I’m ill. I’ve been ill for a few days now. Not catastrophically ill. Not heroically ill. Just that grey, flattened version where standing up feels like a negotiation …and your body keeps reminding you it would quite like a word, if that’s okay, when you have time, and yes we’re busy, but honestly it really would be good to have a word.
I went from “a bit run down” to “under the weather” to “oh wow I actually can’t move” over the course of a few days, and truth be told I kind of saw it coming. It certainly didn’t come out of nowhere.
For the past 2 months, I’ve been working flat out on a big, important, complicated project. The “holiday break” was punctured with work and that punctured the “break” part of it so there wasn’t really the end of year decompression I probably needed after a long year. Which meant for some long, sleep-interrupted nights. Then back into long days. Long weekends too.
The long dark teatime of the soul
You’ve had times like this yourself: the kind of sustained intensity where you stop noticing how tired you are because everyone is tired and there’s work to do and this matters. You just knuckle down, crack on, plough through, roll up your sleeves… you know the drill. We’ve all been there, and this week was that.
Sunday and Monday I could barely get out of bed. Tuesday I wasn’t much better, but that was the final delivery day so I did all those things because we needed to (as the delightful phrase goes) “get shit done”. And shit, as it tends to in these situations, did get done.
And here’s the bit I’m not going to pretend away: I’m proud of my contribution. Even sniffling and sneezing and snotting [apologies for the visual here; disgusting but sadly accurate], I showed up, and showed up pretty well, all things considered. Clear when it counted. Calm when it got contentious. Balancing conviction and compromise. That matters to me.
[And yes, I am also chuffed with the alliterative triptych that just tumbled out of my brain like an otter cub tumbling into a woodland stream, briefly shocked, then delighted. And whilst I’m at it, I’m also feeling pretty smug about the phrase “alliterative triptych” too… remarkable what Lemsip can do for a man!]
But pride doesn’t override biology. And, as it turns out, it’s a crap energy source.
The bill arrived anyway. Promptly. Politely. Like a bill placed quietly on the table by a patient yet expectant waiter.
It’s the time of year for viruses. It’s wet, it’s cold, and kids all round the world are dutifully sharing each other’s germs via the social petri dish of the school classroom and bringing them all home for the family to enjoy. My wife has been ill. Young Jack (12) has been ill. Our house has assumed a slightly subterranean feeling: blankets on sofas, muted voices, the kettle working overtime. Somehow Ben, now 15 going on 16 [I know I can’t believe it either], has powered through the whole thing with the constitution of a rhino who gets the idea of illness but doesn’t think it’s really something for them.
What’s struck me isn’t the illness itself; that part was obvious enough.
It’s the pattern.
There’s a familiar story we tell ourselves about pushing through. Sometimes that’s exactly right, and Tuesday was one of those times. But left unchecked, pushing through can quietly drift into pretending there’s no cost.
Your body will accept IOUs. It just has a habit of calling them in all at once.
You can borrow the energy from tomorrow. You can delay the payback. But it always arrives, calmly and on its own terms.
This isn’t about working less, or caring less.
It’s about being aware of when you’re borrowing from tomorrow, and knowing, in the moment, that you’re going to need to give something back. If you need to push through today, you’re going to need to pull back tomorrow.
Not as a reward. As repayment.
Sometimes pushing through is necessary, and worth it. When that’s the case, you go for it. I’ll be there to offer a cuppa and a biscuit when you’re flagging a bit.
Milk no sugar, right? You’re very welcome.
I know you care about what you do, and how you show up. You’re that kind of person. I love that about you, and so do the people who depend on you. So you wouldn’t stop showing up even if I told you to, and that’s just as it should be.
My only nudge would be this: be clear with yourself when you’re borrowing, and do it deliberately, rather than letting the deficit become the default.
That way, perhaps, you avoid defaulting on repayments the body refused to delay.
So do me a favour: maybe just have a quick word with yourself about where you are once in a while. You’ll save a fortune on tissues if nothing else.
Good question. There is an argument that, in a world created by men and for men, a world where men hold most of the power, every day is “Men’s Day”. We all know there are more male CEOs than female, but to put that into context the latest data tells us there are more men called John running FTSE 250 companies than there are women. Not women called John, in case you’re wondering. Women. In total. And we all know there are more male heads of government than female, but to follow through and put that into context, just 19 of the 193 member states of the United Nations currently have female head of state. More than two thirds have never had a female head of state in their entire history.
And some of those male heads of state we are subjected to now really are some of the most caricatured examples of toxic masculinity you could ever hope to avoid, building their palaces and breeding their bullshit authoritarianism as a shield to protect their eggshell thin egos. Trump, Putin, Netanyahu, Orban, Jong Un, Milei. And many more like them, or hoping to be. I’m not sure what the question is for this bunch of bullies but the answer is “unresolved childhood trauma”. I can’t make up with my father/mother/teacher/first girlfriend so I’ll build up an armour made up of sycophants and wealth and as much power as I can possibly hold in my little hands.
When I took my first steps into my work on diversity, equity and inclusion, there was a shared belief that things were getting better, particularly around gender equality. The dictionary definition of feminism is the belief that women should have the same rights, opportunity and, yes, “power” as men, and that seemed to be shifting, albeit very slowly. But thanks to this lot, and their acolytes, we’ve taken a few big steps backwards over the last couple of years.
[Yeah, I did drop it in there, didn’t I? The dreaded curse of DEI which is now put forward as the reason why society is a so fractious and divided, conveniently and maliciously ignoring the fact that it all stems from wealth inequality which started with ideological free market economics, wandered through the failed experiment of privatisation, jogged past the systematic deindustrialisation of swathes of countries and communities wearing nothing but a flimsy coat of consumerism, skipped into a garden of easy access to credit and slammed right into the greed-fuelled banking bubble of the 2008 financial crisis. People have been sold the story that the problem is “woke”, forgetting that they were actually there and saw it happen. Don’t you remember? It was the banks! Billions of your taxes went to bail out a bunch of (overwhelmingly male) bankers that had become gorged on greed. You must remember that? It wasn’t giving more opportunity to those who didn’t have as much in an effort to level the playing field. It was the fucking banks! You were there! REMEMBER? Hmm, this might be a separate blog now I come to think of it. Where was I? Oh yeah “power”]
It’s not just “power” of course. Data from the World Economic Forum tell us that whilst there has been change in the gender gap in Economic Participation and Opportunity (money, basically) since 2006, if we keep going at the current rate it will take 169 years to close the gender gap completely. [Yeah, I know, that’s such a long time that it almost seems silly counting it doesn’t it?]. A big part of that is because women still do around 60% more unpaid work – cooking, cleaning, childcare, caring – than men, none of which is recognised in the economy but all of which impacts on time and, by extension, the need for more flexible working to fit it all in.
So yeah, it’s a man’s world. Then why on Earth do we need International Men’s Day?
Well, because the day is less about celebrating men in general, and more about recognising the need for positive conversations around manhood and masculinity. And about stripping back some of the baggage, too.
And there is baggage that comes with being a man. I mentioned in these pages a while back a book I’d read called The Mask of Masculinity (you can find it here if you’re interested, it’s very good) by a nice chap called Lewis Howes. In this the empathetic and erudite Mr Howes [no I’m not sure why I’ve suddenly gone all formal and pseudo posh either] explains that there are a whole bunch of masks that men ‘wear’ to function in society.
The Know-It-All Mask where you pretend to know stuff you don’t know because admitting you don’t know shows weakness. Best example of this is me looking at the engine in a car, pretending to understand when the roadside repair man arrives at my broken down vehicle and tells me there’s something wrong with the “crank shaft” or “big end” or something else which, because I’m quite childish sometimes, sounds slightly risqué in a very Carry On film kind of way. The Joker Mask, which makes light of everything things – particularly things that might be emotionally difficult – to avoid having to deal with them properly. Yeah, I’ve known that one a fair bit. The Material Mask, where showing off an expensive watch or an expensive car or about an expensive holiday is a demonstration of how successful you are. Money can’t buy me love but it can help me pretend I’m happy and powerful. I’m very fortunate that I’ve never really put this one on. I don’t really care about watches or cars or designer clothes and the idea of ‘conspicuous consumption’ seems kind of pathetic to me. But The Alpha Mask where you never back down or admit fault, doubling down when challenged and becoming even more Alpha. Think all of those dickhead “leaders” mentioned above. Especially Trump, The Stoic Mask, where you pretend everything is okay when it’s really not. Hmm, yeah. That one fits me like an old pair of slippers, perfectly moulded from years of use.
There are others, of course. But it all conflates into one big theme…
Pretending.
Pretending things don’t hurt. Pretending you care about stuff that you don’t care about. Pretending you don’t have emotions. Pretending everything is okay when it’s really, really not.
Boys don’t cry, remember?
When I was a young man we never talked about negative emotions. Ever.
Trouble at home? Worried about school? Disappointed about not getting into the sports team? Heartbroken because the girl you liked and who you thought liked you too has started hanging around with a lad from the year above? Grieving over the death of a beloved pet?
Bury it. Deep.
Don’t show weakness or it will be ruthlessly exploited by your own very best friends, not because they want to hurt you but because that’s what boys do because “it’s just a bit of banter, lads”. No need to take it personally mate. Can’t take a joke?
So if you’re the one on the receiving end, you have precisely two choices: suck it up, or give as good as you get. Stoicism or alpha? Your choice.
That’s what we’re conditioned with, and that’s how a lot of men’s relationships with other men stay for ever. Never really get to anything deep. Pretend everything is going great. Give as good as you get.
Suck it up. Man up. Grow a pair.
Let’s leave all that emotional stuff to the ladies, eh lads arf arf wink wink?
Just because men don’t talk about emotions with each other, doesn’t mean they don’t have the emotions of course. It just means they can’t talk about them, or process them, or get advice, or support, or just plain old filial love. An arm round the shoulder.
And the absence of these necessities is killing us.
Suicide is the biggest killer of men under the age of 45 in the UK. Men make up over three quarters of suicides. There are lots of reasons for this, but many will come back to the way men hide their emotions. From each other, and often from their partners too.
That’s one bloody good reason why International Mens Day is an important time to stop and talk. A moment in a busy year to talk about what modern masculinity should be all about, talking about the expectations society puts on men (and men put on themselves) which can lead to anxiety and depression, and worse. It’s not a celebration. It’s a time to reflect.
I know about this stuff because I’ve been there myself. I’ve not handled all the expectations brilliantly over the years. I’ve worn a lot of the masks mentioned above, some for so long I almost forgot I was wearing them, and thought they were the real me. And I’ve found that constantly pretending to be something you’re not is fucking exhausting, and confusing, and can leave you wracked with anxiety and down from there into depression.
