Tuesday 21 May 2019

The Pursuit of Attention


In 2019, the pursuit of happiness has become a pursuit of attention. You may have food and clothes, a good health, a house with a garden and some security. If you feel like you don’t receive or ‘deserve’ attention, you will be unhappy. In this time of Beschleunigung and Social Web Addiction, when everybody chases his self-defined goals at 120 km/h and 10Mbit/s, attention has become the most pursued good, the holy grail of happiness.

In the world of politics and media, attention makes and breaks careers. In the world of work, companies no longer need hard-working people or smart people, they need people who spend all their attention to work and it has become a challenge to identify the ones who do. In education, the children have not become lazier or more rebellious, it just has become increasingly difficult to attract their attention, due to the thousands of stimuli and opportunities they need to process each day. We see a lot of kids that are of good will, but they are dropping out because of a lack of attention from their parents and their teachers.

Relationships between friends, partners, parents and children can only be nurtured through mutual attention. Attention is love and love is attention. But attention requires time and energy, so we have to get our priorities right! With this blog, I once again show I’m good in theory. Practice in family life however proves that “we” usually fail towards the ones we love most. It is rare that one regrets not having answered a remark from a remote Facebook friend. After answering a thousand remarks from remote Facebook friends however, we may regret not having paid attention to our partner, our children or our parents. And finally, it can even happen that we don’t pay enough attention to ourselves.

A special kind of paying attention is attentiveness, a very useful virtue in social life. I also refer to my blog: You are your Time

Picture: zijkant Beursgebouw Brussel ©Wim Lahaye

Tuesday 14 May 2019

European Young Engineers


European Young Engineers is an association of young engineers associations of different European countries. It is based on a rotation system: every six month one member organisation or member state organises a meeting for European Young Engineers in its home country. The meetings usually consist of professional workshops, company visits, cultural excursions and social happenings. In this way, European Young Engineers get to know each other, and they learn about other countries' companies, technical innovation areas and cultural cities. EYE meetings can be lots of fun but they are also rather demanding on the organisers. Last weekend, I had the honour and the pleasure to speak at the EYE conference in Eindhoven (a great place to be for engineers!).

I was happy to be among the founding members when the Dutch Young Engineers took the initiative to meet the Flemish Young Engineers in Antwerp 25 years ago. Looking back in time, one can identify a number of things that changed since then. EYE was founded only five years after the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989. We can’t say this European scar has completely disappeared, but a long way has been gone already. We have an integrated market now, and a common European currency for a number of members states. On the technical level, the world has changed as well. The fax has been replaced by the Internet. We have now mobile phones that can do more than one call on a charged battery, and the mobile phone has become a smartphone. We have also seen the emergence of social media since then.

EYE is really a demonstration of positive forces (dunameis) in Europe. On the one hand, the engineering profession is perhaps the profession where international collaboration is most fertile, especially for young engineers. On the other hand, this collaboration is pleasant and it creates lasting relationships. Europe needs courageous vanguard movements like EYE. I’m so glad this initiative continues and flourishes. We had to do this because it was possible. What you can do, you also have to do. I refer to earlier blogs related to Europe.

Thursday 2 May 2019

Leonardo and his Creation

Today we remember Leonardo da Vinci who died on
2 May 1519, exactly 500 years ago. Leonardo remains the most famous example of a “homo universalis”, a versatile man and a man of creativity and passion. He could pass as the man most recognised in history for having developed his many talents.

Looking at today’s company culture, Leonardo could be a role model. Today’s adage is: follow your dreams and passions, develop yourself! I sometimes call this the Steve Jobs culture. Although I support like most people the idea of self-development, this Steve Jobs culture is based on a contemporary problem and a contemporary misconception. The contemporary problem is that in larger organisations, there are only a few people who can really make free choices of their own (such as Steve Jobs) and the other 99% needs to sweat to realise these nice ideas. Even worse, the biotope of knowledge workers is far from attractive in most cases and that is why all this Steve Jobs nonsense is spreading well on the social media. Larger companies will not support multiple Leonardos, at most a single one who pulls the ropes like Steve Jobs.

The misconception is the idea that creative people are people who are doing what they like. Wrong. Creative people have a clear vision of what they would like to realise and they do everything they can to realise it, including the activities they absolutely detest. In other words, creative people aim at a beautiful result of creativity, not at the creation work itself, which is usually hard. Passion means suffering and passionate people suffer a lot during their creation work; they only enjoy the beauty of the end result. A thing of beauty is a joy forever ... once it is ready. The joy of creation is not doing what you like, it is holding in your hand what you could only imagine for so long. Creativity can’t do without patience and diligence.

I refer to “Believe in Personal Progress” and “Ode to Curiosity” and to my Dutch blog: “Imaginatio”.