Right-Brainers Why Will Rule the Future STORY - stories are easier to remember because stories are HOW we remember o most of our knowledge and thinking and experiences are organized as stories - one can explain themselves and connect to others through stories - Hollywood reveres story and makes it seem like it is only to amuse or divert - Minimizing the importance of story puts you in professional peril - Today facts are ubiquitous and free o As they become so widely available, each one becomes less valuable o Need to place facts in context and deliver them with emotional impact - The essence of the aptitude of story is context enriched by emotion - Story exists where high concept and high touch intersect o It is high concept because it sharpens our understanding of one thing by showing it in the context of something else - Stories are important cognitive events - The ability to encapsulate, contextualize, and emotionalize has become very important in the conceptual age - The elusive abilities embodied by Story are valuable - High concept, high touch capacity to weave events into an emotionally compelling narrative has become essential - Successful business people need to be able to combine science, accounting and finance with STORY - Story has become a key way for individuals and entrepreneurs to distinguish their goods and services in the marketplace - WE ARE OUR OWN STORIES SYMPHONY - high- concept aptitude - it is the ability to put together the pieces - capacity to synthesize rather than analyze, see relationships between seemingly unrelated fields, to detect broad patterns rather than to deliver specific answers - To invent something new by combining elements nobody else thought to pair - Aptitude of the brain's right hemisphere - Best way to understand the aptitude of symphony is to learn how to draw - Don't draw what you actually see, but draw symbols - When the left brain doesn't know what the right brain is doing, the mind is free to see relationships and to integrate them into a whole - Negative space is a powerful drawing tool - Symphony is about seeing relationships - There are 3 types of people: the boundary crosser, the inventor, and the metaphor maker - Boundary crosser o The most important prefix of our times is multio Those who can operate in different realms
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o They develop expertise in multiple spheres, speak multi languages, and have a variety of experiences live multi lives creativity involves crossing the boundaries of domains the most creative see relationships the rest of us never notice people will have to cross boundaries and identify opportunities and make connections between them they lead hyphenated and lives jobs and identities great minds are androgynous sometimes the most powerful ideas come from simply combining two existing ideas nobody else ever thought to unite the ability for inventive relationships come from the right side of the brain despite what some might believe, we all have the capacity to invent metaphor is understanding one thing in terms of something else o human thought processes are largely metaphorical o only the human mind can think metaphorically and see relationships that computers could never detect o everything you create is enriched by metaphor o MQ helps to understand others o The more we understand metaphor the more we understand ourselves must be able to see the big picture have to integrate and imagine how the pieces fit together all great entrepreneurs are systems thinkers have to distinguish between what matters and what annoys
Empathy - ability to imagine yourself in someone else's position and to intuit what that person is feeling (ability to stand in their shoes, see with their eyes, and feel with their hearts) - it isn't feeling bad FOR someone else, but feeling WITH someone else o sensing what it would be like to be that person - you have to climb into another person's mind to experience the world from their perspective - empathy allows us to see the other side of the argument, comfort someone in distress and not say something rude - it builds self awareness, bonds parent to child, and allows us to work together - emotional abilities are even more important that conventional intellectual abilities - the one aptitude that's proven impossible for computers to reproduce is empathy - facial expressions are universal (reading them is R hemisphere) - empathy is largely about emotion- feeling what another is feeling - emotions generally don't reveal themselves in L directed ways, but rather through nonverbal cues - people with damage to their right hemisphere have difficulty recognizing the emotions on others faces - those with damage to left side are better at detecting liars - computers are "autistic" when it comes to interacting with people - there are voice recognition capabilities that can detect changes in pitch, timing, volume, all which signal heightened emotion
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empathy makes us human and brings us joy 7 basic human emotions: anger, sadness, fear, surprise, disgust, contempt, and happiness empathy is related to symphony as empathic people understand the importance of context women are generally better at detecting facial expressions and lies to empathize, you need a degree of attachment, to recognize that you are interacting with a person and their feelings