In a recent Harvard Business Review article, YesWare’s VP of Product, Jake Lavirne, asserts, “An environment of discomfort contributes to creativity by breaking people out of their normal thought patterns, encouraging original thinking and risk-taking.” Interestingly, an effective Books@Work seminar does just that—by creating opportunities to discuss provocative narratives, it pushes participants to challenge their own assumptions and reconsider their beliefs and their routines. Time and again, participants tell us that they come away seeing the world and themselves anew, able to take a step back from their daily lives to consider what those daily lives might really mean. In a recent Books@Work seminar, Professor Ryan Honomichl (whose work has been previously featured on The Notebook) led a seminar with a group of participants in a distribution center near Cleveland on Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. Reading and discussing Ishiguro’s haunting novel permitted them to cultivate “creative discomfort”—together.
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In cultivating compassion, empathy and an appreciation for the world, mindfulness practice powerfully overlaps with the benefits of reading. After all, a New School Study recently demonstrated that reading – especially literary fiction – makes readers more empathetic. Reading deeply requires for a moment that we enter into another person’s head, and when we read fiction we enter the minds of characters who are often vastly different from ourselves. Learning about another’s perspective or point of view has the potential to profoundly shape us and our interactions with the world. Reading, in this sense, is an opportunity to practice deep and compassionate listening.
We are so convinced of the parallels between reading and sharing a great text and mindfulness practice, that we invite you to share an experiment with us. Participating in a mindfulness seminar or meditating every morning are not the only ways to focus on the moment, engage in compassion and connect with the beauty of the world. You can also read – and you can read with us.
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Talking about books is an opportunity to see even more perspectives and to gain a nuanced approach to our own. If we live in the echo chamber of our own heads and never listen to alternate voices, we risk missing the ways our thinking has become cramped or trapped–and we’ll never learn to disagree productively or to speak up at work, either.
Paying attention to and learning from other perspectives enriches our sense of the world and our place in it. It can help us feel less isolated, less cut off from people who disagree with us. It can help us find kindred spirits in even the most unlikely places. And, instead of “complaining because the rose bushes have thorns,” we are reminded to “rejoice because the thorn bushes have roses.”
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In the wake of last week’s massacres, we’re all thinking about how we can work to understand each other a little better, how we can overcome and appreciate difference. As Gianpiero Petriglieri writes for the Harvard Business Review, “Fostering civilization means cultivating our curiosity to recognize substantive difference, and our commitment to respect them – within and between groups.” And as novelist Jennine Capó Crucet reminds us, a good book “gives the reader a chance to see what it feels like to be someone else for a little while. And so, in doing that, it shapes a sensory experience that inspires compassion and empathy.”
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Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce’s new report makes the need to adapt for working learners clear and urgent. After all, as the authors state, “nearly 14 million people – 8 percent of the total labor force and a consistent 70 percent to 80 percent of college students” are working learners. “Learning while Earning: The New Normal,” takes a fascinating, detailed look at the people who work while going to school, either pursuing their first degree or returning for additional credentials. But what it leaves out is as important as what it includes. What happens to those who never pursue a first degree? And what about the 65 percent of the “$772 billion spent on postsecondary education and training . . . spent outside of the formal postsecondary education system”?
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Felix writes about Steelcase CEO Jim Keane’s blogpost for the Drucker Society Europe: “He makes an important contribution to the discussion of meaning in the workplace.” Meanwhile, Ann reflects on modernist artist Joaquín Torres-García, Capria thinks about the past and Jessica brings an infographic on parenting to the fore.
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The payoff for good, mindful work is a return to our senses. More than this: the labor that often goes unseen or unrecognized itself has many virtues, many hidden stores of knowledge the like of which the rest of us can only imagine. Nina MacLaughlin examines this often unseen work, and her book, Hammer Head: The Making of a Carpenter, offers insightful glimpses into mentorship, craftsmanship, and the rewards and difficulty inherent to learning.
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Food is legacy, history and culture – both personal and generational. It’s an invitation to link to other human beings across lines of difference: “breaking bread together” is as powerful an image of peace as the extension of the olive branch (wait … an olive branch?). But food (and its preparation) is work – real work – that connects the heart, the hands and the soul in the most essentially human of activities.
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Talking about literature helps us develop complex skills such as “critical analysis”: the ability to see beneath the surface, to reason through the meaning of details, and to situate the object of analysis within a larger context. It enables vital, careful thinking about texts, yes, but also about people, organizations, experiences. We all become better employees and co-workers, friends and citizens, mothers and fathers, when we improve and refine our ability to understand what’s around us through observation and thoughtful analysis.
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