The Power of Wonder: The Extraordinary Emotion That Will Change the Way You Live, Learn, and Lead - Hardcover

Parker, Monica C.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593419367 ISBN 13: 9780593419366

Verlag: TarcherPerigee, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

Wall Street Journal bestseller

An eye-opening journey through the magical, yet surprisingly little-understood, human emotion that is wonder.

From the first tickle of curiosity to an unexpected shift in how we perceive the world, there isn’t a person who hasn’t experienced wonder, and yet the why and how of this profoundly beneficial emotion is only just beginning to be scientifically examined. This inspiring book from thought leader Monica Parker explores the power of wonder to transform the way we learn, develop new ideas, drive social change, and ultimately become better humans. 

The Power of Wonder takes readers on a multidisciplinary journey through psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, literature, and business to share some of the surprising secrets behind the mechanics of wonder and guides readers in bringing more of it into their lives. From art and architecture, to love and sex, to sleep and psychedelics, you will learn about the elements and elicitors of wonder, and how it can transform our bodies and brains. Whether it’s taking a daily “wonder walk” or discovering a new absorbing intellectual pursuit, this book shows us how to become more wonderprone and reconnect with a reverence for the world and all the magic in it.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

A world-renowned speaker, writer, and authority on the future of work, Monica Parker has spent decades helping people discover how to lead and live wonderfully. The founder of global human analytics and change consultancy HATCH, whose clients include blue-chip companies such as LinkedIn, Google, Prudential, and LEGO, Parker challenges corporate systems to advocate for more meaningful work lives. In addition to her extensive advocacy work, she has been an opera singer, a museum exhibition designer, and a homicide investigator defending death-row inmates. A lover of the arts, literature, and Mexican food, Parker and her family split their time between Atlanta, London, and Nice. Her wonderbringers include travel, fellowship with friends, and Trey Anastasio’s guitar.

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This is the story of a very unlikely friendship.

Born into a family of intellectual elites in the mid-nineteenth century, William James was the first person to teach a university psychology course in America, joking that the first psychology course he attended was the one he taught. Now considered the father of American psychology, James spent twelve years penning his twelve-hundred-page masterwork, The Principles of Psychology, and his writings are foundational to the field. Young William's life was a peripatetic one. His father believed he and his siblings (including authors Alice and Henry) would benefit from a global education, so he moved the family from the United States to Europe and back again several times, with James having lived in eighteen different homes (and even more if including hotels) before age sixteen. James begrudgingly attended Harvard University Medical School (he wanted to be a painter), but in the end, he discovered he was interested in the inner workings of the mind and soul, not the body. A contemporary of great thinkers like his godfather Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bertrand Russell, Mark Twain, Horatio Alger, Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, and W. E. B. Du Bois, it was the latter, Du Bois, who introduced James to his young friend.

Helen Adams Keller was born a healthy baby girl in Tuscumbia, Alabama, on June 27, 1880. When Helen was about a year and a half, a fever, perhaps caused by rubella, left her blind and deaf, completely cut off from the world she had known. She would later describe that time in her life as being "at sea in a dense fog." For years following, she descended into a semi-feral state of headstrong chaos until a kindly Alexander Graham Bell took a shine to young Helen and arranged for a recent Perkins Institution for the Blind graduate, Anne Sullivan, to teach her. Sullivan transformed the child's life (Helen referred to the day she met Sullivan as "her soul's birthday"), and their relationship-and Helen's transformation-became lore.

And so it was in Boston, where James and his brilliant radical friend and classmate Du Bois, having taken a short journey from Cambridge to Roxbury, met the then eleven-year-old Keller at the Perkins Institution for the Blind. James brought her a gift that she was deeply moved by, and years later, she still recalled their first meeting vividly. "When I was a little girl he came to see Miss Sullivan and me at the Perkins Institution for the Blind in South Boston. He brought me a beautiful ostrich feather. 'I thought,' he said, 'you would like the feather, it is soft and light and caressing.' We talked about my sense perceptions and he wove a magic web into his discourse." This poignant and perceptive gift was the beginning of a friendship that would last for the best part of two decades until James's death in 1910.

