wonder what Intelligence is actually for?
Curious. And mischievous.
You got into tech because you love to figure out how things work… somewhere along the way the Judge took that seat…
In the Sage half of Positive Intelligence there is an exercise I did not see coming. Find a photo of yourself from before you were 10, hopefully around 6 or 8. Look at that kid. Say what you see. 2 words came back: curious, and mischievous. Neither of them was on my resume… or were they???
…and Charlie studied artificial Intelligence
Charlie Gillingham was born in Torrance, California, in 1960. At Berkeley he studied philosophy and artificial Intelligence, and then went to work as a software engineer in AI. Then he followed something else. The Hammond B3. The piano. The accordion. A Bay Area band that had started with 2 acoustic guitars. Decades later, an Oscar nomination as a co-writer.
The headlines this year are all about artificial Intelligence. Charlie read that chapter first, decades early, and then spent his life on the most human job in the building: playing with a room full of friends, every night, and listening for what the song needs.
Rain King…
Rain King is track 7 on August and Everything After, and Charlie plays on it. The title comes from Saul Bellow’s novel Henderson the Rain King. Adam has described it as “sort of a religious song about the sort of undefinable thing inside you or out there somewhere that makes you write, makes you create, makes you do any kind of art form.”
That undefinable thing is exactly what the Judge is trying to shut down. The Judge wants a scorecard. It has no use for wonder.
I have been a Rain King for other people’s ideas my whole career. Getting curious about my own took a photo of a kid, and a friend who remembered the same thing I did.
…the debate trophies were not wonderful…
The debate trophies came from the same hyper-rational quality that got the bully to back off. People loved it, when it was aimed at someone else. They loved it a lot less when I aimed it at them…
I remember exactly where I was standing, Pho IV of Freddie Mac, 4th floor, in a stairwell, when my Hyper-Rational Saboteur faced its own crossroads. I remember the floor, the building, and that something in me finally agreed to stop grading the wonder out of everything before it got a chance to breathe.
A lifelong friend, a fellow wonder junky, visited not long ago. We traded stories about being told ‘you can’t possibly’, growing up, which is usually the exact moment curiosity gets interesting. The bigger waves just meant we had to work a bit harder to surf on them. Peers told us plenty of it was not worth doing. Some of it got done anyway, 5 years later, by somebody else.
…the Sage starts with wonder
Positive Intelligence calls 2 of the Sage’s powers Explore and Innovate. My friend Richard Boyatzis gets at the same thing from the research side. The Positive Emotional Attractor keeps a leader in the positive, forward-looking brain, the place where vision lives. The Negative Emotional Attractor is the past, and the most negative self-talk. That second one is where the Judge lives.
His research puts it plainly: to build a vision of your ideal self, you have to be in the Positive Emotional Attractor. You cannot get there from the NEA… or better said, the world of tasks and action items. The things the world measures and keep track of – they are the exact WRONG place to create, communicate, collaborate… all the things that teams need.
The Judge is very good at the past. It has nothing to say about what you are curious about next.
No machine is going to do this part for you. This is the human Intelligence, noticing what lit you up, and going back for more of it. That is what the nightly list is quietly collecting.
Your “Simple… Not Easy” move: this Friday night. Just wonder. No agenda… put on some great music, take a walk, call a friend… what is it that your mind needs to…. relax and reconnect to you?
This is my favorite part of my work – watching that sparkle come back to someone’s face. Schedule time with me here.
Heck – take a walk in the rain. You won’t melt. And who knows you might become … Rain King
