An advisor once told me: “Life can be pretty dull sometimes.”

I did not appreciate the perspective.

Normally, I like to think my life is pretty exciting. I live in the city of my dreams. I have a job that brings me great satisfaction, loved ones close to me, and hobbies that fuel me creatively. I’ve traveled the world and leaned into my growth areas. I’ve taken to heart the Helen Keller quote: “Life is a daring adventure or nothing at all.”

My life is not dull.

But his words stuck with me for several days afterwards… a sure sign, I knew, that they were right in some important way that I couldn’t see. So after a few days of avoidance, I gave the thought its full due:

“Life can be pretty dull sometimes… is that true?” (I channeled my inner Byron Katie.)

The answers hit me immediately. Well, yes, in business, of course it’s true. The Lean Startup community has pointed out convincingly that the difference between a successful venture and a failed one is the willingness to do painstaking, intellectually honest, data-driven work. Michael Gerber in The E-Myth Revisted describes how many small business owners throw their heart and soul into service delivery, while ignoring the more challenging aspects of their business. Getting to Carnegie Hall—or the equivalent in any field—requires at least 10,000 hours of practice. Many people find long-term financial planning enormously dull until it’s quite late.

First Lesson: If you’re not actively doing things you find dull, you might be avoiding your real work.

There’s a second lesson. If you strip away your story, your accomplishments, your setting, your goals, your cultivated community, your online persona: who are you? Who are you when you are alone with yourself… with the messy, unfinished you that Yeats called the “rag and bone shop of the heart”?

Many people find this more terrifying than they’d like to admit. So they fill their lives with things and experiences. Never able to be fully present with themselves, they end up always lonely.

It’s a shame, because the emptiness most people feel behind their provisional, social self can be a source of enormous creativity. The actress Thandie Newton describes this eloquently in a recent TED video: “Let’s not be freaked out by our bountiful nothingness.”

Madeline Levine also touches on this topic in The Price of Privilege, exploring how children of affluent, overly involved parents are increasingly the most at risk of psychological and emotional maladjustment. She writes of one teenager:

“Allison’s whole life had been defined by well-meaning parents, relatives, and teachers, robbing Allison of the opportunity to think about what she wanted for herself… She stormed out of therapy one day, declaring the whole endeavor ‘boring.’ What was really boring to Allison was Allison herself. She had evaded growing into a complex, robust, conflicted, normal adolescent.”

The Second Lesson is to know yourself, deeply—it’s never too late. For most people, that looks like some kind of regular meditation practice or other deep check-in… a place where you can witness and be present for what arises for its own sake. In our go-go-go, entertainment-on-demand culture, that may seem dull, challenging, or scary, but it pays enormous dividends.

In the play Our Town, the Stage Manager says at the end that perhaps only “poets and saints” realize their lives as they live them. But that richness of experience is actually available to all of us.

We just need to first embrace the dull.

A renaissance is a time of collapse and renewal—though when we’re living through one day-to-day, the collapses might be easier to perceive.

The years 2000-2001 saw some particularly powerful images: the turning of the century clock, the fall of the World Trade Center, the slow-motion crash of the stock market as the dot-com bubble burst. And there have been other collapses since, including an escalating series of environmental disasters and the debt-driven meltdown of the Great Recession.

But the flickers of renewal are just as real, and the world we are re-making together is in some ways more energizing and promising than any we’ve ever seen.

Watching the world wake up

It’s been roughly half a millenium since the last Renaissance, which we commonly associate with a rapid evolution in science, the arts, and social organization. During this time, a set of ideas and institutions emerged in Europe that most historians agree were novel and discontinuous. In his masterwork From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, Jacques Barzun describes some of these new governing principles as individualism, self-consciousness, separatism, reductivism, and secularism. As the second half of Barzun’s title implies, these ideas are now all in decline.

As the forward motion of the Renaissance dissipates, over the last century a new set of ideas has been gathering strength. Commenting on several merging trends, David Rock and Linda J. Page write:

“Physics has added its weight to the two related trends of postmodernism and globalization in bringing about a greater acceptance of systemic principles in the human sciences… Globalization has introduced Eastern philosophy to Westerners steeped in individualism. Systems theory stresses how people are connected to one another and how their interactions relate to change. And quantum mechanics provides a scientific basis for the importance of human choice and activity.” (Coaching with the Brain in Mind: Foundations for Practice)

The 21st century is, to an extent, when the the earned learning of the 20th century will blossom and pay off.

The co-evolving environment

Our predicament with regards to ecological systems is perhaps the biggest idea that we individually and globally have yet to metabolize. That’s why I particularly appreciate The Transition Timeline by Shaun Chamberlin.The book lays out in a concise, relatable way the conservative consensus of the global scientific community about climate change, and tells four stories of how we collectively might respond. Three of these scenarios are doomsday, and only one is hopeful, but the major themes are consistent across all four: inter-dependence, re-localization, de-industrialization, and imagination. We know where the puck is heading—our context for taking personal action is the same no matter what heads of government or business do.

Technology of course is also an integral part of our environment. Despite its ills, Kevin Kelly is compellingly optimistic about technology’s ability to expand opportunity. Like our natural systems, technology will continue to co-evolve with us—it may have its own “wants” and energies, but it is part of who we will be.

Our renaissance

There is more than one way to look at any time period. Douglas Ruskhkoff in Life Inc. criticizes the original Renaissance, despite its signature accomplishments, as being a major step back in community happiness and well-being. Rushkoff’s evidence is interesting, and he’s not alone in his assessment—a reminder that what constitutes a collapse versus a renewal depends largely on one’s point of view.

But a positive vision can be helpful, as is a fresh start. I find it promising that the decay of old systems, the energy of human understanding and ingenuity, and the constraints of our ecological and technological systems are all leading us to the same place at the same time: a subtler, more connected world, where individual actions matter.

At a recent Next Us event, Chris Carlsson called history “a collaborative act in the present.”

The future will be created by all of us.

Bruce Sterling’s The Caryatids is one of the most delightful and educational near-future sci-fi novels to come out in the past few years, sharing company with Rainbows End, Makers, Little Brother, Daemon, and World Made by Hand. Set in 2065, it’s essentially the fictional version of Sterling’s earlier and excellent Tomorrow Now, where all the forecasts of that earlier book come to pass and hybridize. It’s dizzying and smart. And, although I often recommend it for its business relevance, it’s also a cracking good read.

The Next Us hosted our first informal gathering on November 9 at the fabric8 gallery in San Francisco. The theme of the event was “transformation and resilience” with a range of speakers and participants all working on positive social change across industries, sectors, and levels of scale.

Thank you to the many friends, clients, and collaborators who were able to make it to this first event and for the healthy conversations that followed. We look forward to more in 2011!

Mark Gibson:

Thomas Kriese:

Andrea Saveri:

Dan Ancona:

Natalie Linden: