Tag: Relationships

Learning · Philosophy · Psychology · Relationships

Catherine Hoke and the need for Second Chances in society

Keith GuthrieLeave a comment

[The Tim Ferriss Show] Catherine Hoke — The Master of Second Chances

This is an inspirational podcast. Catherine runs an organisation called Defy that works with prisoners in the US to give them a second chance through an intensive training program and then, after their release, support.

I am not going to try to summarise everything because it’s so worthwhile and inspiring listening to Catherine.

My brief takeaways:

– the dangers of the self critical voices in our heads

– the power of forgiving yourself, the power of forgiving others

– getting the balance right between realism, positivity and negative self talk

– ‎inspiration to set challenging goals and going after them

– ‎being unafraid to contact people and keep at asking them (nicely) until you get what you want, and how to form connections with them (research commonalities)

– ‎the dangers of having to live up to a perfect ideal in society, church or organisations

– ‎the assumptions we make about those in prison

– ‎what does it feel like to be an ex convict: imagine what it would be like to be identified by, and reminded of your most shameful moment every day of your life

– ‎the inspiration to give something back to society and in particular, that everyone willing to own their past mistakes and wanting to change, deserves a second chance

– ‎focusing on the 5% that you can do, that no one else can do

– ‎writing your own eulogy as you expect it will play out on your current life course versus how you would like it to play out and what 10 changes you need to make to make that a reality?

Listen, learn and be more compassionate towards yourself and others.

Learning · Philosophy · Psychology · Relationships

Being realistic about love

Keith GuthrieLeave a comment

Another Alain de Botton interview, this time with Krista Tippett whose “On Being” podcast often covers interesting topics on relationships, spirituality etc.

I am a romantic and an optimist, yet I find such wisdom in Alain’s kind and compassionate realism and anti-romanticism. If you are serious about your relationships (with lovers, friends or colleagues) I think there is a lot to learn from Mr De Botton and I would strongly encourage you to listen to it.

The most read article in the New York Times in 2016, the year of the US election and Brexit, was Alain de Bottons article “Why you will marry the wrong person”. What does that tell us about us as a species? Relationships are what we are about.

Here are some of my memorable take-aways from this jam-packed episode

  • It is better to come to a relationship on your first date with a starting point of “I am flawed, I am crazy in the following ways, in what ways are you crazy?” rather than “I will pretend I am perfect and you will only find out how I am flawed over time as the facade fades”. Accept that we are two flawed people trying to come together.
  • “We are all deeply damaged people.”
  • If we think we are easy to live with then by definition we are going to be hard to live with and don’t have much of an understanding about ourselves. You have wisdom if you know that living with you, just like every one else, is pretty difficult. No one really gives you this feedback. Your friends, your lovers never tell you (during the good times) that you are difficult to live with because they don’t want to upset the relationship.
  • The great enemy of good relationships and good friendships is self-righteousness.
  • The ancient Greeks described love is a benevolent process whereby two people try to teach each other how to be the best version of themselves
  • We only get into a sulk with people we feel should understand us, but don’t. We expect out partners to read our minds. We operate with this mad idea that true love means we should have an intuitive understanding of what the other needs.
  • As adults we are incredibly generous towards children, we look for a benevolent reason for their behaviour, but we take it personally when we have a difficult experience with an adult. We need to go behind the facade to understand where the behaviour came from rather than taking umbrage and offence.
  • One of the greatest sorrows we have in love, is realising that our lover doesn’t understand part of us. A certain heroic acceptance of loneliness seems to be one of the key ingredients of forming a good relationship. If you think your lover must understand everything about you, then you are going to be furious most of the time.
  • “Asking someone that you love and admire to be in a relationship with you is a pretty cruel thing to do.”
  • Marriage is a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind, gamble taken by two people who don’t know yet who they ar,e or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of, and have very carefully avoided investigating.
  • Realism, accepting reality and acceptance of complexity is ultimately the friend of love.
  • Children are hard on a marriage.
  • There is a lot of mundanity in life and in relationships, and we don’t give enough significance to the every day activities that make up our lives.
  • A functioning society requires love and politeness
  • Love in society is a capacity to imaginatively enter into the minds of people with whom you don’t immediately agree; to look for the more charitable explanations for behaviour that does not appeal to you, or could even seem plain wrong; not to immediately tell people how stupid they are.
  • Politeness is an attempt to not say everything; an understanding that there is a role for private feelings which, if they were to emerge, would do damage to everyone. Our culture has a orientation towards self disclosure that “if I am not telling you exactly what I think, all time, then I am not doing the right thing or being true to myself”.
  • Compatibility with each other is the achievement of love, not the precondition for love.
  • We are used to being strong, what we don’t know is how to make ourselves safely vulnerable – which is what we need to do in a good relationship.
  • Flirtation is the attempt to awaken someone else to their attractiveness.
  • Freud is wrong: Psychological Dynamics are not all driven by sex. Rather Psychological Dynamics are everywhere including in sex. The meaning we infuse into sex is that “I accept you in a very intimate way.”
  • We have this idea that good relationships must be conflict-free relationships and we are quick to terminate relationships when conflict develops.
  • “We have a long way to go: a narcissism of our time is that we think we are far along in the development of the world. Rather we are at the very beginning in our understanding of ourselves as emotional creatures. We are taking the first baby steps in our understanding of love. We need a lot of compassion for ourselves, as we do make horrific mistakes all of the time.”
  • We have an enormous loneliness around our difficulties. We need solace for the sense that we are suffering for not being perfect in a culture that is oppressive in its demands for perfection.
  • We need a certain amount of pessimistic realism about our relationships, which is still totally compatible with hope, laughter and good humour.

