Love & Work
A notebook about how we work, learn, love and live.
I've got a beautiful song stuck in my head, Mercy Now, by Mary Gauthier. As she says, "I love life and life itself could use some mercy now". The spirit of this song informs this week's playlist: There Ain't No Good Place to be Broke.
Happy Friday.
How We Learn
Why do we treat "playing" and "hobbies" as qualitatively different from "work"?
Plum Tree House, designed and built by Devan Anthony
On a family Zoom last Sunday, our son Devan shared some thoughts that are emerging for him and his partner Esther about the coming years for their young daughter, Evelyn. "One thing is for sure," he said, "her education won't be centered in a classroom". The same day I stumbled upon this article about the power of learning by doing projects of one's own.
"It's a bit sad to think of all the high school kids turning their backs on building treehouses and sitting in class dutifully learning about Darwin or Newton to pass some exam, when the work that made Darwin and Newton famous was actually closer in spirit to building treehouses than studying for exams.
"If I had to choose between my kids getting good grades and working on ambitious projects of their own, I'd pick the projects. And not because I'm an indulgent parent, but because I've been on the other end and I know which has more predictive value. When I was picking startups for Y Combinator, I didn't care about applicants' grades. But if they'd worked on projects of their own, I wanted to hear all about those." - Paul Graham.
It reminded me that Devan has designed and built a lot of treehouses, as well as furniture, audiophile speakers, sculpture, beehives, businesses of various scales, a commercial botanical extraction facility, and a camera-controlled security system for that facility. He does have a degree from a name-brand university, but it makes me wonder: what if his education had focused on projects rather than grades?
Article: A Project of One's Own
Teaching
"Teaching innovation requires a different stance towards teaching. It’s less about learning the pre-prepared material (mastery of knowledge) than it is about creative capacity building (mastery of practice)."
Lisa Kay Solomon
"Innovation is hard to teach because it’s inherently messy, unpredictable, and team-oriented – which makes success hard to measure in a quantifiable way. This mindset is at odds with the traditional constructs of education, where students are taught to think and act in accordance with existing guides, chase down right answers, and are measured and ranked by quantifiable evaluation metrics.
"Innovating requires nearly the opposite mentality. In order to innovate, it is necessary to abandon judgment, open oneself to a seemingly endless field of possibilities, and then try those possibilities again and again, iterating and (hopefully) failing enough times to know that you’re onto something. The fact that there is no single 'right answer' in innovation can be frustrating at first – but, it can also be incredibly freeing and fun for students, especially creative thinkers yearning to play." - Lisa Kay Solomon
Article: Why Isn't Innovation Taught In The Classroom?
How We Learn
A school that blends the best parts of children’s museums and classrooms
Collaboration and small group spaces serve as an extension of the classroom, and teachers use pegboard systems for display. Laura Peters/CannonDesign
"At Seneca Valley’s Ehrman Crest Elementary and Middle School, K-6 students are benefiting from an unusual collaboration. School leaders, architects and the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh teamed up on the $63 million project, which opened in August 2022 after 790 construction days. With a student capacity of 1,400, the 200,000-square-foot facility takes a novel approach, forgoing the traditional school design for the playful, interactive, colorful elements of a children’s museum. Time magazine declared it one of the “Best Inventions of 2022.”
“Public schools and the Children’s Museum had the same goal, which was to educate children, but the way they were doing it and the paths they were taking were wildly different,” says Michael Corb, an architect with CannonDesign, the firm behind the project. He thought, “Why aren’t public schools going about it the way the Children’s Museum does?” - Kellie B. Gormly
Article: Is This Elementary School Near Pittsburgh the Future of Education?
Creativity
Bob Dylan has been accused of plagiarism. But hasn't he just relied on a respected, centuries-old creative tradition?
Bob Dylan recording Make you Feel My Love live in the studio.
"Because Dylan 'samples and digests' songs from the past, he has been accused of plagiarism.
"This charge underestimates Dylan’s complex creative process, which closely resembles that of early modern poets who had a different concept of originality – a concept Dylan intuitively understands. For Renaissance authors, 'originality' meant not creating something out of nothing, but going back to what had come before. They literally returned to the 'origin.' Writers first searched outside themselves to find models to imitate, and then they transformed what they imitated – that is, what they found, sampled and digested – into something new. Achieving originality depended on the successful imitation and repurposing of an admired author from a much earlier era. They did not imitate each other, or contemporary authors from a different national tradition. Instead, they found their models among authors and works from earlier centuries.
"In his book 'The Light in Troy,' literary scholar Thomas Greene points to a 1513 letter written by poet Pietro Bembo to Giovanfrancesco Pico della Mirandola.
