John Pospisil

Is there any better truth about ultimate things than the one that helps you to live?

CJ Jung

I just  chanced across this comment about  French philospherJean-Paul Sarte:

Sartre maintained that the concept of authenticity and individuality have to be earned but not learned. We need to experience death consciousness so as to wake up ourselves as to what is really important; the authentic in our lives which is life experience, not knowledge.

How true, even if you’re not a French existentialist.

There have been a number of books that have resonated with me years after I have read them. Ernest Hemingway’s The old man and the sea is one of those books.

There’s a passage that always comes back to me when I’ve found myself facing a tough or difficult situation; it comes at a time in the book when Santiago, an aging Cuban fisherman, is trying to bring his catch, a giant marlin, back to the shore, but the big fish is being mauled by sharks.

‘But man is not made for defeat,’ he said. ‘A man can be destroyed but not defeated.’

…

‘Don’t think, old man,’ he said aloud. ‘Sail on this course and take it when it comes.’

…

It is silly not to hope, he thought. Besides I believe it is a sin.

By the way, the image used to illustrate this post is from a painting by John McGlynn, a talented UK artist.

The Lovers by Rene Magritte

While doing a project for Organisational Analysis and Design (OAD) during my MBA, I came across this quote, which really resonated with me at the time, and since:

"The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes."

Marcel Proust

The big concept in OAD was that there is more than one way to look at or analyse a situation in an organisation. This OAD model used four frames (or perspectives) to analyse situations – human resources, structure, culture (symbolic), and political.

While it might sound pretty obvious, for me it helped me gain an insight where I suddenly saw the world in a whole new light. And it’s a concept that applies not only to management, but also to our personal lives.

Often we’re so stuck looking at a situation in our lives through our own jaded eyes, that we don’t see the alternatives, which are visible if we only we can step outside our current frame of reference.