Our Emotional Fingerprints
I first learned about Einstein’s method for capturing ideas from a book called “Learning How to Learn”. Einstein would put his keys into one hand, relax in his chair with his arms draped over the sides, and take a 20 minute power nap. Just as he drifted off into deep sleep, his hands would relax and his keys would fall to the floor, instantly waking him up.
This is when he captured his best ideas. That dreamlike state between awake and asleep is a time when our brains make new connections and find concepts between ideas that we hadn’t realized before.
This state of thinking, called diffuse mode, is daydreaming essentially. It’s when we let our minds wander. The other type of thinking is focused mode - when we are concentrating deeply and specifically on something.
Recently I’ve had several people ask me about my writing process. It’s a combination of a few things, and starts with focused mode. Just about everything I consume is “thick and chewy” as my husband calls it. If there is one thing that strikes panic into my heart it is the fact that there are so many books to read and so little time. I find life, or non-fiction as we call it, more interesting than fiction.
My next ritual is going for walks. I used to listen to a podcast for the first half of the walk, and then walk in silence for the second half. Now I usually just walk in silence and let my mind wander. There is something magical about walking in silence that allows the ideas to bubble up.
It’s not easy to capture my thoughts when I’m walking, so I use voice-to-text and just send myself a text message. By the time I get home I’ll have sent myself a bunch of text messages that I then use as the basis for my writing.
I write on Fridays, or sometimes Saturday mornings, and the blogs are usually 300-500 words in length. My husband is my first reader and best editor. We all love stories, so I try to relate a personal story to the idea that I’m sharing. Joan Didion said “I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking...” and I find the same. Writing helps me clarify and work through what I think. And it seems to me that I can think something on one day, and the opposite on another. As Walt Whitman said “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.).”
A few weeks ago I copied and pasted all of the blogs I’ve written so far into ChatGPT and asked what type of book could be created based on the content. It suggested “Leadership in the Age of AI”.
If you read this newsletter regularly, you know I am passionate about people telling their stories. I love hearing them. Our stories connect us to one another. Because they are unique to us individually. Our stories are our emotional fingerprints. As AI makes everything a commodity, our individual experiences, our stories, are the one thing that it cannot commoditize.
There was a recent piece in the New York Times that perfectly captures my sentiments on this:
There have been just a handful of moments over the centuries when we have experienced a huge shift in the skills our economy values most. We are entering one such moment now. Technical and data skills that have been highly sought after for decades appear to be among the most exposed to advances in artificial intelligence. But other skills, particularly the people skills that we have long undervalued as soft, will very likely remain the most durable. That is a hopeful sign that A.I. could usher in a world of work that is anchored more, not less, around human ability….Today the knowledge economy is giving way to a relationship economy, in which people skills and social abilities are going to become even more core to success than ever before.
We crave most that which makes us human. If you decide to share your stories, I would love to hear or read them.
When you’re ready:
1) Book a call and let’s chat about how I can help you create your stories: https://graysonhaydencall.as.me/