I always argue the we are products of our time and place in history. The meaning in our lives is made up from the story we continually strive to create among others out of the raw materials handed to us by our circumstance. This morning I revisited a little book that did much to shape my life’s journey.
In his book, “Man’s Search for Meaning” , Victor Frankl, a psychiatrist and survivor of the Holocaust, remembers that in order to survive the trials of the camps….
“We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual”.
W. E. Deming spoke of meaning in terms of creating “aims”.
Short Takes
- Lip Reading Babies: Utter nonsense!
January 17, 2012 | 8:54 pmSays psychologist David Lewkowicz of Florida Atlantic University, who led [a] study published yesterday…
’The baby in order to imitate you has to figure out how to shape their lips to make that particular sound they’re hearing,’’
Can you “figure out” why this is utter nonsense? I should as obvious as monkey see, monkey do. With this sort of thing passing for science, we are surely doomed.
- The Mark of Cain
November 9, 2011 | 3:13 amWatching Herman Cain duel with his female accusers is like watching the Jerry Springer Show. Not a pretty picture. If you partake, be sure an wash you hands afterwards.
- The Truth About Sovereign Debt
November 1, 2011 | 4:01 pmDuring the housing bubble people bet on rising home prices by taking out loans on to-good-to-be true terms and investment banking made bets on the rising home prices by lending on to-good-be-true terms. Everyone drank the Kool Aid. Prices went down. Having made bad bets, home owners should default on their loans and bankers should take their losses. This is the simple-minded logic of every-man-for-himself market economics.
The nations that joined the EU placed bets on rising economic prosperity that would come from joining the EU and adopting the Euro and borrowing from the EU banks on to-good-to-be-true terms. The EU investment bankers made speculative bets on EU member nations by lending them billions on to-good-to-be-true terms. The borrower economies went down not up. Everyone drank the Kool Aid and having made bad bets the borrowers should default on their loans and the bankers should take their losses. This too, is the simple-minded logic of every-man-for-himself market economics.
So how do the bankers hold the world hostage to their bad bets? They claim they are too big to fail. In other words, the only game they know is heads they win, tails we lose.
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Dan Pink Note:
This idea of the will to meaning is very simple when taken in the context of a theory of knowledge. For example, would you say that a young bird’s pre-flight fluttering is an intrinsic motivation or an genetically programmed drive? The young bird does not “want” to fly. It just does what its genetic programming calls it to do and as it matures, it flies.
In human beings, the “will” to construct meaning — to make sense out of the challenges presented to us by the world — is the same as the flight programming in the bird. Humans seek meaning and meaning is constructed in interaction with others, so we “flutter our minds” with others so that we may “fly”. If you bind our wings or clip them or cage us, you thwart the process by which we can create meaning. You kill the bird or make it a zombie-like imitation that is devoid of the quality of birdness. Many workplaces are designed to create zombies.
In other words, we are not “motivated” by a desire for (fill in the blank). We just are meaning creating creatures that act to make sense of the world — meet challenges, create, innovate, sing, dance, and in all other ways, contribute to the world of meaning we share with others. Any human enterprise will do better when it is designed to enable such flight.
As far as I can tell, Dan Pink doesn’t understand this at all.