The Leader's Voice

The Power of Time

RSA Animate is a terrific site - one worth checking out. Animates talks and provides an interesting method of remaining engaged in a talk (although in some cases the original talk is pretty interesting all on its own).

Below is a sample of a talk given by Philip Zimbardo on the power of time perspective on individuals and cultures.

Deep Conversation

For at least thirty years or so I have always added to one of Socrates' dictums that, "the OVER-examined life isn't worth living either." Must have been during my therapy years. It appears Daniel Dennentt wrote something similar back in 1984. Seems I keep good company. But perhaps, like the Goldilocks lesson, somewhere between the unexamined and the over-examined there lies a region that helps promote well-being.

A short article in the February issue of Psychological Science posts an interesting study by Matthias Mehl. His work concerns the connection between deeper conversations versus more shallow or social conversations and well-being. He speculated that those individuals who had longer conversations about more meaningful subjects experienced greater well-being than those who were more isolated (duh) and those who gabbed an equal amount, but about more shallow topics. His correlational analysis showed those with a greater sense of well-being talked more about more meaningful things. He concluded:

"On the one hand, well-being may be causally antecedent to having substantive interactions; happy people may be 'social attractors' who facilitate deep social encounters. On the other hand, deep conversations may actually make people happier. Just as self-disclosure can instill a sense of intimacy in a relationship, deep conversations may instill a sense of meaning in the interaction partners. Therefore, our results raise the interesting possibility that happiness can be increased by facilitating substantive conversations."

Makes me wonder about our Facebook quest to post life's everyday moments, when a lunchtime conversation about the economy, life's purpose, the quality of our work, etc. might be more fulfilling. Sorta like the difference between a healthy meal and a lot of tasty junk food. And it could mean that using Facebook to alleviate isolation may be less helpful than calling a friend for a walk, talk, or meal.

Pleasure

The avalanche of books concerning "happiness" that slid upon us the past few years perhaps obscured the subject's intimate cousin "pleasure." Paul Bloom, a Yale psychologist, has recently written a book on the topic. I like it because, like my work in communication, it plumbs interior depths rather than observing surface features and concluding we understand a subject. 

For those who attend to this subject matter, I recommend you listen to the New York Times Book Reviews interview with Bloom in its entirety. Below I have excerpted about five minutes of this interview and added a couple of short clips from the original British version of Antiques Roadshow to illustrate one of Bloom's ideas.