Three things from this week
Here are three things that were on my mind this week:
“Antilibrary” and our relationship to knowledge
This piece from Ness Labs made me think long and hard about the (many) unread books that I have on my bookshelves, and to my surprise, not in a negative light. According to Nassim Nicholas Taleb, an antilibrary is a private collection of unread books:
Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.
This view of libraries does not only emphasize the importance of curiosity and constant learning but it also calls out the rather consumerist/capitalist relationship we have with knowledge:
“We tend to treat our knowledge as personal property to be protected and defended. It is an ornament that allows us to rise in the pecking order.”
Wouldn’t it be better if we were focused more on what we don’t know instead of holding onto what we know, to the point where it becomes the central lens through which we relate to the world around us? Is it possible to stay humbly curious and accept our limited nature with grace? Can I feel excitement for the things that I am yet to read/learn, instead of guilt and stress?
Creativity and productivity
I watched the second half of the Virtual High-Five poetry night on Tuesday. Remembering that I was at the actual event last year (in-person, with a stage and a drink in hand) was bittersweet, the new materials from Sarah Kay and Hanif Abdurraqib were beautiful and tear-inducing.
At the end of the night, one of the questions that the audience asked the poets was about the strangest writing advice they ever received. Here was Hanif’s response:
The strangest advice that I hear circulate is that in order to be a writer, one must write every day, though I think that is particularly being deconstructed during the pandemic. I hope that we come out on the other side of this with our ideas around productivity beginning to change. So much of these ideas are rooted in the capitalist essential of “you have to produce in order to be a person” when there are so many reasons why one would not be able to actually write every day and I just don’t wanna fucking write every day. I also think it is unkindness to oneself to demand every day to be productive in some way because on the day that you cannot, you are not learning how to be good to yourself.
This made me face my “productivity” expectations from creative endeavours. It also made me realize how much space they have occupied on my to-do lists over the years. Why do I remember the creative projects I didn’t continue with a tinge of failure and a sense of incompletion? How many times have I beat myself up for not writing every day?
I’ve been making a conscious effort to distinguish between things I have to do and things I would like to do, adopting a more intention-based approach for the latter: “I have to work to pay my rent. I intend to write more because I enjoy it.” Let’s see if it will work.
Advice process for decision making in teams
I started The Hum’s Patterns for Decentralised Organising training this week and one of the key learnings was the advice process for decision-making in teams. According to this approach (which was first developed by Frederic Laloux), any person can make a decision, as long as they ask for advice from (i) those who will be impacted and (ii) those who are experts on that subject. The key here is for the person to be able to genuinely listen and integrate this advice.
By [engaging in this process] they become the best qualified in the community to take on or take over a responsibility, in part by gaining the knowledge and competence necessary, and in part simply because the act of connecting with those who are dependent upon their decisions places them in the right position in our social network to act. (Read more here).
Effective decision-making is one of the biggest challenges for horizontal teams, and I am really struck by the essence of autonomy and trust in this approach. How different would our workplaces look like if this could really be the basis of decision making?