Hi from Taipei! I got sick this week so I did a lot of reading! I'm hosting a Boundless book club tonight (if you opened the e-mail right away) at 8:30PM EST on the book "Bullshit Jobs" - Join Me
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#1 Future of Work: As a former jargon expert from my strategy consulting days, I have a good sense what people are really talking about when they drop terms like "digital transformation" or "future of work." The future of work has come to mean so many things and so little that I decided to write up an article breaking down the five different conversations happening at once. This is version 2.0 after a lot of feedback from people throughout the week => The future of work is five different conversations (Boundless)
#2 Liberal Arts: When I was looking at colleges in high school, I did not understand what "liberal arts" colleges were for. How did people get jobs? I was practical and majored in business and engineering in undergrad. I was highly employable, but I still knew little about the world. In grad school, I took a class called "literature, ethics & authority" taught by an English professor that blew my mind open and pushed me down a path that led me to a wider range of literature, history, and philosophy. I'm quite grateful for that push.
Should universities be solely in service of the economy or do some of these liberal arts colleges have it right? Andrew Taggart tackles this question better than I could in Quartz => How workers killed the liberal arts. I loved this quote he shared from Yuval Harari:
To know what you are, and what you want from life. This is, of course, the oldest advice in the book: know thyself. For thousands of years, philosophers and prophets have urged people to know themselves. But this advice was never more urgent than in the 21st century, because unlike in the days of Laozi or Socrates, now you have serious competition. Coca-Cola, Amazon, Baidu and the government are all racing to hack you.
#3 Existentialism: I just finished Sarah Bakewell's book, "At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails" which is a fantastic history of existentialism with the added backdrop of 20th century economic and political battles. It is an enjoyable read focusing on people such as Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Søren Kierkegaard, Albert Camus, and the controversial Martin Heidegger.
#4 Relaxation: Bakewell's book gave me about 10-15 additional things I want to read. One I dove into was William James "Gospel Of Relaxation" speech, which was given in 1911. It is definitely a bit outdated and biased towards the Brits, but some of his
I hope that here in America more and more the ideal of the well-trained and vigorous body will be maintained neck by neck with that of the well-trained and vigorous mind as the two coequal halves of the higher education for men and women alike
He goes on:
Many years ago a Scottish medical man, Dr. Clouston, a mad-doctor as they call him there, or what we should call an asylum physician (the most eminent one in Scotland), visited this country and said something that has remained in my memory ever since. "You Americans," he said, "wear too much expression on your faces. You are living like an army with all its reserves engaged in action.
This idea of the well-trained mind could go well with what Taggart is arguing for in his liberal arts essay and one might say that the whole world has been drawn more towards the American approach of action over mindfulness. Thoughts?
#5 Nationalism & Polarization: This article is a #longread, but worth reading. Anne Applebaum recounts her personal history as an American living in Poland over the past couple of decades as that country has fallen victim to nationalist politics. It is a fascinating recount of the history of those movements in Europe and what makes them so appealing => A Warning From Europe: The Worst Is Yet to Come (The Atlantic)