Dear Friends

This is the 160th edition of Strategy, Soul and Self (you can find all the previous editions here). I decided to have some fun and asked ChatGPT to write an article about all these letters. You can read what it wrote here. There’re a few peculiar errors, but it is interesting to see its perspective. Let me know what you think by commenting here.

/ strategy – “languages are your window on the world”

The Foclóir Farraige, or Sea Dictionary, is a project to record the ‘sea-language’ of Western Ireland – unique words used to describe the life of the sea.

Claudia Geib tells us about it in To Speak of the Sea in Irish.

She notes, “The Irish language reflects a deep relationship between humans and the natural world, a sensibility shared with many Indigenous languages—from those belonging to First Nations of British Columbia, to the Ainu of Japan. Irish largely does not demarcate between the human world and nature, nor between this world and the next”.

Manchán Magan, who leads the Foclóir Farraige project, tells us that a word like borráite, from Carraroe village, describes a rocky offshore reef where kelp grew and gave refuge for fish.

Today it is not used much because the kelp has died off and so there is not much need to reference it. He says, “Contained within that word is the entire ecosystem that was in that area.”

In the early 1970s, Ireland joined the EU, which gave member states equal access to Irish waters driving much of the Irish fishing industry out of business and with it the language that describes it.

Brenda Ní Shúilleabháin, a history lecturer at the University of Limerick, says, “Languages are your window on the world”. The disappearance of West Ireland’s sea language reflects the decline of fishing and the livelihoods and lifestyles associated with it.

It is an insight that we can all use.

What are the phrases that we hear in our businesses? Do they describe what we’re hoping to achieve?

What words used to be in our business that are no longer there, or are used less frequently? What does that tell us about what is happening beneath the surface?

Words, and their decline, speak powerfully to the reality that they reflect. They help express the particularity of what makes your business, or life, a success.

/self – build fluency in your life’s language

We have all asked ourselves “Am I doing what makes me happiest?”

In my work, I’ve come to realise that it is not only what we do, but how we do it and who we do it with that makes a difference.

Marcus Buckingham’s Love and Work: How to Find What You Love, Love What You Do, and Do It for the Rest of Your Life is a manifesto on the importance of finding love in one’s work (and because most of you are in leadership roles, to creating workplaces that enable people to do what they love).

He says that he wrote the book, to help you “build fluency in your own life’s language. Let’s help you learn how to decode its signals to discover the extraordinary powerful truth about you”.

He despairs that so many of us are lost at work.

He says that “at work less than 16% of us are fully engaged” and that “In the worst extremes of always-on, high-stress jobs such as distribution centres, emergency room nursing, and teaching, incidences of PTSD are higher than they are for veterans returning from war zones. Imagine that. We’ve created work conditions that are so blind to the needs of each human being that they wind up experiencing more soul-destroying distress than soldiers who’ve witnesses the killing and harming of other human beings”.

I will return to his book in the near future. For now, I want to leave you with this thought – our ability to express who we are is dependent on how well we understand ourselves. The richer the language we can use about ourselves and our loves, the more possibilities we create for ourselves.

Claudia Geib tells us that the Irish stranach means ‘the murmuring of water rushing from shore’ and that mada doininne, references a particular type of dark cloud lining the horizon warning of bad weather. It literally means ‘hounds of the storm.’

Those words help Irish coastal communities appreciate the richness of their world. Your words can do the same for your life.

Buckingham suggests that you ask yourself these 9 questions, when was the last time…

• You lost track of time?
• You instinctively volunteered for something?
• Someone had to tear you away from what you were doing?
• You felt completely in control of what you were doing?
• You surprised yourself by how well you did?
• You were singled out for praise?
• You were the only person to notice something?
• You found yourself actively looking forward to work?
• You came up with a new way of doing things?
• You wanted the activity never to end?

And then for each one asks yourself, does it matter…

• Who you did it with?
• When you did it?
• Why you did it?
• What the focus or subject matter was?
• How you did it?

/soul – at night all blood is black

To close today, we turn to Senegalese author David Diop’s International Booker Prize-winning At Night All Blood is Black.

Diop plays with what we expect from a novel. It is a slender work that weighs heavy. Author Ali Smith described it as “incantatory and visceral”.

Like those occasional dreams that we can’t escape, the ones that unfold through the night, impervious to our wakings, Diop takes up deeper and deeper into Alfa’s unraveling in the trenches of World War One.

The book opens with Alfa’s childhood friend dying in agony on the battlefield.

Alfa says, “Three times he asked me to finish him off, three times I refused…But I thought of my old father, of my mother, of the inner voice that commands us all, and I couldn’t cut the barbed wire of his suffering. I was not humane with Mademba, my more-than-brother, my childhood friend. I let duty make my choice. I offered him only mistaken thoughts, thoughts commanded by duty, thoughts condoned by a respect for human law, and I was not human.”

He speaks silently with Mademba’s memory saying, “I let you plead with me for reasons that were corrupt, because of thoughts that arrived fully formed, too well dressed to be honest.”

How often do we confront convention that is not humane? How often do we, like Alfa, buckle to expectations and ignore what is needed?

What a powerful way to think about thoughts.  The truth of life is that it is ever-emergent, immensely complex, and often slightly shabby. Beware the fully formed, well-dressed argument, it may well be a lie, or at best, belie complexity. It serves us to be suspicious of solutions in tuxedos.

As the threads of Alfa’s sanity fray, he reflects that “Yes, I understood, God’s truth, that on the battlefield they wanted only fleeting madness. Madmen of rage, madmen of pain, furious madmen, but temporary ones. No continuous madmen. As soon as the fighting ends, we’re to file away our rage, our pain, and our fury. Pain is tolerated, we can bring our pain home on the condition that we keep it to ourselves. But rage and fury cannot be brought back to the trench. Before returning home, we must denude ourselves of rage and fury, we must strip ourselves of it, and if we don’t we are no longer playing the game of war. Madness, after the captain blows the whistle to retreat, is taboo.”

Diop shows that the madness of war cannot be contained. Alfa’s pain eventually consumes even those that care for him. The convention that says the madness of war stays on the battlefield is too well-formed to be honest. At this moment in our world, it is a book we should all read.

With love,

Karl

Karl writes his weekly letter for people who want to have a significant impact, live joyful lives, and build a humane world - subscribe here. Get in touch on LinkedIn or Instagram.