Symptoms are not causes
Friends!
I do hope you’ve had a good week.
I continue to try to understand this new and quite challenging reality as best as I can. Fortunately, many business challenges and emotional ups and downs are interspersed with pauses that help me remember what being human should be more about! This week, we celebrated one of our children’s 30th birthday. Such a welcomed moment to reflect, marinate and bathe my soul in 30 years of photos, memories, and celebrations of who your children have and are becoming. So proud of them. They help make sense and meaning of all other confusing aspects of life right now. For that, I feel truly blessed.
I continue to do my thing. Trying to find and amplify the silver lining in this moment. And this week, I must confess, was not a good one. It was like chasing a soap in a bathtub. I kept feeling it, seeing it, but yet couldn’t quite catch it.
One of my “house-philosophers” David Brooks nailed it this week in this op-ed. He talks about how the shifts we are living through “have created a moral, spiritual, and emotional disaster” and how the reactions to them are more about the symptoms of our problems than the solutions to them. That resonated deeply with me. For several decades now, it’s been increasingly clear that we are witnessing the end of the world as we know it. Or as Francis Fukuyama proclaimed many years ago “the end of history”. What that means is that we are collectively mourning the loss of our predictable future. Or as Yogi Berra (at least most often attributed to it) used to say: They future isn't what it used to be.
All these uncertainties make us anxious and we grab on to whatever place of comfort we can find. Some want to go back to a time when they felt better. Some numb themselves with substances or other forms of distractions. Some want to throw out most of our current institutions to make way for a very poorly (and unproven) future. None of these options are attractive to me. We simply have to accept and embrace the fact that there are MANY challenges facing us for sure. And that MUCH change is desperately needed. AND, it will have to come from all of us. There are no silver bullets. There are no short cuts. And there are no superheroes that will fly in, do all the work, and make it all great. The change will only happen if ALL of us participate and co-create the world we’d like to see. Or to channel our inner Gandhi: Be the change you wish to see in the world.
Change is hard. It’s tedious. It’s about details. It's about being pragmatic more than prophetic. And it is about patience. We confuse the symptoms of pain with the causes of gain. As any farmer knows, we have to plant new seeds, we have to nurture our gardens and we have to patiently and often painfully wait until we can eat the fruits of our labor. When something goes bad we don’t recover by canceling our plants, firing our staff, protesting the weather, or using brutal force against our tools.
Think about these three statements of change below that have inspired me for many years. They are all very true! They suggest to me that change HAS to come from people who currently are not inside the systems we’d like to change. And that my friends, means us. Or as Jerry Garcia from the Grateful Dead said: Somebody has to do something and it is just incredibly pathetic that it has to be us.
Have a great week!
“It should be borne in mind that there is nothing more difficult to handle, more doubtful of success, and more dangerous to implement than initiating change. Innovation makes enemies of all those who prospered under the old regime, and only lukewarm support is forthcoming from those who would prosper under the new.”
— MACHIAVELLI, THE PRINCE (1513)
“The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them”
— ALBERT EINSTEIN
“It’s difficult to get a man to understand something if his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
— UPTON SINCLAIR
All of you know how passionate I am about food. I have studied, prototyped, experimented, tried to change large and small food systems. I posted this great article in my 2nd newsletter by my friend Dr Mark Hyman, All fueled by a deep conviction that we are what we eat. Changing our food system will solve just about all our current existential problems ranging from health care and poverty to sustainability and happiness. Fabrice Braunrot is a good friend who is as passionate about this as anyone I know, has teamed up with Erica Ballard and they have produced this podcast series called The Lies That We’ve Been Fed. It’s a great service to humanity. Whenever I have a “nerdy” question about biome, intermittent fasting, sleep or mitochondrial effects of a certain food I call Fabrice. He is a gift. Please listen to their first episode here. I think you’ll find it very valuable.
I posted some of Philip K Howards articles in a newsletter a number of weeks ago. I am doing what I can to support his organization, the Common Good. I feel strongly that we are often trying to fix our problems at the “individual” level vs at the systemic level. Philip is making a strong case for simplifying our legal infrastructure and making our system work better for all of us. Please watch quick video below. And please do what you can to support their important work.
A few great things here. My dear friend Dov Seidman founded LRN and recently the How Institute for Society. They just published the report here (you can download by clicking on image) with really revealing data. The most poignant line regarding moral leadership is that “it is high in demand but short in supply”. Darren Walker is the CEO of the Ford Foundation. He also serves on the board of the How Institute. He wrote a great piece in NYT this week where he asked whether we are willing to give up our privilege? These conversations about moral leadership are crucial at this time. We all need to help fill the supply side by providing the leadership that is demanded of us. And we all have work to do here. No question.
We are all surrounded by COVID speculation. I find it exhausting and I don’t trust many sources. As a Swedish citizen, I have the benefit of having access to their databases which I believe are completely without bias. There are certainly many things we still don’t know about this virus. Which is unsettling. But I also think “the other” perspective is not well represented. Particularly about the opportunity costs of aggressive lockdowns. Therefore I am posting this interview with Michael Levitt. While not an Epidemiologist he is a Nobel Laureate and therefore no fool! While I don’t agree completely with all his arguments (like I don’t agree with almost anyone completely, including myself!), I think it is important that this perspective is represented better than it is. I am also more worried about our lack of ability to have a vibrant, healthy, and productive civil discourse and debate than I am about the virus. I think our politicized and mean spirited division of facts and science is another form of virus capable of much more harm than any form of “traditional” virus. Climate change, pandemics, health care, or just about any challenge we face can only be solved with a more reasonable, decent, and open-minded, trustworthy climate of productive discourse.