LEARNING
We are not done becoming.
Human beings can learn together, and what we learn can expand what becomes possible.
Raphael, The School of Athens, 1509–1511, Vatican Palace, Rome. Raphael imagined human knowledge not as the possession of a single great mind, but as a conversation extending across generations.
I started Love & Work because of a belief I have carried with me for most of my life: human beings have enormous unrealized potential.
We are biological creatures with the remarkable capacity to think, imagine, communicate, cooperate, make things, and learn from one another. Even more remarkably, we can pass what we learn to people we will never meet and generations not yet born. That seems to me to carry a responsibility. If we possess these capacities, then surely part of being human is learning how to use them well.
For a brief and exhilarating moment in the late 1960s and early 1970s, it seemed as though much of the culture was testing those capacities. What else could we learn about ourselves? How differently might we live? Assumptions about race, gender, war, work, sexuality, the environment, authority, and even consciousness itself were suddenly up for grabs.
One of the most consequential questions was how human beings actually develop. Researchers were paying closer attention to how children learn. Educators were questioning the distinction between learning and schooling. Psychologists were asking what conditions allow human capacities to emerge. Around me, people were experimenting with different ways of teaching, working, living, and learning together.
I absorbed a powerful idea from all of this. Curiosity, intelligence, imagination, and the desire to learn aren’t capacities that need to be installed in us. They are already there, ready to develop when given the conditions that allow them to flourish. That possibility has stayed with me ever since.
But our capacity to learn does not guarantee progress. Gloria Steinem had a useful name for part of what happens. She called it “frontlash.” Significant change creates backlash precisely because something has changed. People and institutions whose wealth, authority, status, and sense of control are threatened push back. Gains can be slowed, compromised, and sometimes reversed. But the resistance itself can be evidence that the starting point has moved.
And yet, when we pull the camera back far enough, something important becomes visible. Across many measures of human well-being and freedom, the gains have ultimately been greater than the take-backs.
That does not mean the work is finished. Slavery still exists, but much of humanity has learned to regard as morally indefensible what civilizations once accepted as ordinary. Women have gained rights that remain denied or threatened in many places. We learned how to prevent diseases that once routinely killed children, even as some of that hard-won knowledge is being challenged today. We have brought polluted rivers back to life while continuing to damage the living world on an enormous scale.
Progress is neither complete nor secure. What we learn can be resisted, forgotten, distorted, or deliberately undone. But over generations, knowledge can accumulate. Expectations can change. Gains that were once radical can become ordinary, providing the starting point for the next round of learning.
We are a learning species. That matters enormously right now. We have created technologies powerful enough to threaten our future. We have also created tools capable of expanding access to knowledge, intelligence, and one another on a scale no previous generation could have imagined.
There is nothing inevitable about what happens next. Our opportunity is to keep learning, to share what we learn, and to help others discover that they can learn and contribute, too.
That is why I keep gathering the stories in Love & Work. They are evidence of people learning how to do things differently, and then making what they learn available to the rest of us. My hope is that seeing what others have learned expands our own sense of what is possible—and inspires us to try something, too.
Hope doesn’t require believing that progress is inevitable. But it does require that we recognize that learning is possible, that learning accumulates, and that we can participate in what humanity learns next.
LEARNING, COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE
We inherit what others learned.
Joseph Henrich challenges the idea that humans succeeded because we are exceptionally intelligent individuals. Our advantage is that we learn from one another, inherit knowledge, and build on what others discovered. Learning can be forgotten or resisted, but reversals don’t always return us to where we started. Once another way is demonstrated, a new possibility enters the human repertoire.
BOOK: The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter
LEARNING, COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE
We know how to make a "we."
Humans have an unusual ability to understand that we are doing something together. Michael Tomasello calls it shared intentionality: establishing common goals, coordinating different roles, sharing attention, and adjusting our behavior to help one another succeed. This capacity makes shared knowledge, norms, institutions, and collective action possible.
BOOK: Why We Cooperate
LEARNING, COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE
We can learn how to govern ourselves.
Elinor Ostrom studied communities that successfully managed shared resources without relying solely on markets or governments. While she didn’t find any single recipe, she did see recurring patterns: locally appropriate rules, participation, monitoring, conflict resolution, and growing trust. Her work demonstrates something profoundly hopeful: people can learn how to cooperate, turn that learning into durable institutions, and invent new ways of governing themselves.
LECTURE: Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems
LEARNING, COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE
Maybe the smartest thing about us isn't inside our heads.
Here’s a radical idea: some human intelligence exists not inside individuals, but in the connections among us. Ideas circulate, accumulate, improve, and combine, allowing networks to accomplish what individuals cannot. The implication is enormous: collective intelligence depends on how well knowledge moves. Participation, access, diversity, teaching, communication, and institutions all shape how smart we can become together.
