Brain Power

When I was doing leadership development for supervisors at what was then Amoco, my favorite assignment was facilitating a weeklong class.  It started on Sunday night with a reception after which we kicked off the program with a 10 minute video called Brain Power.  The narrator was British-American actor John Houseman and the scene was a classroom similar to the one he oversaw in The Paper Chase. At the main point in this training film he looked at the camera and said, “You get paid to think, not just to do.”  That sentence triggered a lot of post-film discussion.

What company today would send an employee to a week of soft skill training, let alone admit that they valued thinking along with doing?  It is rare for any of us – in or out of the workplace – to put on our ‘to-do’ list a line item that says ‘think.’  We’ve become a people, a society, a world focused on action, actions that evolve from the various roles we play.  We’ve allowed those actions and those roles to become the definition of who we are, both as individuals and as a culture.  In doing so, we’ve lost something critical not just for civilization but for each of us. 

This topic came to the forefront as I listened to the nativity story, particularly one verse in Luke.  It’s the part where Mary, who must have been overwhelmed not just by giving birth for the first time but by visits from angels, shepherds, and foreigners, “pondered it all in her heart.”  I’ve always appreciated that portion.  These weekly outpourings are evidence that I, too, like to muse, to reflect, to ponder.

Just today I ran across these lines, “The world’s frivolities have robbed me of the time that I was given for reflecting upon God.”  Michelangelo wrote this at the end of his life.  Now I don’t know if he was lying on his deathbed, if his hands were arthritic and unable to control a brush stroke, or even if he personally penned or dictated those words, but this is quite a statement from a man whose lifetime of work has lasted for centuries and brought joy to countless people. 

Perhaps it is not God you would choose to reflect on.  Maybe you would like to ponder how, in all of our ‘to-doing’ we’ve lost ourselves.  We’ve allowed what we do to define who we are.  We all need some brain power time to reconnect with our true selves so that our contributions to society, to family, to friends, and yes, even to work, reflect our uniqueness.  What we do may not linger for hundreds of years, but our legacy that represents who we are can be just as powerful if we put some thought behind it.

Marilyn