To quote Alain in conclusion:

We must realise that in our relationships, however well-matched we are, the issues we face are common to all: we have to learn how to love well – it’s something we can progress – it’s not just enthusiasm, it’s a skill – it requires forbearance, generosity, imagination and a million things besides. We must fiercely resist the idea that true love means conflict-free love and that the course of true love is smooth: it’s rocky and bumpy at the best of times, and that’s the best we can manage as the creatures we are; it’s to do with being human, and the more generous we can be towards that flawed humanity, the better chance we will have of doing the true hard work of love.

Here is the podcast

http://feeds.soundcloud.com/stream/306909014-alain-de-botton-the-true-hard-work-of-love-and-relationships.mp3

The ideas covered in this podcast are similar or connected to a number of other podcasts that cover similar topics include the amazing Esther Perel for anyone looking for more wisdom on relationships. I will cover her in a future blogpost.

Business · Business Culture · Learning · Psychology · Relationships

Nancy Lublin, CEO of Crisis Text hotline

Keith GuthrieLeave a comment

A truly inspiring podcast that I would recommend anyone interested in any of the following topics to have a listen to.

Key insights and takeaways for me:

Business leadership: Being decisive and moving fast, yet still caring very personally for the people you work with

Purpose: Being driven by a real need and passion not money and perhaps not even really aiming to make money, aiming to make a difference.

Hiring: aim to hire someone who you could live with in a bunker with, someone energetic and someone who is not going to bore you

Developing people: it’s okay to have someone onboard for a short period of time where they develop this part of their life/journey and for it then to be time for them to move to something else. Not everyone has to be a lifer ie. with the company forever. But in the time they are with you they have to be energetic and dedicated.

Developing people: Her enjoyment of seeing people through crucial development phases of their lives when they are in their 20s and 30s.

Creativity: giving people enough space to come up with creative ideas and then pursuing the ones that really get you excited

Process: Applying Systems thinking and feedback loops on data to training people, improving systems.

Creativity: Empowering people you work with and getting out of the way of their creativity, sometimes that requires you stepping out of the frame.

Empathy and support:When helping someone in crisis know the magic words: what not to say: don’t ask “why?” questions e.g. Why someone did something: it usually comes across as accusatory and denigrating. (note this is the opposite of what to do when you are being analytic, as highlighted in a previous blog, when asking Why repeatedly is a very powerful technique).

What to say: use the words “proud, brave, smart”. Those words move people from hot to cooler quickly. Use that with your kids too.

Other people’s perspectives: The value of the perspective of younger generations and understanding the millennial generation. Eg. Her insights that at least for a period of time, texting is a more powerful medium than Facebook and other social media as it is more trusted.

The podcast:

Uncut Interview — Crisis Text Line’s Nancy Lublin from Masters of Scale with Reid Hoffman. https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/bonus-uncut-interview-crisis-text-lines-nancy-lublin/id1227971746?i=1000392185172&mt=2

General · Learning

The Introspective Fool

Keith Guthrie1 Comment

“The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.” ― William Shakespeare, As You Like It

Why this blog?

What inspires you? What motivates you? I love learning. I am motivated by learning and I become inspired by learning. I spend a lot of my time listening to podcasts, reading and interacting with interesting people. But I won’t make much impact if I keep what I learn to myself. I want to share the things I am learning, with anyone who is interested. Perhaps they will help and inspire you and make the world a better place…

What is the purpose of learning?

To acquire knowledge but more importantly to translate that knowledge into wisdom – the beneficial application of knowledge.

