KNOWLEDGE AT WHARTON
Pico Iyer — essayist, author, travel writer and thinker — has a unique perspective on many things. His physical domain ranges from California (where he lived as a child) and England (where he studied) to Cuba, North Korea and Ethiopia (which he visited) and Japan (where he resides). His mental domain knows no limiting boundaries. In this interview with Wharton associate dean and chief information officer Deirdre Woods and Knowledge@Wharton, Iyer spoke on an unusual topic — the value of silence and stillness amid the rush of business. If we spend too much time in the MTV rhythm, says Iyer, we won’t be able to cultivate the parts of us that need more slowness. Iyer has written several books, including The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama and most recently, The Man Within My Head.
An edited version of the transcript follows:
Knowledge@Wharton: Chronic distractibility seems to have become part of our lives. What do you think are the causes? And what are the consequences for individuals and organizations?
Pico Iyer: The causes are the acceleration of the world, the bombardment of information that comes in on all of us at the moment, increasing with each year, and, ironically, our methods of communication. Somehow, the more ways of connecting and communicating we have, the more inundated we are and the harder it may be for us to communicate deeply. I feel almost as if many of us are on an accelerating roller coaster that none of us quite wanted or asked to get onto. But now we don’t know quite how to get off. My image of the modern world is of teenagers joy-riding in a Porsche at 160 miles an hour around blind curves — which is the excitement of it, but also sometimes the unsettling quality. So the more time-saving gadgets we have in our lives, the less time we have.
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(Thanks to reader)