Wisdom 2.0: The New Movement Toward Purposeful Engagement in Business and in Life

By Soren Gordhamer

Technology is not the answer. It is also not the problem. What matters instead? Awareness, Engagement, and Wisdom.

Wisdom 2.0 addresses the challenge of our age:to not only live connected to one another through technology,but to do so in ways that are beneficial, effective, and useful.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9780061899256

Soren Gordhamer

Soren Gordhamer is the founder and host of the Wisdom 2.0Conference, the premier gathering of those interested in mindfulness andwisdom in modern life.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

There is more to life than increasing its speed.

—Mahatma Ghandi

It is hard to fathom the extent to which our lives have changed in recent years. Just a few short years ago:

• engaging in social media was a fringe activity for college students and artists;

• families generally spent their evenings watching one screen, a TV, rather than their own individual computer screens; and

• cell phones were primarily for businesspeople and performed the simple task of allowing us to make a phone call.

Today there are more than nine hundred million people on Facebook, from high school students to senior citizens, who are uploading more than three hundred million photos a day. We are creating two billion tweets a month on Twitter, and most of us never leave the house without our cell phones, whose global use is expected to reach five billion people this year, and which now do just about anything a computer can. While once people went to cafés and talked to other people, now you are more likely to see people at tables looking at screens.

The age of technology is upon us. Certainly this has awesome benefits. The free exchange of information, whether it be through blogs or social media, allows it to move unhindered, no longer under the control of a handful of large media companies who choose what we do and do not consume. We can now do our own research on issues that matter to us, and can easily stay updated on the activities of friends and family through social media. It even has the power to create huge change, as the Arab Spring of 2011 revealed.

Yet many of us secretly question the impact this technology has on our life, as we simultaneously experience some of the downsides to an increasingly connected culture. Studies suggest that up to three out of every four US workers now call their job stressful. In a recent National Sleep Foundation study,¹ 63 percent of Americans say their sleep needs are not being met during the week. More people today feel increasingly hurried, overwhelmed, and distracted, which has much to do with the pervasiveness of these same technologies. While once we could go home and get away from work, now it follows us through cell and computer, such that we are always at the office and available for demands. The constant onslaught of messages and information leaves us feeling frazzled and unhinged, and it’s damaging the quality of our work and our relationships.

I wrote this book as someone who deeply appreciates both technology and wisdom. The challenge is to find the right balance. When that balance is not found, we pay a big price. I had something of a wake-up call after several years totally immersed in technology, particularly the online world, where my desire to be connected all the time took precedence over just about every other facet of my life, including my mental and physical well-being. The tools that were once my humble servants and that I had enjoyed had become my overbearing masters, directing much of my life. I realized that if I continued my constant late nights surfing online, religiously checking my e-mail every few minutes, regularly clocking twelve-hour days, and never swaying far from a communication device, my health and well-being would continue to deteriorate. As such, I was not sleeping well, my relationships were in chaos, and I had less free time. Though this certainly was concerning, what really floored me was what little progress I was making in such a life. I had more stress, was completing less of what was important to me, and was not making a positive contribution to the world as far as I could see. It was a lose-lose-lose situation. I sensed that there had to be another way.

In spite of my epiphany, I was not (and am still not) willing to renounce my interest in or use of technology. These devises and services can be powerful tools for creating a more free and open world. The truth is, we can use just about any device either for benefit or for harm. What matters is not that Twitter and Facebook exist; they are what they are. Whether we use them as means of distraction and gossip, or harness them to help us accomplish what is most important, depends on us. I wrote this book to help you learn to make conscious choices about how you use these tools, and live in our constantly connected world in a way that is creative and aware, and where you are in the driver’s seat.

After the initial publication of this book, I began to talk to more people in the technology industry, and I soon realized a movement was afoot, particularly among the movers and shakers in Silicon Valley, where stress is at its highest and work-life balance can seem nonexistent. After numerous conversations, we decided to launch the Wisdom 2.0 conference, which brings wisdom teachers from various traditions together with members of the technology community. Speakers at the conference include the founders of most of the major technology companies, including Twitter, Facebook, eBay, PayPal, and Zynga, as well as spiritual luminaries such as Eckhart Tolle, Jack Kornfield, and Jon Kabat-Zinn. It soon became clear that the very people who are creating some of the most influential companies of our age are tapped in to an inner dimension that guides their work, and that in order to build lives and companies with meaning, we must bring into our modern world a very ancient concept: we have to learn to pay attention, or to develop what can be referred to as awareness or mindfulness. In fact, without it, we will easily drown in this time.