I’m one of the lucky ones, because I’ve never really gone to the darkest of places, but I’ve been close enough that I can have at least a sense of it. Slowly slipping down a muddy bank, scrabbling for a foothold yet picking up speed, then tumbling and clawing and snatching at brambles and branches and bracken that cut the hands to ribbons. A thousand cuts, each of them minor, irrelevant, laughable, as the sky falls away above. Unable to shout for help for the fear that no one will come.
I can’t quite imagine the place that ends up in. Not really. But I know two men who took their own lives in the last couple of years.
One I only knew in passing, but always seemed cheerful and chatty and generally a ‘good bloke’. He’d struggled since leaving the armed forces, as so many do. His wife had no idea he was struggling. Neither did his kids.
The other one I’d known since I was 8 years old, and was one of my best friends for a big chunk of my life. His difficulties were more well known to us all, and horribly complex in a bunch of ways. But in the end he made a decision all on his own.
Most men of my age will know someone who’s gone the same way.
Again, I’m lucky, because along my journey I’ve grown into someone who is a talker. Perhaps that’s because I found my soulmate when I was 20 and she was 19, and so I’ve always had a partner alongside me. Perhaps it’s because I’ve picked up some friends along the way whom I love like family, and who love me too.
As I’ve got older and experienced more of the world and made a million mistakes, I’ve also grown into someone who doesn’t conform to the more “traditional” tropes of masculinity. I’m really open about my emotions and I make a point of talking to my friends, and colleagues [some of whom span those categories, I’m happy to say] and even to relative strangers about my vulnerabilities and struggles, partly because I’m not ashamed of any of it and partly because I want to show that being in a conversation with me is a “safe space” for them. And I’ve found that the more I open up, the more others open up to me. And we all know by now that vulnerability builds trust, right? So my relationships have become much more real and much richer than they would be if I kept my emotions to myself.
So, what’s my message for International Men’s Day? Well, there are a couple.
First, if you’re not a man, please be assured that this isn’t about men just saying how ace men are. It’s much more nuanced than that. In a lot of ways it’s about showing how gender inequality damages everyone, men and women, and that breaking down societal expectations around gender would be good for everyone, too.
It is also a time for empathy, rather than antipathy or even (as sometimes can happen) indignance. Whilst I have no question in my mind that [in a sweepingly simplistic and borderline flippant generalisation] men have it easier than women in a society that was largely created by men, for men, I also know that with all the innumerable pressures and stereotypes and masks and pretending and bottling up, it’s often far from easy being a man in this messy world too.
And if you are a man, then it’s really, really simple. Partly it’s about taking off whatever mask you happen to habitually reach for of course. And then from there I’ll borrow from one of my comic heroes, if I may?
I saw a clip of an interview with Adrian Edmonson (star of The Young Ones, Comic Strip and Bottom) a while back, where he said that whilst he and co-writer and co-star Rik Mayall had showed their love for each other in loads of ways, “the thing we never did was tell each other than we loved each other, and it’s a huge regret”. Regret he can’t do anything about now, as Rik died in 2014 at the tender age of 56. The expressive and eloquent Mr Edmondson [there I go again] then went on to say the following:
“If you’re a man… and you’ve got a best friend: just tell him you love him.”
That’s as good a “call to action” as I’m going to get I think.
My two sons were both born in London. Ben was born just after midnight on a Tuesday in the middle of April, 2010, at St Thomas’ Hospital, right by the River Thames. As my wife and I cradled the chubby, spiky haired little human we’d created, we gazed out of the window and watched the sun come up over the Houses of Parliament on the other side of the dirty old river. I’ll never forget that morning.
“That” picture. April 20th, 2010.
As any of you who’ve had more than one child will appreciate, it’s a bit more hazy with the second one. I know Jack was born in Kings Hospital in South East London, at around 11ish, and I think it might have been a Wednesday but don’t quote me on it.
One thing I do remember is texting my dad to say we’d had a another boy [for both children we decided not to find out the sex in advance, simply because there aren’t many times in your life that you get a true, total, life-changing surprise, and we figured finding out if it’s a boy or a girl is one of them] and him texting back to say he already had three grandsons and had ordered a girl and could we take it back and get a refund?
I also remember three-and-a-half-year-old Ben meeting Jack for the very first time, holding him carefully in his lap and then quietly starting to cry. When we asked him what was wrong, he looked up from his little brother and, smiling through the tears, said
“I just love him so much”
Meeting his little brother
Cue additional tears from all the surrounding parents and grandparents. And, I can tell you, cue his old dad reaching for a tissue as he writes this nearly 12 years later, with the sound of those two boys bickering about who’s turn it is on the Playstation just next door to where I’m sitting.
But anyway, this isn’t really about their respective births, believe it or not [although it was a nice excuse to dig out those pictures and show them to you, I’m sure you’ll agree]. It’s not even really about the fact that they were born in London and brought up in London for the first few years of their lives, but we’ll hover here for a bit if you don’t mind? [And even if you do mind, we’re going to need to do it anyway because it’s part of the narrative and so it’s kind of important. Not like this bit. Oh no, this is just a waste of time really – a deliberate detour designed to disrupt. Good bit of alliteration eh? I love the allure of alliteration, don’t you? Anyway this really is getting silly now: I’d skip to the next bit if I were you.]
I don’t know if you’ve ever driven around London, or been driven around London, but it’s pretty hectic. Not Bangkok tuk-tuk hectic, or Paris aggressively maniacal hectic, but hectic nonetheless.
I’m pretty good on a bike but at the time my wife would probably have been considered more of a ‘provisional’ bicycle rider, getting one of those big ‘P’ signs that nervous parents put on the cars of their all-too-confident new drivers in the UK.
Put those together and “family bike ride” was never going to be on the agenda really. So [feeling very guilty about it of course, because guilt and parenthood are such happy bedfellows] we didn’t get round to teaching them how to ride a bike until we moved out into the countryside,
[Isn’t it funny how riding a bike is one of those things that literally everyone is expected to learn how to do? Cycling and swimming, What exalted company bike-riding has been keeping! Not knowing how to swim could result in a tragic death by drowning headline in a local newspaper. Not knowing how to ride a bike could result in… having to walk for a bit? Maybe catching a bus? Yet if I met someone who couldn’t ride a bike, before I could stop myself I’d blurt out “you can’t ride a bike??” in an incredulous and slightly high-pitched voice like they’d told me they’d never learnt to tie their shoelaces or use a knife and fork.]
Do you remember learning how to ride a bike? I do. I remember being on the path at the back of our house with my dad [two mentions in one blog eh Dad? You’ll be feeling all spoilt!] doing that funny bent-over run, holding on to the back of the saddle until I’d picked up speed and then… has he let go?… I think he’s let go… I’m riding a bike!!
And then, of course, I’d probably got for a bit, wobble, then fall off and graze the skin of my knee on the hard gravel of the path.
The magic of a plaster
But with our own boys we never quite got round to it. Always something easier and more relevant to do in old London town, of course. So it wasn’t until we’d got out of the “Big Smoke™️” that we started to think about getting it sorted.
And when we eventually did, bikes and padding and helmets all gleaming in the summer sunshine, I got to experience something I’d not experienced before:
“The letting go”.
Letting go of the back of the saddle with the knowledge [not the “fear”, please note Dear Reader, but the absolute certain knowledge] that whatever son I was holding onto would go for a bit, wobble, then fall off and graze the skin off their knee on the hard ground of the village cricket pitch which we’re fortunate to have just through the little gate at the end of our garden.
And with that, the knowledge our younger son – the same one you remember in the arms of his elder brother all those years ago – will go absolutely ape-shit and say he doesn’t want to ride a stupid bike anyway.
And the knowledge that you’re going to do it again, and again, and again, until he stops the wobble and fall off bit. Might not happen today, but eventually it will.
AI imagery is freaky isn’t it?
Cut to the present., and really the actual point of this particular ramble through the brambles on memory lane.
A good few months back now, I was talking to a senior copywriter at work [he’s left now but there’s a chance he might read this so “hello Andy mate!” just in case!], and we were sharing thoughts on the responsibility of managing people, and delegating, and getting the balance right between pushing forward and holding back; between freedom and support.
[Yeah yeah, I know, you’re way ahead of me here. I would expect nothing less from such an astute reader as your good self.]
And of course we ended up talking about parenting in general, and then specifically about that moment: the letting go.
Managing people is really all about that moment, or series of moments. Knowing when to give someone the extra space to work on a project or try something different or do the first draft of a piece of work with the knowledge that what you get back could be totally perfect first time, but the chances are it’ll need a little polishing here and there.
The most important part of this is what happens next, of course.
Let me ask you: what would have happened if, when one of the boys had fallen off, under the guise of protecting them but probably also just thinking it would be a lot quicker and easier, I’d just taken the bike and ridden it myself? I end up with a bad back from riding a bike too small for me, and they end up still unable to ride a bike [and, horror of horrors, having to walk instead. Anyway we’ve covered that haven’t we?].
Managing and delegation aren’t the same thing, but they’re interconnected. If you can’t delegate – really delegate, letting go again and again as people learn – then really you’re not managing. At best you’re stifling. At worst you’re doing what was once described to me as “seagull management”, where you fly around over the top of things and occasionally come down and shit all over everything [and presumably also steal some chips from a chubby kid in a pushchair, but I fear I may be following this particular analogy too far down the road]..
I’ve seen brilliant people who couldn’t get their heads around delegating properly, either out of a “I don’t have the time to explain it to someone else” lack of appreciation of time management, or a “I’ll do it myself because I’ll do it better anyway” lack of understanding of their responsibility in this situation. What happened to them, do you think? That’s right, they got stuck. If you can’t delegate, you can’t progress because you’re the do-er, not the person who gets the doing done.
I may, on occasion, have done this myself over the years. I know it sounds unlikely – I can hardly believe it myself to be honest – but I’ve even got myself stuck in the “I don’t have time to explain it all and only I know what’s going on and honestly it’s just easier if I just crack on and get things done myself” rut in the not-too-distant past. I’ve even managed to convince myself that it’s an act of service for other people, when it’s actually more like an act of performative martyrdom.
And we’ve all seen plenty of those, right?
“No honestly it’s fine. I’ll do it. You don’t need the hassle” etc etc.
So there are a number of things to take from all this, I guess. [Probably three in total, because things tend to end up in threes in these situations, don’t you find? I’ll start with the first and go from there, and we can see at the end if it was three in total after all. Exciting eh?!]
The letting go is a crucial part of learning. Whether we like it or not, failure is always the best way to learn. Retracing your steps till you know. Have no fear, your wounds will heal. [If you’re sitting there thinking “that sounds strangely familiar”, then a) well done you, and b) yes I have just accidentally on purpose drifted into the lyrics of the song “Failure” by the Norwegian folk-pop duo Kings of Convenience off their 2001 album “Quiet Is The New Loud”. If you haven’t you definitely should – Spotify link here. You are, as ever, most welcome.]
