The benefits of not thinking

What’s in my head? Not a lot, which is underrated.

The last Greek hotel I stayed in was huge and somehow rather frenetic. Perhaps it was the constant wind. Most of the hotel guests – a party-mix of well fed Americans and Europeans, along with a number of freshly-minted Russians – were glued to various mobile devices and were not settled. They were all physically there, but none of them, it seemed, were mentally present. They appeared to be scanning the cyber-horizon to see whether something more interesting was happening elsewhere. They certainly seemed incapable of letting go. Mild frustration mixed with disappointment seemed the dominant theme.

Contrast this with where I am now – a 15-minute flight away. The pace is glacial, if that’s not oxymoronic for a volcanic island. The wind has more or less disappeared and it’s stillness that now dominates. People are sitting, looking outwards. But this outer gaze inevitably turns inwards. People end up looking at things with their hearts.

Why would this be so? I think the reason is the view.

I’m in a tiny hotel (14 rooms) overlooking an extinct volcano that last erupted several thousand years ago. The crater is about 14 kilometres across and is filled with very deep, and hence very still, water. The view is uplifting. It’s partly the distance, but you should never confuse a long distance with a good view. What is happening is that people are looking at is themselves reflected in the water.

The mobile devices that were so ubiquitous a few days ago have largely disappeared and people appear to be contemplating both their immediate past and their more distant future. It seems impossible for any thinking person not to be seduced. I suspect that this is due to several thousand years of human history mixing with a geological event of such intensity that all human accomplishment is meaningless.

It reminds me slightly of a conversation I had watching a cricket match a few months ago. I was talking with someone about what I liked about Europe and said that the age of things, especially some of the buildings, left me feeling hugely connected with everything historically. But that simultaneously it meant feeling totally insignificant. Bizarrely, both felt rather empowering.

This place is much the same. The age of the surroundings, together with the raw potential of nature, makes you feel simultaneously connected and disconnected. You feel like stardust one minute and personal assistant to Zeus the next. Thinking is elevated. Minutiae disappear, replaced by substance.

In my experience you can connect with this kind of thinking almost anywhere, bit to do so one has to first do absolutely nothing. It is only with disconnection and letting go that one can arrive at this destination. It is only by sitting quietly, looking outwards, that one can start to see what really maters.

 

Plane stupidity

I’ve been in Greece doing some stuff. The hotel was very nice, but to be frank it could have been anywhere. Interestingly, the guests were largely American, although that’s probably because the hotel was linked to a large American chain. The BRIC tourist crowd that I usually bump into was nowhere to be seen, except for a few young Russians.

The journey out was awful. Because I wanted a direct flight I ended up going with Thomas Cook, which was beyond dreadful. It wasn’t so much the 8-hour delay, but the fact that nobody ever bothered to make an announcement about what was going on. The airport departures board continually displayed incorrect information (3, possibly 4, factually incorrect statements about boarding and departure times) and to find out what was actually happening you had to find the information desk (no signage whatsoever) and even then you ended up talking with a handling agent, not Thomas Cook.

My only explanation for this is that representatives of Thomas Cook were too scared to make an appearance in front of their own customers. You probably think I’m exaggerating this point, but when the final announcement about whether the plane had been fixed or not was about to be made 5 policemen turned up to keep the peace – in case the news was bad. Actually that’s one thing I’ve started to notice about the English – that they no longer sit quietly and do nothing, but complain loudly like Americans.

But what really got me was this. If the company had the foresight to arrange for the police to be present (armed, by the way, although this was a pure coincidence) then why did they not have the intelligence to handle the whole situation better?

What people wanted was information. They wanted someone from the company to show up in person and explain to them what was going on as soon as things looked bad (so within an hour of the missed departure time). If this meant saying that they didn’t know what was going on that would be fine.

Moreover, announcements that certain things would happen at certain times were just plane stupid if they then didn’t. I can understand (but only just) the fact that the departures board continually displayed incorrect information, because there was, I was told, a third party involved. However, people that explain, in person, that |”You’ll be off by 12,00”…“You’ll be boarded at 2.10” or ‘We can load the whole plane in fifteen minutes” should know better than to make promises they can’t necessarily keep.

Customer service moral: Tell people what’s going on directly as soon as there’s a major problem and don’t say things you know not to be true or things that may turn out not to be the case. I get on a lot of planes and I’ve never seen one carrying several hundred people boarded in 15-minutes, for example.

Also, when you apologise to a planeload of angry customers, do it from the heart and not from a soulless script. “We’re sorry for the delay” is a perfectly good response if a plane is 15-30 minutes late. If a departure is 8 hours behind schedule it just won’t do. “We’re incredibly sorry for the huge delay” might be a little bit better. Equally, offering passengers “One free drink” isn’t really appropriate. Do what Virgin Blue once did and say: “All drinks are on us until the bar runs dry”.

BTW, I’ve got two book recommendations for you. The first one is called Why You are Australian by Nikki Gemmell. It’s a letter from the author to her children about why she moved then from England to Australia and it’s terrific.

The second book, that I picked up on impulse at the airport, is called future Babble: Why expert predictions fail – and why we believe them anyway by Dan Gardner. I’m still reading it but so far so good.

Trends for 2011 (I know, I know)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Time to revisit this, I think. It’s a list of predictions (I know, I don’t do them) for 2011, originally published in the Courier Mail in Australia in January 2011.

Here’s the list.

1. Uncertainty
2. Volatility
3. Discontent
4. Religion rising
5. Formality
6. Food inflation
7. Long land
8. Digital deluge
9. Feature fatigue
10. Pyjamas

The full article can be found here.

Quote + rant

Here’s a quote you may like. I’ve spent most of the day planting box hedging, largely because it’s deeply satisfying, unlike my ‘new’ (it’s a 3) iPhone, which has become so annoying that I’ve given up trying to fix it.

I’m thinking of getting a nice metal hammer and smashing the s**t out of it. The battery life is equivalent to the lunchtime nap of a Mayfly and it’s latest little quirk is telling me that I don’t have enough credit to use data. I’m supposed to call 4444 to sort this out, but for some reason the ‘dismiss’ button is being dismissive and won’t f**ck off when I press it. It’s a good job I’m not having a heart attack and really need to use my f***ing phone.

BTW, my really old phone is doing just fine and seems to last a week with a single charge. Mind you, it’s somehow switched predictive texting off and refuses to let me change it back, which makes writing rather laborious, and one day last week suddenly switched to French without warning. Quelle surprise!

Oh, the quote…

“Entrepreneurs are congenitally wired to be too early. And being too early is a bigger problem than not being correct.”
– Marc Andreessen, Co-founder of Netscape
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Smart books, lost dogs and no man’s land

It is still holiday time so don’t expect too much here. Today I’m doing some final comments on one of my books, Future Vision, and trying to work out how the dog got out of the garden over the weekend – and walked 20-minutes up the road to the pub by himself. I assume we have a hole in the fence somewhere.

Two things that have caught my eye over the last few days. The first is a snippet in the Shaping Tomorrow newsletter about self-organising textbooks. If you don’t know about Shaping Tomorrow it’s worth checking out – www.shapingtomorrow.com

The second snippet came via Corrina in Oz (a regular What’s Next contributor) who spotted a story about a women-only city planned in Saudi Arabia. Full story here.