Are We Too Impatient to Be Intelligent?
A copywriter, an art director, and an advertising account man are boarding a plane to go to a client presentation. Slightly implausibly, they open the overhead locker and a genie pops out. The genie says, “I’ve been stuck in that bloody overhead locker for 10 years. As a reward, I’ve only got three wishes, but I’ll give you one each.”
“I think I’d like the life and the prose style of Hemingway. I’d like to live that life. I’d like to write that way. I can’t think of anything better.”
“It’s got to be Picasso. Think about it. The locations, the lifespan, the eye, the beauty. I’d like the life of Pablo Picasso.”
In that joke, there’s a kind of analogy for the present day, which is that we’ve sometimes allowed the urgent to drown out the important. The short-term consideration drowns out the long-term consideration. But in the process, rather like that account man, we may also be ruining it for everybody else.
I’ll come to that thought, but I’ll start with something which I always share for a very good reason—I think it might save somebody’s life. The image below shows how extraordinarily subjective our perception of time is.