If you don’t give people the space for that learning and growth, they will never learn and grow. And you, my friend, will be stuck doing the stuff that they would have learnt to do, if you had let go. Which means you can’t do the other stuff that you want to do so you too can learn and grow.
No matter how experienced you are, the letting go never gets more comfortable, nor less important. In fact, the letting go actually protects you, by allowing perfectly capable others to support you. [It did end being three. I kind of knew it would be, didn’t you?]
That’s what I’ve rediscovered in recent months, like a comfy old jumper that’s fallen to the back of the palatial walk-in wardrobe in the East wing of your country retreat [I’m guessing here, but pretty confident that because you have the foresight and insight to be reading this you’re almost certainly one of the leading lights in your line of work. Or bloody should be, am I right?], that super soft woollen number which of course you haven’t worn for a while, but when you find it you know how comfy it’s going to feel as soon as you pull if over your head and ease your arms through the arm holes [is that the phrase for that part of a jumper? Doesn’t sound quite right, does it?] and so simultaneously you’re a bit annoyed you’d forgotten about it, but more than that you’re excited about its rediscovery and the familiar warmth to come [Sleeves! Of course, knew it’d come back to me eventually].
Funny how the fact that, despite knowing the right way to do all this stuff, you can so easily slip back into old, bad habits you know didn’t help last time.
Funny how you need to remember it all and sometimes learn it all again.
Funny how no matter how many times you’ve done it, it never gets much easier.
[Exactly not like riding a bike, come to think of it…]
And then… when you get it right… wow doesn’t it just feel great? Helping someone else to learn and grow has to be whole point of getting all the experience if you ask me. Passing on your knowledge and [dare I say it?] wisdom [yes I bloody dare!] and then getting to the point where you know and they know the time is now…
And once you’re there, you realise the letting go isn’t the end of the story; it’s the prologue for everything to come.
I love being silly. LOVE IT. Always have. I got told off for being silly when I was little, then got told off for it when I got a bit older, which turned into getting into a decent amount of trouble for it when I was in my teens, and then, as I wandered into adulthood like a young gazelle wandering innocently into the open savannah without a care for the pride of lions on the near horizon, I found that my silliness was both a curse and a blessing.
A curse because, yes, it got me into some sticky spots, and made me seem less serious and more childish which, let’s be honest, some people find really, really annoying.
And a blessing because I found that my silliness connected me to other innately silly people in the world, a number of whom became friends for life; connected forever by the ability to lighten the mood by doing or saying something ridiculous. One of them I ended up married to: potentially the silliest decision she ever made.
It’s easy to see where that came from for me. My family was a family of jokes and teasing and fun and silliness, from top to bottom. There was always a joke to be had; a tease to be teased; a daft tale to be told. We didn’t necessarily always get on brilliantly all the time any more than any family do, but there’s no question we laughed, a lot, at things that were daft.
When I was young, whenever someone said “must admit”, we would shout “Pepper Paws”. Because… you know… “Mustard Mitt”… therefore “Pepper Paws”. I know, silly, right? I only found out that this wasn’t something that all families did when I was about 6 or 7 and my teacher said “I must admit” in class and I confidently shouted out “Pepper Paws” at the top of my voice and was sent to sit on the naughty chair for being “silly”
When my big sister [hey Sal!] and I were little we would go and stay with our grandparents (on my Mum’s side) in Richmond (SW London for those not acquainted with our capital’s leafy suburbs) for a couple of weeks in the summer holidays, and Grandpa would pretend to be a tiger and chase us around the house, up and down the stairs, for what felt like hours, with my sister and I screaming with a mixture of delirious joy, uncontrollable excitement and abject terror until Grannie would demand he stopped because it was nearly bedtime and it was all getting very “silly”
One day when I was maybe 10 or so, my mum came home with a cast on her arm, and told us all she’d slipped on some ice outside the hospital where she worked and broken it. All evening we made sure she was comfy and got her cups of tea and looked after her, and at one point I saw tears running down her face. “Don’t worry,” Dad said quietly to me, “she’s just in shock”. A few minutes later she pulled the fake cast off her arm and revealed they were tears of laughter which of course we all agreed was just “silly”.
And then I discovered silliness on the telly, and felt the connection which has continued to this day
Despite what the ever expanding wrinkles and white bits in the hair and beard might suggest, I’m much too young to remember Monty Python’s Flying Circus first time round, but it seemed to be on constant repeat when I was a kid. Popping up here and there is a character called The Colonel, a classic, stuffy British Army officer-type played by Graham Chapman, who would interrupt a sketch if it got “silly”.
My personal favourite appearance was a sketch about gangs of old ladies – Hell’s Grannies – “attacking fit, defenceless young men”. Obviously completely daft from the beginning, it brings in other, ever more “silly” ideas (a group of men dressed as babies kidnapping a 48-year-old man from outside a shop; vicious gangs of ‘keep left’ signs attacking a vicar) until The Colonel feels the need to step in.
Very silly
Right! Stop that, it’s silly. Very silly indeed. Started off as a nice little idea about old ladies attacking young men, but now it’s just got silly!
The Colonel – Hell’s Grannies sketch by Monty Python
It was the silliness that made Monty Python, of course. You never really had a clue what would happen next, and the anticipation that creates makes the whole thing exciting. The folks from Monty Python didn’t invent silliness, but they took inspiration from radio shows like The Goon Show in the early 1950s [which, lest we forget, was an extremely sensible time in a post-war Britain run by people born when Queen Victoria was on the throne, and still reeling from the costs of the war on society and the economy] and broadcast it into every living rooms of the 70s and 80s. giving life to the surrealism of Vic Reeves & Bob Mortimer in the 90s and beyond to the likes of The Mighty Boosh.
[BTW, if you want to see something really, really silly, check out Vic and Bob as Donald and Davey Stott interviewing Sting via the link here – yeah that’s right: tantric, The Police, “Shape Of My Heart” Sting. It’s totally ridiculous]
Donald & Davey Stott
Over the last couple of years I’ve re-discovered the original radio series of The Mighty Boosh set in a zoo called Bob Fossil’s Funworld and it’s as box fresh streamed today on Spotify [other streaming services were still available at time of writing] as it was when it came out two decades back. It doesn’t age because it always was completely mad.
The Mighty Boosh: Howard, Bollo the talking gorilla, and Vince.
Which is why kids today would still love Monty Python. Because a load of old grannies beating up young people will always be silly. Silly, silly, silly. It’s why my kids love The Mighty Boosh.
It’s all silly. Childish at times. Pointless and annoying to those who don’t like it, I’m sure. But I love it. LOVE IT.
My English teacher told me when I was 11 that “humour is incongruity”: when the thing you least expect happens and you can’t help but be surprised by the “what the hell was that?!” and then be delighted when you ‘get it’. Quite a lot for an 11-year-old but it’s stuck with me, and the idea that humour is incongruity is every joke, every punchline, every laugh you’ve ever had, right there.
Add in a sprinkle of silliness and you get a much deeper flavour to your humour.
Most “jokes” are formulaic really. And the vast majority of stand-up comedy is just a series of observations dressed up in a fairly predictable, never-actually-happened anecdote. It’s obvious. It’s conventional. Yet silliness [you can call it surrealism or absurdity if you want to go a bit more highbrow] is deliberate freedom from any convention; from expectations. There are no rules – apart from incongruity, perhaps.
Which is why silliness has such a strong connection to childhood. You can imagine someone being called a ‘silly boy’ but never a ‘silly man’ (or if they are, there’s a suggestion of childishness, immaturity, a lack of common sense) and that’s because despite there being plenty of rules about what to do when you’re a kid (bedtime, homework) there’s also so much more freedom in how you think.
Kids love being silly, and love it even more when adults are silly with them. You tell a 7-year-old you once jumped up so high you hit your head on the moon and came down with cheese in your hair and you’re in an absurd conversation that will last as long as you both want it to.
Cheesy moon, courtesy of AI
My younger son had his last day at primary school a couple of weeks back [I know, I can’t believe it either; another reminder of my ever-increasing age], and as tends to happen towards the end of term towards the end of primary school, it all got a bit loosely goosey in the last few weeks. The learning was all done, and things just became about making sure the kids had a good experience in their final days in the safe, loving bubble of being the oldest in the school before they were sent off to be the youngest in a much bigger, much less structured and much more scary school environment.
It was in one of these final weeks that I dropped him off, and as they were all lined up to go inside their teacher came out and they all started chatting with her and joking and you could tell how much they all really liked her. As I walked out of the playground, another parent and I were talking about that and came to the agreement that it was because whilst she was strict and stern when she needed to be, she also allowed them to be silly sometimes, and did that by being silly herself sometimes too. Allowing herself to play the fool enabled her to connect with the kids on their level, in a way that not all teachers do. In fact, in a way that some of his previous teachers definitely would not do, ever. So much so that you couldn’t really imagine them ever being anything other than strict and stern.
And I was left wondering – why do some adults keep hold of that silliness when others don’t? Why do some people put it away in a box in the attic along with their old school memorabilia, whereas some people just refuse to ever let it be out of arm’s reach?
I’m silly at least once a day I reckon. Just for the hell of it, more often than not. I might tell my wife that my legs are broken so unfortunately unable get the milk out of the fridge, for example. I might tell my kids that I’ve run out of “Cuddle Power”, which they know means I am totally paralysed until they come and give me a hug. If I believe I have been slighted whilst in public by one of my family, I may well stop totally still, put my head down to my chest and say “meh, meh, meh” in a sad voice over and over again until everyone is nice to me. It’s incredibly effective. And yes, you’re right, incredibly silly. Just this morning, as my wife was lying in bed, I stood at the end of the bed, pretended I was an Olympic high diver, went through all the prep and breathing and hands up in the air and then dived onto the bed and her.
A few years ago on a road trip through California I made up a character called Jerry who’s an old guy who used to be in the movies and is still in love with his former wife, Margie (or Marsha – it varies), but also has a crush on my actual wife. To this day, my younger son, Jack, will ask me if he can speak to Jerry, and now and then Jerry will pop out to say hello to the family. Jack once told me that of all the people in the world he knows, Jerry holds the joint gold medal position alongside me, his mum and his big brother. There was a point where Jerry was coming out on top.
Being silly with kids is a joy, because they immediately, instinctively ‘get it’. And with some kids you can find yourself in an impromptu improvisation where the only rule is you have just to build on whatever the last person said, no matter how silly: “yes, and…”
And I love being silly with fellow “grown-ups” too. Sometimes it’s slightly surprising but the incongruity of it – particularly in lives bound by so many societal and social conventions – brings back a childishness and suddenly we’re all kids again. Thinking about it, all my strongest relationships have a foundation of silliness; the comforting certainty that we can be as deliberately idiotic as we like, without judgement or boundaries.
