21 Letters on Life and Its Challenges

by Charles Handy

  I made a point in my writing career to challenge conventional wisdom as I searched for clues to what the world of work might be like in twenty years’ time. Inevitably I was first ignored, and then scorned and ridiculed, until, years later, they said, ‘Well, that was obvious,’ when some of my fears and ideas proved to be only too real. It was in those times that I remembered Galileo and Copernicus. Take nothing for granted, question everything, doubt the certainty of your superiors but sometimes keep your doubts to yourself until the time is right. I will say more about this in my next letter.

  LETTER 6

  CURIOSITY DOES NOT KILL THE CAT

  In my first job, working for an oil company in South East Asia, I was told to spend my first six months exploring the country and the workings of the company. I started questioning some of the distribution patterns and thought it my duty to suggest how they could be improved. But the operations manager was not my philosophy professor. He did not welcome me thinking for myself. The conversation went like this:

  ‘How long have you been in this country, Handy?’

  ‘Four months, sir.’

  ‘How long has this company been here?’

  ‘Er, forty years, I think.’

  ‘Forty-eight, to be precise. And do you really think that in your four months you can come up with a better system than we can with all those years of experience?’

  ‘No, sir, of course not.’

  That was the end of that bit of creative thinking.

  I took some private satisfaction a few years later when I saw that a new manager had created something similar to what I had recommended, but that was too late for me.

  It happens all the time. Come up with what you think is a great idea and someone is bound to say, ‘If it is that good or that obvious someone would have done it years ago.’ It is never easy or popular to challenge orthodoxy. Heretics used to be burnt at the stake. Nowadays they just get ignored or, worse, dismissed. Entrepreneurs don’t flourish inside organisations, even when their bosses claim to encourage creative thinking. The founders of innovative start-ups shrivel up inside when they sell their business to some big corporation and are obliged, by the terms of the contract, to serve out two or more years as an employee of the purchasing company.

  Bureaucracy may be necessary for efficiency but it stifles imagination and creativity. Don’t go there if you value your independence more than security, as I hope you will.

  Creativity starts with curiosity. We are all born curious. You only have to watch a tiny child trying to make sense of his or her world to know this. But that inborn curiosity can easily be knocked out of you by over-protective parents worried about the health and safety of their little person. It can’t be coincidental that most entrepreneurs are second- or third-born children, when the parents have learnt to be more relaxed. An enterprising person is like a good scientist, always asking questions: What is going on here? Are you sure? Can that be right? Is there another possibility? What is the evidence? Can we trust these data?

  Entrepreneurs have a mix of curiosity and courage; curiosity because they are naturally inquisitive and courage because they put their ideas into practice and see failure as a step to learning; if something does not work it eliminates one possibility that never needs repeating. If you haven’t failed you haven’t gone far enough, is the message they take for themselves. I am told that James Dyson built 5,127 prototypes of a vacuum cleaner before he got it right. Each failure brought him nearer to his goal.

  My own curiosity had been encouraged by my studies in philosophy at university. The course listed the numerous philosophers that we were supposed to study and I thought at first that our task was to learn and absorb their work as a sort of secular Bible. But I was delighted to discover that my tutor was not interested in me reciting their theories but only in helping me to develop my own, using the philosophers of the past as stimulants not authorities. It was the key to my intellectual freedom. Now I had official permission to think for myself, to question anything and everything and only agree if I thought it right. A good education would have given me that permission much earlier. Some, alas, never seem to have received it and go on reciting the rules of others as if they were sacrosanct. They are the unwitting prisoners of other people’s worlds. Philosophy, I now think, is too important to be left to professional philosophers. We should all learn to think like philosophers, starting at primary school.

  Science also starts with curiosity, but unlike religions, or my teachers, it never claims to know for certain. It progresses by assuming that those who went before, who created the current narratives of how the physical world works, were neither right nor wrong, they just were not right enough. The good scientist is always challenging current knowledge, pushing the boundaries, testing hypotheses in the search for a more complete understanding. In everyday life I find it useful to assume that everyone is worth listening to, even if most of what they say is, to your mind, balderdash or unacceptable. They may well be more wrong than right but there is often some right concealed amid the wrong. Even fools may know more that they think they do. David Hume, the Scottish philosopher, suggested that truth came from argument among friends. That is also, in my experience, the best recipe for a good dinner party, although I like to keep the party to four or a maximum of six people, so that everyone has a chance to express their own version of the truth.

  Another thing I learnt was that it was fine to be doubtful, to question convention or the accepted truth. I remember, in my teaching days, being a member of the committee that appointed new professors. One of the candidates was well known for his exciting lectures and for his external consulting work. He was clearly an expert in his field. Why then was there some uncertainty around the table about his promotion to professor? Then someone put his finger on it: ‘The trouble with Richard’, he said, ‘is that he has no decent doubt.’ You cannot be a good academic unless you are always willing to question the accepted wisdom, even to believe that you yourself might be wrong. To question your own beliefs and actions is often the best way of learning.

