What's the best part of being human?
What's the best part of being human?
Whatever your answer is to that question, I can guarantee it's fully human, both emotionally and physically. Things like feeling goosebumps; feeling love; feeling stomach-churning nervous; finding the balance of fear and excitement when you step out of your comfort zone; feeling warmth; feeling cold; the moment you realize you’re from the same hometown as the person sitting next to you on the plane; kinetic sparks between people who go to pick up the same thing; how you've figured out how to smile with your eyes while wearing a mask.
To take it one layer deeper, what is the best part of being human are our shared values. Sharing an appreciation for things or experiences like creativity or community; respect, courage, bravery.
However, you see or feel being human, I bet there's an aspect of connection - with each other, with experiences, with ourselves.
In a USAToday interview months ago about his (now relatively) new book, The Anthropocene Reviewed (Subtitle: 'Essays on a human-centered planet’), John Green (Kenyon '00) noted that he wrote the book because he wanted to write about the places where his everyday life runs into large forces in contemporary human experience. The best part is that he noted that a year and a half into writing the essays, a bigger force showed up.
"This book is my attempt to pay attention to what I pay attention to," he said. "It's my attempt to see the wonder and the beauty in the world without minimizing or denying the reality of suffering and injustice. I guess what I hope people take away from it is a feeling that being alive, having consciousness, is very strange. It's not always easy. But there is so much wonder and joy to be found in giving the gift of our attention."
(Sidebar: For anyone who needs a refresher, the term 'The Anthropocene' is used to describe the time during which humans have had a substantial impact on planet Earth.)
Green's aha! moment, the most human thing, or the best part of being human, is paying attention. It's not easy, but it is, in fact, one of the most human things we do.
In that case, our roles as writers, marketers, communicators, storytellers, humans in 2021 is to find places, stories, great lines, cultural references, points of connection that makes us feel human again. We learned that hard in 2020. There’s no algorithm for that. It just requires paying attention. The future of business will need it.
At the end of the first chapter - aptly named 'Fully Human' - of the book Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People in Them (HBR, 2020), Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini make the case that bureaucracy - ‘humankind’s most deeply entrenched social technology’ - must die. They then ask: “You were put on this earth to do something significant, heroic even, and what could be more heroic than creating, at long last, organizations that are fully human?”