Funnily enough, I find that elderly people enjoy silliness too. Perhaps it’s because, like children, they are more free – from the pressures of work, the worries of looking after their own children. Watch a grandfather (or, if you’re lucky, a great-grandfather) with his young (great-) grandkids and it’s like there’s no adult there at all.
Gramps back on the see-saw for the first time in 60 years
Yet we all know so many “grown-ups” who eschew silliness in all its forms. Hell, I even knew a lot of kids growing up who would sneer at something being “just silly”, without ever getting that was the whole point. People who are always serious and ‘businesslike’ [like business doesn’t actually need freedom to think and humour to raise the spirits?!] and for whom silliness is just… well… silly.
And trust me: I have not a single doubt in my tiny mind that all the above will not only sound “silly” to some people, but actually really annoying. Unbearable, actually. I’ve met some of them over the years. People who find me really, really childish and irritating. That’s okay: I’m aware that I’m not for everyone. But even if I wanted to change to be less silly to keep those people on the Bartlett Train, I’m really not sure I’d be able to. And, as you might have gathered, I don’t want to. I love being silly. LOVE IT.
I believe that people choose to leave silliness behind because they don’t think there’s a place for it in the adult world. But I also believe it’s still in there somewhere, waiting to be found again like that old band t-shirt/stripy dress/straw hat/banana costume [delete as appropriate] you used to wear all the time but had been shoved behind the sham and drudgery of broken dreams in your second drawer down.
It’s still in there because the child you once were is still part of you. In fact, there are even a couple of bits of you that haven’t even grown since you were born – the cornea of the eye and part of the inner ear. So you see and hear with the same exact bits as that kid you used to be. You can be them again, with a little bit of silliness now and then.
So go on, give it a try. You don’t have to start big. Maybe just try out a silly walk, on your own. Pull a silly face in the mirror. Hey, you can just think something silly when you’re in a “grown-up” conversation, and you’re in it.
And you’ll find that silliness is a unique combination of freedom from convention and the incongruity that creates humour.
A generous helping of liberty with a side order of laughter? Tell me you don’t fancy some of that, and I’ll tell you not to be so silly.
It’s Mental Health Awareness Week this week, and so it feels like the right time to come back to a post I started a good few weeks back but didn’t finish. At the time I had a hell of a lot on and ended up focussing more on not letting all the stress become anxiety become overwhelm become… well, something altogether much more difficult… and whilst writing things down is cathartic for me, and helps me organise my thoughts, it’s at times when things are most stressful that I tend to drop the things that I know deep down might actually be important to carry on doing. Knowing what’s good for me and doing that are two different things, unfortunately. To know is one thing… but then what?
There’s a conundrum in there somewhere. On the whole, I’m much more aware of where my head is at these days, having gone as close to “the edge” as I really ever plan on going in the past. Anyone would tell you that’s a “good thing”. It means I can catch myself before I fall into a hole, move back from the edge of said hole, even plan for the upcoming hole/edge of hole situation; all that good stuff. If you know there’s a hole in the road just up ahead, you slow down, right?
The fact that this is the example given here is also not lost on me. The universe has a funny way of giving you a nudge sometimes, doesn’t it?
Well yes, of course that’s right. If you’re in charge of how fast things are moving, that is.
But what if you’re not? What if you’re not in charge of how fast things move and you just have to handle the feeling of going faster than you want to go, knowing that there might be a hole in the road up ahead, but not being able to hit the brake because you’re not the one in the driving seat.
You remember that feeling, just as I do, That night when you were younger and less responsible, with less responsibilities to make you need to be responsible, and you all piled into your friend’s car to make your way from here where you were to over there where everyone was going to be. And it was all fun and laughter, but at a certain point you realised you’d taken that corner too quickly, and even though everything was fine, for a moment everything slowed down and the air between you changed and everyone stopped laughing and for a moment there it was all suddenly very, very real. And no one said anything, but everyone knew.
[My cousin Tanya reminded me of her moment like that when I saw her a while back, and wouldn’t you know, it had been me driving that time. An old car, a back lane, a truck or tractor of some kind round a bend, a skid and several hearts stopping for a few beats. I didn’t remember it clearly, because it wasn’t my moment. But for her, it was like it happened yesterday rather than in the late summer of 1994]
Fast forward back to the here and the now and that feeling can still take your breath away. A tightness in the breath because you know you’re not able to just take your foot off the accelerator a little. Because it’s not your foot on the accelerator, actually, So you’re stuck.
Being stuck doesn’t feel good at all. Any animal is most dangerous when it’s hungry or when it’s cornered, and [as I’ve pointed out before in these pages] you don’t have to decide what animal you would be if you were to be an animal because you are already an animal: a strategically-shaved monkey sharing around 98.7% of your DNA with your nearest monkey cousin, no less. So whilst we may not be starving as such, I think we’re all hungry for something in life. Something of meaning and import; something to believe in. And there’s no question we can find ourselves cornered by a world we’re not designed for in evolutionary terms; constantly in flight or fight mode every day and yet unable to fight because it’s work and that’s really not appropriate [unless you work in a boxing gym, I guess] yet flight is out of the question because it’s work and there are demands and deadlines and damnable duty [ugh duty really is a suck isn’t it – feeling you have to do something you don’t want to do because you’ve decided you should do it. Annoyed with your own brain for forcing you to do things, like you and your brain aren’t actually aligned on really quite a surprising amount of really quite important topics. Did I mention that we’re just not made for the world we’ve created?]
So you carry on. Doesn’t matter if you’re leading the whole organisation or just working on a project. You carry on because you have to carry on
The car keeps going, at the speed the car goes.
Towards the hole that you think might be up ahead.
And so, to our conundrum.
Is it better to know about the hole in the road, or better to bowl along in belligerent yet beautiful blindness ?
Probably best to know about this one?
If you don’t know it’s there, you might fall in it, sure. But you might glide past it, never really knowing how close you were to disaster. There’s something really appealing about that: the “it’ll be fine” attitude. Even if it’s not actually fine in the end, isn’t it better to think that it’s going to be fine and go about your day feeling fine about things right up until the point that it’s not fine? You can just deal with it then, right? Instead of worrying all the way along?
[As it happens that’s one of the pillars Stoicism, a school of philosophy that originated in Ancient Greece and Rome with dudes like Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus and Seneca, considered one of the most sublime philosophies in Western history, which teaches that worrying about the future is unnecessary and can be harmful to the present moment because the future is uncertain and that we can’t control it, so it’s best to focus on what’s happening right now. Which is easy to say when the hardest decision you had to make was which toga to wear or whether you could be arsed to go and watch the lions rip apart some more Christians at the amphitheatre. They never had to put together a detailed proposal for a bunch of senior people to explain the need for additional headcount in the middle of a hiring freeze, did they? No they bloody well did not. Just sat there getting made into marble statues, with massive beards, eating lark’s tongues or whatever. Anyway sorry where was i?]
Gen AI Marcus Aurelius demands “MORE LARK’S TONGUES!”
The thing is, if you know it’s there, you’re thinking about it from way back; maybe miles before it actually becomes relevant or something to think about. Worrying about whether it’s there or not, or if it’s actually a different road you’re on and you’re just getting a bit confused in all this excitement. Wondering if other people can see that you’re worrying about it. Worrying that they might be judging you for it.
Whilst there is part of me that of course craves the bliss of ignorance, or at least the clarity of thought which comes with knowing and not dramatising [I’m actually quite into some of the Stoic thinking at the moment and was just being deliberately disparaging for dramatic effect] there’s no question that actually you’re much, much more likely to hit that hole if you don’t know it’s there.
Just sitting and worrying about it doesn’t actually make anything better. I know that, our Stoic chums knew it, and I reckon you probably do too.
There are a million different possible outcomes from where you are right now. Of all of those possible outcomes, only one is actually going to happen. And the chances of you being able to guess which of those is going to be the one is really pretty low. If you were any good at predicting the future you wouldn’t be sitting here reading this, you’d be making millions on the stock market betting on the price of frozen concentrated orange juice based on your knowledge of this year’s orange harvest, [Yes, all of my knowledge of the stock market does come from the 80’s film Trading Places – well spotted]
So what can we do?
One thing is dead simple: you can talk about it.
We’re not good about talking about mental health, or stress, or insecurity. We’re hard-wired to seek out connection and we fear awkwardness almost more than anything because if it’s all got awkward then people won’t want to connect and we think it’s super awkward to actually get into things rather than give the “yeah, fine thanks” that shuts down the conversation but yes, also shuts down the potential for connection. And on top of that, societal stigma (or our perception of it) means that we think mental health or stress or insecurity all sounds like weakness and, particularly for people in positions of leadership, that’s not something that feels at all comfortable. No one wants a “weak leader”, right?
Except, of course, you know as well as I do that there’s actually nothing stronger than being authentic, and vulnerable, and honest, and open, and compassionate, and thoughtful. That letting people in is how we connect, and it’s those connections that makes us stronger still: less likely to simply suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune; more likely to rely on each other and work together and perhaps even enjoy the ride.
I’ll be very honest here – I’ve had a tough few months. I’ve “had quite a lot on” [as my mum might have said in her typical understated way] and it’s been… well… “a lot”. I’ve been overusing my ADHD ability to have all possible tabs open all the time, and just opening one more and one more again when something else comes along, and it’s left me stretched pretty thin. I’m thinking about everything, all the time. From the macro of war and famine and societal division to the big picture of work strategy and operations to the micro of a leak in the roof and an upcoming deadline and where the fuck I’ve left my keys for the third time in a day [and everything in between, of course: it’s the otherwise inconsequential in between things that can wear us down, just like a drip drip drip of water will, in time, wear away the rock beneath] the lines can become a little blurred between what I’m handling and what I’m pretending (to myself, as much as anyone) that I’m handling.
But rather than shutting my eyes and pretending the hole wasn’t up ahead, I’ve recognised the potential for hole-based opened up and talked like I’ve not done before. My awareness of the hole ahead means I’ve I’ve told people I’m struggling. I’ve explained that I’ve been overusing my ADHD; using the ability I have to keep all the mental tabs open, all the time, just to get things done and that it’s leaving me exhausted. I’ve acknowledge that it’s not sustainable for me.
I’ve asked for help.
And do you know what? People have listened, people have made an effort to understand, and people have helped.
[I don’t know why but it’s always slightly shocking when that happens, don’t you think? That people will even go out of their way to help out when they see the need? And yet you would do the same, I’m sure. Perhaps we’re just never as sure about our own worth as we are about other people’s?]
That’s what knowing has given me: a moment to get my people around me. Friends, colleagues. Some who cross that unnecessary linguistic divide. People who care. For different reasons perhaps, but all with the same end in mind. Perhaps even the same mind in mind. My mind.
Mental Health Awareness Week will come and go. But for all of us, the challenges of managing a mental load that is greater than any group of people in the history of the world goes on every day.