W. E. B. Du Bois also maintained a friendship with Keller. Despite being deaf, Keller had a voice, and it was one she used in support of several issues of the day, including civil rights. "Perhaps because she was blind to color differences in this world, I became intensely interested in her, and all through my life I have followed her career." Du Bois, who went on to found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, nurtured Keller's activism, and he remarked on her maturation from child to racial equality advocate (and eventual cofounder of the American Civil Liberties Union), "So it was proven, as I knew it would be, that this woman who sits in darkness has a spiritual insight clearer than that of many wide-eyed people who stare uncomprehendingly at this prejudiced world."

Throughout their friendship, James and Keller often spoke of the ideas of perception and consciousness. James felt strongly that many humans develop their external senses at the expense of their internal ones, and he was in awe of Keller's exceptional aptitude in deploying her interior senses. "You have escaped from your prison-house," he wrote in one of his many letters to Keller. "Most of us are still beating about in the dark round the walls of our prison, and we seldom find the secret door of exit." Du Bois, James, and Keller, each in their own way, were exploring the meaning of watching and openness. Of sight and vision. People can be invisible, and people can be seen-sometimes not for who they are but for who they are perceived to be. People can be sighted, wide-eyed, looking but not seeing. And we can be without the physical faculty of sight but, like Keller, blessed with insight. James described this sort of aspirational, open awareness as "the capacity of the soul to be grasped, to have its life-currents absorbed by what is given... the non-thinking level, the level of pure sensorial perception."

What say we open ourselves to the life-current of pure sensorial perception?

The first element: openness

Watching-openness to experience-is the first element of wonder. The watcher is open and present, always mentally seeking, searching, and seeing, examining the familiar with new eyes to find undiscovered details and delights. Openness to experience is a personality trait associated with a number of characteristics like cognitive flexibility, intellectual curiosity, unconventional thinking, and absorption, and researchers have consistently found people high in openness to be naturally energetic, inventive, and compassionate. And because of these characteristics, and the broader nature of the experiences open people typically seek out and encounter, people high in openness frequently live nonconforming, less traditional lives.

By the time we're about twenty years old, a lot of who we are is fairly fixed, as our elemental qualities as humans-our personality traits-have pretty much settled into place. How we react to or approach any given situation will be based on both our traits-our deeply ingrained personality features-and our states-our temporal and variable emotional reactions to a given situation. Attributes like our propensity for happiness, our political views, and the jobs we might like are all heavily influenced by our personality.

Analyzing personality traits en masse began in World War I when the United States military had soldiers fill out personality questionnaires to assess their preparedness for war. Since then, similar questionnaires have steadily grown in popularity, especially in the corporate sphere. Today, there is a proliferation of what are erroneously called "personality tests" on platforms like Facebook and Instagram, where you can find out who your life partner should be based on the length of your middle toe or what your perfect job is based on your Harry Potter house. (Before social networks, these "tests" were all the rage. Those of a certain age may remember the saucy questionnaires in the back of women's magazines that promised to help libertine ladies determine which sex position was right for their personality type.) One would hope it goes without saying that such tests are "for recreational purposes only." Arguably, though, many people also consider the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) or the Enneagram valid personality tests.

While tools like the MBTI can be beneficial as a reference point for discussion and self-awareness, the reality is that for all the years the MBTI has been used, it is still viewed as scientifically dubious. Loosely based on the theories of Jungian psychology, the MBTI has been called "bogus," "corporate astrology," and "shockingly bad" by scientists, but despite this, it is still taken online 1.5 million times a year. There are, however, several validated personality inventories, the most commonly cited being the Five-Factor Model of Personality, or the "Big Five," which comprises the personality traits openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism (also called OCEAN or...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: TarcherPerigee
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2023
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593419367
• ISBN 13: 9780593419366
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 400
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Tarcher; https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/search/tarcher?page=1&q=TARCHER; ; Attn: Andrea T Sheridan 1745 BROADWAY; New York; NY; 10019; USA
• Verantwortliche Person: Penguin Random House Ireland; https://eu-contact.penguin.ie; ; Arnulfstr. 124; München; 80636; Deutschland