Love & Work
A notebook about how we work, learn, love and live.

It's the day after Thanksgiving, it is Native American Heritage Day. I am deep in the couch. My idea of a great day off is to spend it with people I want to learn from by reading their work. I've got an un-cracked New York Review of Books, the latest Atlantic, and last week's New Yorker and New York Magazine, all in print form, on my reading list today. Joy. This is how I build and nurture "a nice, mild, slow-burning rapture all the time."

I hope that you can nurture slow-burning rapture, too.

Happy Friday. Happy holiday.


History
Unraveling the myths surrounding the 1621 feast


This 1925 painting depicts an idealized version of an early Thanksgiving celebration in Plymouth.
Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

"If not for a few lines written by English colonist Edward Winslow, the uniquely American holiday of Thanksgiving might never have made it to the dining room table. A celebration of family, food and football, the tradition of a festive, harvest-time meal evolved from a letter penned by the esteemed settler about an obscure event held in the fall of 1621 at Plymouth Colony in what is now Massachusetts.

Four hundred years later, the so-called first Thanksgiving is undergoing a reassessment. Museums and historic sites in Plymouth and around the country are telling a more nuanced story about the origins of the holiday—one that goes far beyond the lasting legend of smiling Pilgrims and Wampanoag people happily enjoying a big meal together.

Article: How to Tell the Thanksgiving Story on Its 400th Anniversary
 

Futures Thinking
More than half of Americans, young and old, say children today will be less economically successful than their parents. But people in poorer nations are more optimistic.


Clockwise from top left: Khadija Farah for The New York Times; Ben Roberts for The New York Times; Marie Eriel Hobro for The New York Times; Andri Tambunan for The New York Times; Anastasia Vlasova for The New York Times

"Will the next generation do better than the one that came before? To young people in wealthier nations, that dream of upward mobility seems more like a story about the past than modern-day reality, according to a large new survey taken in 21 countries.

"In poorer countries, though, there is still hope that young people’s lives will be better than those of their parents, and that the world is becoming a better place.

“'In a lot of the developing world, there is a bit more optimism that yes, with each generation our living standards are improving,' said Laurence Chandy, director of the office of global insight and policy at UNICEF, which conducted the survey with Gallup. 'But there’s a recognition in the West that’s stopped happening.'”

Article: Where Are Young People Most Optimistic? In Poorer Nations

Related Article: Young People More Optimistic About the World Than Older Generations – Unicef

Communication, Community
How to orient ourselves in the face of conflict



"If disagreement is a tree, anxiety and cognitive dissonance would be the water and air that help the tree grow, and the fruit that we have spoken of in passing up until now – security, growth, connection, and enjoyment – is what the tree produces. A disagreement that’s oriented entirely around the fruit of security will never yield productive questions because in those conversations information and questions are used to attack and defend our positions. There’s no reason to ask your enemy a real question, because the assumption is that they see uncertainty as a vulnerability and will try to use it against you—and vice versa. In order to shift out of battle mode, we need to remember to value different kinds of outcomes, reorienting the purpose of the conversation away from security and toward growth, connection, and enjoyment. When you do this, incidentally, security also comes along indirectly. Each of these four fruits of disagreement can be sought after individually, but the art of productive disagreement will ultimately show us how to seek all of them together."

Book Excerpt: Why Are We Yelling?: The Art of Productive Disagreement


Graphic Design, Social Messaging
Disposable posters were a primary means of communication throughout the Soviet occupancy.

 I. Bindler: Smoking is Healthy?, Lithuania, 1984

"This website, comrade-kiiev, which houses art dealer Stephane Cornille's mighty poster collection, is testament to the originality of Soviet art as seen through the disposable posters put up as a means of communication throughout the Soviet occupancy. Stephane tells us more on the uniqueness of the collection, 'artists in the Soviet Union weren’t allowed to leave, and could only work for the state,' he says. 'Because they lived in a closed society, the art they created wasn’t influenced by western style, and was also heavy in propaganda.' During the time of their creation, the posters weren’t appreciated as an art form, merely regarded as propaganda, and part of Stephane’s goal today is to raise awareness on the artistic merit of these delights.

