05/03/24 Faith & Business Friday

Personal Development: When we collaborate, creativity unfolds across people; the sparks fly faster, and the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Collaboration drives creativity because innovation always emerges from a series of sparks—never a single flash of insight.

Psychologists are typically trained to focus on the individual, an approach firmly supported by our culture’s belief that the solitary individual is the source of creativity. But to our surprise, beginning in the 1990s, our research began to point in the opposite direction.

We began to see that innovations once believed to be the creation of a genius actually emerged from invisible collaborations, and that collaboration was responsible for famous creations throughout history.

• Sigmund Freud is credited with creating psychoanalysis, but in fact these ideas emerged from a vast network of colleagues.
• The French impressionist style of painting associated with Claude Monet and Auguste Renoir emerged from a closely connected group of Parisian painters.
• Albert Einstein’s contributions to modern physics were embedded in an international collaboration among many laboratories and teams. In fact, he didn’t discover the famous formula e = mc2; it was already known. Einstein’s attempt to prove the formula was mathematically flawed; the correct proof came later from another physicist. (Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize for a different project.)
• Steve Jobs didn’t invent the PC or the smartphone
• Linus Torvalds didn’t invent the Linux operating system.

Just like today’s software and business innovations, psychoanalysis, impressionism, and quantum physics emerged over many years of interactions, trial and error, and false starts—not in a single burst of insight.

Thanks to Keith Sawyer for the above and please buy and read his book Group Genius to gain a better insight to innovation and creativity in organizations.

Business Mastery: Phases of Growth in a business

• Discovery – New Idea
• Emulation – copy people around us. Prototyping our business based on other businesses.
• Divergence – develop your unique contribution. Contribute your unique body of work to the world.
• Crisis – We begin to settle in, we stop growing. We optimize our current work not looking for new opportunities (Discovery / Emulation)

Spiritual Maturity: Extraordinary Activities of Evil Spirits

• Infestation is a term for demonic activity connected to a particular location or object. Disturbances that act on houses, objects, animals, rather than people.
• Oppression describes demonic attacks on a victim’s exterior life: influences on their bodily health, finances, work situation (distraction or someone who can’t keep a job), family (example driving a wedge people married couples) and other social relations.
• Obsession refers to a more severe and relentless form of the struggle in the victim’s interior life, wrestling with disturbing or obsessive thoughts or a “running negative commentary” planted by the Enemy. Fr. Ripperger gave an unsubstantial statistic that an estimated 25% of Americans are diabolically obsessed.

Note: Such symptoms may well have mental or physical causes rather than spiritual ones. That’s why the Church insists that those who experience such afflictions should first approach medical professionals for help before concluding that they are under an attack by evil spirits.

• Possession is the most dangerous—and most rare—form of extraordinary demonic activity. It involves periodic episodes in which an evil spirit controls the body (in its entirety or in part like the lower back) of a victim, though the victim is usually not aware of what is taking place. Several accounts of demon possession are found in the Gospels.

One important note: A demon can never “possess” someone in the sense of “owning the soul” of a person. All human beings belong to God and are His personal possession. But in cases of demonic possession, the Enemy has become a usurper, occupying human bodies that were created to be indwelt by the Holy Spirit instead.

More about this in the book Dominion by Fr. Chad Ripperger

Catholic Meme: