey ways for people to make money." Things like Uber and Lyft, GrubHub, and other on-demand marketplaces "provided a path to self-employment for millions of people, [but] they also homogenized the variety between service workers, prioritizing consistency and efficiency." The emphasis on consistency and efficiency, while important in certain marketplaces, devalues the individuality and unique talents of those working through these platforms.
Given the lack of stability throughout the world, due to social distancing and very real public health concerns that may not be ending any time soon, now is the time to analyze how we fit our unique talents, interests, and abilities into what it is we do.
From a recent Brookings Insitute blog, we see a quick but thorough exploration of the meaning of work and how our individual and collective identities are tied to it.
Whether one finds themselves jobless due to the global pandemic response or adjusting to the new life of telework, the dynamics and motivations around work are in drastic changes for much of the world. The author's research "shows that the perceptions we hold about the meaningfulness of our job can actually have serious consequences for how we behave in the labor market." As such, we must examine what motivates us, and the importance of finding work with real meaning.
Read about the author's research into job meaningfulness and its effects on health, productivity, and happiness for workers the world over.
Author James Clear provides us with an excerpt from his book Atomic Habits to better understand how we can examine our own habits, giving us a simple way to bring the unconscious to the conscious regarding our habits and how we analyze them.
By listing and then rating our daily habits (even the most simple and basic!) we can begin to understand the margins we actually have in our days and weeks. Now that many of us are living and working within the same space, building, changing, and examining our habits becomes all the more relevant. Use this simple tool to benefit yourself and those around you.
