Monat: Oktober 2020

Leider habe ich das erst jetzt gefunden, das hätte mich vor fünf Jahren auch schon erhellen können: in den google-Talks wurde endlich der Sinn des Lebens aufgedeckt. Und das von niemand geringerem als einem der größten Fachmänner für den Sinn des Lebens, John Cleese, welcher sich für den Monty-Python Film „The meaning of life“ bereits vor 1983 an den Recherchen zu diesem Thema beschäftigte:

„The more that we have a disrespectful attitude towards or own egos, I think, the happier life becomes.“ – „I was with a wonderful psychiatrist who said, that the moment that he knew someone in the group was getting more healthy, was, as they started laughing at their own behaviour; was a little daylight between themselves and their ego. So if we can laugh at ourselves, that can’t be a particular cruel thing to do, can it?“

Im folgenden zitiert Cleese Sammy Davis Jr.: „Boredom was a great help to creativity, because when you start getting bored without constant external stimulation, that’s when stuff starts coming up from the inside.“

John Marwood Cleese aus Weston-super-Mare, Somerset, England, wieder mit eigener Stimme: „You have to learn how to contact your own conscious and use it. […] You’ve got to be quiet. You can’t have a creative idea when you’re rushing around, answering your cell phone, looking at your watch, sending off email.“

Cleese beschäftigte sich tiefergehend mit der Verbindung seiner linken Gehirnhälfte (Mathematik, Latein, Justizrecht) mit seiner rechten (das „instinctive thing“, die Kreativität, welche er in seinem Fall herunter spielt: „I just discovered that I could write scetches, that made people laugh.“).

Er rät dazu, Entscheidungen hinaus zu zögern, so lange es geht: „When you have to make a decision, the first question you got to ask yourself is: when does this question has to be answered. And then you answer it – then. But you don’t answer it before, for two reasons: one is, you may get new informations, well that’s obvious. But the other is: the longer you leave it, the more chance your own concious has of coming up with some stuff.“, das bedeute „if you stay with that uncertainty, the lack of resolution, then you’ll come up with better answers in the end.“

Seine Erfahrung in der Teamarbeit mit Graham Chapman, Michael Palin, Terry Jones, Eric Idle u.a. bringt Cleese ebenfalls zum Ausdruck: „The great thing about a team is, that the members of the team need to have completely different skills, not the same ones. There is no point of having a team with people who have the same skills.“

Es gibt auch hier wieder eine kurze Einführung in den Dunning-Kruger-Effekt: “In order to know how good you are at something requires almost exactly the same skills and aptitudes as it does to actually be good at it” so führt Cleese aus, “which means that if you’re absolutely no good at something, you lack exactly the skills and aptitudes that you need to know that you’re no good at it.”

Bezüglich aktueller Technologie versucht Cleese, Verständnis zu erlangen: „I’m reading a lot of stuff at the moment about how it is affecting us all. I’ve certainly come to the conclusion, that all this stuff about multitasking, is been shown by research, that it doesn’t work. You get less done and it takes you longer. But people run around talking about the fact they could multitask.“

Den Zusammenhang zwischen Zeitdruck und Kreativität fasst John Cleese aus seiner Sicht zusammen: „Normally, time pressure makes you anxious.
It’s essential in organisations that you have people who understand the process and I think when there is constant pressure that the people in charge frequently don’t understand: anxiety makes people go along more conventional lines.“

Quelle:

John Cleeses Buchempfehlung in diesem Zusammenhang:
Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking
(Susan Cain, englisches Original)
Still: Die Bedeutung von Introvertierten in einer lauten Welt
(Übersetzerinnen: Franchita Mirella Cattani, Margarethe Randow-Tesch)
Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology
(Neil Postman)
So, anyway…
(John Cleese)