More Space Essay: Opening, Part I

Fittingly I run across this quote by editor and essayist Phillip Lopate, author of The Art of the Personal Essay.

The enemy of the personal essay is self-righteousness, not just because it is tiresome and ugly in itself, but because it slows the dialectic of self-questioning.

This is an essay about self-questioning – mine own and maybe yours. And about how vital (as opposed to dying) business strategy – namely, marketing, innovation and product – is intimately tied to questing and questioning. If we always had all the answers, we’d stop learning, stop creating - stop dead.

Homeostatis. Equilibrium.

Coasting along. Resting on laurels. It’s extremely tempting. But it’s not business. And it’s not life.

Creative destruction, in the eyes of an economist, is the process of one product being substituted by another due to competitor activity. The complex systems management theorist would describe that as the outworking of complexity, or environmental change. Either way, they’re basically talking about the same thing. The operating world has changed. – Jim Underwood, from What’s Your Corporate IQ?

Capitalism, then, is by nature a form or method of economic change and not only never is but never can be stationary.

[The history of American business is a] history of revolutions.  - Joseph A. Schumpeter, from Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy

This is an essay on creative destruction in our minds, in our media, in our society and in our businesses. It’s definitely not about change for change’s sake.  If all’s right with the world – there’s absolutely no incentive for change. But you don’t need to let the world sneak up on you either.  They say people don’t like change. In actuality, we have too high a tolerance for pain. For some of us (and I know of what I speak all too well), things have to go wickedly downhill before we ask the obvious: I wonder if there’s another way...

This is an essay about how media is oft times a harbinger of things to come. Marshall McLuhan may have had it right when he quipped, “The medium is the message.” McLuhan said that creating, viewing, participating, and engaging in media alters our neurology. Media literally messes with our mind. Deep ingrained patterns of thought reinforced by biochemistry can be loosened and new brain terrain explored from the emergence of a new medium.

This is an essay on worldviews and our mental maps. That coherent set of concepts that serve to help us make heads and tails out of the complex world about us as well as our place within it. Our worldview is our decision-making framework. Useful stuff. Kinda like clothing. But imagine if we wore the same garment endlessly - we could run the risk that the fibers graft onto our skin. It gets hard to separate out where the skin ends and the cloth begins. Which is which?

This is an essay on becoming ourselves. Thought you were already yourself? Perhaps. But all of us – and there might be a dozen exceptions scattered globally – are so mired in our self-concept that we’d need to send out an archeological dig to unbury the actual me underneath.

This is an essay about expanding the perspectives we can hold fluidly in order to truly communicate with another human being. Developing and marketing an innovative product that meets deep-seated and even unstated needs requires precision. A precision rooted in not only reading people, not only understanding people, but knowing another as ourselves.

Society needs a return to spiritual values – not to offset the material but to make it fully productive…Mankind needs the return to spiritual values, for it needs compassion. It needs the deep experience that the Thou and the I are one, which all higher religions share. – Peter Drucker, from Landmarks of Tomorrow

As I write I hear the echo of Lopate’s opening words. This essay has challenged me because I sincerely aim not to be self-righteous. Being “right” is way overrated. There is a fleeting moment of vindication and validation – even hints of glory. But soon enough a feeling of loneliness settles in its place. We are always alone in our righteousness.

Think of me as a fellow patient in the same hospital who, having been admitted a little earlier, could give some advise. – C.S. Lewis

Comments

[Johnnie Moore]

Thanks Evelyn. I too am struggling with my More Space essay, especially with my own disssatisfaction with what I'm writing.

This strikes me an awesome start to your new draft. It would certainly hook me in, although I biassed in your favour.

I especially like the riff of overlapping themes for that this is about. Great stuff.

One minor anxiety would be the use of the word precision. I think the search for precision often takes us down the path of trying to put numbers on the unmeasurable... it might we worth exploring what you mean by the word in this context... I wonder if you might mean something more like courage?

Anyhow, you've got me inspired to think again about how I'm writing my own piece!

[graham]

Yes you've got me hooked.
The next part please.

The concept that it is all about how vital things are in our world rather than everything is dying.

It seems easier to talk about everything dying and of being of no benefit rather than to relook at our world, inside and out, and decide what is vital for our existence and ongoing growth.

Thank you for the thought process.

Graham