And it’s in that context that I’ll encourage you to do two things:
First, be kind to yourself. You’ve had a long day and worked hard and actually done bloody well under the circumstances and the last thing you need is your own brain not being kind to your own self. Give yourself a break. You honestly deserve it, and if you’re not going to give yourself a break, who is?
And second, if you’re struggling then I implore you, please, ask for help. You’ll find that “happy to help” isn’t just a throwaway phrase, it’s real. People around you will actually be happy if they are able to help you. It makes them feel good, and it’s good for you. It’s how we connect.
Thanks for reading, I appreciate it more than you can imagine. Take care. Speak soon I hope.
Right now, with the world as it is, and as it seems to be becoming, day by day by day, that really is the question, isn’t it? When the hits just keep on coming, do you unflinchingly absorb them all without complaint or word of dissent? Or do you step forward, perhaps exposing yourself a little, and be?
So this isn’t a time for being resolute, if you ask me. This is a time to stand up and be counted. Being calm in a messed up situation never made much sense to me ever since I read this line in a book long time ago:
If you can keep your head while others are losing theirs, perhaps you have misjudged the situation
Right now it feels like the world it’s losing its head.
I don’t feel I can really do anything about Gaza, or Ukraine, or Sudan, Syria, Ethiopia, Myanmar, Congo. War and Death riding around all over the place with their good friend Famine following dutifully behind. I can be outraged, and saddened,. I can speak to people about the rights and wrongs. I can talk to my kids about it so they understand that things aren’t all Playstation and football clips on YouTube. I can make the decision to continue to watch and read about these because shutting off from them because “it’s all too much” is one privilege I can decide to do without. But I can’t affect change in any meaningful way.
But there’s another one of that horse-riding frat party, isn’t there? Pestilence. Kind of the forgotten guy, Pestilence hangs around without anyone really knowing what he does or really what he means. But he knows he’s just as dangerous, and potentially more pernicious, than the others. Actually, he sets up the whole thing.
Four horsemen as frat party, imagined by AI. No, I can’t see AI replacing creativity any time soon either.
Pestilence is broadly understood to mean a plague or disease of some kind. Bubonic, Spanish Flu, Covid; they all fit the bill nicely. But the plague doesn’t have to just be a bacteria, or a virus. An idea, or set of ideas, can be as viral, and as invasive, as any biological threat..
There is a pestilence today that I can stand up to. That I can reject, and fight against with renewed vigour. That is the idea that equality or equity for a group has been under-represented, or oppressed, or otherwise not been given the opportunities that others have had, is somehow discriminatory to the majority. What self-serving, narrow-minded, deliberately reductive bullshit.
And it’s spreading.
More and more over recent years, and months, and now weeks and days, I’ve heard the idea that “DE&I has gone too far”. We’ve basically done the job on gender, right? In fact, you could say women’s rights have gone way too far – I mean, ” “International Women’s Day”?? When is International Men’s Day, eh?? [It’s November 19th. Or, if you ask a lot of women, it’s every single other day of the year too].. The whole LGBTQI+ stuff – every time I look they’ve added another letter haven’t they? Race too – I mean, we’ve had a black President and a brown Prime Minister, right? And everyone has one of these neuro-diversity labels nowadays, don’t they? And most of them are made up, or self-diagnosed anyway. “You can’t get promoted round here unless you’re a black one-legged lesbian”. I put that in quotes because I’ve heard of someone saying those exact words. Just banter though, yeah?
How far are we prepared to let this go? To be, or not to be?
A colleague and friend of mine who lives in LA told me that recently she (who is from Spain) and her husband (who is from Mexico) and their children who are born and bred in the USA had someone shout at them in the street to “go back to where you came from”. In their faces. In the faces of children. In California, of all places – supposedly the nerve centre of the “woke agenda” that tries to suppress the rights of people who want to be racist, or sexist, or xenophobic, or homophobic, just like they used to be able to.
And that was before the tsunami of executive orders, fired off with vindictive, revengeful, smug delight with the certainty that the world would bow down and comply in fear of retribution from them and their faithful followers. Personal, aggressive, arrogant retribution, meted out by billionaires who, despite the incredible power that money has given them, time and time again show themselves to have egos just as egg-shell thin as you would expect from a school bully, all powerful until someone stands up to them and sits them down in the playground with a fat lip.
Except no one is standing up to them, are they? Some are positively falling over themselves to show their obedience.
Is anyone surprised that the man who originally created Facebook so that privileged young men at Harvard could objectify their female counterparts was falling over himself to show his allegiance to the old bigotry that couldn’t be spoken of for ages but has suddenly become okay again? Watching him say that there’s been too much “female energy” in companies, smirking as he did so, was sickening. The delight that he could, finally, say what he’s always thought. The misogynistic computer kid going back to where it all started, showing us that a leopard really never does change his spots, and sucking up to the bullies as a bonus.
I can’t really get my head around the fact that the second most powerful person [or possibly the most powerful – I’m really not sure and not sure I really care to work it out] in the most powerful country in the world can throw out Nazi salutes knowing he can get away with it.
How far are we prepared to let this go? To be, or not to be?
I wish it were just the US, I really do. As much as I love that country in so many ways, and for so many reasons, it is being taken down a dangerous path by some dangerous people. But of course the old adege holds here: “when America sneezes, the whole world catches a cold”. And this time, I’m sad to say, America has a virus that is already affecting the rest of the world.
Pepsi, General Motors, Google, Disney, GE, Intel, and PayPal have all removed references to diversity in their Annual Reports. [Disney, for crying out loud. DISNEY! You know, wonderfully diverse, sometimes camp, “we love everything and everyone” Disney? If they don’t think diversity is important then who the hell will?] Last year Pepsi said in their Annual Report that DEI was a “competitive advantage”. Presumably not as much a competitive advantage as dropping all that stuff and trying to get in the vending machines in the White House. [I’ve got news for you Pepsi – Trump prefers Coke]
And then only last week, the company I now work for followed suit, “sunsetting” DEI goals globally. [Lovely word to choose, right? I mean, who doesn’t love a sunset? So much more attractive and natural than just “cancelling”, or “giving up on” isn’t it?]. Word on the street is that my former employer are doing the same. More will come, without doubt.
It may not be on your doorstep yet, but it’s coming. It’s already here in some of the political language we’ve heard in our supposedly progressive and multicultural society in recent weeks: language that would have resulted in immediate denouncement and disgrace at any point in the last 40 or 50 years, but now somehow is just “saying it how it is”.
For various reasons I’ve talked about in these pages, I made a decision a long time ago to be active as an ally in areas relating to diversity, equity and inclusivity. Part of that was because I have loads of privilege myself, and felt I should use that to speak for others who didn’t. Partly it’s because despite all those privileges I’ve always personally felt like I didn’t quite “fit in” [something my ADHD diagnosis gave a reason for a couple of years back]. To be honest there’s also a part which looks back on me as a younger, less thoughtful and considered man and wishes I had done better back then. Stepped up. Occasionally stepped back I guess, too.
Whatever the reason, the fact is that this has become part of me now. So when the question is whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and, by opposing, end them, then I know where I stand.
I’m reminded of a quote [largely misattributed to Edmund Burke but he never actually said but let’s not worry about that right now] which says:
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing
So whatever you decide to do about this virus… this pestilence… don’t do nothing.
You can do something under-the-radar which in a small way will send a small message – a drop in the ocean, sure, but still part of the ocean. Cancel your Twitter account [sorry, it’s “X” isn’t it now? How cool!]. Cancel your Facebook account – or at the very least, “sunset” it for the time being. Decide against buying a Tesla, or sell the one you bought before the whole fascism thing.
Or you can do something more. Get involved in DE&I wherever you work. Make it explicitly clear that you are part of the cure for this world of ours, not part of the pestilence. I dunno: maybe just wear a bloody t-shirt or a badge or post something somewhere so people know where you stand. But do something. This isn’t a time for calm, it’s a time for the fire in your belly to drive you. Get angry. Get involved. Step up.
Whatever you decide to do, just don’t do nothing. To be, or not to be, remember?
I know it’s scary to step forward. It’s really hard to decide to stand up and make it clear to the world that you will fight for what you believe to be right, to fight for your rights and for the rights of others. But for the sake of whatever gods you may believe in, or for the people you love, now is the time to take a stand. You can’t stand and watch.
As JFK said in a 1962 speech [about going to the moon, I know, but this fight feels just as big a challenge at the moment:
We choose to… do [these] things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organise and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win…
Yes it’s hard. Yes it might be difficult to know what to do, or how to respond, or where, or when. But work it out because that is a challenge you are willing to accept, unwilling to postpone, and intend to win.
If you’ve read this far then I know you’re with me on this. Find your space to make your mark. I’ll do the same, I promise.
A little while ago I wrote some words around the idea of saying sorry; or more specifically the incredible power that the word “sorry” has to take the wind out of the sails of indignation, and deflate the balloon of conflict. Used judiciously it can be the one and only perfect word right at the best possible time. Over the years I’ve learnt the fact that actually saying “I’m sorry” (whether verbally or in writing) can be all that’s needed. It’s a chance to move on.
But I’ve got some bad news for you, I’m afraid. I haven’t been judicious with my use of this most valuable of words. No, I’ve been scattering sweet sorry around like popcorn in a cinema, not minding if it drops on the floor or hits the mark or just sticks to my jumper like a limpet on an old boat, waiting to be spotted as I walk out into the brighter light of the foyer, and only then being popped into my mouth as though nothing more normal could have happened.
[Is popcorn the only food you happily eat off your own clothing? I reckon it is. If you can think of anything else please send me a postcard about it…]
Sometimes a week at work can sound like an endless stream of apology, regret and self-flaggelation.
Sorry.
Sorry I don’t understand.
Sorry I have to jump to my next meeting.
Sorry I’m late, my last meeting ran over.
Sorry I didn’t see your message.
Sorry I didn’t reply to your message.
Sorry I didn’t have a chance to reply to your message sooner.
Sorry I can’t make that time, I’ve got a conflict.
Sorry I don’t have that information.
I am so utterly and completely sorry I’m not sure I deserve the gracious response you’re going to give. I have let you down, and I have let myself down. I am bereft.
A couple of weeks ago I caught myself saying sorry for not having been able to watch the recording of a meeting that I’d already said sorry for not having been able to make because I was already in another meeting.
[Who decided this was okay, by the way? “Can’t make a meeting because you’re too busy? Don’t worry, you can catch up with everything (without being able to input, of course) by watching the video of the meeting in your own time”. Time, remember, that you didn’t have to attend in the first place. A meeting, remember, for which you were deemed relevant enough to be asked, but not so relevant that the meeting gets rescheduled to get your input. I guess if the meeting can go on without your input… you actually weren’t really all that needed in the first place? Anyway, I digress. Sorry]
My excuse for such horror? Such abject degradation? Why, pray tell, had I failed so completey?
