Pro Pointers: Bring back the awe and jumpstart creativity
By: Priya Chetty Rajagopal
It’s easy to get lost in everyday minutiae. Remember to be amazed and feel wonder instead, for the best ideas
In these bustling, mechanised days,it’s considered odd to be awed, overwhelmed, wonder struck or uplifted. But to carry on with our daily lives, we need a lot of the ‘aha’ as fuel to do what we do, and to enjoy what we do. How many times have you had your eyes open with wonder or your mouth open in awe? Or even sought it? Far too few I would reckon.
Last week, I felt some awe atTiE Leapfrog , a wonderful symposium with world class speakers showcasing what is required to leapfrog to the next growth stage. I rarely attend events like this, because time is often a constraint, and the idea of being a passive listener does not excite me. However, look at Bengaluru as a start-up city, the number of billion dollar valuations, the vast market that we represent, the tremendous power of the possible. One of the billion dollar company founders was going to be 30 years old in 10 days, and probably felt that it was old age! The atmosphere was charged with over 2,000 delegates and a whole start-up flavour. I am glad I stepped in to plug into that incredible energy. It was all there –bright ideas, brimming hope, and a million buzzing synapses.
Isn’t awe required to think big, radical or dream the impossible? Have people become more individualistic, more self-focused, more materialistic and less connected to others? Are we awe-deprived? Has it been too long since we have experienced goosebumps? Why is awe so important at work? We can understand that awe would lift us human beings and make us more aligned to being a small part of a magic, infinite universe and time, but how would this impact us being better leaders, altruistic team members and creative problem solvers at work?
A New York Times article on ‘Why do we Experience Awe’ gives us some understanding: Awe imbues people with a different sense of themselves, one that is smaller, more humble and part of something larger. Our research finds that even brief experiences of awe, such as being amid beautiful tall trees, lead people to feel less narcissistic and entitled and more attuned to the common humanity people share with one another. In the great balancing act of our social lives, between the gratification of self-interest and a concern for others, fleeting experiences of awe redefine the self in terms of the collective, and orient our actions toward the needs of those around us. It’s simple. Awe makes us stretch, allows us to visionalise, makes us do (and as importantly, want to do) the bigger things.
Doreen Lorenzo in her article Awestruck in the Office shares that ‘When it comes to building and maintaining a strong creative culture in the workplace, or in developing a company with the potential to change the world in some way, promoting “everyday awe” at the office could be an important tool for managers, especially those who understand that getting people to undertake difficult creative challenges requires special attention to the emotional investment they are making in their work’. She shares a fascinating example where Hurricane Katrina and the poor disaster response struck an awed design colleague to look at a Styrofoam cup in front of him as a prototype of simple, affordable, easy to assemble housing for the displaced. A few years later, he actually built a successful company called Reaction Housing around the concept.
Are we doing more things to build our resume than to build our soul? When was the last time you stretched on green grass or took a trip to an art gallery? How do we ensure we don’t lose out on ‘everyday awe’?
» Lie back on the grass and look up at a starlit sky, sit on a beach and look at the infinity of the horizon and the vastness of the sea, climb up that mountain if you can – feel that sense of insignificance as well as connectedness.
» Listen to incredible opera, alaap or soaring orchestra, close your eyes and let that perfect harmony make you soar.
» Take the tallest roller coaster and plunge down along with your stomach!
» Look down from a plane window and cloud walk in your mind, a thousand miles above the earth.
» Appreciate the dedication of a young woman who cooks and feeds a 100 street dogs everyday of her life.
» Experience perfection and creation. Hold a newborn.
» Look into the eyes of a young child experiencing something for the first time.
As Albert Einstein said ‘There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle; the other is as though everything is a miracle.”
So the next time when the perfection of a flower or the vastness of a mountain range fills you with awe, just go ahead, give in, surrender and embrace. Your next big idea could be lurking right there.
