Understanding People. Our Portals. Chris Ware.

The Future Does Not Fit in the Containers of the Past. Edition 7.

1.Understanding People.

( art by Chris Ware…see more later in this edition)

How do you take a measure of a person? Is it possible to understand a person.

Here are some lines from literature that say it is difficult and may be impossible

“You get them wrong before you meet them, while you’re anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you’re with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again.

The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That’s how we know we’re alive: we’re wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that — well, lucky you.”

From American Pastoral by Philip Roth

And let us say we get a person right which person of the many identities and moods of that person did we just get right?

“We cannot live with only one identity.We all have many identities, they are liquid”

Olga Tokarczuk. Polish Author and Nobel Prize Winner for Literature.

And as many writers state it is sometimes hard enough to know our selves..

“Sometimes you don’t know who you are till you put on a mask”

Alexander Chee in the the Short Story “Girl” written in 2015

And do any of us want to be profiled and boxed and put into clusters ? None of us wants to hear that somebody has our “number”. The poet TS Eliot best verbalizes this in a stanza from one of my favorite poems “The Love Song of Alfred J Prufock”

And I have known the eyes already, known them all— The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,

And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,

When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,

Then how should I begin To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?

And how should I presume?

Emotional Intelligence can help in understand our selves and others. It can bring meaning to an age of math and reduce the “algos” which in Latin means “pain” in the algorithmically tuned streams that colonize our minds.

In the book “Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls through Seven transitions into Adulthood” is one of the best definitions of Emotional Intelligence I have come across:

“Seeing yourself from the outside and seeing others from the inside”

2. Our Portals

(some portals …my study in Chicago)

“ We don’t see things as they are. We see them as we are” anonymous

In many ways what makes us “us”, in addition to our genetics and experiences, is what we put into our minds which include the books, movies, tv shows, music, social media streams, magazines and much more that we ingest as well as the people we meet and places we visit.

Today, the people we meet and the places we visit are very constrained and our portals to the world increasingly are screen based whether they be television, phone, tablet computer or Amazon Echo, Google Home and the ironically named Facebook Portal.

What are your portals to the world ? And how do you make sure that you find ways to control them rather than have engagement and attention maximizing algorithms control them ?

This is important because of the value we add and the way we make sense of the world incorporate three steps. 1)Curation. 2)Cogitation. 3) Communication.

Curation requires us to ingest a lot of information and then distill them down to parts we want to use and think about. We then cogitate and connect the dots and build a story, a thesis and a point of view. We then find the best ways to communicate them.

But if the curation was not wide enough, deep enough, or mindful enough all the cogitating and communicating may have us following and promoting the wrong point of view.

Over the years I have learned from people I admire four methods to ensure that my eyes are open , my ingestion broad, my skeptical bone tuned to filter out buzz words and detour from the thoroughfare of thought trammeled by many, but most importantly being sensitized to the nuances, glimpses and niches where the meanings lie.

1. Diverse and Many Sources: In the course of any week I ingest at least 100 different sources of information and stimulation including four global “newspapers”, 20 different magazines ( via a still badly designed Apple News+ which bought Texture), half a dozen literary journals ( eg.Paris Review, Granta, New York Review of Books), half a dozen online subscriptions from Quartz to Ben Thomson’s Stratechery to The Information to Correspondent supplemented by a Feedly news feed of many local sources and over a dozen podcasts. And I also read many other Substack writers. ( Pay attention to Substack as it peels way the best creative talent from magazines and newspapers and online sources…)

2. Lots of Analog / Long Form Ad Free Environments: Nothing beats good books in paper form for me. They are another form of dreaming. Or movies on the Criterion Channel ( which along with Netflix and ad free premium version of HBO Max ) will expose you to more great movies across the decades and across the world than any other source. The key is not to be distracted and be forced into micro moments of engagement or be tricked into seeing something which an algorithm decides is good for you not on your taste but your buying behavior. The more analog and the more ad-free the less your views on the world are machine driven and a notification sways you away into a world you never wanted to visit. It is amazing how the bosses of Silicon Valley severely limit their kids screen behavior. They know. They know all too well…

Great books and movies or long magazine articles are portals into worlds and other people and perspectives that give you the opportunity for information to sink into you, for your mind to link it to other things you know and teach you how to think. Do things that allow stuff to sink, you to link, and therefore think.

