Legacy is much talked about in both personal development and IT circles — two communities I frequent. So, when I stumbled across the legacy of the QWERTY keyboard in a Paulo Coelho book as an analogy for the way some people live their lives I had to smile. Legacy is not the only theme relevant to personal development that Coelho explores through this work though: conformity versus madness and the value of truth are given due consideration too. This intensely moving and uplifting book is a tight, poetic song of life. Its central message speaks to the head, the heart and the soul and is one worth absorbing in today’s environment.

“Do not decide to die. Seize the day.”

***

Had you, like me, thought that the QWERTY keyboard was the result of meticulous human planning and decision making; an arrangement of the sounds of the alphabet in such a way as to make typing as fast as possible? Had you, like me, assumed that in the same way our children now learn phonics to allow them to build sounds and words quickly and get quick wins, so had the keyboard been developed?

In truth, the QWERTY keyboard was designed to slow typing down! Previous models led to the keys jamming easily when used at speed, so to solve this problem some bright spark (one James Densmore actually, a business associate of Christopher Latham Sholes and his colleagues, Carlos Glidden and Samuel Soulé, who invented the first practical typewriting machine in 1866) suggested splitting up keys for letters commonly used together to slow down typing.

“Slowing you down.” Not quite the legacy today’s innovators aim for (except perhaps for Carl Honore) although sometimes slowing down in the short term can lead to speeding up in the longer term.

Legacy, and the need to slow down in order to speed up are just two sub themes explored by Coelho in this novel which follows the story of the beautiful, young, clever and talented Veronika, who, in spite of these attributes, a steady stream of boyfriends and a loving family, decides to die. Having taken what she had believed was a fatal dose of sleeping tablets, Veronika awakes to find herself in Villette, the “famous and much-feared lunatic asylum” of her native and little known country, Slovenia. Being told that she has damaged her heart irreparably and has just a few days to live, Veronika finds herself playing a weird yet wonderful waiting game where she feels that she is in, but not of, this world.

Veronika does not die of course, for it is not true; she has not done irreparable damage to her heart. By telling her this is so though, the eminent psychiatrist Dr Ivor is able to further his research on “vitriol”, a hormone which he believes is released when people are continuously confronted with fear to leave a taste of bitterness, a taste which if untreated, can go on to cause madness.

Coelho’s question is not new (”who or what is mad?”). Neither is his answer, if you wish to interpret the course of the story as an answer (”either none of us or all of us”). What is new is the depth and warmth which is brought to the work via his, frankly, chilling responses. Light and shade, pitch and pace, he uses them all.

“Everyone has an unusual story to tell” is the starting-point of the new treatment initiated at Villette by the enigmatic Dr Igor. Through telling a story, known to be untrue, of the destiny of this new young arrival in his care, not only does he allow her to see as if for the first time, he also allows the other patients and carers in this “neighbourhood” to view things differently too (enter another theme: truthfulness and its real value).

“Everyone has a story to tell,” it is true. It’s the way that Coelho tells them though which catalyses changes within both his characters and his readers. Forced to understand that every second of existence is a choice, Veronika is moved to perform in ways she had never before dared, she finds the courage to experience what life could have offered her, only to learn that it still can. In today’s environment it is more important than ever to remember not to decide to die. It’s far better to “seize the day”.

This week I have been mostly reading Jo’s blog.

Actually, this year I have mostly been reading Jo’s blog. In fact I blame Jo for my inability to stay on my intended path of posting one review a week about something I have read relevant to positive psychology or story telling. Why so? Because, in my time challenged life, stumbling across blogs which regularly send me on two hour detours around the blogosphere, making me lose all sense of time and place whilst feeding my sense of purpose, is a mixed blessing.

Let me take you back to the beginning of my Jo Journey. Goddamn it, she reviewed Paulo Coelho’s novel The Witch of Portobello, the next book on my reading list. Still, I guess she saved me the job of doing it here and my messages would have been pretty much the same as Jo’s.

From there I wandered aimlessly (or perhaps I flowed purposefully?) through her content. I will not share my path from this point (‘cos it’s my path - go find your own). I will however tell you what I found out about her. Then you can decide whether you dare risk joining the flow.

