Category storytelling

The Saturday Read ‘Every Time I Find the Meaning of Life, They Change It’ by Daniel Klein

Eileen Kohan Leave a comment

A U.S. Senator, a philosophy student and a welder walk into a bar…maybe not. In a debate last week U.S. Senator Marco Rubio questioned the value of a philosophy major in a world that needs more welders.

“I don’t know why we have stigmatized vocational education, welders make more money than philosophers. We need more welders and less philosophers.”

I can understand those who seek to define college as an extended vocational school experience, given the cost and potential for significant debt, but to limit the aspirations of 18 year olds diminishes the value of higher education. I think we go to college to figure things out. Part of that is the career decision, but the larger experience incorporates learning how to think, question, listen, reflect and argue in a quest to live our best life.

In defense of philosophy majors, and the politicians and welders who might benefit from their wisdom, The Saturday Read this week is ‘Every Time I Find the Meaning of Life, They Change It: Wisdom of the Great Philosophers on How to Live’ by Daniel Klein.

Like many college students, Klein “didn’t have a clue as to what I wanted to do after college; basically all I knew was that I didn’t want to be a doctor, lawyer, or businessman, eliminations that put me in a distinct minority of my classmates. I figured studying philosophy would be just the ticket to give me direction.”

His father, like Senator Rubio, let him know that “studying philosophy was simply a wast of time.”

Fortunately for the reader, Klein continued his studies, recording selected ‘Pithies’ in a notebook hoping “to find some guidance from the great philosophers on how best to live my life.” These quotes and current reflections form the structure of the book.

“I now realized that those how-to-live questions were still very much alive in my mind. Sure, time had crept on and my life, with its ups and downs, had simply happened, as lives tend to do, by my appetite for philosophical ideas about life had not diminished in the least. In fact, as I look at life from the vantage point of my eighth decade, my hankering for such ideas has only increased. Late in the game as it may be, I still want to live my final years the best way I can. But more compellingly, I find myself at that stage of life when I want to give my personal history one last look-through, and I am curious to see how it measures up to fully considered ideas of a good life.”

Why this book? Because legislating, welding and philosophy should not be mutually exclusive terms. As the Thanksgiving inter-generational conversation turns to the big ‘vocational’ questions of choice and what you are doing with your life, it’s the central question of philosophy being posed, how to live the best possible life.

‘Every Time I Find the Meaning of Life, They Change It’ is an accessible, often humorous, tutorial, presenting a pageant of philosophy’s luminaries and author commentaries.

One quote in particular, resonated with me in light of the domestic and international scene this week, from British philosopher, Bertrand Russell.

“The man who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his age or his nation, and from convictions which have grown up in his mind without the co-operation or consent of deliberate reason. To such a man the world tends to become definite, finite, obvious; common objects rouse no questions, and unfamiliar possibilities are contemptuously rejected…(But Philosophy) keeps alive ours sense of wonder by showing familiar things in an unfamiliar aspect.”

The week@work April 27 – May 3  Chief Storytelling Officer & Nancy Drew @ 85

Eileen Kohan 1 Comment

Writing from North Carolina, this week@work has been a transcontinental journey. Observing life along Highway 40 you notice the new urban growth areas and the blight along old Route 66. Booming city centers and suburbs of Oklahoma City, Nashville, Knoxville and Charlotte contrast with graffiti covered, abandoned roadside attractions in a land that time forgot.

Travelling by car is typically reserved for tourists, but it’s worth the trip to reconnect with the reality of the changing economic landscape that’s hard to see from 20,000 feet.

Two stories to share from the past week:

Fast Company magazine reported on a new creative position, the ‘chief storytelling officer’:

“The CSO is a thoroughly modern title, the product of a growing interest in corporate storytelling, a pursuit that has lured other established writers and journalists into the world of corporate hackery.”

Using the example of Pakistani writer, Mohsin Hamid author of ‘The Reluctant Fundamentalist’, we discover the value of novelists in a corporate environment. “He’s now working for the half-century-old creative consultancy Wolff Olins as the company’s first chief storytelling officer.”

“Last year, Wolff Olins—which in 2001 became a subsidiary of the marketing giant Omnicom Group—contacted Hamid to explore how he could contribute to its work; the more he thought about it, the more he recognized, he says, that “storytelling isn’t only for novelists, but CEOs and leaders as well.

More than just a feel-good theme, Hamid says a unifying narrative that all employees can grasp can help them work more creatively and independently—necessities in today’s company structures, which often rely on a distributed leadership approach, rather than the top-down supervision of yesterday.”

This week we celebrated the first national Independent Booksellers Day and the eighty-fifth anniversary of the publication of the first Nancy Drew mystery book. Author and journalist Theodore Jefferson wrote an excellent piece on the influence of the series on book publishing and expanding young women’s aspirations:

“Agency.

It is that which forms the foundation for any hero’s ability to save the day. In America, agency for teenage girls in literature made its debut in 1930 in the person of Nancy Drew.

Scholars Janice Radway and Nan Enstad assert that stories like Nancy Drew’s provide girls a “place to dream.” While they highlight romances and the “dime novels” of the pulp era as prominent examples, that “anything is possible” spirit was not limited to those forms.

It was the imaginative energy of that era that propelled Nancy Drew and characters like her into the kinds of stories nobody had ever seen before.

“…it is what Nancy Drew does in her stories that sets the Drew-niverse apart from what once was. Nancy gets into fights, drives a car, packs a gun and relies on herself to get out of tough situations. She is mechanically inclined and at the same time doesn’t act like most people in the 1930s would have expected a teenage girl to act.”

This week we celebrate storytelling as a way to communicate corporate culture and we recognize a heroine whose stories encouraged young readers to dream.