Everything I do starts by enticing people, sometimes easily and sometimes not so, out of their intellectual comfort zones. I'm interested in helping business leaders to think bigger and different, to solve their most important problems, to seize their best opportunities.
This is a better starting point to create the future, to drive innovation, to accelerate growth, or simply to lead a business. With fresh thinking, with inspiring ideas, with a desire to create the future, strategy becomes more meaningful, and implementation much easier.
Yet most most business leaders struggle to capture and communicate their best ideas, to engage and inspire people with their vision, and to rise above the daily grind of delivery. My challenge is to stretch and stimulate their minds, as well as to guide their smarter choices and practical actions.
So where do I get new inspiration?
One of my favourite thinkers is Jason Silva. He is a filmmaker, an ideas curator and storyteller. Whilst no academic, or business expert, his fast, impassioned "idea explainers" explode with enthusiasm and intensity as they distill how technology is expanding our sphere of possibility.
He cuts through the jadedness of most business thinking. That can be saturated by the same old words, spoken by poor communicators, in ways that don't match their incredible meaning. He wants big ideas to have aesthetic relevance. He wants to tickle people's intellectual sensibilities and instill a sense of wonder.
Psychologist Nicholas Humphrey coined the term "the biological advantage of being awestruck" to describe his theory on why our unique ability to be enthralled was, somehow, biologically selected for in a Darwinian sense. He believes this quirk of our consciousness imbues our lives with a sense of cosmic significance that over the course of history has resulted in a species that works harder not just to survive but to flourish and thrive. To "awe" gives us a "raison d'etre." A reason for being.
Humphrey says being enchanted by the magic of experience, rather than being just an aid to survival, provides an essential incentive to survive.
Terence McKenna, in his book "Food of the Gods," wrote about the origins of human language: this unique, often ecstatic expression of consciousness that bursts forth as morsels of meaning encoded as vocal patterns.
He believes the origins of language stem from our early use of psychedelic compounds, which caused a sort of "ontological awakening" of our species and thus acted as an early catalyst for religion, cosmic feelings of awe and a desire for transcendent experiences.
These experiences, to borrow the words of Tim Doody, re-contextualize oneself as a marvelous conduit in a timeless whole, through which molecules and meaning flow, from nebulae to neurons and back again. Early shamans, Davis wrote in "TechGnosis," became ecstatic technicians of the sacred.
Regardless of whether you buy McKenna's theory, he does provide a compelling case for the relationship between "cosmic, out-of-body euphoria" and the cognitive leaps to which it can give rise.
Some of our greatest poets, scientists and other thinkers have attributed some of their greatest inspiration to the use of these psychedelic chemicals and their resulting out-of-context perspectives.
In Jason Silva's mind the key idea here is that of being forced out of context. We don't necessarily require psychedelics for this, although they might offer a shortcut.
What we require is a bold new attitude and a sense of humility that accepts the ambiguity of many of our so-called truths, habitual thought patterns and cultural reality tunnels. By accepting the need to constantly de-condition our thinking to approach the world with new eyes, we can reconnect with our sense of awe and wonder.
As Michael Pollan wrote, "In order to see things as if for the first time, we must remember to forget." Bucky Fuller used to say "dare to be naive." Oftentimes, our sense of what we think we know is precisely what prevents us from approaching situations free of prejudice.
This makes perfect sense. In a world where disruption is the new normal, and technological change is happening at an exponential rate; a world where we are bombarded with media messages, and where "attention" is the new limited resource, it seems easier to recoil away from all the mindblowingness going on, and instead look for reasons to be bored. The mundane can be quite comforting for those terrified of leaving their comfort zone.
And this where I think my work serves the purpose of infecting people with wonderment. My short videos are "digital psychedelics" meant to "de-center" the self, dwindle the broadcast of the ego and provide people with a long view, "big picture" perspective on humanity, technology and how their symbiosis might make a dent in the cosmos.