FOLLOW THE THREAD
One liners
ARTICLE: Wikipedia turns 25, having become the world’s largest encyclopedia by letting millions of people build knowledge together.
ARTICLE: Wisconsin researchers found that farmers who were more socially connected were also more likely to put conservation practices to work.
ARTICLE: Scientists and Indigenous knowledge holders are combining ways of knowing to help restore the Great Barrier Reef.
ARTICLE: A new climate-planning method asks communities to imagine their future together; it is already being used in 19 communities.
ARTICLE: Boston residents generated more than 1,200 ideas, developed proposals together, and then decided how $2.2 million of their city’s money should be spent.
ARTICLE: Residents of two Cincinnati neighborhoods learned about climate risk together—and emerged with stronger networks, greater civic agency, and influence on citywide climate planning.
ARTICLE: Nineteen teams of biologists, computational scientists, and developers spent 48 hours combining their expertise to solve problems none of the disciplines could tackle as well alone.
"Progress is people flourishing."
-Ted Gioia
Personal Development
A simple way to improve at something is to imitate someone more skilled than you.
Cate Hall makes a simple observation: humans are mimicry machines. Babies learn this way, absorbing the sounds of native speakers long before they understand grammar, and mastering walking, facial expressions, and social cues through imitation.
ARTICLE: How to Be Instantly Better at Things
Joy
Joy is resistance
Ryan Urie asks how can we be joyful when our country is so divided, the planet is warming out of control, our democracy has been coopted by wealth, and wars are raging across the globe? Because, he says, times have been this bad before, and historically joy is what redeems life’s inevitable struggles.
ESSAY: Finding Joy in Dark Times
Hope
"Hope is dedication to life."
Rev. Indira Grace Huerta writes that "the blatant racism, xenophobia, religious persecution, environmental assaults and political and governmental disregard for life—all life, including the accused, the poor, the marginalized, the elderly, as well as nature and our planet—have taken their toll on my heart and mind."
ESSAY: Hope is a Verb
Libraries
"As more libraries act as community centers for teens, they are meeting needs that schools, among other institutions, are unable to serve."
If you still think libraries are just quiet rooms full of books and shushing, it’s time to look again. Today they offer far more: technology access, museum and park passes, digital media, tools, and a wide range of community programs.
ARTICLE: Why Teens Love to Hang Out at the Library
Improvisation
Embracing vulnerability, making decisive choices, and active listening are learnable skills.
My mind opens a bit every time someone uses the phrase “yes/and” in conversation. The term comes from improv, where a performer accepts what another has introduced (“yes”) and then adds something new (“and”).
ARTICLE: Second City’s Side Hustle: Helping CEOs Improvise
Futures Thinking
"Political violence behaves like other self-organizing natural phenomena—wildfires, earthquakes, or epidemics. "
Complexity science examines how the interacting parts of a system shape the whole in ways that can’t be understood by studying each component in isolation. Since its emergence in the mid-twentieth century, it has been used to understand systems as different as economies, social networks, climate dynamics, supply chains, and public health.
ARTICLE: History as Science: How Complexity Thinking Is Transforming Foresight
Personal Development
"My heart is at peace, peace generated from my faith in interbeing, in impermanence, and in continuation."
Mick McEvoy is the manager and head of the permaculture garden known as the Happy Farm, at Plum Village, the Buddhist monastery founded by Thich Nhat Hanh in France.
ESSAY: The Wisdom of Autumn: The Reality of Interbeing is Unsurpassed.
Futures Thinking
"The only way to relegate yesterday’s news to the dustbin of history is to rebel today by re-imagining tomorrow."
I love Edward de Bono’s reminder that we can enjoy the future. Solarpunk is a transdisciplinary movement—spanning literature, art, and activism—that celebrates the radical hope required to make that possible
ARTICLE: Solarpunk: Radical Hope
Futures Thinking
We don't spend much time imagining all the possibilities the future holds.
She is a science policy expert, journalist, and author working at the crossroads of social progress, environmental change, and science policy. In her 2019 book The Optimist’s Telescope: Thinking Ahead in a Reckless Age, she explores how individuals and societies can overcome shortsightedness to confront long-term challenges like climate change and public health.
TED TALK: The power to think ahead in a reckless age | Bina Venkataraman
Futures Thinking
Books
“If you do not design the future, someone or something else will design it for you.”
Here’s a delightfully radical perspective: we do not need to suffer the future. In fact, since the future exists only as a conceptual exercise in possibility, we have every reason to enjoy it.
BOOK: New Thinking for the New Millennium
Futures Thinking
Solarpunk
How the aesthetic, utopian yet pragmatic movement of Solarpunk reimagines a future without a climate catastrophe
In the early 70s when I was a very idealistic young man, science fiction like Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke, and hopeful sociological observation like The Greening of America, by Charles A. Reich, provided springboards of optimism that allowed me to imagine and believe in a new and different way of being.
Article: What if We Cancel the Apocalypse?
