A More Beautiful Question (40 page)

  
2
   
Some of the answers that emerged . . .
Acumen success stories as told to me by Novogratz, though they are described in more detail in her book
The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World
(Rodale, 2009).

  
3
   
During a recent college commencement speech . . .
Novogratz at Gettysburg College, 2012, http://www.gettysburg.edu/commencement/2012/novogratz.dot. Hat tip to Maria Popova’s BrainPickings site, which featured the speech in the post “Live the Questions: Jacqueline Novogratz’s Advice to Graduates,” May 29, 2012.

  
4
   
A mid-2013
Huffington Post
conference urged . . .
Alina Tugend, “A Budding Movement to Redefine the Successful Life,”
New York Times
, June 14, 2013.

  
5
   
Magazines ran cover stories about the importance of . . .
Among those was
Fast Company
, which featured the “#Unplug” theme as its cover story in July/August 2013.

  
6
   
Oxford University psychology professor Mark Williams . . .
Mark Williams, “Stress and Mindfulness: A Primer,” Mindful.org, November 2, 2012.

  
7
   
Jeff Weiner, the chief executive of LinkedIn . . .
Adam Bryant, “In Sports or Business, Always Prepare for the Next Play,”
New York Times
, November 10, 2012.

  
8
   
The filmmaker Roko Belic told me . . .
I am greatly indebted to Roko Belic, whom I interviewed at length in February 2013. Belic’s film
Happy
was released in 2011 by Wadi Rum Films and Shady Acres, www.TheHappyMovie.com.

  
9
   
The high school teacher David McCullough . . .
The speech, at Wellesley High School, was widely covered at the time; both text and video of the speech were posted June 5, 2012, on Wellesley High’s blog, The Wellesley Report, http://theswellesleyreport.com/2012/06/wellesley-high-grads-told-youre-not-special/.

10
   
What is your sentence? . . .
Drawn from Daniel Pink’s
Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
(New York: Riverhead Books, 2009).

11
   
The start-up entrepreneur Kasper Hulthin discovered . . .
Kasper Hulthin, “Why Every Entrepreneur Must Learn to Ask the Right Questions,”
Under30CEO
, March 22, 2013.

12
   
The author and creativity coach Eric Maisel . . .
From my interview with Maisel.

13
   
John Hagel suggests you ask yourself . . .
From Hagel’s September 2012 post “The Labor Day Manifesto of the Passionate Creative Worker,”
Edge Perspectives
, http://edgeperspectives.typepad.com/edge_perspectives/2012/09/the-labor-day-manifesto-of-the-passionate-creative-worker.html.

14
   
Life coach Kelly Carlin is always . . .
From my interview with Carlin, wherein we talked about her father, George, but also discussed her experiences as a life coach.

15
   
Is there something else you might
. . .
Godin’s question was posed in his October 2012 interview with Jonathan Fields for the Good Life Project, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwANZNEOAoY.

16
   
Randy Komisar talks about the “deferred-life plan” . . .
From Komisar’s book
The Monk and the Riddle
.

17
   
The author Jonathan Fields, who has . . .
From my interview with Fields, March 4, 2013. Fields explores this subject at length in his book
Uncertainty
(New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2011).

18
   
How many people does it take to change a light bulb for a senior citizen? . . .
From my interviews with Hilary Cottam in 2009; plus, Alice Rawsthorn, “A New Design Concept: Creating Social Solutions for Old Age,”
New York Times
, October 26, 2008; Jonathan Freedland, “The Perfect Gift? How About An End to Loneliness—and Not Just at Christmas,”
Guardian
, December 22, 2009.

19
   
need to find one’s own “tortoise enclosure” . . .
Cleese has discussed this in speeches on creativity, as noted in Chris Higgins, “John Cleese: Create a Tortoise Enclosure for Your Mind,”
Mental Floss
, November 11, 2009, http://mentalfloss.com/article/23240/john-cleese-create-tortoise-enclosure-your-mind.

20
   
One of the current proponents of “unplugging” . . .
From my March 2013 interview with Shlain. She also discusses this in her article “Tech’s Best Feature: The off switch,”
Harvard Business Review
, March 1, 2013.

21
   
“Thinking means concentrating on one thing . . .”
William Deresiewicz, “Solitude and Leadership,” October 2009 graduation lecture, U.S. Military Academy at West Point, printed in
American Scholar
, Spring 2010.

22
   
Happiness researchers such as Tal Ben-Shahar . . .
From Tal Ben-Shar’s video interview on Big Think, “Five Steps for Being Happier Today,” November 17, 2010, http://bigthink.com/videos/five-steps-for-being-happier-today.

23
   
When he visited a friend at . . .
Belic’s trailer park was featured in
Vanessa Grigoriadis, “Bohemian Cove,”
Vanity Fair
, March 2011.

24
   
Jacqueline Novogratz has her own spin . . .
From my interview with Novogratz; her question was also discussed in Adam Bryant, “When Humility and Audacity Go Hand in Hand,”
New York Times
, September 29, 2012.

25
   
Author Carol Adrienne related to identifying . . .
From the interview of Adrienne by Nancy Rosanoff for the online talk show
Listening Place
, January 5, 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flsxwnSilGI.

