In his Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle describes the ‘great-souled man,’ someone of the highest virtue who takes pride in his own worth. We don’t know if he had Socrates in mind as an example of such a person, but he might have, because not only did Aristotle greatly admire Socrates, but Socrates’s two principal biographers, Plato and Xenophon, describe him in…
If you visit Portland, Maine, you may come upon the Portland Observatory. Built in 1809 by captain-turned-entrepreneur Lemuel Moody, the tower served local merchants, whose ships, because of the geographic layout of Portland Harbor, could not be seen until very close to shore. By using the services of Captain Moody’s Observatory, however, which cost $5,000 to build, was 86-feet tall,…
Most of us hope that what we produce is appreciated, valued, loved by those for whom we produce it. Marketers describe this goal as that of delighting customers. In the process of delighting others, however, can we not also experience pride, pleasure, self-confidence, and self-efficacy from what we produced, because we too see it as great and valuable? That is,…
“The prosperity of a people is proportionate to the number of hands and minds usefully employed,” Samuel Johnson wrote, naming a principle for the ages, at a time when Industry was still becoming its own Age. The principle? That Production is the great cooperative endeavor. From our primitive days of isolated, self-sufficient farming, with single families laboring virtually on their…
As Aristotle taught us, all human knowledge begins with sense perception ― what we see, hear, smell, taste, and touch ― from which we reason our way to everything we know. At the same time, our senses are quite limited, thereby limiting the potential of our knowledge. Enter production. By producing goods and services, we increase the power of our…
Successful production is so complex an endeavor that it’s easy to forget some of the steps. For example, saving. As economists say: Saving leads to Investment leads to Production leads to Consumption ― Consumption being the end goal and purpose of Production. Absent funds to buy equipment and pay employees, before anything yet exists to sell for revenue, there can…
Dr. Myron Rolle is a former National Football League player who is now a neurosurgery resident at the prestigious Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. He has been profiled several times, both for performing surgery on COVID-19 patients and for his unusual background. Certainly he seems a highly productive person ― twice over. Not only has he reached the heights in…
To explore another atypical example of production, consider David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian, winners of the 2021 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. According to the Academy’s announcement, Julius won for identifying a sensor in human skin that responds to heat, and Patapoutian won for identifying sensors in the skin and internal organs that respond to mechanical stimuli. Because of…
(This is a re-post of one of the first posts on this blog, on its three year anniversary.) Children’s Television Pioneer Fred Rogers once said: “Imagining something may be the first step in making it happen, but it takes the real time and real efforts of real people to learn things, make things, turn thoughts into deeds or visions into…
What makes life enjoyable? Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi offers an intriguing answer: flow. As he puts it, “When we choose a goal and invest ourselves in it to the limits of our concentration, whatever we do will be enjoyable.” For him, such “flow activities” provide opportunities to exercise control over challenging situations by consciously directing our psychic energy, rather than be…