3. Twitter Purposefully Curated: One of the most powerful resource to learn and open your mind and have a high aperture portal online is to build lists on Twitter. You can see and subscribe to any of mine here…https://twitter.com/rishad/lists

I spend 30 minutes a day visiting these lists to see what the best thinkers, writers, practitioners, and publications in areas of Advertising, Finance, Technology and also Art and Film, Book and Writing , and in Designer have to share and say. I make sure that I am adding people of completely different perspectives to these lists. My list on Curators and Voices include some of the most Right and Left wing thinkers in the world. I sometimes search for the people—the people who make the most sense follow in their lists— and not surprisingly the best thinkers follow many opposing perspectives.

4. We need to be careful about focussing too much on curating tweets instead of experiencing the streets: In keeping with oppositional perspectives, I am quoting Aki Spicer the Chief Strategist of Leo Burnett who shared this perspective with me when I interviewed him for the What Next? Podcast that I host for Publicis Groupe (right now still behind a firewall but may change given the amazing guests and conversations stay tuned…). For more of Aki thinking read this piece from think with Google.

Basically he is saying get out there in the real world..

3. Chris Ware

One of my portals into the world is reading the best cartoonists aka graphic novelists.

It is very likely among the best artists living today, there is no one who better translates what it is to be alive and to see yourself from outside and other people from inside than Chris Ware.

He is a cartoonist behind master works like Jimmy Corrigan, Rusty Brown and a comic that broke out of the containers of the past called Building Stories, which is fourteen different posters, comics of varying sizes and shapes about the inhabitants of a 3 flat in Chicago, inside a box. “Out of the box thinking” for comics was a box full of different comics about a building and its inhabitants that you could read in any order and which spanned life times of each individual !

Among my favorite books of all time is Chris Ware Monograph which is besides being the most beautiful book I own, tells a story of how what many believe is the greatest living cartoonist came to be. A story of creativity which illustrates how we can all be increasingly sensitive to a finer shade of differences. It is not cheap ($60) but if you want to see, think and feel differently its the book I would get.

In time for Halloween here is a cover from five years ago for the New Yorker described by Francoise Mouly, the Art Editor of the New Yorker.

“What makes Chris stand out is the humility of his grand project: he aims at pinning the butterflies of our most basic and universal emotions. His beat is daily life: how we relate or fail to relate to each other. How we inhabit our homes and apartments., What goes through the mind of a dad who takes his daughter to be vaccinated. For a Halloween cover, Ware stayed away from the usual Halloween signifiers of kids in costumes, pumpkins and straw, colorful candy. He condensed the Halloween narrative into the upturned faces of the children as they knock on a door-and behind them on a street, the parents faces turned downwards towards their phones. Both are slivers of white masks, the parents faces illuminated by the light of the phones. The eager young excitement and the jaded boredom exist in perfect contrast…”

Imagine if one cartoon can be filled with so much distilled, what you will open yourself to if you go through the Chris Ware Portal…

Three Six Packs

It has been seven weeks since I began this newsletter and many folks have told me how much they look forward to it on Sunday mornings. As of this writing there are 2,270 subscribers with many new subscribers discovering the newsletter from people like you who forward it to them.

As a way to make it easier to read and share, I re-mixed and jazzed up the content of the first six issues into three e-booklets with the skill of my friend Ben Damiano

a) 6 ways to grow your career  :  https://spark.adobe.com/page/v5Vm3Adj4wZNY/

b) 6 ways to grow yourself : https://spark.adobe.com/page/zASIWWv1Z3Wxv/

c) 6 thoughts for the next six months :https://spark.adobe.com/page/dMocYiB0zlhag/

Thank you for taking time to read this

While it is free, it is costing you 10 or 12 minutes of your precious time.

Hopefully its worth the time...

Rishad Tobaccowala ( @rishad ) is the author of the bestselling “Restoring the Soul of Business: Staying Human in the Age of Data” published by Harper Collins globally in January 2020. It has been described as an “operating manual” for managing people, teams and careers in the age we live in and The Economist Magazine called it perhaps the best recent book on Stakeholder Capitalism.Rishad is a sought after speaker, teacher and advisor who helps people think, feel and see differently about how to grow their companies, their teams and themselves. More at https://rishadtobaccowala.com/