In our world of constant information, where we can check every ten minutes and discover twenty new e-mails, twenty new tweets, or fifty fresh posts on Facebook, we can easily forget what it is to focus on one thing at a time or to truly be present in any moment. Not only does that disrupt our relationships, it also greatly impacts our ability to get anything done in a work setting, let alone access the space inside each of us where truly great ideas come from. We’re too busy responding to requests to actually do what it is we need to do.

In fact, with little focus of mind, the technologies meant to help us with a task can have just the opposite effect: The tools that are supposed to save us time can take more of it. Those created to help us communicate can actually lead to less genuine purposeful communication. And those meant to enhance our creativity can diminish it. This is why we can spend ten hours on our computer and find ourselves thinking afterward, Just what did I accomplish in all that time?

This book explores ways to access the creative mind, which experiences life freshly, thinks out of the box, finds new solutions to old problems, and expresses itself in innovative ways. It allows us to write a report or term paper with clarity and ease in three hours instead of banging our head against a wall and getting it done in eight. As you’ll see throughout this book, the great leaders and thinkers of our time both understand the power of technology, and that time spent away from the computer can be helpful. Google cofounder Larry Page famously got the idea for what became Google’s search algorithm in a dream one night. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos spends several days at the end each quarter locked away, halting most communication, so that he can vision and let his mind focus. Without a connection to our inner world, to our own thoughts and body, the creative mind becomes inaccessible amid the mass of other content we digest.

This is the frustration so many of us feel—knowing the potential that is possible when we are more focused and engaged but not knowing how to access that space very often. Wisdom 2.0 will help you learn the art of mindfulness, how to respond to situations with less stress and more ease, artfully access the creative mind, and start living your life with purpose. Rather than a scientific or philosophical exploration of this issue, it focuses on practical approaches and tools that can be performed in our daily lives, and includes real-life stories of luminaries in various fields putting these ideas into practice.

Though years from now some of us may renounce technology and return to the ways of the Luddites, for most of us our interaction with it will only deepen, making us ever more connected in the years ahead. The question for most of us is not if we will use and be connected through technology, but how to do so in a way that enhances our creativity and well-being instead of adding to our frustration and stress. This book charts a map on this journey. It illustrates how the qualities that add stress to our lives are the same ones that limit our access to the creative mind, how what is best for our own well-being is also what is most helpful in our creative work. This is no easy endeavor, and one that I am continually challenged by, but the fundamental question is no longer, How do I stay connected all the time, consuming as much information as possible? It is instead, How do I live mindfully, in ways that are beneficial to my own well-being, effective in my work, and that harness the technology for the greatest benefit? Like anything, knowing the right question to ask can make all the difference.

As such, this book is not the four steps to retiring young (I haven’t), or how to become a part of the new Internet rich (I am not), or how to guarantee that you rule the Web (I don’t). I have nothing against these efforts, and some material here may even help achieve these goals, but the focus here is on living with deeper connection and greater ease; it’s about creatively instead of stressfully responding to the conditions in our lives. I have met enough multimillionaires to know that you can be as miserable on a private jet as you can on a crowded city bus, and have known enough techies to learn that you can be just as lonely with thousands of friends on a social network as you can with only one. Something is underlying the conditions in our lives, determining the level of our suffering or ease. To know this is the path of wisdom. To live it in our day and age while benefiting from the technologies of our time is Wisdom 2.0.

PART I

THE ART OF ATTENTION

In our massively connected world, it is easy to think that the more information we have, the better our chances of success. While more information can be helpful for issues such as logical problem solving, it is often useless for innovation. It’s not what allows us to live with greater presence and ease . . . or how a game-changing device like the iPhone is envisioned.

When Steve Jobs said, I began to realize that an intuitive understanding and consciousness was more significant than abstract thinking and logical analysis, he was describing a different quality of knowing, one less based on external information and more on harnessing an inner intelligence.

Now that we have access to unparalleled amounts of information, certainly getting the right information matters, but it’s the inner dimension that is the most vital element for any creative person or company. In fact, this will likely be the primary factor in the great companies of the future. It is no longer about accessing information; it is about the digestion, application, and creative use of that information. For this, we need to learn to tune out and tune in.

The great innovators of our time are already aware of this and putting it into action. In the early days of Twitter, cofounder Evan Williams developed an internal document that included a set of principles to guide the company. One of the key sections in that document was titled Pay Attention.

Doing anything really well requires paying attention to what you are doing, Evan said when asked about this mission in an interview during one Wisdom 2.0 conference. Essentially, if something is not being paid attention to, you are not able to innovate or iterate.

Another word for paying attention is mindfulness, which can be described as bringing our full attention to the present moment. When hearing this, people often respond, "Hold it,

Reviews for Wisdom 2.0

[james0802_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A creative and largely successful attempt to apply mindfulness principles to today's technological world.