THE NONLINEAR PATH 14: Empty Your Cup
Clearing Old Mindsets To Find A New Path Forward
My mind is full….overflowing…. with statistics, stories, articles, reports, and conversations on the changing landscape of creative careers across so many industries. Layoffs are the one thing in abundance, confidence is scarce, opportunity is constantly shape-shifting, real intelligence is neglected and everything seems artificial. And cheap.
My partner calls it ‘the enshittification of everything’. It is what happens when we lose our way as humans, when we start to focus on profit over people. It’s what happens when business people cut out the artists and think they can easily replicate their jobs, either with young cheap labor… or robots. It’s likely to get worse for a while before it gets better.
We can blame part of this on the lost love affair with design. While there has always been a somewhat jealous tension between business and design, for the past two decades creatives have enjoyed a strong station and growing influence over the product infiltrating our society. The result has been a rapid push forward in innovation, technology, and lifestyle as well as the meteoric rise of the brands that bring these ideas to market.
Now, post-pandemic, these companies are sitting on too much inventory, looking at an uncertain future, and cutting loose the very people who helped them get where they are. The fact that they are not utilizing these inventive minds to help design a pathway into the future shows how little designers are understood by business leaders. And, conversely, how little designers understand about business.
Layoffland And The Post-Apocalyptic Landscape of the Creative Career
The recent Fast Company article, The Big Design Freak-Out, outlines the expansion and new contraction of the profession of design while asking some poignant questions, like “Did business really break up with design, or did it just break up with a generation of design leadership?”.
In the fashion, sport, and outdoor industry we know that designers are essential to product ideation and creation. However, in my experience over the past twenty years, design has been slowly moving from a full creative career track to smaller, lower-level roles placed under product managers and people who haven’t a clue how designers do what they do. Director-level, VP, and C-suite design roles have been gradually eliminated, if they existed at all, virtually wiping out a creative career path for both the young AND the experienced. The result has been a growing sea of sameness in product, leading to consumer boredom and watered-down brand identities. What the hell does anyone stand for anymore?
For many years I’ve been hearing business leaders say ‘Product is everything.’ Now we have plenty of product, too much product. What we’ve done in the process is to neglect people …our employees, our families, our communities, and ourselves …all in the name of brand, product, and money.
Meanwhile, I hear questions from industry leaders asking why there is no innovation happening. My answer is always the same: there is no innovation because the companies have let go of their risk-takers. They’ve replaced their linchpins with cogs thinking they could save money by sticking to the barebones basics.
A good designer is a risk-taker, a linchpin. They are not always easy to work with. They aren’t ‘yes-men’ who do what they are told. They are not followers. They are also commonly not good managers. Being a creative linchpin in a corporate environment is fraught with pitfalls and designers are often ill-prepared.
Design thinking didn’t come with any management approach or operational playbook; certainly not one developed at Ideo or Frog, which were never known for management discipline. Even as design thinking packaged itself successfully as a mainstream business process to senior management, we neglected to mention that designers, by nature, are pretty lousy managers, and there was little opportunity or support to develop those skills in boutique practice.
Magowan of Design Leaders is hearing this sentiment from his clients on the hiring side. “Companies are still adjusting,” he says. “Trying to understand how to embed design properly and not make the mistakes they made by hiring folks into design leadership roles who were not equipped.” -Fast Company, Feb,2024
So design layoffs across tech, media, fashion and retail, sport and outdoor, you name it, are the name of the game right now. For every design leadership role, Senior Director and above, there are hundreds and thousands of applications. Those who do secure an interview end up going through several rounds over weeks and months only to have the position eliminated before it is filled, be told they are overqualified, or just be plain ghosted.
This is our new normal and it has never been the case before. Incredibly smart, talented, hardworking passionate people are now finding themselves, after fifteen or twenty years of expanding creative work, at midlife with kids in school, aging parents, a mortgage, rapidly increasing costs, and a career that’s been stalled out.
It’s like hitting a “ROAD CLOSED” sign at the end of a highway that may never be completed. Do you wait it out? Or do you turn around and find another road to travel?
It’s dehumanizing, to say the least. For many years I’ve been hearing business leaders say “Product is everything.” Now we have plenty of product, too much product. What we’ve done in the process is to neglect people …our employees, our families, our communities, and ourselves …all in the name of brand, product, and money. It’s time to change the mantra.