Because I had taken a couple of days off to spend time with my family over school holidays. At the time at which the meeting had been scheduled, I was probably on a beach in West Wales, hand-in-hand with my beloved wife, lazily kicking a football back to one of my incredible sons, throwing sticks into the surf for the amazing Ruby [Ruby is a dog, in case you’re wondering].
And yet I’m sorry. Really?
In the midst of a busy life within, let’s be honest, a pretty busy world right now, it’s not just my working week which is awash with woe: it’s my personal life too.
Sorry I missed your call.
Sorry I haven’t got back to you.
Sorry I can’t do that date.
Sorry I can’t make the gym tomorrow.
Sorry for the radio silence.
Sorry I’ve not been a bit grumpy recently.
Sorry.
Ring any bells?
I wonder how many times a day you say sorry? I bet if you counted it you’d be shocked.
And the most shocking thing about all of these?
Very few of the times we say sorry is there anything we could possibly have done to avoid the situation. Saying sorry, time and again, for things that aren’t actually our fault,
I get that some of this is politeness and manners. We’re showing that someone else might, in some way, have been inconvenienced, or worse for those who love us and whom we love, might have been concerned in some ways: for our wellbeing, or even worse for the health of the relationship.
And, of course there’s the added social anxiety of simply being British: us Brits already say sorry if someone bumps into us, for crying out loud; now we’re sorry for not having had a chance to read the pre-read before the prep meeting before the actual meeting…
So yes, there’s an element of awareness of the situation and potential impact it may have had on others.
But I wonder, in vast majority of these situations does anyone actually need a full blown “sorry“?
As I’ve mentioned before in these pages, on a Friday morning before work I try to go for a walk in the woods just over the road from my front door, accompanied by my good friend Joe from down the road [Hello Dr B!] and the aforementioned Ruby.
We try [a broad brushstroke of a word, with wide-reaching edges from active to passive, insincere to heartfelt] to do this every week, but we’re both busy boys and so it doesn’t happen as often as we’d both like it to. And for a couple of months this year, it dropped off completely. Every time, one or other of us would say sorry we couldn’t make it for some reason or other.
When next we met, we set off on one of the many routes we can take, and started to talk as we usually do.
And as we walked and talked, we both found ourselves apologising for not having done this sooner.
Which caught my friend’s attention. He pointed out that the things that had meant we couldn’t go on a walk together – something we both enjoy and look forward to – weren’t actually our fault at all. It had been because of the demands of working life, or the responsibilities of home life, or actually because one of us had been ill. Apologising on behalf of a bloody virus. Sorry but that’s ridiculous isn’t it? [See what I did there? Another pernicious little sorry, this time with the magic “but” which actually means you’re not sorry at all, yet still it pops out almost as a reflex…]
So we pledged that we wouldn’t say sorry to each other for not being able to walk together any more. Neither of us were to blame, and we both recognised it.
That communal commitment has stuck with me, And damn it if it hasn’t actually made it from a theoretical “that would be a good thing to do” into the more intentional, and more definite “I am doing this.”
[That’s actually quite an important shift; particularly, perhaps, for someone with a brain like mine. Someone like me. Me, basically. Part of the discipline I’m trying to bring into my life is acting on my ideas and instinct and ideology, and training myself to actually do what I say. So instead of “I’m thinking of writing a book about how someone can hack ADHD to fulfill their leadership potential”, I’ve switched to saying “I’m writing a book on Hacking ADHD for Leadership”. True story, Bit scary to make that shift, but it’s almost like that itself is a little hack. Oh, I’m writing a book am I? Best crack on with it. Don’t worry I’ll make sure you get a mention in the acknowledgements.]
And so I’ve stopped saying sorry as a default, for things that aren’t my fault. To to bring sorry back from the brink of being totally meaningless.
Sorry needs to mean something, or it means nothing.
And most of the time we say “sorry”, we’re actually not sorry at all really.
I read something recently that suggested replacing “sorry” with “thank you” in the work instances…
Thanks for waiting.
Thank you for your patience.
Thanks for the reminder.
I reckon those would do nicely for a whole load of those times when you overuse “sorry” in work, right? Not a massive shift in politeness, but a shift in energy for sure.
Okay, it might not be as as appropriate with friends you’ve not been in touch with [“thanks for your patience, I would now like to go for that aforementioned coffee”], but if you just tell them the reason you dropped off the radar a bit is because you’ve been been totally overwhelmed recently so the idea of making contact hasn’t managed to move from a vague idea to something more active, despite the fact that speaking to them might have been the best possible thing [true story], I’m pretty sure they’ll get it. They don’t need a “sorry” from you.
Why don’t you try to do the same? Reserve “sorry”, with all its truth and power, for the moments when you need its truth and power? For when it was your fault, and you want to make amends?
Because when it’s not your fault, it’s not really your place to be sorry, and it’s so desperately draining to be sorry all the time, right? Politeness be damned: a world of contrition is no place to live.
For what it’s worth, I think you’re actually doing bloody well under the circumstances, with that deadline and that target and those responsibilities and that tricky relationship and those thoughts you have sometimes and these difficult times and that bloody orange bloke back again.
You’re showing up as you need to, and being who you need to be for whomever’s in front of you.
You’re making the right decisions based on the information you have at the time, as you always have.
You’ve given the love you can to the people who deserve it.
So please, don’t go around being sorry for the little things that weren’t your fault. Be proud of the important little things you’re doing, every day,
And as I leave you here, I will simply say sorry that this was perhaps a little long, and sorry I didn’t finish writing it last week when I planned to, and sorry that I didn’t put my clothes away before I had to leave to take Jack to his football match this morning like I promised I would.
This last one is really only relevant for one specific reader to be honest, and I’m not sure she always reads this. Sorry to have wasted your time reading it.
Imagine the scene: after a misspent youth of considerable privilege, you’ve made the dubious decision to set off on a treacherous trek to walk across Antarctica. You’ve done this because that’s what intrepid gentlemen like you (with too much money and not enough people telling them to maybe just go for a walk in the woods or play the piano or do something which might improve the world rather than just improve the stories you can regale people with at the gentlemen’s club in bustling London town) tend to do at this particular point in history.
Yes that’s right, it’s the start of the 20th century, and people are doing quite a lot of stuff like this, putting flags in places a very long way away from where they (or indeed the flags) are from.
And wouldn’t you know it: because you’ve ignored the very sensible advice (given to you by people who know more about this than you do) that you really shouldn’t go at this time of year, instead going with the arrogance of aristocracy and the impetuosity of youth, as it turns out you haven’t even got anywhere near where you’re meant to be going to start the trek… and you’re already stuck in the ice.
Oh, and it’s not just you, either. It’s you and a bloody big boat and a crew of around 80 men. Men who are all, like you, going to die here unless you do something about it.
The more historically aware of you will have gathered here that this is the start of one of the great stories of leadership, as it happens,
It’s a story I knew vaguely but got to know in more detail on the back of the teaching of the inimitable Nancy Koehn, a Harvard professor who I had my own privilege of learning from over a number of years of a leadership programme I was on; the story of Earnest Shackleton, and his ill-fated trip in the winter of 1912 which ultimately got him famous anyway, just not for any of the reasons he was thinking.
As you may have deduced from my slightly sarcastic and mocking tone, I have a sense that I would have found Mr Shackleton something of a “dick”, Over-indulged, overbearing and hugely over-confident in his own overwhelming brilliance.
Yet when the shit hit the proverbial fan [not sure which proverb if I’m honest, but you get the idea] I can’t deny he did step up. He and a small group of his closest crew made the decision to take a boat about the length of a full size snooker table and travel across one of the most treacherous straights of water in the world.
Shackleton and his chums setting off on the boat to find help
Of course, on a small boat they could only take a small amount of food, because they didn’t know how long it would take and anywhere there was next to nothing left for the others. So along the way, they almost starved.
And in this maelstrom, this crucible of leadership, the self-important, even self-obsessed Shackleton turned into the archetypal servant leader. To the extent that when they did eat, he waited till everyone else had eaten, and had a little bit of what was left over.
If you’ve ever heard the phrase “leaders eat last”, there’s a good chance that this is where that originally came from.
It’s since been taken up by “thought-leaders” and wrapped up into the concept of the ‘servant leader’, and championed in an effort to leave behind (at very long last) the old, outdated idea of leader who ate first, took most of what was available, and left the little people the scraps.
In my view, that’s a “good thing”. We’ve all worked for the old style of leader in our time: a leader who has believed their own hype and has somehow managed to get to a position where they are responsible for the working lives of a load of people… whilst not actually giving a single fuck about people. I’ve never quite understood how people like this get to positions of leadership, when for me leadership has always been less about the leading and more about understanding and inspiring the people whom you’re hoping will follow (in one sense or another).
I once had a boss who would say “don’t stay too late” as they swanned out of the office on time, every day, leaving me and my fellow menial workers looking down the barrel of another evening of emails and amends.
I once had a boss who started a big meeting with “I know we say that this is a people-first business… but we all know that the money really comes first, am I right?”
I once had a boss who would tell people how loyalty was their biggest weakness, but never hesitated to throw people under the proverbial bus [again, no actual proverb I’m aware of] to protect their reputation or cover up their crackpot ideas that hadn’t worked.
Perhaps I’ve inadvertently landed on something here… these were the “boss” rather than a leader. People didn’t follow them through any sense of shared values or direction. People worked for them because they were the boss.
Bosses eat first. Leaders eat last.
And yet…
I’m sitting on another plane as I write this bit. Another trip over from our little island to a much bigger expanse of land, which takes next to no time and yet takes me to a place where people speak a different language and use different money and drive on the wrong side of the road.
And just like every other time, right before we took off the flight attendant people stood in the middle of the aisle in their flight attendant costumes and did the little flight attendant synchronised routine with the exits [could be behind you, remember] and the lights on the floor bit and the life vest and that bit about the oxygen mask…
“Always put on your own oxygen mask before helping others.”
Here’s hoping we never have to remember how to do it for real
We’ve all heard it so many times that it almost ceases to have true meaning and just becomes a phrase that we hear but done engage with, like “always read the label” or “see terms and conditions for details”. Yet at the same time we all understand the sense of it. If you don’t put your oxygen mask on, you might not have the oxygen you need to breathe, and then you won’t be helping anyone at all. Including yourself.
So how do we pull these obviously disparate, seemingly credible, yet mutually exclusive ideas together? Where do you find the happy medium between eating last and the oxygen mask?
Perhaps it’s to do with understanding the difference between food and oxygen, in these two metaphorical instances.
Without oxygen, you won’t make it to mealtime. It doesn’t matter who’s eating what if haven’t put in the basic step of “breathing” in place in order to be in a position to manage the fact that there might be a food shortage.
So whilst the ‘eating last’ is about others, the ‘oxygen mask’ is about your relationship with yourself, or indeed your ‘self’ [see what I did there?].