Some quotes to illustrate the difference

  • “Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.”  ― Aristotle
  • “The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.” ― Socrates
  • “The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.” ― Isaac Asimov
  • “The unexamined life is not worth living.” ― Socrates
  • “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and instruction.”  ― The Bible, Proverbs 1:7

Why learn?

I love learning for many reasons:

We are creative beings. Creativity creates meaning in my life. As a kid I grew up programming computer games, reading fantasy novels and dreaming of creating my own adventure stories with friends. I remember thinking “adults lose their imagination.  I must make sure that as I grow up I must never lose this… this ability to create something out of nothing, by using my imagination.” As I grew up what interested me changed, or more accurately expanded: I still love those things I grew up with, but I discovered that the world had many more interesting topics to explore. I realised that creativity builds not out of nothing but on the ideas of others. Learning about things we don’t yet know is a great way to inspire yourself to being creative.

Learning will make me a better person. I know I will never be perfect (one of the wonderful, liberating truths to be found in the doctrines of Christianity). But I want to be a better person, more true to myself, and a richer contributor to the lives of my family, my friends, my colleagues at work, my community.

I do love trivia. I just love learning stuff just for the sake of knowing something interesting. I hope it makes me a more interesting person. But what I desire most through knowledge is wisdom. Let’s be clear though, Wisdom should not be our only aim. God was pleased with King Solomon’s request to grant him Wisdom, but he still ended up failing to live as a godly man. Perhaps there is something even deeper we should be aspiring to? Relationship? Wisdom about relationships? Join me on that journey…

Breadth vs depth, what do I want to be expert at?

In any given area there are experts, who through their tremendous skill, focus and extensive dedicated time have built exceptional expertise in that area, more than I could ever hope to do. The world typically encourages and rewards great specialisation.

But my interest in learning is broad. I love connecting the dots between disparate, seemingly unrelated topics. I have always tended towards the generalist rather than the specialist in one particular area. I love the idea of being the “meta connector” of concepts. As an example, my job in investments gives me the tremendous privelege of dealing with true “best in the world” experts on a very wide variety of investment topics, which is why I love it so much.  It was one of the few careers I came across where I felt, “I can do the same job every day and never stop learning about a very wide range of things.”

But what about the gaps between the specialist experts? The unexplored cracks and fissures between the various fields-of-endeavour?  For me the interesting opportunities are in making connections between those disparate areas, how can ideas in one area be applied somewhere new? That’s where I want to focus: to be the expert “meta connector”. I want my skill, my differentiator and competitive advantage, to be that I am a person able to make those diverse connections. Through that I will be able to have greater creative impact and to hopefully boost the creativity and enhance the skills of  the specialists with whom I am priveleged to work or interact.

But you can’t be properly broad and wise without also getting sufficiently expert in some areas. I still need to be enough of an expert in the areas I want to apply the things I learn to. So I will need the skills and focus to learn to become an expert in some select areas. The key is focus, doing a few things well.

My mission in life is to develop my expertise in a few specific areas:

1. In being the expert meta concept connector, my learning passion

2. In Investment Management generally, and specifically in Asset Allocation, my work passion

3. In Photography, my creative passion

4. In enriching a select human relationships: my family, my friends, my colleagues and my chosen communities, my human passion.

What do I want to learn and share about?

So what will this blog cover? For the reasons mentioned above I am intentionally keeping it broad. There are some broad categories I find myself interested in which might appeal to different people, so I will try to categorise each entry into one or more topics, listed below, to which it is most pertinent. But remember, it’s the connections between diverse topics, the repeating patterns, that allow us to make the connections where there are gaps in expertise.

The main categories of topics I will focus on are, in no particular order

  • Relationships
  • Psychology
  • Business (particularly the cultures we define in business)
  • Investments (because it is what I do)
  • History
  • Health
  • Science (broadly but also particularly Physics and Astronomy)
  • Art
  • and in particular Photography (because that is what my hobby is)
  • Maths and Statistics

Many of the posts are likely to be quite short. But occasionally I might publish a thought piece, more like an essay. If these are of less interest please skip them, the last thing I want to do is bore people.

So why another blog of this nature?

Well firstly just because I will enjoy producing it.

Secondly I have found an unexpected benefit in producing it: it helps me to internalise the learning, to explain it succinctly to others is to understand it better oneself (and it will be a useful reference for me in future when I want to remember something).

And finally because learning is how we progress as a civilisation. That may seem like a statement of the obvious, but how good are we at learning as a civilisation? If I can help spread ideas more widely we may all learn wisdom a little faster, and the world will become a little  better….