"Comrade Kiev is split into a range of collections, one of these being posters designed by women."

Article: Explore the Women of Soviet Art Through This Carefully Curated Poster Collection


Persuasion
In 1940 Bell Telephone needed to explain why the rotary phone was better. We can learn from their pedagogy.



This is fun. Following a classic story arc, problem - solution - hero, The Bell System explains why you want a new tech. My favorite line from grandpa: "I was just wondering why they wanted to change something that still works alright." My favorite line from the teen granddaughter after grandpa reads from the paper that "they" are going to take out "our" phones and replace them with dial-phones: "Oh gramps, that's yummy. Did they say how soon?"

Video: The Dial Comes To Town


Organizational Health
The psychological pitfalls that lead us to schedule and attend too many meetings

"Attending too many  meetings can be highly stressful and tiring, and both productivity and quality take a hit when employees tune out, become demotivated, and lose valuable heads-down work time. As such, it’s hardly a surprise that managers in one survey reported 83% of the meetings on their calendars were unproductive, or that US-based professionals rated meetings as the 'number one office productivity killer.'

But despite what seems to be an overwhelming consensus, endless check-ins, debriefs, all-staffs, and Zoom calls continue to plague the corporate world. What will it take for us to break free from our collective addiction to meetings?

Article: The Psychology Behind Meeting Overload


Learning
The brain’s visual system rewires itself to make the best use of its neural resources.

"The eye is something like a camera, but there is a whole lot more to vision than that. One profound difference is that our vision, like the rest of our senses, is malleable and modifiable by experience. Take the commonplace observation that people deprived of one sense may have a compensatory increase in others — for example, that blind people have heightened senses of hearing and touch. A skeptic could say that this was just a matter of attention, concentration and practice at the task, rather than a true sensory improvement. Indeed, experiments show that a person’s sensory acuity can achieve major improvement with practice.

"Yet with modern methodologies, neuroscientists have conclusively proved that the circuits of the brain neurons do physically change. Our senses are malleable because the sensory centers of the brain rewire themselves to strike a useful balance between the capacities of the available neural resources and the demands put on them by incoming sensory impressions. Studies of this phenomenon are revealing that some sensory areas have innate tendencies toward certain functions, but they show just as powerfully the plasticity of the developing brain."

Book Excerpt: The Brain Reshapes Our Malleable Senses to Fit the World


Oneliners
Article: Someone Unearthed A 1997 Wired Article Predicting '10 Things That Could Go Wrong In The 21st Century' — And Nearly All Of Them Came True

Article: The Pandemic Brought Back QR Codes—and They’re Not Going Away Anytime Soon

Article: Bison in Canada Discover Ancient Petroglyphs, Fulfilling an Indigenous Prophecy


Playlist


I've mentioned the artist who calls herself Reina Del Cid, and her friends and cohorts, Joshua Lee Turner, and The Other Favorites more than once in this letter. But her guitarist, Toni Lindgren, seldom gets called out, even though she deserves the attention. Here she is with a lovely rendition of Dylan's Bucket of Rain.

Video: Bob Dylan - Buckets of Rain cover by Toni Lindgren


Image of the Week

The image of the week is the work of Osijek, Croatia-based sculptor and land artist Nikola Faller. Each year he heads to the city's parks with a rake to shape the fallen leaves into new art, art that will be transformed by the next day's winds. When I first saw this image I assumed that it was shot in Japan, where raked sand is central to Zen garden tradition.

Instagram page: slama.land.art

Article: Nikola Faller – Master of Sculpture Says; Art Can Not Disappear – Just Change its Shape.


What's Love & Work?
Love & Work is the weekly newsletter by me, Mitch Anthony. I help people use their brand - their purpose, values, and stories - as a pedagogy and toolbox for transformation.