Jo is an HR professional whose overall goal is to deliver workplaces that she would want to work in.  Her vision is of a world where people can be excited by work whilst delivering goods and services value consistent with the standard of living they desire. Her mission is to help people use social media to make these workplaces.  She uses Flowing Motion to help her think ahead, whilst working alongside organisations such as Social Media Mafia to facilitate all this.

All this and she writes fluently, fluidly and ferociously. I have only one request:

Can you tone down the relevance please Jo? Either that or write something about how to bend the space time continuum so I can keep up.

That’s all. Until next week anyway …

Yes I know. This is meant to be a blog about corporate story telling. Why, oh why am I telling you about a novel written by the daughter of a Chilean diplomat whose life path was deeply influenced by the military coup that brought Pinochet to power?

It’s simple. No one tells stories, or understands the impact that story telling makes on people and society, quite like Isabel Allende (apart from Gabriel Garcia Marquez, William Shakespeare and the Monty Python team, perhaps…).

Don’t believe me? Listen to her speak about Tales of Passion at a TED Conference last year (be warned though: it’s a highly flammable concoction of comedy, tragedy, passion and truth).

So what can the corporate world learn from Allende’s unique brand of Magical Realism? So much, I could write a thesis on it. I shall not though. Instead, I shall simply quote a short passage from the book in which the heroine of the novel, Eva Luna, uses her great gift for story telling to help the hero recreate his past, bit by bit.

“What happened to Katharina?”

“She died a sad death, alone in a hospital.”

“Alright, she died, but not the way you say. Let’s find a happy ending for her. It was Sunday, the first sunny day of the season. Katharina felt very good when she woke up, and the nurse put her in a canvass chair on the terrace, her legs wrapped in a blanket. Your sister sat looking at the birds beginning to build nests across the eaves, the budding tree branches. She was warm and safe, the way she was when she slept in your arms beneath the kitchen table - in fact, she was dreaming of you at that very moment. She had no real memory, but her instinct retained intact the warmth you gave her, and every time she felt happy, she whispered your name. She was doing just that - happily saying your name - when, without her knowing, her spirit drifted away.

Your mother arrived a little later to visit her, as she did every Sunday, and found her motionless, but smiling. She closed her eyes, kissed her forehead, and bought a bride’s coffin, where she lay wrapped in the white mantle.”

In the current climate, many businesses could benefit from telling their stories in more compelling ways, from finding happy endings. As Jim Loehr explains in The Power of Story, the way we tell stories about ourselves to ourselves impacts our business and personal lives. “We are our stories,” he teaches us.

Isabel teaches us:

“What is truer than the truth?

The story.”

So, what’s your story?

Written by a survivor of a Nazi concentration camp, Man’s Search For Meaning is one of those books that everyone should find time to read. Unless of course you already ‘get it’, it is very likely to change the way you think. It is very likely to help you understand that happiness is a choice — or as Dr Frankl puts it, that:

“Man is not free from his conditions, but he is free to take a stand towards his conditions.”

In this book, Dr Frankl describes his harrowing journey through the Nazi concentration camps. People’s survival depended on many factors. He found one common thread though. He found that many survivors had something to live for beyond the immediate terror. They had a book to write, a relationship to rebuild or a dream to pursue. People who saw a purpose to their lives had an increased will to live. These were the people who survived.

Dr Frankl describes how, as a long time prisoner in a concentration camp, he found himself stripped to naked existence. His father, his mother, his brother, his wife and many friends died in the camps or the gas chambers. Still, with every possession lost, every value destroyed, cold, hungry and living in permanent expectation of further brutality, he found meaning enough to make his life worth preserving.

Everybody needs to see meaning in their life. This book shows that it is possible to find meaning, no matter how desperate the circumstances.

Frankl’s ideas had a profound effect. People on workshops in many walks of life, for example, are often invited to define their purpose. They can then use this as an inner compass when facing key decisions in life. There are, of course, many ways to define this compass. My friend Mike Pegg describes some of these in this article.

Jim Loehr’s The Power of Story reveals how the the way we tell stories about ourselves to ourselves impacts our business and personal lives. “Your story is your life,” he announces before showing you how to rewrite your stories and transform your life.

Loehr claims the three rules of good storytelling are founded on these three questions:

1. Will this story take me to where I want to go in life (while at the same time remaining true to my deepest values and beliefs)?
2. Does this story reflect the truth as much as possible?
3. Does this story stimulate me to take action?

I concur…