Tonight, I saw the 60 Minutes piece on Steve Jobs’ biography coming out. Ironically, I came across this remake of a video of Seth Godin, a former boss of mine, and transcribed it because of how important I think the message is. There are several similarities between these two men: brilliance, an incredible ability to sell, not great people managers, found great equity in their business ventures (took some along, but not everyone), incredible passion & vision, and when they speak (with or without sentimental guitar as a backdrop)…people stop and listen.
Click the picture to see the YouTube video (I cant embed video w this version of WP.)
Seth is summarizing a bit of my path here. It took me 10-15 years to turn the barge around from playing safe to being curious. He’s right…it takes a long time, especially for those who (through whatever circumstance) are either less entrepreneurial and more motivated by a perception of security–but it is possible.
Seth is right, fundamentalism has very little to do with religion and everything to do with outlook and the ability to broaden our views.
An example from Pathwise underscores this further.
Something happens to scuba divers when they come upon an underwater precipice. Under the sea there are shelves or shallow areas that may only be a hundred feet deep or so and then there will all of the sudden be a drop off that could be 1 or 7 miles deep. He shared that even though, logically, the diver knows that he or she is at the same depth, when embarking out over a precipice, there is a sense of ones relative size and importance in the face of this great void. This causes them to be compelled to scurry back to where the bottom is again visible.
The anxiety is existential. In other words we lose the sense of who we are without the form we are used to seeing or using.
So to be able to work in ambiguity without holding on to old ways of doing things; or to be able to “not know” in a situation where one is accustomed to knowing, is very much like this going out into the abyss. Logically it may be no big deal; however we have difficulty because it is “existentially” hard to do.
Transcript from Soul Biographies: Curiosity
what is a fundamentalist?
a fundamentalist is a person who considers whether a fact is acceptable to their faith before they explore it.
as opposed to a curious person who explores first and then considers whether or not they want to accept the ramifications.
so, here is what happened…in 1950-something, TV kicked in. And what TV demonstrated was that if you spent enough money, you could make money interrupting people with ads they didn’t want to get. if you spent enough money, you could repeat a message enough times, you could make enough money to buy more ads, which would allow you to make more stuff to buy more ads…
and so we end up with all those jingles that stick in our heads and all this mediocre products that we think is great, we end up with all these habits that got built after 40-50 years of this.
and then, it stopped.
that what the smartest and richest people in the world have done is turn off their TV sets.
Is your television ‘ON’or ‘OFF’?
There are two camps…
People who still have a 12:00 flashing on their VCR. They are fearful, they are stuck, they are not interested.
People who are curious…Curious is the key word. It has nothing to do with income, nothing to do with education, it has to do with a desire to understand, a desire to try, a desire to push whatever envelope you are interested in.
Here’s the reason these people count…not ’cause there is a lot of them, but because they are the ones who talk to the people who in a stupor, they are the ones who talk to the masses in the middle, the ones who are stuck. the masses in the middle have brainwashed themselves into thinking that it’s safe to do nothing.
it’s easy to underestimate how difficult it is for someone to become curious. that for 7, 10, 15 years of school you are required to not be curious. over, and over and over again the curious are punished.
I don’t think it’s a matter of Mao saying “A thousand flowers bloom” and suddenly a thousand flowers bloom. I think it’s more about a 5, 10 or 15 year process where people start finding their voice and they start realizing that the safest thing they can do feels risky and the riskiest thing they can do is play it safe.
Might you be playing it SAFE?
I’m not that curious about why I’m curious, but my guess is that I grew up in a house where it was rewarded and cherished. And despite a lot of effort by a lot of people to make me non curious, I just resisted. and now, I get all my reward, all my positive feedback, all my income, from being curious. so now, it’s easy. but getting to the point where it was primed wasn’t easy at all. I just coulnd’t get it to go away.
Have you found your COURAGE to keep your outlook wide open?
a fundamentalist is a person who considers whether a fact is acceptable to their faith before they explore it.
what we are seeing is that fundamentalism has very little to do with religion, and everything to do with an outlook regardless of what your religion is.
Is your outlook worthy of the label of CURIOUS?