People are everything.
We must start here, by caring first for people. Once we do, the products will change, the innovations will change, our choices and reasons will change and we, and the planet, will be better for it.
To do this, we must become a warrior of sorts and look inward. We must start with ourselves. The true heart of martial arts training is not about fighting and self-defense, it is about building a stronger character and being a better person… by starting with the self, expanding into the community, and making things better for the world.
Starting with yourself is not being selfish. It’s taking responsibility. It’s the only real change any of us can truly have control over.
Unlearn What You Have Learned
It’s time for all of us to learn something new. That is clear, but for those of us entering midlife the things we need to unlearn and relearn are 10-fold. The rapid changes that are happening in the world are making our heads spin. The economy, politics, business, technology, family, and our entire culture is shifting so fast it’s palpable.
For those of us in the sandwich generation …the time spent between kids and aging parents, that period of adulthood where we are expected to hold it all together and run things. …the changes are hitting us like a loaded freight train.
We are now living longer than retirement templates were designed for.
We are battling job losses in an era of skyrocketing costs. We are fighting irrelevance and ageism in the workplace. We are navigating a daunting tech landscape alongside our growing sense of the loss of precious youth. We are facing the realities of the end of job stability, Social Security, and any type of “retirement”. We are trying to find our true selves in midlife, not because of a crisis of identity, but because we have to. For mere survival.
A big part of this is coming from the shift in lifespan. We are beginning to see the results of the Industrial Age in terms of increased longevity, health awareness, disposable income, and overall lifestyle. We are now living longer than retirement templates were designed for. Our global population has more than doubled in my lifetime. Not only do we have more competition for jobs from other people, but now we have AI.
This is the current reality and we have to face it.
There is hope.
Two books have been gifted to me recently by fellow genXers and both have profoundly changed the way I am responding to this new world.
The first, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, by Marshall Goldsmith, focusses on leadership and the mistakes many of us make as years of success begin to stall out. High achievers, a category I do put myself in for better or worse, tend to rely on certain traits and habits to push them forward to reach new heights.
However, at a certain point, these habits start to become hindrances, getting in our way when trying to lead others. Our drive toward success tends to take on a sour note when we find ourselves in roles managing, guiding, and leading others. A new attitude and skill set are needed.
The book turns into a workshop of looking inward, facing oneself, and making difficult shifts to navigate this next phase. I found it enlightening if not a little dismaying and somewhat confusing. It wasn’t until I read Strength To Strength, by Arthur C. Brooks, a book recommended to me by at least three colleagues, that I was able to put some context to it and feel more hopeful.
The first chapter of Strength To Strength hit like a side thrust kick squarely to the ribs. It took the wind right out of me. The subsequent chapters laid out the silver lining.
Brooks’ book gives a new piece to the life puzzle: the concept of the second curve. Both books are focussed on midlife, somewhere between the forties and sixties, where we tend to see career shifts, gain empty nests, experience divorce, have midlife crises, and where traditional retirement usually happens. It’s where people often start to feel put out to pasture.
We aren’t really up for that anymore but the cultural structure of our world has not yet caught up with our new mindset.
Brooks’ concept of the second curve illustrates the change that happens in our brains at this time. During midlife, we do experience a cognitive decline in what he calls our fluid intelligence, the intelligence responsible ‘for our ability to reason, think flexibly, and solve novel problems’. Typically, once we begin to head down the backside of this curve, we give up, give in, and retire. We tend to say that we’re old.
Brooks gives us a new hope, detailing a second curve to which we can navigate a shift as an alternative to decline. This is the curve of crystallized intelligence, the ability to use a stock of knowledge that we have learned and collected over the past decades that then serves as a foundation for those coming behind us. It’s a new place, a new mindset, in which we can pull from experience to guide the next generations.
It sounds obvious, but I’ve never heard it laid out so clearly as an actual phase of life. The second curve is the time when we shift into leadership, mentorship, storytelling, education, writing, documenting, and connecting on a more human level. It’s when we shift our focus to our legacy and what we want to give back. We begin to care more about having meaning in the work we do, how we spend our time, and who we spend it with. It’s not about more connections, it’s about deeper connections.
