“Your remembered self is a translation of your life.”

‘When we are grateful, we are most fully alive.’**

Ian Duncan Smith has just resigned as the UK’s Work and Pensions Secretary.^

Behind the scenes of any news story, there’s something else happening.  Roz and Ben Zander remind us that by the time we’re conscious of something, it’s already been processed and shaped by our brains:

‘[F]irst our senses bring us selective information about what is out there; second, the brain constructs its own simulation of the sensations; and only then, third, do we have our first conscious experience of our milieu.’**

There’ll be opposing political opinions about what is right and wrong, but the point the Zanders are making, as Noah Yuval Harari is also at pains to make in Sapiens, is that all opinions are constructs.  And if they are constructs, why don’t we create something better?

This will mean opening our minds to more, something that is both possible and difficult.

Dan Ariely offers some interesting thoughts.  When it comes to the things we are selling or give away, there are three quirks to the experience: ‘we fall in love with what we already have;’ ‘we focus on what we may lose;’ and, ‘we assume other people will see the transaction from the same perspective as we do.’^^

Daniel Pink would want to add to this that “to sell is human” – it is what we’re doing all the time – like when we share an idea or tell someone about a great restaurant experience we’ve had.   But, what if instead of trying to “sell” our stories to each other, we add them together to create a better story.*^

Mind you, what I’m suggesting is yet another construct, another story, but I like it because it’s about offering the possibility to thrive to everyone.

(*From Erwin McManus’s Uprising.)
(**From Rosamund and Benjamin Zander’s The Art of Possibility.)
(^I pick out this story because it was one the news programme I’ve just been listening to.  Apparently, after more than five years of overseeing disability benefit cuts, supposedly to encourage people back into work, the latest round of cuts announced in the budget is “a compromise too far,” for IDS because the budget also includes tax cuts for the higher earning.  Different views of this story and what it’s about have been offered by friends, colleagues, and opponents.)
(^^From Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational.)
(*^Daniel Pink’s To Sell is Human.)