Getting back to human
Welcome back to The Snow Report! I’m writing this one from Tokyo, where I have already seen a robot dog. Thanks for supporting, reading, caring, et al!
SOME TIME AGO, I had an epiphany that now sounds so obvious as to be silly when I say it out loud. The epiphany was that everything is teamwork.
I’m on work teams, of course. But even my solo work like writing is the product of collaboration and building off of others’ work.
And also, my family is a team. So is my neighborhood. My city. My country. And really… I’m part of a team called Team Humanity. And so are you. It’s just that I and probably a lot of the rest of us don’t really think of it that way, in part because so much of what we do takes place in our own heads and from our own points of view.
But whatever the case, I’m convinced that the more we remind ourselves that we humans are all on the same team, the more critically we’ll think about the way we treat each other and work together. And the better we’ll get at our own solo stuff too.
To quote futurist Doug Rushkoff:
The simplest way to understand and change our predicament is to recognize that being human is a team sport. We cannot be fully human, alone. Anything that brings us together fosters our humanity. Likewise, anything that separates us makes us less human, and less able to exercise our will.
That’s why I’m excited about a book that’s coming out this week by my pal Dan Schawbel, called Back to Human. It’s about making business and work human again. In other words, being more real in an era that seems more digitized and surreal than ever. I just posted an interview with Dan about his writing process and why the book matters here, if you’d like to check out a sneak peak!
It’s also why I’m hyped about a book that comes out early next year called Team Human, by the above Doug Rushkoff himself. He’s a thinker and futurist whose work you should know. And his podcast, also called Team Human, is a dose of insight that will change the way you think about humans and society.
So let’s remember to be humans. And let’s remind ourselves that part of being human is being human together.
Much love,
Shane