Category: Wisdom@Living

When Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016, he didn’t acknowledge it for weeks. No statement, no interviews. He did not attend the awards ceremony. One can assume that he couldn’t care less about the world’s most prestigious prize. Grigori Perelman is considered the greatest living mathematician. In 2002 he solved one of the seven mathematical “Millennium Problems.” He was selected for the Fields Medal, a Nobel Prize for mathematics—which he declined. Nobel Prize, Oscar…Facebook likes… The need for validation is coded into us through evolutionary biology – to retain or gain status in the tribe. 

West Germany and Japan endured widespread devastation during World War II. Yet, in the years after the war, both countries experienced miraculous economic growth that sustained over decades and shaped their new position in the world. In his book “The Rise and Decline of Nations,” Mancur Olson writes that both countries drove exponential growth primarily because their old ideologies and beliefs had been disrupted. That disruption opened space for something fresh and new. The pandemic has been a force of disruption. There has been disruption outside and inside. We have been forced to reevaluate aspects of our lives, work, relationships… As we sketch the