800-CEO-READ Excerpts

A Whole New Mind: Meaning Portfolio

Take the 20-10 Test

I heard this exercise from Jim Collins, author of the blockbuster book Good to Great. He encourages people to look at their lives--in particular, their work--and ask themselves whether they would still do what they're doing now if they had twenty million dollars in the bank or knew they had no more than 10 years to live. For instance, if you inherted $20 million dollars, no strings attached, would you spend your days the way you spend them now? If you knew you had at the most ten years to live, would still with your current job? If the answer is no, that ought you tell you something. This test alone obviously can't determine your life course. But the approach is smart--and the answers will be clarifying.

Read These Books

Recommending Books about Meaning is difficult. Much of the world's great literature and religious texts tackle the topic of what Meaning is and how to find it. So the following book recommendations don't trump great novels or sacred texts. Read the Sermon on the Mount, sections of Torah, and parts of the Koran, too, if you'd like. But for more secular, contemporary, and prescriptive guides to Meaning, consider any of these fine books.

Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl--Simply one of the most important books you'll ever read.

Authentic Happiness by Martin Seligman--It astonishes me that more people haven't read this book and absorbed its lessons. It's a perfect introduction to positive psychology and contains all sorts of exercises to help you put the findings into action in your own life. Also visit the accompanying Web site.

Flow by Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi--"Flow", when you're absorbed and enthralled in an activity that your sense of time and place, is an important component of Meaning. This book is your guide.

[There are a few other recommedations in the book -t.s.]

A Whole New Mind - Play Portfolio

Step on the Humor Scale.

James Thorson, a professor at the University of Nebraska-Omaha, has devised a Multidimensional Sense of Humor Scale, which has been used by both researchers and clinicians to measure individuals' level of mirth. The test asks things like whether you use humor to cope and whether your friends consider you a wit. Thorson's research has found that "those who score high on a multidimensional sense of humor scale have lower levels of depression and higher levels of purpose than those who score low in humor." Take the test yourself and see where you stand.

A Whole New Mind: Empathy Portfolio

Test Yourself.

Empathy Quotient--Measure your EQ with Simon Baron-Cohen's sixty question instrument, which will determine whether you have a "female brain". If you want to check your "male brain" bona fides, also take that measures your Systemizing Quotient, or SQ.

Emotional Intelligence Quotient--When you're done testing your EQ, test your "E-IQ" with this ten question survey prepared by Daniel Goleman for the Utne Reader magazine. [It looks the survey has been taken down at the author's request. See this page].

A Whole New Mind: Symphony Portfolio

Hit the Newsstand.

One of my favorite exercises in conceptual blending is the "newsstand roundup". If you're stymied on how to solve a problem, or just want to freshen up your thinking, visit the largest newsstand you can find. Spend twenty minutes browsing--and select ten publications that you've never read and would likely never buy. That's the key: Buy magazines you never noticed before. Then take some time to look through them. You don't have to read every page of every magazine. But get a sense of what the magazine is about and what its readers have on their minds. Then look for connections to your own work and life. For instance, when I did this exercise, I figured out a better way to craft my business cards thanks to something I saw in Cake Decorating--and came up with a new idea for a newsletter because of an article in Hair For You. Warning: your spouse might give you uncomfortable looks when you come home toting Trailer Life, Teen Cosmo, and Divorce Magazine.

Read These Books.

Here are five books to help hone your powers of Symphony:

Beethoven's Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture by William Benzon--An excellent exploration of how the brain processes music, in particular how music draws on all parts of the brain in a whole-minded , symphonic fashion.

Powers of Ten by Charles and Ray Eames--Created by the well-known husband and wife team, this flip book contains seventy-six pages, each with one image, each of which is seen ten times closer than its predecessor. Start at the beginning of the book with an image of the earth seen from ten million light years away. Then flip through the pages with your thumb, and zero in on a man at a picnic on Chicago's lakefront--and descend into the man's skin, one of the skin's cells, the skin's DNA, all the way to a single proton.

Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson--This is a short, accessible work is the best book available about metaphor as a thought process.

Not Waste A Project (A project by Laboratorio De Creacion Maldeojo)--A TV aerial made out of discarded metal cafeteria trays. Toy cars fashioned from spent plastic shampoo, ink, and glue containers. Those are just two of the images in this remarkable collections of photographs of ingeniously repurposed items from the streets of Cuba. A stunning display of combinatorial thinking.