  When, in my seventies, I wrote a memoir of my life, I discovered that the most interesting bits were my mistakes and what I learnt from them. I wish now that I had made more experiments with my life and more mistakes early on. My moderately interesting life might have been far more interesting and useful if I had. Looking back, my early education disabled me for real life. Curiosity was discouraged, even seen as disruptive in the disciplined classroom. Asking your friend for help was seen as cheating, and mistakes were, of course, a sign of failure. I grew out of it eventually, helped by the study of philosophy that also starts with questions and revels in uncertainty, but the tendency to accept the authority of others without question lingered for many years.

  My wife went to a dozen different schools as she accompanied her army parents around the world. She ended up at a friendly but incompetent school with only two elderly teachers. She left at sixteen without any qualifications and knowing very little about any of the subjects in the curriculum. What she had instead was an unbounded curiosity that has served her well in life. She was prepared to challenge anything and anyone, to question whether something has to be the way it is, or whether it could be done differently. She thought like a good scientist and was often proved right. In many ways she was the ideal life-long learner. For her, every experience was a learning opportunity. But then she was lucky; she never had the answers drilled into her. Towards the end of her life she suddenly decided that she would never cook the same meal twice. ‘Why on earth not?’ I asked her. ‘Because I want to keep trying something new,’ she said. For her, life was an endless learning opportunity.

  As my lecture agent she used to be enraged by conference organisers who often insisted on a time for Q and A (Questions and Answers) after my talk. It was always so boring, she felt, and ruined any mood of excitement that I might have created. Often half of the audience were behind the questioners and could not see who they were; the other
half were in front with no eyes in the back of their heads with the result that the questioners were effectively invisible to the audience. Added to which the questions were only too often just an opportunity for the questioner to give his or her own mini lecture. ‘Why not turn it into a running conversation?’ she said. So she proposed what she called the ‘empty chair’ idea. She asked the organisers to put three chairs on the stage. I would sit in the middle chair and would ask anyone who wanted to talk with me to sit in the one on my left. That left the chair on the right empty, waiting for the next conversationalist to come and sit in it. When they did I would round up my talk with the first person, who would then return to their seat leaving their empty chair ready for the next participant. And so it would go on, a series of short conversations in front of the audience. Everyone loved it; it was like a celebrity programme on the television. Just one example of how her curiosity led her to challenge convention and reinvent tradition.

  Travel is one activity that helps you to think differently, as long as you are curious. One of our friends disagrees. She maintains that travel narrows the mind. I know what she means when I see some tourists who want to travel the world without leaving their own comfortable culture, staying in familiar hotel chains, eating the food they would eat back home, speaking only their own language, looking at the towns and cities they visit through their camera lenses without making any contact with the people living there. They return home with all their prejudices confirmed, relieved and pleased to be living where they do, minds narrowed not enlarged. Your travel, I know, will not be like that, as long as you go prepared to be curious, keen to explore other ways of life in other conditions. We, my wife and I, were sociological tourists. Ruins don’t excite us unless they have major historical importance. It is the people that interest us, how they live, what they value, how their societies work. That is why we always travelled by bus or train and not in taxis, the better to watch people.

  Sometimes the history and the sociology combine. One year we visited what is left of Persepolis, the capital of what was Persia 500 years before Christ. Its ruler, Cyrus the Great, ruled over the world’s largest empire, twenty-seven different countries, and did so for thirty years. We stood there in awe at how he did it when information travelled only on horseback. It was an early and original example of a federal constitution, with some things controlled centrally such as the selection of regional governors or satraps, and others devolved. Cyrus was also a stern enforcer of human rights, spelling them out for all on the Cyrus Cylinder, which survives to this day. He sent the Jewish captives back home to Jerusalem, where he was acclaimed as a messiah, the only non-Jew ever to be so. As we stood there, I could only reflect that his management principles could well be a model for today’s international businesses. That’s what curious travel can do. It can stimulate you to think differently, to provide alternative models for life when you observe how other people live and work. I hope that you will travel with curiosity in your backpack as you walk through life.

  LETTER 7

  HOW CLEVER ARE YOU?

  By now you will probably have had enough of exams. Perhaps you have done well in them and can now consider yourself to be clever. Or perhaps you did not do as well as you or your parents might have liked. Do not despair. There are different ways of being clever, and some are more useful than others in life.

