I figured out recently why many people are so exhausted. Here's a lesson from teachers and writers to engage your mind better every week and beat back exhaustion.
1. How it works
2. Prescription
3. photo caption below
You know what I love about writers & teachers? It's their bright, curious gaze. Having just spent some time with a bunch of them, I started to wonder why this group of people was so much more fired up than other groups. And I think I know now what it is that the business world is missing, especially business people who have gotten sad or lost their way. Try this little exercise for a few days, and re-invent how your life feels.
In business, we tend to focus so much on people. People, people, people.
- What are they thinking?
- What are their quirks and hangups, so we know how to deal with them?
- What are we going to do about these negotiations to bend them to our will?
Teaching and writing, at least, when done well, tend to be focussed on serving the receiver. Rather than bending the student or reader to our will, we seek to engage and delight them. We're constantly looking for something new, or a new way to look at something old, to delight others. It is a very fun and rewarding activity, to think of delighting people.
So teachers and writers who succeed in delighting their readers and students get a lot of energy from that. Let me explain a little of how I think this thought process works.
Think instead for a while about things. Just delightful things. Just take time to indulge in curiosity and wonder.
People with a bright, curious gaze are constantly making observations. They're awake. Alive. And so intensely interested in learning (and teaching or sharing through writing) that they don't have time for silly things like worrying about what other people are thinking about them. They're too interested, thinking cool thoughts, to be uncool.
Writers are focussed on noting human behaviours and quirky little things that happen, formulating new descriptions for future books or just because we can't help it. You might be talking to a writer and see that they look distracted, and the reason is that they've just seen someone drop a pen, and in their heads, they're thinking "the sunlight caught the crystal barrel of the pen as it spiralled to the floor," or, "hm, that's how a pen falls, I wonder if the sun would glint off the murderer's knife in the same way as she dropped it? Would the blood reflect the light the same way? Hm. Maybe I need to test this at home." So they're thinking that and you're like "Jordan. Jordan. Jordan! Can you hear me?" and finally their head snaps up and they're like "what?"
Don't blame us for that. It's because of such focus that you have delicious books to read, movies to watch, songs to sing.
A teacher might watch the pen fall and think the same writerly thoughts, and start dreaming up ways they might coax their students to write such a description. Or, they might watch the pen fall and then pick the pen up and take it somewhere higher where they could repeat the experiment, just for fun, or maybe because it's given them an idea for an experiment to do in class.
I started as a writer, and a teacher, and then I let myself get hammered down. I started to let my thoughts get consumed by the business side of things. And I became exhausted.
To get your mojo back, try this prescription: Let yourself wallow in wonder for a while. Watch a pen drop, imagine a unicorn dancing on a rainbow, or a rebel leprechaun dashing through the forest at the bottom of that rainbow, keeping his gold from some adventurer.
Or go for dim sum at lunch at the Chinatown mall, and stare at the fish in the koi pond for a few minutes and imagine what they're thinking. Make up some silly little conversation. Or, if you'd rather, ponder how you might get a group of kids to calculate their velocity (and if there are turtles on the side of the koi pond, what are the kids going to say about their velocity? Hm...).
It doesn't really matter what you do to sink into wonder, whether it's completely imaginative and silly or rather science-based. The essence is to get curious.
Curiosity is the fuel of intelligence. Fire yours up.
Photo caption: the two people in the photo are Diana Gabaldon and Brandon Mull, who both inspired me at a conference recently. Brandon, because he really LOVES HIS LIFE and loves what he does and spends all day in the kind of crazy wonder I've tried to describe here, and Diana for the same reason (with less craziness and more academic rigor), but also because Diana, during the whole two hours of keynote speeches and everywhere else I always saw her, was always absorbing everything with a bright, curious gaze. She may have been on the dais, being watched by everyone, but she was watching everyone, too.
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