How To See: A Guide to Reading Our Man-Made Environment by George Nelson--First published in the mid-seventies, and reissued in 2003, this book is an amazing tutorial in looking critically at the world around us, making connections between what we see, and conceived of human creations in a broader context.

A Whole New Mind: Story Portfolio

Write a Mini-Saga

Writing anything is hard work. Writing a short story is really hard work. And writing a novel, a play, or a screenplay can take years. So go easy on yourself by writing a mini-saga. Mini-sagas are extremely short stories--just fifty words long...no more, no less. Yet like all stories, they have a beginning, a middle, and an end. London's Telegraph newspaper has long sponsored an annual mini-saga contest--and the results show how much creativity a person can pack in exactly fifty words. Try writing a mini-saga yourself. It's addciting. [Here is one example to hook you]:

A Life

by Jane Rosenberg, Brighton, United Kingdom

Joey, third of five, left home at sixteen, travelled the country and wound up in Nottingham with a wife and kids. they do shifts, the kids play out and ends never meet. Sometimes he'd give anything to walk away but he knows she's only got a year and she doesn't.

Get One Story

Reading short stories is a fine way to sharpen your story aptitude, but how can your find the good ones withour poring through dozens of highbrow literary journals? One answer: Let Maribeth Batcha and Hannah Tinti do the shifting for you with their innovative publication, One Story. One Story delivers exactly what the title promises. Every three weeks or so, Batcha and Tinti send subscribers...one story. It's printed as a pocket-sized booklet that's easy to stick in your pocket or toss in a bag. The stories are all great. And there's a elegant simplicity to reading a single story all by itself--rather than jammed between a bunch of other stories or wedged between a ten thousand word article about Kazakhstan and a review of the anniversary edition of Jude the Obsure in the New Yorker. I've subscribed to One Story for a few years now--and given subscriptions (a mere $21 per year).

Read These Books.

The best method for heightening your appreciation for Story is just reading great stories--particularly the archetypal stories found in Aseop's Fables; Greek Nordic, Native American, South Asian, and Japanese myths; the Bible; and Shakespeare's plays. But if you're looking for a broader view of Story itself, the following three books are must reads.

Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting by Robert McKee--Even if you don't plan to write the next big screenplay, McKee's bbok is valuable reading. It explains the basic structure of the cinematic story--from how characters drive narrative to the twenty-six different types of story genres. At the very least, this book will change the way you watch movies.

Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art by Scott McCloud--People laugh at me when I say this is one the best books I have ever read, but they just don't get it. Scott McCloud's masterpiece (yeah, it is) explains how comics work--how the stories unfold, how the pictures and words work together, and how readers supply much of the meaning. And get this: McCloud wrote it in the form of a book-length comic. Amazing.

The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell--Campbell's book introduces the "hero's journey," something that every aspiring writer--not to mention, any self-actualizing human--ought to understand. For another avenue into Campbell's mind, look for his famous late-1980's interviews with Bill Moyers, which are available on CD, DVD, and video. A collection of Campbell lectures and writings is also available from the foundation established in his name.

A Whole New Mind by Dan Pink

A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age
by Daniel Pink
Riverhead Book - March 2005
272 Pages - ISBN 1573223085


Here is the product blurb:

Lawyers. Accountants. Radiologists. Software engineers. That's what our parents encouraged us to become when we grew up. But Mom and Dad were wrong. The future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind. The era of "left brain" dominance, and the Information Age that it engendered, are giving way to a new world in which "right brain" qualities-inventiveness, empathy, meaning-predominate. That's the argument at the center of this provocative and original book, which uses the two sides of our brains as a metaphor for understanding the contours of our times.

In the tradition of Emotional Intelligence and Now, Discover Your Strengths, Daniel H. Pink offers a fresh look at what it takes to excel. A Whole New Mind reveals the six essential aptitudes on which professional success and personal fulfillment now depend, and includes a series of hands-on exercises culled from experts around the world to help readers sharpen the necessary abilities. This book will change not only how we see the world but how we experience it as well.

We are going to run excerpts from the Portfolios in the book. These are sections at the end of each chapter. They give you a list of ideas to improve your "six senses".