When Do the Old Rules Still Apply (in Life, Love, and Publishing)?
I’m a sucker for the quotations on Starbucks cups, what they call “The Way I See It”—which sadly will be no more until the holiday season ends (they’ve switched to…
I'm a sucker for the quotations on Starbucks cups, what they call "The
Way I See It"—which
sadly will be no more until the holiday season ends (they've switched
to the festive red cups now).
Tom Brokaw (The Way I See It #130) was featured on my recent latte:
It
will do us little good to wire the world if we short-circuit our souls.
… This transformational new technology must be an extension of our
hearts as well as of our minds.
In a recent HR training session
at F+W, I watched a video called "Shift Happens," available here on
YouTube. It emphasizes how much has changed due to technology, globalization, increased access to information. The question posed afterwards was: What do you take away from this?
The
first thing I thought of was the Tom Brokaw quote. The more information
we have to deal with, and the less we comprehend, the more we
have to rely on what is human about us. And our actions still have the same causes: chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reason, passion, and desire (Aristotle).
Jane Friedman is a full-time entrepreneur (since 2014) and has 20 years of experience in the publishing industry. She is the co-founder of The Hot Sheet, the essential publishing industry newsletter for authors, and is the former publisher of Writer’s Digest. In addition to being a columnist with Publishers Weekly and a professor with The Great Courses, Jane maintains an award-winning blog for writers at JaneFriedman.com. Jane’s newest book is The Business of Being a Writer (University of Chicago Press, 2018).