It’s the biggest shift we make as humans, and we’ve been almost completely unaware of it until recently. To successfully make this shift, we need to think differently, to view aging and life from a fresh perspective. We need to unlearn what we’ve learned to make space for something new.
We need to empty our cup.
A Zen Master’s Lesson: Empty Your Cup
Years ago, as a young adult student in the martial arts, one of my teachers encouraged me to read the book Zen And The Martial Arts by Joe Hyams. Joe had been a student of Bruce Lee’s in the 1960s and recounts several lessons with Bruce in his book. Published in 1979, the book became de facto required reading for all of us students at the school. I still keep a copy today.
My favorite chapter by far is the one entitled Empty Your Cup. In this chapter, Joe is introduced to Mr Lee for the first time with the hope of becoming his student. When Bruce asks Joe why he would like to train with him he states that he has trained another style for a long time but that he stopped a while ago and wanted to start over again. After watching Joe run through some moves he had learned before, this is what Bruce said to him:
“Do you realize that you will have to unlearn al that you have learned and start over again?” he asked.
“No, “ I said.
Bruce smiled and placed is hand lightly on my shoulder. “Let me tell you a story my sifu told me,” he said. “It is about the Japanese Zen master who received a university professor who came to inquire about Zen.
“It was obvious to the Zen master from the start of the conversation that the professor was not so much interested in learning about Zen as he was about impressing the master with his own opinions and knowledge. The master listened patiently then finally suggested they have tea. The master poured his visitor’s cup full and then kept on pouring.
“The professor watched the cup overflowing until he could no longer restrain himself. ‘The cup is overfull. No more can go in.’
“‘Like this cup,’ the master said, ‘you are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?’”
Bruce studied my face, “You understand the point?”
“Yes,” I said. “You want me to empty my mind with past knowledge and old habits so that I will be open to new learning.”
“Precisely,” said Bruce. “And now we are ready to begin your first lesson.”
This story has been an important reminder to me through several stages of life, the latest being the midlife transition of career changes and COVID, kids and puberty, parents and health issues, divorce, death, and sliding down the backside of the first curve.
But what do you do once you’ve emptied that cup?
Find Your Gifts And Put Your Ego In Service Of Your Ilmu
What do you do to make the leap from curve one to curve two once you’ve cleared space in your mind for new ideas and experiences?
It can be terrifying to let go of what has brought us success in the past. It’s easy to feel lost and disconnected from ourselves as we shift from our fluid intelligence to crystallized intelligence. That’s precisely, though, what this phase shift is about …letting go and finding your next strength.
To do that, you need to turn your focus inward, to dig deep. You need to identify your true gifts and passions and start thinking about how to put them into service. It’s time to shift thinking from ‘How can I compete? How can I be better? How can I get more?’ to ‘How can I make a difference? Where am I needed? How can I best serve?’.
It’s time to put your ego in service of your ilmu (your chi, ki, or energy). What does this mean? Simply put, it means putting your sense of self-importance in service of doing the right thing. The word ilmu is Indonesian for knowledge. In the martial arts, we learn to become aware of and understand our knowledge and the energy it creates so that we can direct it with intention.
You don’t need to be a martial artist to put your ego in service of your ilmu. You just need to align with yourself, be honest with yourself, and ask yourself deep questions about what you really want. It’s one of the hardest things to do. It requires you to look into your past for the roadblocks and blinders you’ve built for yourself when you were young and learn how to let them go so that you may find your true direction.
Once you do, you’ll also start to let go of external expectations and false measures, you will find some alignment with yourself and you will begin down the path of the second curve.
I Don’t Give A Damn About Your Bad Education: The Reality Of AI
There is another monster of a reason to do the soul-searching and realignment of the self at this age and stage.
The articles and stories surrounding the fear of AI are not unfounded. While the proper approach to quell fear is to find the positives and opportunities, it is a good idea to make ourselves aware of the realities and possible pitfalls. Having our heads in the sand won’t change what is coming. Being a leader of how this new energy gets directed can change where it heads.
The second curve will need to be a healthy blend of figuring out what knowledge we have to share and learning how to use the modern tools we need to share it.
I plan to be on that side of the equation. I know that we already need leaders with experience and knowledge to drive AI in the right direction. However, we cannot and should not leave it solely to the young. Which finds us heading to the second curve with the responsibility of stepping up to the plate.