“'Imitation,' Bembo writes, 'since it is wholly concerned with a model, must be drawn from the model … the activity of imitating is nothing other than translating the likeness of some other’s style into one’s own writings.' The act of translation was largely stylistic and involved a transformation of the model." - Raphael Falco
Article: How Bob Dylan Used the Ancient Practice of “Imitatio” to Write Songs
Learning, Neuroscience
Our brains may be hardwired to look on the bright side.
Tali Sharot via Wikipedia
"To make progress, we need to be able to imagine alternative realities – better ones – and we need to believe that we can achieve them. Such faith helps motivate us to pursue our goals. Optimists in general work longer hours and tend to earn more. Economists at Duke University found that optimists even save more. And although they are not less likely to divorce, they are more likely to remarry – an act that is, as Samuel Johnson wrote, the triumph of hope over experience.
"Even if that better future is often an illusion, optimism has clear benefits in the present. Hope keeps our minds at ease, lowers stress and improves physical health. Researchers studying heart-disease patients found that optimists were more likely than non-optimistic patients to take vitamins, eat low-fat diets and exercise, thereby reducing their overall coronary risk. A study of cancer patients revealed that pessimistic patients under 60 were more likely to die within eight months than non-pessimistic patients of the same initial health, status and age." - Tali Sharot
Book Extract: The Optimism Bias by Tali Sharot
TED Talk: Thinking About the Optimism Bias: Tali Sharot at TED2012
How We Work
Encouraging people to come back to the office provides a great reason to experiment, pilot and learn.
Photo: Ryan Gobuty/via Gensler
"Offices are undergoing a long overdue transformation. As office design decisions have become more closely linked to talent strategy, HR leaders have had to figure out how to reconfigure workspaces in a way that will bring employees back in the door."
"...HR leaders looking to make improvements to their cubicle-farm layouts can start with adding spaces for creative group work and individual quiet work, according to recent (workplace design firm) Gensler research on the office amenities that are most attractive to employees and drive productivity.
"Tech-free zones and innovation hubs were the amenities most closely correlated with workplace experience and effectiveness, according to Gensler’s 2022 Workplace Performance Index, which surveyed over 2,000 US workers who have returned to the office at least part-time." - Aman Kidwai
Article: If You Want Employees in the Office, Build Creative Spaces and Quiet Zones.
Related Article: This Company Beta Tested its Way to a Perfect Office Design.
How We Work
Why cognitive diversity will be a key feature of competitive advantage for the next 50 years.
"One a psychological point – we are attracted unconsciously to people who think like us. When people are mirroring our perspective back to us, it makes us feel smarter, it validates our world view. The pleasure centers of our brains light up in brain scanners when people are telling us things we already suspect or believe or confirm our prejudices.
"And can you see the problem? When it’s a simple task- that's fine, any one person has the solution – you surround yourself with like-minded others, you are able to deliver the solution. But as the complexity increases – and no one brain is sufficient to solve the problem - when you are attracted who think in the same way, you’re getting no uplift at all in collective intelligence.
"And by mirroring each other’s perspectives, you become more confident about a solution
that might be gravely mistaken. This is why cognitive diversity is so important – and I believe will become the key feature of competitive advantage for the next 50 years." - Matthew Syed
Video: The Power of Diverse Thinking | Matthew Syed
One-liners
Article: Bookmobiles Have a New Mission: Delivering Banned Books.
Article: The Strange Similarity of Neuron and Galaxy Networks
Article: Skills That Improve With Poker
Playlist
Video: The Delines - The Oil Rigs at Night (Live on KEXP)
The Delines refer to themselves as a "retro-country band", which is an enormously limiting classification. While their four album catalog does include a lot that refers to music of the past, their sound is thoroughly modern. And they are a country band who doesn't hail from Nashville, but from Portland, OR. Their sound is centered around singer Amy Boone's evocative vocals, and supported by singer, songwriter and guitarist, Willy Vlautin, once a leader of the band Richmond Fontaine. (She also toured with that revered and greatly missed group.) Their songs are cinematic in their ability to paint plainspoken portraits of working class America without sentimentality or romanticism. In my house they are an easy band to keep on replay.
Video: The Delines - The Imperial (live)
Mitch the editor in his a new role as Mitch the DJ
A mix-tape inspired by the music and spirt of The Delines
This is the seventh post in my new weekly series of mix-tapes, Big Sounds from a Small Planet.
Mix-Tape: There ain't no good place to be broke
Image of the Week
The image of the week is a portrait of Julia Child, shot by her husband, Paul Cushing Child.
It's from a beautiful Twitter thread curated by Isabelle Baldwin.
Twitter Thread: Portraits famous photographers have taken of their partners.
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.
If you get value from Love & Work, please pass it on.
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