A few weeks ago, I read and reviewed Matt Mason's book The Pirate's Dilemma here on the blog. He spoke at The Medici Summit in early March and his presentation is terrific; insightful and fun to watch.
Matt Mason at The Medici Summit
April 16, 2008
March 29, 2008
The allure of "Now"
Just over ten years ago I began a psychoanalytic treatment. Psychoanalysis, as you may be well aware, is the original, hardcore Freudian approach to psychotherapy wherein the analyst takes a passive role and the patient freely associates whilst lying on a couch. It was a dramatic and ultimately very helpful treatment for me. However, psychoanalysis has become the whipping boy par preference in the psychotheraputic establishment. It is accused of being misdirected, cumbersome, old fashioned and, above all else, slow.
It is this final accusation that is of particular interest to me since one of the trends I often talk about now is the increasing speed in business and life. From the algo-mania of Wall Street to the millisecond searches on Google, speed is a defining characteristic of life in the early 21st century. Not only is speed seductive for adrenaline-seeking car enthusiasts and wealth-building brokers, it is also the object of affection for many self-help gurus and management litterature writers. Browsing a bookstore at Amsterdam's Schiphol a few days ago, it struck
me that nearly all management books are somehow promising fast change. In the self-help department, the flavor of the moment is Eckhart Tolle whose bestseller is called "The Power of Now". It seems like "Fast", "Now", "Instant", "change your...in ten days" are trendy words if you want to sell books. Why?
The answer may be related to our brain's capacity to think about the future. Embedded in the prefrontal cortex (the front lobes of the brain) is the ability to plan ahead, project future consequences of present action and so on. It is, according to neuroscientists, the newest part of our brain in terms of evolution and the last part of the brain to mature when we grow up. The positive consequences of this ability are numerous but the downside is that we become nervous, worrisome, even frightened of potential future events in our life. Never mind that few of the things we worry about ever happen, worrying is a defining feature of the human condition. We are, in other words, condemned to think about the future - in positive and negative terms. This is why all talk about "live in the present", "be here now" and "fast change" is the self-help equivalent of alchemy - alluring yet deceptive and unscientific.
