Many years ago, Walt Kelly's Muppet-like cartoon character Pogo famously observed, "We have met the enemy, and he is us." Centuries before, Shakespeare expressed the same idea when he penned in Julius Caesar, "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings."
We unquestionably live in times treacherous and challenging but of unprecedented opportunity. Just think, for example, how many millionaires and even billionaires have emerged from garages, basements and spare bedrooms over the past two decades.
Take Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, for example. They launched Google in 1998, when both were 25 years old. Nine years later, each is worth overe $16 billion. Not that money is the measure of their worth in their's and in many other's mind.
Search engines had been around for some time: Archie was the first, coming on line in 1990. Then came InfoSeek, Lycos, Yahoo, Alta Vista, and others. So how did Google jump ahead of everyone else and become the most dominant Internet company on the planet? By not trying to improve on other models, but formulating their own.
Most companies pattern themselves and their products after others. Rather than applying critical thinking to an opportunity, they apply creative theme-and variation thinking to the way others have approached the same opportunity.
These are times that call for the kind of critical thinking approach employed by Page and Brin to create the Google juggernaut. What do I mean by "critical thinking?" I mean a cognitive mode that accepts no proposition without questioning its validity. In a Cartesian sense, critical thinking presumes everything to be wrong until proven otherwise.
The trouble is today, is that in a hurry to get to a goal, we too often accept what others have claimed to be true without going through our own proof.
In workshops I conduct, I often use the aging of the population as a platform for showing how much we base our thinking about a matter on unchallenged, erroneous claims.
In a Fast Company article several years ago, Shoshana Zuboff, author of The Support Economy, wrote:
We've all heard how older people today are unlike any previous generation of older people, starting with how adults now live much longer. But the truth is, however, adults are not living much longer than they did a hundred years ago. People - including infants and children are living a lot longer, but not adults as a single category of people.“Modern adulthood is a place with no maps. Until the late 20th century, there was no concept of midlife, because there just wasn't enough time in between climbing out of adolescence and dying.”
About 23 years of the total 30 years in life expectancy gains between 1900 and 2000 accrued to people under 18.
Adult longevity increased relatively little during the 20th century. According to Social Security, a man reaching 65 today can expect to live only about 2.6 years longer than a man reaching 65 in 1940.
Perhaps more mind-catching, a person celebrating her 85th birthday today has barely a year greater life expectancy than her 85-year-old counterpart a century ago. In other words, the human life span (how long we can live) has not changed in modern times. It is the same as it was a thousand, two thousand, even 10,000 years ago. Our only gains have been in longevity – how long we do live. And since 1900, those gains have been relatively little for adults, especially after the age of 50.
Zuboff further said:
This new new adulthood is about becoming a truly unique individual who cannot be reduced to a role or a Rolodex, a net worth or a network -- a person who is more than the sum of his or her own parts, more than achievements and the expectations of others, more than titles, statuses, and all the glittering prizes.”
There is no “ new new adulthood.” Zuboff ignores what Maslow called self-actualization, Carl Jung called self-realization, and theologians and philosophers for centuries have described as a letting go of worldliness when youth is spent. Midlife was not, as Zuboff claims, a 20th century concept.
The term “midlife” may have been coined in the 20th century, but what it stands for has been around for millennia, spoken to in the annals of Vedic scriptures, classical Greece and notably in the works of the Roman stoic philosopher, Seneca.
If an esteemed Harvard Business School professor like Shoshanna Zuboff can get away with such sloppy scholarship, one wonders about the long-term costs to our society of continuing to “dumb down” entertainment, advertising, news presentations – and higher education. As time goes on, we seem less able to discriminate between truth and fancy, for opinion increasingly outweighs critical thinking in human affairs.
The next time you're involved in seeking out the truth for a major undertaking, try to identify the fundamental assumptions as to what is true that you and your colleagues have until now simply taken as givens. Invite everyone to do the same. Then raise questions about what might make those assumptions false. Following that, try thinking of new ways to approach the task at hand that do not depend on those assumptions. In other words, formulate new assumptions.
This exercise will start moving you outside the box. As you get there, it may become apparent to you that when most people think they are operating outside the box, they are really only looking outside the window of the box. Getting outside the box means casting off the shackles of unexamined claims.
DBW
Recent Comments