"Think of many things. Do one."
No.87
Friday 4 March
Hi, it's David here.
Here in the School of Athens Newsletter and as of this week here in LinkedIn.
School of Athens has always been a wonderful metaphor for what we do at BeenThereDoneThat, I'm sure when Raphael sat down at his easel, the brief from Pope Julius II was ‘find a way to get the world’s greatest thinkers in one place’.?
In the wonderful world we live in today, if the Vatican were to ask for pitch presentations from a range of artists at least one of them would come back with a digital idea called LinkedIn.
A platform that provides those in business with access, to those in the business of providing services to business. And what’s great is they all think they are the world’s greatest thinkers.
LinkedIn is actually the only social media platform I am on and it works for me because in my mind it is specifically focused on work and I can turn it on and off.
However, in an article in The Guardian this week entitled ‘Your work is not your god: welcome to the age of the burnout epidemic’ Jonathan Malesic proposes that the reason why so many of us are at the end of our rope is that we can’t turn work off and on and we have allowed work to be what gives our lives meaning.
‘I was blinded by my trust in the American promise: if I got the right kind of job, then success and happiness would surely follow’.
This promise, however, is mostly false. It’s what the philosopher Plato (one of Raphael’s mates) called a “noble lie”, a myth that justifies the fundamental arrangement of society.?
The fact that Doctors in British Columbia can now prescribe a year long pass to Canada’s National Parks as an antidote to burn out is a fundamental demonstration that the way we live and work is fundamentally broken.
Like many Startups looking for new models it’s best to look at the pain points and problems of the old. We believed that we could create a way of working that worked for everybody.
We wanted to be a value based business and we were under the illusions that our values were what made us different.
Will Sewell, a software engineer, writes in his blog that the question we should be asking is What are your company's anti-values? Everybody says they want nice values but values should come at a cost. Move fast ... sure, Move fast and break things .. Are you sure?
We believed strongly that it was important to provide our clients with thinking without agenda but that meant we had to decouple thinking from execution and I can not tell you how many times we left money on the table as a result of that decision. But it's the right decision.?
Whether it is Raphael or LinkedIn the intention of both was to provide the ability to access a wide and diverse range of thinkers.?
(I recently came across an amazing community of thinkers called ConCreate, who have just happened to have spent time behind bars).
There are so many different communities who if accessed could genuinely solve so many problems. The key going forward is to be able to harness these thinkers and focus them on solving the right problem.?
We’ve looked at many different things on our journey but if there was one thing that we focus on today more than anything else, it's Problem Definition.?
As always, I'm curious to hear what you think.
David Alberts
Co-Founder at?BeenThereDoneThat
领英推荐
1. Your work is not your god: welcome to the age of the burnout epidemic
Read Time: 12m
The reason why so many of us are at the end of our rope? We allowed work to be what gave our lives meaning.
2. B.C. doctors can now prescribe a year-long pass to Canada's national parks
Read Time: 4m
Parks Canada says it's backing a nature prescription program in B.C., Ontario, Saskatchewan and Manitoba so doctors and nurses can prescribe a Parks Canada Discovery Pass to patients suffering mental and physical health problems.
3. What are your company's anti-values?
Read Time: 2m
Think big, start small. Focus on impact. Learn and be curious.
4. Radical Ideas From Radical Thinkers.
Read Time: 9m
ConCreates is a creative agency powered by currently and formerly incarcerated individuals.