26
   
“In school we learn that experimentation . . .”
From Schank’s essay “Experimentation,” Edge, http://www.edge.org/q2011/q11_2.html#schank. He was one of a number of leading thinkers writing in response to a question posed in 2011 by Edge: “What scientific concept would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit?” The essays are compiled in John Brockman,
This Will Make You Smarter
(New York: HarperPerennial, 2012).

27
   
a friend referred me to the writer . . .
The friend was multimedia producer Gordon Platt.

28
   
Jacobs is an intensely curious man . . .
The section on A.J. Jacobs is based on my interview with him, February 6, 2013.

29
   
One of Jacobs’s other experiments was . . .
Jacobs wrote about this in his book
The Know-It-All
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004). He also wrote
The Year of Living Biblically
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007);
My Life as an Experiment: One Man’s Humble Quest to Improve Himself by Living as a Woman, Becoming George Washington, Telling No Lies, and Other Radical Tests
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010); and
Drop Dead Healthy: One Man’s Humble Quest for Bodily Perfection
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012).

30
   
Esquire
article called “The Rationality Project” . . .
A.J. Jacobs, “The Rationality Project: One Man’s Quest to Ignore His Gut Instinct,”
Esquire
, November 2008.

31
   
“you have a wonderful lab in . . .”
From my interview with Chris Young, February 6, 2013.

32
   
When you change one small thing . . .
I am indebted to a friend, the art director and illustrator Jaye Medalia, for sharing this observation (based on her own experiences) in conversation.

33
   
“It’s easier to act your way . . .”
Fuller’s quote appears in various places, including the post “Millard Fuller: A Home for Everyone,”
Mark of a Leader, http://www.themarkofaleader.com/library/stories/millard-fuller-a-home-for-everyone/.

34
   
Herminia Ibarra, a professor of organizational . . .
Herminia Ibarra, “Managing Yourself: How to Stay Stuck in the Wrong Career,”
Harvard Business Review
, December 2002.

35
   
It was popularized a couple of decades . . .
The quote appears in Schuller’s
Possibility Thinking: What Great Thing Would You Attempt
. . .
If You Knew You Could Not Fail?
(Nightingale Conant, 1989).

36
   
in a widely circulated TED speech . . .
This is the same TED speech by Dugan cited in chapter 1.

37
   
What if a TV drama could inspire real-life change? . . .
Phil Zabriski, “After ‘The Wire’ ended, actress Sonja Sohn couldn’t leave Baltimore’s troubled streets behind,”
Washington Post
, January 27, 2012; and the RewiredforChange.org website.

38
   
“failure is good” message has gone mainstream . . .
Richard Pérez-Peña, “Commencement Speakers: In Looser Tone, a Call to Take Risks and Be Engaged,”
New York Times
, June 16, 2013.

39
   
who used the term
failure fetish
. . .
Daniel Altman, “The Failure Fetish,” Big Think, June 11, 2013

40
   
The writer Peter Sims pointed out . . .
Peter Sims, “The No. 1 Enemy of Creativity: Fear of Failure,”
Harvard Business Review
, October 5, 2012.

41
   
“When we hit failure, I start . . .”
From my interview with Ebeling.

42
   
“Failure is, in a sense, the highway . . .”
Manoranjan Kumar,
Dictionary of Quotations
(APH Publishing, 2008).

43
   
author Judith Beck told me she . . .
From my e-mail exchanges with Judith Beck, April 2013.

44
   
The blogger Chris Guillebeau put yet . . .
From Guillebeau’s post “What Would You Do If You Knew You Would Not Fail?” from his blog, The Art of Non-Conformity, October 21, 2010, http://chrisguillebeau.com/3x5/what-would-you-do-if-you-knew-you-would-not-fail/.

45
   
Fran Peavey, a social activist, excelled . . .
For the section on Peavey, I relied on Peavey’s book
By Life’s Grace: Musings on the Essence of Social Change
, excerpted in the Context Institute’s “Creating a Future We Can Live With”; David Leser, “Good Will Hunting,”
Melbourne Age
, May 30, 1998; and Sharon Ede’s post “Strategic Questioning: Asking Questions That Make a Difference,
Cruxcatalyst
, May 21, 2012, http://www.cruxcatalyst.com/2012/05/21/strategic-questioning/#sthash.PnMnHmlg.dpbs.

46
   
“her flesh wobbles . . . her chest heaves . . .”
From Leser’s
Melbourne Post
profile.

47
   
“I refined my interviewing technique . . .”
Ibid.

48
   
One of her more interesting projects . . .
Peavey’s account of this project is from her book
By Life’s Grace.

49
   
Former-adman-turned-activist Jon Bond . . .
From my e-mail exchanges with Bond, April 2013. Bond’s initiative was also covered in Joe Nocera, “Changing Minds After Newtown,”
New York Times
, March 2, 2013.

50
   
What would you do to reach yourself? . . .
From the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship’s website article “Dare to Ask a Beautiful Question,” http://worship.calvin.edu/resources/resource-library/dare-to-ask-a-beautiful-question/.

51
   
we should heed the advice of . . .
This is from Chris Hughes’s 2013 commencement speech at Georgia State University, as featured in Pérez-Peña, “Commencement Speakers.”

52
   
one other question comes highly recommended . . .
From my interview with Michael Corning, December 2012.