Thursday, April 30, 2009

What is fueling collaboration?

It’s an increasingly outdated debate whether one is doing “what one loves to do”, trash this thought. We do jobs, or may be jobs do us in, the bigger harm is done by the thought that we are not doing what we love to do.

Traditionally we were given a choice of “loving what we do” OR “to start doing what we love to do”, any other state of mind was considered bad, for you and for people around you!

Most of the people on this planet cannot afford to do what they love to do, for some it’s the daily bread, for others it’s equated monthly installments. And there are too many mundane things to be done to keep the world spinning.

Early on humans found the way out by introducing hobbies. It works fine, but it lacks variety in intellectual fulfillment. The connected world has started solving this problem bit by bit! Today one can choose the area of interest and contribute at will, start all over again at something else tomorrow.

The good things in life are always relative, there has to be some bad to call the good as good and some good to call yet another better.

People are slicing their time, and some slices are being used to do what one loves to do intellectually. People are increasingly becoming dual.

It’s this duality which is fueling collaboration in this age. An hour of intellectual fulfillment is giving a day long high and we love it. When we collaborate; a little contribution can make us feel part of bigger achievement. Collaboration facilitates the variety of part time intellectual fulfillment which otherwise was not available.

Erma Bombeck once said … “When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left, and could say, "I used everything you gave me.”

I believe more and more people are feeling what Erma felt, and duality is the means for some people to “go get it”.

6 comments:

  1. To do what you like to do and to keep it like that has also to do with how much freedom you have. It's in the men's mind to built a castle but when a small cottage is an option you wont be a slave from your property. Organising your life creates opportunities. Lot of people do not realise that the dream that they are chasing keeps them far away from todays little miracles.

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  2. Yes, it's the critical business competency of this digital age. One certain thing that it won't be by standing upon the shoulders of giants but the ability to cooperate that depends on creating value, and will be.

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  3. Collaboration is often driven by an overarching need of some type. Research & development efforts in many different arenas (science, industrial design, product design, etc.) benefit and progress through unlikely professional alliances, and unpredictable discoveries that are driven by the need to develop a new product, test a hypotheses, or disprove some wacky concept.
    The "duality" you speak of, and the need for intellectual fulfillment is all the more powerful when it happens to drive a breakthrough moment of discovery in your professional / business life.

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  4. i do not believe this 'duality' thing if it means you can not take the time you need to sit and think. freedom has a price, as learning, or identity, always had, and always will. i do not defend that anybody just breaks free for the fun of it, but i do not believe that to spend an hour per day to 'colloborate' will necessarily allow you to do what you have to do. j.verrips@gmail.com

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  5. There are faces to a coin, sides to a cube and dimensions to a being.
    We can try to think about work and life and interest and vacation and ...create slices Or we can let it go . Organising one self - One for sustainance ( work ) on for satisfaction ( Hobby ) on for collaboration work for some. If it works it really works. Other wise do what you like else you will have to like what you do.

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  6. I think steve jobs made a very valid comment during one of his speeches.."keep loving what you do till you do what you love" there is no end to human desires. personally i feel that intellectual fulfillment is a myth and we dont know whether that state of mind exists.

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