Serenity Now

With so much information flying at us every day, it's essential for the successful leader to find time to turn inward.

Nighthawks by Edward Hopper, 1942 (public domain - Wikipedia via the Art Institute of Chicago)

“I’m very concerned that our society is much more interested in information than wonder. In noise rather than sound.” — Fred Rogers

I’m fascinated by words.

I enjoy creating turns of phrase (like saying that the corporate legal department is the one that puts the ‘no’ in innovation), listening to those who know how to wield the English language, and the discovery of odd and arcane words.

I came across just such a word last week: ephemerons.

I found it in A Writer’s Life by Gay Talese, in which he wrote about being a newspaper journalist (circa 1960). He said:

“We were ephemerons.”

Even then — nearly sixty years ago — he knew that what was being chronicled for print in The New York Times was here and then gone in the space of a day.

In some ways, that seems like a luxury today, when the life cycle of a tweet is hours or even minutes.

Campaigns, emails to employees, quarterly earnings calls, tweet…