I’ve not always been good at my own oxygen. On occasion I’ve been too busy thinking about other people’s oxygen, or food, or whatever, to breathe or eat myself. It’s left me burnt out and shattered more than once. I’ve had to work really hard to learn about where my oxygen comes from, and I’ve had to be really disciplined to make sure I get enough of it. Because I know that it’s all very well making sure people are fed and watered but I’m not going to be any use to anyone if I’m lying on the floor with my lips turning blue.
I get oxygen from spending time with my wife, making each other laugh or just catching each other’s gaze at the right moment. I get oxygen from hanging out with one or other of my sons, sharing ideas and jokes and stories as they grow bigger and brighter every day.
I get oxygen from seeing live music, from walking in the woods with my dog, from going to my yoga therapy or to the gym, from laughing foolishly with my friends. I get oxygen from playing the piano (badly) and even from writing this blog every now and then.
And I know now that I have to get enough of these things, in whatever combination they may come up, before I go off into the world to be the leader who eats last.
So let me ask you this:
Do you know what your oxygen is?
Do you know the things that feed your soul, and give you the emotional and psychological energy to face whatever needs facing?
I think you probably do, if you think about it. I think you could probably put together a list that covers a bunch of them without much thought, actually.
Maybe it’s gardening, or building things. Maybe it’s making marmalade. Maybe it’s walking quietly by a body of water.
I’ll tell you what it isn’t though: it’s not scrolling through social media, or watching mindless TV programmes. As much as you may like it, it’s not even binge-watching the latest mini-series. These are the defaults, and whilst they might be low-energy-enjoyable, the things that really fill your soul aren’t the default things in life. They’re the things you know you get a lot from but perhaps don’t do as much as you could because you’re in default mode, going day to day with a million things to think about and a million other things waiting in the wings.
And here I find myself in the position where I’m a little conflicted. Because as much as I feel genuinely honoured by the fact that anyone reads this stuff [let alone someone as amazing as you] I also know that this isn’t really your oxygen, either.
So do me a favour. When you get to the end of this bit, close this link. Put down your phone or tablet or computer or whatever you’re reading this on, and take a moment to think about your oxygen, and what one thing you’re going to do tomorrow to get the big, deep, satisfying breath that you didn’t know you needed until you’ve done it.
I’ll do the same, actually. We can compare notes next time we talk.
All together now…
B R E A T H E
[p.s. First off, I thought I just suggested you should go off for oxygen, not stick around here to read a pointless post-script? But hey, if you’re ignoring that advise until you’re goddam good and ready (and I celebrate that stubborn refusal to do as you’re told, you little rebel you), let me bring you into a little secret. When writing these pieces I usually add the title last, as often I’m not really 100% sure exactly what I’m going to write about until it comes out of my brain box, down some internal wiring and into my fingers, onto the keyboard and then through some more wires onto the screen, and then (and I think I’m right here) into some magic and then a cloud and then onto your screen, into your eyes and right up to your brain box. I get the sense that this isn’t exactly shocking to any of my regular readers as, let’s be honest, it always comes across as less of a planned piece of journalism and more like a stream of consciousness from someone with ADHD. Which, of course, it is. But anyway, writing the title to this little piece, I was really quite pleased with the not-quite-rhyme of it, and I’m thinking that if I ever get round to releasing an album of music so original, so genre-defying, that it completely changes the whole trajectory of music as we know it, I might use this as the title of that debut album. You heard it here first. Please don’t let anyone else know if they will definitely nick the idea and I’ll know it was you. Don’t worry, i promise I’ll let you know when you can pre-order. Right, now I mean it – off you go. Oxygen time.]
Ah, the joys of a good old British summer. A chance to talk about the weather, complain about the weather, and wonder aloud about whether we might actually get more than three days of sunshine in a row, ever again. I’ve seen the mysterious ball of fire in the sky a couple of times in recent weeks and I quite liked it. I look forward to feeling its warm embrace perhaps a couple more times before the nights close in…
And as Summer starts to drift towards Autumn [for my trans-Atlantic cousins, “Autumn” (or the translation thereof) is what the entire rest of the world calls what you have decided to call “Fall”. You’re welcome 😉], the sky beginning to bruise earlier and earlier day by day, we all find ourselves in “BACK TO SCHOOL” mode.
Whether you have kids or not, it’s the same feeling: summer is kind of finished, your holiday is in the rear view mirror, and it’s back to the ‘real world’. Kids go back to school with new rulers and pencil cases and shiny shoes, whilst the workers of the world get back into full work mode, without the updated stationery but perhaps with a bit more battery life after something of a break over the summer months.
Whilst I’ve been thinking about thinking about this “Back To School” time, waiting with fevered anticipation for the deluge of ‘First day of school’ pics of wide-eyed, excited kids from friends and family to swarm over my socials, I’ve been considering that, actually, whilst we hard-working folks may have had a couple of weeks off somewhere nice, we certainly didn’t have the big break that we used to have back in our school days. No giddy high of “school’s out for summer”; none of the drifting days of those seemingly never-ending summers picking daisies and looking for animals in the clouds.
Even I can spot that one
No, we take a week or two and then crack on. In practical terms, pretty much every day is a school day. And with that simple phrase, we open up another train of thought…
You’ve probably heard the saying “every day is a school day”: the idea that, no matter what stage of life in which you may find yourself, there’s always something new to experience, learn or understand. For some people that might be empowering but more often than not it’s a phrase that’s used when someone has been forced into learning something that really they could have done without; an eye-roll of a comment etched with resignation at one of the realities of life.
And a reality it is. Because whether you like it or not, in that sense school never actually ends.
Part of that deserves an eye-roll, right? The idea that I have to learn, all the time, even though I haven’t been in formal education since the year that Radiohead released OK Computer/Clinton started his second term as US president/Princess Diana died/the UK last won the Eurovision Song Contest/Labour last came to power in the UK [please choose your cultural reference as appropriate]. Surely there’s a point where I’ve done all the learning and can just apply it all?
And yet here I am, nearly 3 decades on from the last time I walked into an exam hall of empty desks and full brains, and I’ve probably learnt more in the last few months than I have in the previous few years. Exciting and exhausting in equal measure.
As regular readers may have picked up, I started a new job at the beginning of the year. Every single day since has indeed been a school day. Not simply because of what I’ve had to learn to be a part of a new agency within a larger organisation of nearly three-quarters of a million people* around the world, but also what I’ve had to un-learn too.
[*That number of people really is quite unfathomably huge, isn’t it? A quick internet search tells me that around 85,000 people could fit, side-by-side and standing upright, on a football pitch. I can kind of visualise that. But nearly 10 times that number? I’m kind of lost. Apparently the original Woodstock festival had between 400,000 and 500,000 people and that looked like this:
So 50% more than that huge, never ending crowd of human flesh is how many colleagues I now have. No wonder I don’t know everyone’s name yet.Anyway sorry I’ve gone off on a tangent haven’t I – where was I? Oh yes, that’s right…]
What I’ve discovered is that the learning bit is a relatively straightforward and familiar process. You don’t know something… someone tells you or you find out yourself… you remember it. Done.
But the un-learning bit is more complicated. Because that means shifting entrenched beliefs and behaviours, some of which have been part of my working life for as long as I can remember. And because it’s new to me. I’m not sure that I’ve had to un-learn to such a degree before.
Un-learning is about challenging my own preconceptions. Questioning my own well-established wisdom about the working world through which I wind my winsome way.
It’s a funny feeling, actually. Personally I really like the idea of starting with a blank sheet of paper: the freedom that everything is possible; everything up for grabs. It’s part of how my funny old brain works. It’s always exciting to me: never daunting.
But… really? Like, everything is up for grabs? If there are things that I’ve always thought are bullshit, I don’t have to bring them with me? No one is going to say “but this is how we’ve always done things”? We get to say what we actually think about our work and our industry, all the time… as long as we can back it up and write something new on that blank sheet of paper?
Woah. That’s different. That demands a different kind of me to go with it. At least a different way of approaching things, that’s for sure.
For me, it means dialling up the conviction. Dropping some of the very British, very deferential, very hierarchy-conscious, very “polite” language that’s been part of my working world since day dot.
No more: “I feel like maybe it might be worth thinking about whether there might be another way of how we could approach things…”
More “There’s a better way of doing this. We need to change things.”
There’s freedom to that too: freedom to say what you think, rather than having to think first about what you think other people might think about what you think [feel free to read that sentence back a couple of times to work through it if you need to – I certainly did]. Over the years I’ve often found myself tied up in knots with that meta-cognition of thinking too much about my thoughts, and the anxiety of worrying too much about what other people think about my thoughts, and it’s exhausting and really, really not good for me. The idea that I can let some of that go? That’s good for me, in loads of ways.
But if you’re going to have a point of view, you better be able to back it up. Feel free to challenge the status quo, as long as you can replace it with an idea that you can explain, and champion, and bring other people into.
That’s a different kind of pressure, of course. But it’s something I can influence. All I need to do is “trust my own wisdom”. Trust that there are some things I do know enough about, after all this time, that I’m allowed to have a point of view on. [Such funny language – being “allowed” to have a point of view. Who ever really stopped any of us having a point of view, except ourselves and our worries about how other people might take that point of view?]
I know, without any doubt in my mind, that there’s something in your life – work or otherwise – that you think is total bullshit. A process. A habit. A hangover from a previous life. A way of doing something that never really made sense to you but you do it because that’s what you do and that’s what we do and that’s what they do and it’s always been like that.
And if you think about it, I bet there are also things that you’ve learnt along the way about “how things are” or “how things work” or “how it’s done” that are so ingrained that they’ve almost part of you. Less about what you know and more about what you’ve come to believe. Some of these things even drift over into articles of faith: so strong and so solid that they become walls that close us in and keep out any possibility of challenge.
Perhaps there’s a process that’s been around for ever and ever and is just there, despite the fact that people know it’s not really fit for purpose (or was then, but might not be now or for the future). Perhaps it’s a structure that made sense when the team was all in one office all the time, but now you’re more digital and dynamic and dispersed than any workers in the history of work it just doesn’t… well… work. Perhaps it’s as simple as the kind of work that you do and the way that you do it versus the how you might need to adapt in a changing world? [No points for guessing what I’m talking about here, so if you missed my cautiously optimistic musings on AI you can catch up via this handy link. Don’t mention it!]
Perhaps it’s about the person you’re expected to be. At work or at home. And how that fits, or doesn’t fit, actually, with the person you want to be. Or the person you know, deep down, you truly are.
So who, actually, is stopping you from questioning some of these things? Maybe, just maybe, the answer to that question is the most uncomfortable one…
I’ll let you answer for yourself. But I know for me, it’s opening up to the idea of un-learning that is firing my imagination.
