A whole new mind: why right-brainers will rule the future by Daniel H. Pink

Author:Daniel H. Pink
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Psychology, Creativity, African American Studies, Success - Psychological aspects, Success, Psychological aspects, Social Science, Human Resources & Personnel Management, Finance, Business, Leadership, Popular Psychology, Creative thinking, Cerebral dominance, Creative Ability, Personal Growth - Success, Economics, Self-Help, Personal Growth, Business & Economics, Personal Guidance, Ethnic Studies
ISBN: 9781594481710
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Published: 2006-03-07T11:22:23.957000+00:00

Bomeisler is a sympathetic teacher with the gentle manner of Mr. Rogers had Mr. Rogers done time on Paris’s left bank. During each drawing exercise, he glides around the room offering encouragement. “I’m here to keep your left hemisphere quiet,” he murmurs. One day he teaches us about negative space—that is, the area between and around an image. He shows us the logo of FedEx, like the one below.

Look at the white space between the “E” and the “x” in “Ex.” See the arrow? That’s negative space. When we draw portraits of our classmates later in the week, we begin by lightly shading our large piece of paper—and then erasing the part that’s not the outline of our subject’s head in order to reveal it. “Negative space is a powerful drawing tool,” Bomeisler says. “It’s one of the secrets to learning how to draw.”

Over the next four days, we learn to see several of these relationships—between space and negative space, between light and shadow, between angles and proportions—in ways that many of us never noticed. We draw stools propped on tables, the wrinkles on our hands, and the shadows that caress the corners of Bomeisler’s studio. Throughout Bomeisler repeats his mantra that “drawing is largely about relationships” that, when combined, create the whole. And so, in some sense, is this course. All of our exercises in relationships lead to the final afternoon, when we must integrate our newly acquired understanding into a big picture—a second attempt at a self-portrait.

Seeing Relationships

Like drawing, Symphony is largely about relationships. People who hope to thrive in the Conceptual Age must understand the connections between diverse, and seemingly separate, disciplines. They must know how to link apparently unconnected elements to create something new. And they must become adept at analogy—at seeing one thing in terms of another. There are ample opportunities, in other words, for three types of people: the boundary crosser, the inventor, and the metaphor maker.

THE BOUNDARY CROSSER

What’s the most prevalent, and perhaps most important, prefix of our times? Multi. Our jobs require multitasking. Our communities are multicultural. Our entertainment is multimedia. While detailed knowledge of a single area once guaranteed success, today the top rewards go to those who can operate with equal aplomb in starkly different realms. I call these people “boundary crossers.” They develop expertise in multiple spheres, they speak different languages, and they find joy in the rich variety of human experience. They live multi lives—because that’s more interesting and, nowadays, more effective.

Boundary crossers are people like Andy Tuck, a philosophy professor and pianist who applies the skills he honed in those fields to run his own management consulting firm. They include people such as Gloria White-Hammond, a pastor and pediatrician in Boston; Todd Machover, who composes operas and builds high-tech music equipment; and Jhane Barnes, whose expertise in mathematics informs her intricate clothing designs.1 Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, the University of Chicago psychologist who wrote the classic book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience as well as Creativity: Flow and

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