7/3/2023 0 Comments Calli forgotitI just finished Kafka on the Shoreby Haruki Murakami and there’s a scene when one of the characters requests that a fellow traveler of the same world burn her manuscript. Once you talk it all through, you come closer to being able to let go, to find closure. There’s a magic there that’s gone by 9 AM, so I want to catch it within easy reach at 5 AM. It’s why I try to wake before the kids and try to avoid talking, even of the e-mail chatter sort, in the early hours. It made the struggle to understand-and view-the path ahead clearer. It made the connections between all the fragments clear, helped sew up the loose ends, fuse together the matching pieces. Yes, it brought up some family drama I wanted to avoid, but it did a ton of heavy lifting on unfinished work that is of importance. The mind just spent hours chewing over unfinished business. I think this might be why the mornings are so magical for work. Psychologist Arie Kruglanski calls this a Need for Closure, a desire of our minds to end states of uncertainty and resolve unfinished business. All through those other tasks, it will subconsciously be remembering the ones it never got to complete. It wants to keep working – and it will keep working even if you tell it to stop. Zeigarnik ascribed the finding to a state of tension, akin to a cliffhanger ending: your mind wants to know what comes next. At the end, the subjects remembered the interrupted tasks far better than the completed ones-over two times better, in fact. A group of adults and children was given anywhere between 18 and 22 tasks to perform (both physical ones, like making clay figures, and mental ones, like solving puzzles)-only, half of those tasks were interrupted so that they couldn’t be completed. Zeigarnik then did what any good psychologist would: she went back to the lab and designed a study. As soon as the order was sent out and complete, they seemed to wipe it from memory. In 1927, Gestalt psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik noticed a funny thing: waiters in a Vienna restaurant could only remember orders that were in progress. In her Scientific American article “ On writing, memory, and forgetting: Socrates and Hemingway take on Zeigarnik,” Maria Konnikova opened with the story of psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik. Stick with me a bit here, for a short ramble. These non-summits have the potential to steal your work’s soul-and your soul’s work. When you’re at the base of an actual summit, don’t hold a meeting. These non-summits are a form of procrastination. If you’ve been following this blog, you know my feelings about the trending use of the word summit to describe events, workshops, interviews, get-togethers, and a long list of other things that are not summits of either the mountain or meeting variety. Think Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin during WWII. If it is a summit meeting, it is a meeting of individuals at the peak. Instead of pushing procrastination, let’s make sure that the only thing non-summits are pushing is daisies.Ī summit is the highest of the high. This post returns today with high hopes of deep sixing the non-summit.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |