The Renaissance Man

It is not the new year that matters to me one iota as much as the emergence of the learning pathway.  I detail on LinkedIn why I do not believe in being a "follower" https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/renaissance-man-cityvp-manjit/

My current learning pathway (Pathway 57) has one major challenge incorporated which relates to the offline pathway, and that is building in time to accommodate long-form content like books.  The problem with books is that too become social instruments including aspects of economic necessity.  The principal focus will be non-fiction material and then maybe on a new pathway I may finally develop a taste for reading fiction. 

For the reading of non-fiction books, the goal is not to read cover to cover but to fast-forward on parts that are already known to me and while not skip past or browse through the "non-value add", develop an instinct or nose for value.  One would think that we individually would possess that, but that was not readily apparent during Pathway 56. 

I have updated my hives at beBee to the latest Pathway Release #57.  The greater challenge is updating my attention habits. When we want to be read, we expect the attention of others and that is de facto way we engage online, but it is not reading what people have written that forms my Learning Pathway, but what we are not reading.  There is no problem in reading what people have written but the difference comes in adaptation.  I want to adapt what I pay attention to my Learning Pathway and that always presents a challenge, because this does not form a conversation in the social sense.

There can still be conversations but they become adaptive riffs but there is a certain aspect of leading towards one's own True North rather than to the point being made.  The Achilles Heel in this is that the linearity of "What is your point?" gets in the way of adaptive development.  What is tougher is that the learning aspect in this emerges after the adaptation and not often related to the point.  Making a point turns the conversation into a particle, but I want to be a wave.  The paradox wisdom is wave-particle duality and this duality is not binary, it is whole and it is also nothing. 

Another nagging particle is a socially engineered focus on personal branding.  I cannot respect this as a mass-form of thinking.  I can certainly respect branding experts at the top of their game and the complexity and creativity of their genius, but the kind of sell job that associates personal branding with pesky and irritating professionals is an altogether different proposition, because it is not driven by either high level entrepreneurial mindset or better still social genius.  Mediocrity is bringing thinking down to the level of who we hire to engage that thinking, and there are many dime a dozen personal branding guru's who just do not pass the smell test, and the kind of particle that offends a smell test is one we all know.

Another aspect is affinity and the monstrous broadcasting mindset.  This is so 20th Century and it is a continuation of the mentality of publish or perish.  When we are selling personal brand like detergent not even detergent cleans this kind of ugliness.   When I look at my learning hives they are from the viewpoint of popularity.  My learning pathway is not designed for such popularity.  There is at least some interesting information when my hives are measured for popularity, I can relate in my head which pathways are more important to me - and then draw some insights from what is usually a huge difference.  A focus on content also effects these measures, as does what people write about that literally colours this hive measure of popularity :

The Observer is the Observed

The social engineering aspect of being observed was mentioned in my LinkedIn piece and so the mentality of popularity is pervasive.  It does not lend to greater growth, it actually lends to either polarization (if we are a specialist) or mediocrity (if we are a generalist).  As "The Renaissance Man", clearly I am not angling towards the specialist.  Personal branding is not by any measure my top peeve, that would be "professionalism".  Ironically the most effective way to distance oneself from professionalism is to take a nosedive in one's own career, and that would be complete career suicide.  My angst about the professional hierarchy subverting the managerial hierarchy is not meant to be a talking point, but a lived experience.  When push comes to shove, I am willing to sacrifice prospects and opportunities.

It is not the fault of the owners of LinkedIn or Facebook or Twitter to see life this way.  This is how we are all taught to look at life and we all went through an education system that simply reinforces that 20th Century psyche.  It is as far removed from 21st Century thinking that can be imaginable.  A part of my renaissance psyche is to be the first of the new rather than the last of the old, but it could well be that the last of the old will outlast me.  If that happens then I become infinitely relevant to this century after I have passed on - what a bummer!

One thing I like about my association with Toastmasters is that they begin from the higher level of leadership.  The problem in Toastmasters is that this is a recent strategy and over many decades, there are traditional Toastmasters who cannot move out of their niche.  When I look at personal branding, that is a niche of a niche. It really does not represent the future for me, but at least leadership does.  Ironically, while Toastmasters have the right strategy, the material that I have gone through is not commensurate with complexity science or leadership in the reality of uncertainty and chaos.  That does not matter, what matters is that in the offline world I adapt Toastmasters as much as I adapt online portals to my learning pathway. 

I am pretty happy with the aim of being a renaissance man even if it does not transform into successful image.  I am not interested in being an image.  Yet  I also have a long way to go before I meet the genius of Krishnamurti's "The Observer is the Observed".   What matters is that I have a learning pathway and it is unique to me and wherever it goes, it goes and that is the greatest beauty of emergence.