  We have to recognise that not every young person, maybe including you, is academically inclined. Why should we expect everyone to be clever in that way and neglect all the other ways in which you can express your intelligence? Aristotle was the first to point out that there are different ways to be clever. He said that there were three types of intelligence: episteme (intellect), techne (craft) and phronesis (practical wisdom). Few can have all three in equal measure. Howard Gardner, a professor at Harvard, went further. He described a whole range of eight different intelligences, including musical intelligence, emotional intelligence and practical intelligence. You can, he suggested, be a wonderful musician but hopeless at maths, a brilliant cricketer and a dunce in the classroom. Howard Gardner would still call you clever, in your own way. Schools do you a disservice if they concentrate only on the cognitive intelligences. Don’t let them. Real life needs more of the practical intelligences. Perhaps if we called them intelligences it might help to give them more recognition and acceptance in our educational system.

  High academic scores on their own do not always mean that you will do well in life. For a time I was the director of the graduate programme at a leading business school. Every applicant for the programme had to complete an aptitude test as part of their application. This test measured their numerical and comprehension skills. Business schools competed with each other to boast of the passing levels they required from their applicants. In my time there I found little correlation between the scores and the end-of-year results in our examinations and even less correlation with their success or lack of it in their subsequent employment. All the application tests told me was how difficult an individual with a low score would find the academic work of the school. On several occasions I overruled the selection committee’s recommendation based on the test scores, because I liked the applicant’s motivation and personality at interview. It was pleasing in later years to see how much those students achieved in their careers despite struggling with their academic studies. Their determination won through.

  In whatever way you are clever you will still need to deal with the practical problems of life. It is the one great paradox of education that all the really important things you need to learn about life cannot be taught. You can only learn them by endless exploration. How do you learn to get on with strangers? How do you know whom to trust? How do you know how to plan your life? No teacher can teach these very practical things. You could, however, do worse than use Rudyard Kipling as your guide. I have found him very helpful as I encountered the tricky problems of life in the real world beyond the classroom. Rudyard Kipling, who wrote the Just So Stories and that great poem ‘If—’, also wrote a small poem for a young girl he knew:

  I keep six honest serving-men

  (They taught me all I knew);

  Their names are What and Why and When

  And How and Where and Who.

  He was right. These ‘serving-men’ are there to answer the key questions that will face you as you move through life. The answers will be different on each occasion because each time will be different in some respect from what happened before. That is why education is both so difficult and so deceptive. A school or college will claim to be able to prepare you for life but it cannot give you the answers to any of these practical questions without knowing the particular circumstances.

  Let us imagine that you meet someone and are beginning to think that they might be the life partner you would love to have. All of Kipling’s questions now become appropriate. Is he/she really the right one? Why do you want a partner in the first place? And what does it involve? Is this the right time, anyway, to be pairing off? How should you put the question, and where do you plan to live? These are all open-ended questions, the ones to which there is no right answer. It is up to you. Sadly, most couples don’t get around to asking them until they are already coupled up. My wife and I never discussed how our lives might evolve, whether we wanted children or which country we might live in. We were in love and just wanted to be together.

  Or suppose you are thinking of buying a house. You see one you like. But perhaps you should stop and think: Why do you want to buy rather than rent? Is it the right time? Do you want to have to cut back on your spending in order to save for a deposit just when you are having such a good time? Where should it be? How are you going to afford it? Who will you need to help – an estate agent, architect, accountant, mortgage broker, surveyor? How best to choose the right one? All Mr Kipling’s helpers are needed. At the very least they provide a useful checklist.

  The problem is that you will have had no practice in using the list. You may want to go
with your instinct and choose the house you first saw, ignoring the other questions. You might even be right, but Mr Kipling and I would advise you to think twice before deciding in order to let the other helpers have their say. In our marriage, my wife did instinct while I did analysis, running through Mr Kipling’s other questions in my mind. It could make for big arguments between us, at the end of which she might reluctantly admit defeat, only to say, defiantly, ‘But I’m right.’ It often pays to put the decision off until the next day and then test it against all the questions to see if your instinct can stand the test.

  The truth is that neither the school nor anyone else can tell you whether you should pick that person as partner for life or not, buy that house or wait for another. Nor can school tell you what job to take, or how to vote, even if they try to persuade you.

  I have argued in an earlier letter that school and Google are happier dealing with those closed problems, the ones with known answers: How far away is the sun? What is the composition of water? What is the cause of malaria? A school can help you to work out how to get to Borneo but can’t answer the question: Why do you need to go there? What the school should be doing is to help you to use Mr Kipling’s helpers so that you can better deal with the practical questions, ones that will face you every day of your life, starting with: Why should I get out of bed today?

  Schools deal best with the known world. But education can and should do more. Ernst Schumacher, who wrote Small Is Beautiful, the topic of another letter, put it well:

  Our ordinary mind always tries to persuade us that we are nothing but acorns and that our greatest happiness will be to become bigger, fatter, shinier acorns; but that is of interest only to pigs. Our faith gives us knowledge of something much better: that we can become oak trees.