Ai is already quietly replacing jobs under several other guises and labels. Newsweek reported this past December that ‘nearly four in 10 business leaders said layoffs are happening to replace workers with AI.’
The true numbers aren’t clear at all.
Companies that report layoffs due to jobs migrating to AI are getting pummeled and bashed. No wonder others are hiding the truth. Many of them don’t even know if the jobs will be replaced by AI. Many companies are freezing hiring and restructuring so that they can buy time to figure it out.
“There are probably more jobs in the economy that are being cut because of AI already than are getting attributed to that or announced. Every time a company mentions it, they get headlines across every news outlet for like a month,” Challenger said. “They would rather go under the radar most of the time.” Senior Vice President Andrew Challenger, Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc, said in an interview.
“The big thing you’ll hear companies say is they’re not focused on elimination, but augmentation — trying to make people more effective and efficient,” Challenger said. “But clearly there are a lot of scenarios right now where one person could do the work of four or five people with the help of AI in a way they couldn’t a year ago. That’s playing out on the ground even if we’re not hearing about it in big announcements from organizations.”
“Let's not pretend — jobs are going to go away because of AI," said Bob Toohey, chief human resources officer at insurer Allstate Corp., adding that he was referring to the overall labor market, not his company specifically. “There will be jobs lost, and also jobs enhanced.” - Bloomberg, Feb 2024
So it’s time to empty our cups of what we think we know, stop thinking we are old dogs who can’t learn new tricks, and buckle down to some fresh education. The second curve will need to be a healthy blend of figuring out what knowledge we have to share and learning how to use the modern tools we need to share it.
Singapore is on the front end of this curve and we could learn something from their example. The country has implemented a new program of free education for all citizens over the age of 40 to learn AI and stay relevant to their economy and culture.
Singapore's 2024 budget unveiled a game-changing initiative: a subsidy program to support individuals over 40 in acquiring skills and knowledge in Artificial Intelligence (AI) models. This move signals the nation's proactive approach to future-proofing its workforce in the face of the ever-evolving technological landscape. It's a significant step toward a future where continuous learning and digital literacy are at the core of professional development.
In an age where artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping industries, the Singaporean government's decision to introduce subsidies for AI learning among the over-40 demographic is both timely and strategic. This move acknowledges the dual challenge of an aging workforce and the rapid pace of technological advancements. By targeting individuals who are at a critical juncture in their careers, the subsidy aims to foster an environment of lifelong learning and ensure that no one is left behind in the digital race.
The introduction of this subsidy is expected to have a profound effect on the Singaporean job market. As more individuals are upskilled in AI, we can anticipate a shift towards more knowledge-intensive roles. This will likely increase the demand for jobs that require analytical thinking, creative problem-solving, and technical expertise. Furthermore, it could lead to a reduction in skill gaps, making the Singaporean workforce more versatile and adaptable to the needs of a digital economy.Singapore's approach offers a compelling blueprint for other nations to follow. The path to a digitally inclusive society is paved with education, innovation, and the unwavering belief in the potential of every individual to adapt, grow, and thrive in the face of technological advancements. - Your Story, Mar 2024
This may not be on offer to each of us, but we are all capable of utilizing the internet and online tools to acquire some of the new knowledge we will need for the future. It’s mind-numbingly overwhelming to be sure, but it’s necessary. It is also necessary that we bring each other along, help each other learn, and give each other a hand up.
People are everything and we are going to need each other more than ever.
You Are Not Special… But You Are Unique
It’s important to understand yourself and what your contribution can be. As the author, podcaster, and YouTuber Mark Manson says: you are not special.
However, no one is like you. Your combination of passions put through your filter is unique…in the same way your DNA and fingerprints are unique. These are your gifts to give to yourself, your family, your community, and the world.
No one will ever do anything the same way you would. The martial art I have trained for over thirty years is called a broken mirror system. If you throw a rock into a mirror, it shatters into many pieces. Every piece will look different but each piece makes up a part of the bigger whole.
Empty your cup, throw that rock, and find your piece.
Thank you! So much of this piece resonates with me. I study and teach yoga nidra, a practice of meditation and self-inquiry that helps us to ask the deep questions about what we really want and what we are being called to do. It feels so necessary in this current landscape.
In regards to AI, I'm curious about what ways you have found most effective to learn and engage with it.