(The author is a CXO search consultant and Women Leadership champion)
It’s easy to get lost in everyday minutiae. Remember to be amazed and feel wonder instead, for the best ideas
In these bustling, mechanised days,it’s considered odd to be awed, overwhelmed, wonder struck or uplifted. But to carry on with our daily lives, we need a lot of the ‘aha’ as fuel to do what we do, and to enjoy what we do. How many times have you had your eyes open with wonder or your mouth open in awe? Or even sought it? Far too few I would reckon.
Last week, I felt some awe at
What was exciting was listening to the tremendous bursts of ideas and spiralling of thoughts. How does one conceptualise, let alone ‘invent the future’? To hear Nandan Nilekani sharing amazing statistics in Indian Financial Services, talking about the complete, disruptive shifts via the mobile and fuelled by Aadhaar and banking interoperability, was to blink a little and say: ‘Really? Here?’ While Harvard Professors such as Tarun Khanna and Amazon leaders such as Diego Piacentini set the stage, speakers such as Doreen Lorenzo (erstwhile Head of Frog and Quirky) and Zenia Tata of XPrize simply awed me as they shifted the stage to more esoteric concepts such as ‘institutionalised empathy’ and the power of inciting and rewarding the creation of world-changing ideas. Organic rarely works, one needs to leapfrog. How do you think futuristic? How do you think vast? Twenty years ago, who would have thought Virgin Galactic or Google’s driverless car was viable? So why shouldn’t we follow through with mining Mars?
Isn’t awe required to think big, radical or dream the impossible? Have people become more individualistic, more self-focused, more materialistic and less connected to others? Are we awe-deprived? Has it been too long since we have experienced goosebumps? Why is awe so important at work? We can understand that awe would lift us human beings and make us more aligned to being a small part of a magic, infinite universe and time, but how would this impact us being better leaders, altruistic team members and creative problem solvers at work?
A New York Times article on ‘Why do we Experience Awe’ gives us some understanding: Awe imbues people with a different sense of themselves, one that is smaller, more humble and part of something larger. Our research finds that even brief experiences of awe, such as being amid beautiful tall trees, lead people to feel less narcissistic and entitled and more attuned to the common humanity people share with one another. In the great balancing act of our social lives, between the gratification of self-interest and a concern for others, fleeting experiences of awe redefine the self in terms of the collective, and orient our actions toward the needs of those around us. It’s simple. Awe makes us stretch, allows us to visionalise, makes us do (and as importantly, want to do) the bigger things.
Doreen Lorenzo in her article Awestruck in the Office shares that ‘When it comes to building and maintaining a strong creative culture in the workplace, or in developing a company with the potential to change the world in some way, promoting “everyday awe” at the office could be an important tool for managers, especially those who understand that getting people to undertake difficult creative challenges requires special attention to the emotional investment they are making in their work’. She shares a fascinating example where Hurricane Katrina and the poor disaster response struck an awed design colleague to look at a Styrofoam cup in front of him as a prototype of simple, affordable, easy to assemble housing for the displaced. A few years later, he actually built a successful company called Reaction Housing around the concept.
Are we doing more things to build our resume than to build our soul? When was the last time you stretched on green grass or took a trip to an art gallery? How do we ensure we don’t lose out on ‘everyday awe’?
» Lie back on the grass and look up at a starlit sky, sit on a beach and look at the infinity of the horizon and the vastness of the sea, climb up that mountain if you can – feel that sense of insignificance as well as connectedness.
» Listen to incredible opera, alaap or soaring orchestra, close your eyes and let that perfect harmony make you soar.
» Take the tallest roller coaster and plunge down along with your stomach!
» Look down from a plane window and cloud walk in your mind, a thousand miles above the earth.
» Appreciate the dedication of a young woman who cooks and feeds a 100 street dogs everyday of her life.
» Experience perfection and creation. Hold a newborn.
» Look into the eyes of a young child experiencing something for the first time.
As Albert Einstein said ‘There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle; the other is as though everything is a miracle.”
So the next time when the perfection of a flower or the vastness of a mountain range fills you with awe, just go ahead, give in, surrender and embrace. Your next big idea could be lurking right there.
(The author is a CXO search consultant and Women Leadership champion)
