9. A drop in the bucket

I do not pretend that this e-book will change your life forever. What I can say, is that people applying some of these advices during my last 10 years of consultancy started to change their attitudes towards work. We live in a strange era, compared to the overall history of humanity. Society asks us to be productive and to consume at our maximum speed. Hollywood proposes new and old heroes with superhuman power, strength and resistance. Why these models have so much appeal?

Because all these messages confirm the mainstream life model: if you want to accomplish results at work, you should be under stress. This is the Big Lie of modern times – roughly, from the Industrial Revolution. Good work? Be stressed. No! The opposite is true. Every person we consider exceptional – take Albert Einstein, always quoted by time management experts – tells the same story: the most relevant results were obtained by chance, through an error, thanks to serendipity, even without working on them.

In the terms of the ArtP4T, they let the parasympathetic system be present every moment of their life. The point is not looking for the solution of the problem. The point is to let the problem speak by itself, and be ready to listen. I am sure that everybody at least once in their life has the occasion to be in front of something important and wonderful during their journeys into work. But very few are ready to recognize the occasion when it happens.

I know the question in your mind right now: yes, it happened to me too, some years ago. I have been obsessed for the deep structure underlying natural language grammars since my primary school years. Why in maths a solution is right or wrong while in grammar the final judge is the teacher? I think I became a linguist because I was seeking the answer with the same passion of the quest of the Holy Grail. I studied a lot of existing natural grammar formalisms, but none of them completely satisfied me. I took ideas from here and there, but… I almost lost hope, and suddenly I stopped to study any sort of linguistics. I delved into Artificial Intelligence, theory of systemics, cybernetics, artificial languages (in many senses) cognitive sciences and other interesting things sonehow related to Computer Science. Then, suddenly, a day I understood that all these disciplines were correlated with my original quest. I had to decide what topic should my PhD dissertation about and everything seems clear to me. When I was writing my dissertation I realised that the path I was going through was not the best: I had a partial result, very good indeed, but partial. I almost fell desperate but luckily my advisor – one of my best friends now – helped me achieving the result: the PhD itself. Other two years passed, and me and my former advisor decided to reprise those ideas and questions still left open. Eventually we produced a co-authored monography about the topic. That book was not the end of the story. It was the beginning of a journey of discoveries, and we are still working out them nowadays.

This is my story in short, but it is not special. The point is that you should be brave in letting things go this way. It is no shortcut. You should work hard as usual, but before this you should believe in it without any support and even hostility from the environment. Sometimes life does not allow us to follow this line as the main stream of work, but in any case let it breath and you will feel fresh air every day.