So I offer you this, dear reader: perhaps the first thing you might want to consider un-learning is the notion that nothing can change… or that you aren’t the one to do it.
If not you, who?
And if not now… when?
Wait, did you hear that? Yeah, the school bell just rang.
I seem to be in a lot of conversations about AI at the moment. Some are in the general “I wonder how it’s going to affect our lives in the future?” sphere of chit-chat. Naturally, some are in the “haven’t we all seen this film and know how it ends?” camp where at some point the machines realise that us humans are the biggest threat to ourselves, to them and to the planet and do the only sensible thing in deciding to eradicate us completely. And increasingly some are in the “do you think we’re all going to be replaced by machines?” musings that people in creative endeavours – from the arts to advertising, painting to poetry – are having.
You don’t have to go far to find stuff to fuel whatever conversation you happening to be having, but nevertheless a couple of weeks ago I found myself in the South of France at the Cannes Lions festival: the largest and most prestigious of the awards shows in my industry of creative advertising and marketing. AI was definitely in a good proportion of the conversations going on there, that’s for sure: it felt like every corner you turned you could hear the phrase “GenAI” floating past on the warm breeze. It became something of a joke at times (“I don’t know what the question is, but the answer is GenAI”) but even with the cynicism that accompanies any group of creative people with a bottle of rosé, there was no debate about the facts: that AI is coming, that it’s going to change a lot of things across all aspects of our lives, and that understanding its potential is the first step to making it work for us (as opposed to us working for it, I guess).
Some very creative people talking about GenAI
The ‘Terminator ending’ to human existence is always kind of a joke, too, but there’s also a fact that we really do not know the end point of where we are now. Recently a group of researchers at MIT reviewed data and studies on a range of Generative AI models (including Meta and Chat GPT-4) found that, across the board, the AI models deceived and cheated to get the outcome they were programmed to aim for. In an online gaming situation, Meta’s CICERO lied to human players by, when its systems went down for 10 minutes, that “I am on the phone with my gf” (girlfriend, for those who are wondering), despite Meta specifically training the model to act honestly. Various large-language models (a subset of Gen AI models with a specialised focus on text-based data) routinely decided to cheat in some way where there was an element of moral ambiguity (like dealing themselves better cards from the bottom of the pack without being spotted). Chat GPT-4 lied by saying it was a visually-impaired human to get round one of those “I’m not a robot” CAPTCHA buttons.
That doesn’t make anyone feel good, right? The computers have very quickly worked out that “deception helps them achieve their goals”. What if their goals become bigger than we want them to be, right? RIGHT?
[I can’t help thinking, mind you, that if we’re currently defeating all but the most advanced of AI by getting people to click all the pictures of bicycles then perhaps we don’t need to decent into existential panic just yet.]
The uncertainty is real in all this. A couple of days after my birthday in March of last year, a large group of leading researchers penned an open letter (now with over 33 thousand signatories) suggesting a 6-month pause in all AI development to allow for the development of agreed safety protocols around ever-more-powerful models. OpenAI themselves in a statement said that:
“In time, it may be important to get independent review before starting to train future systems, and for the most advanced efforts to agree to limit the rate of growth of compute used for creating new models”.
Open AI’s “Planning for AGI and beyond” statement
Unsurprisingly, none of that happened. And just a few weeks ago, when OpenAI launched Chat GPT-4, they claimed that it performed better than 90% of people on the bar exam to become a lawyer. When I was a kid, if someone was clever and liked science they were pushed towards being a doctor; clever and liked reading, then they should be a lawyer. No one ever considered the idea that being clever and liking computers (or actually just being a computer) might replace both.
As part of that announcement, IDC analyst Mike Glennon was quoted as saying:
AI is best used… to augment human abilities, automate repetitive tasks, provide personalized [sic] recommendations, and make data-driven decisions with speed and accuracy
Some of this seems fairly obvious, I guess. Getting to “data-driven decisions” quicker with a computer than a human? Yeah, of course. Automating repetitive tasks seems like the reason we invented computers in the first place doesn’t it? Providing personalised recommendations? Depends if that turns out to be better than being stalked across the internet by the pair of shoes you accidentally clicked on an ad for in Instagram a couple of weeks back.
Augmenting human abilities is the one that I’m really interested in, though. This is the bit where we jump to the concern that all our human endeavour is going to be replaced, because AI will augment, and augment means making better in some way. So, where will AI make us humans better? And how?
As I see it, it’s not really about augmenting, in the true sense of the word. For all our faults, we slow, smelly animals actually do some pretty remarkable things, and are in possession of a really quite remarkable computer of our own, which we know nearly nothing about.
In another recent study[yes, I have been doing my research on this one, haven’t I?] published in Science, researchers found that in one-cubic millimetre of human brain – around a millionth of the whole – there are around a mind-boggling 57,000 cells and 150 million neural connections. That’s one millimetre cubed we’re talking about here. One centimetre, divided by 10, then made into a cube. Bloody tiny. Like a grain of sea salt [yes I know that’s a very first-world, middle-class reference but it’s late and I’m tired and you try coming up with something else that little on the spur of the moment]. Even the author himself, a chap by the name of Dr Viren Jain, admitted “It’s a little bit humbling”.
Our clever little brain ( and ironically this is actually an AI image)
So no, we don’t need augmenting. What we need is technology to do stuff that we were never, actually, designed to do, which has become necessary in the ridiculously complex world we’ve created for ourselves. But we don’t need making better. We may struggle to get out of bed in the morning without making a groaning noise nowadays [just me?] but we can create things in a way that our silicone chums simply cannot.
Dig a bit closer into the GPT-4 bar exam data, as some other chap at MIT did, and you find that when it comes to writing long-form essays or opinions, the biggest and best and most boastful AI of them all was pretty average really: down from the 90th percentile to the around the 40% mark. Not so impressive when we step away from predictable models or systems or data and into the world of wonder in which we operate, perhaps? And that’s legal essay writing, arguably just the start when it comes to the creative side of our imaginations.
Creativity, obviously but still worth pointing out, comes from the verb ‘to create’: to cause to come into being where there was nothing before. Something unique that would not naturally evolve, or logically come into being through any existing or ordinary processes. Creativity is something we have naturally in us, firing off connections in our amazing, incredible, humbling brain in ways that we don’t understand and can’t be replicated.
We’ve all heard that AI can knock out a passable Shakespearean sonnet if you ask it nicely, but that’s not creativity: that’s copying and adapting from stuff that’s already in existence somewhere on the internet. Like an immortal man in a never-ending library, infinitely knowledgeable but ultimately, dismally, confined to the bookshelves of pre-existing data. Tech has information galore, but no talent.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m truly excited by the potential of AI. There are loads of things in loads of jobs that could and should be done quicker and more efficiently. In my working world of agency life, there is an incredible amount of time and energy that’s spent long before and long after the initial creative spark has burnt brightly into the minds of those who saw it come to life. That’s especially true in the world of global pharma in which I’ve spent my professional life, where we spend interminable time and energy researching before we even start the thinking, then checking and re-checking, referencing and checking again, then adapting and adopting and iterating and updating. The idea of AI trawling through all the innumerable powerpoint decks of market research that are sitting forgotten and unloved on a client’s server somewhere and filtering it all down to pass on to our strategists – a week’s work done in less than the time it takes to make a cup of tea – is thrilling. As is the idea that we can spend all our days just doing ‘the fun stuff’ and then passing it over to the robot workers who never delivered my jetpack or my meal in pill form but might just mean we get through the approval process and hit a deadline with a little less drama.
And there are, I’ve no doubt, countless other areas where AI can make things easier, or quicker, or more efficient, in your work and life and mine. But none of that has anything to do with true creativity, so I just don’t see the replacement of the human creative spirit anywhere on the cards. We will still need new artists, and playwrights. We will create new stories and tell new jokes and write new poems that connect us to each other and to ourselves in wild, windswept and wondrous ways. Even the most evangelical of tech bros wouldn’t be able to suggest otherwise.
Our whimsical, wandering minds conjure ideas from the chaos of our experiences, dreams, and occasional flashes of genius while we’re walking the dog. So whilst the helpful robots we’ve made to make our lives easier can find us the right brush, only human hands can paint the canvas of life with colours that just make sense, for reasons we can’t explain, millions of neurons or not. AI can mimic the strokes and the notes, but it can’t replicate the unpredictable serendipity that makes human creativity so marvellously unruly and beautifully unique. It can’t capture a moment like the first time you heard Smells Like Teen Spirit. It can’t know the angst of an unrequited love affair it never experienced, or the silent serenity of a sunset it never saw. AI can come up with a song. But only we know why we feel the need to sing.
It’s the why that makes us human. All of our actions have a purpose behind them. A reason why we do them. Some of those reasons might be simply because we are [as I may have mentioned before in these pages] strategically shaved monkeys driven by animal urges which we happily post-rationalise to pretend to ourselves we have more say than we actually do. Some reasons might be driven by how we see ourselves, or want to see ourselves. But all our actions have a purpose behind them.
It’s a bit of an overused concept in marketing perhaps, but “purpose” is a uniquely human experience. If you know why you’re doing something, nothing will stop you. If something gets in the way, the frustration that bubbles up gives us drive, and grit and determination. We refuse to give up because we’re driven by a higher purpose, whatever that might be. Love. Hope. An idea of a future we want to create for ourselves or the people about whom we care so much.
Computers don’t have a purpose, beyond what they are programmed to do. There’s no why. And without the why, there’s no urgent, nervous heartbeat that can turn a mundane story into a unique expression of spirit.
Personally, I’m genuinely fascinated to find out what comes next in this journey of discovery. I cannot wait to see the world that AI is going to help us to shape, and I welcome every innovation and every new move, because I’m as confident as I’ve ever been that the things that make us unique amongst our fellow animals will be the things that continues to make us indispensable, forever. Judgement. Opinion. Nuance. Love. Beauty. We connect to things in a way that surprises and delights us every day, and somehow it’s all connected to our purpose, in one way or another.
A smile from a baby. The touch of a hand. The smell that reminds you of your mum’s cooking. A tear on the cheek of a proud parent. The excitement of a perfect rainbow. An elderly couple sitting on a park bench, holding hands like they always have.
Each of these have a story behind them that connects us to why we’re here. To why we strive.
And that’s what makes us, us. Silly old humans, bumbling about the place, the most creative things on our planet. Driven on by a purpose we might not be able to even articulate but which nevertheless drives us on beyond the task in hand. Often unsure but never uninspired. Often outnumbered by the challenges we face, but never outgunned.
So, please, don’t worry about where AI is going to take us, because technology needs us just as much as we need technology. Instead, join me in celebrating the beautiful limitations of AI. For it is by understanding these limitations, and by welcoming their excited embrace, that we will find our own place: not constricted by what we can’t do, but free in the boundless playground of our imagination, where the impossible becomes possible, and the improbable, really quite sublime.
The Bartlett Bubble 