While your assessment of motivational speakers is accurate, isn't that essentially their job? One key lesson I've learned is that most problem solutions lie in effectively implementing fundamental principles or Basics. I frequently advise my team to 'go back to basics.' By revisiting the fundamentals, we ensure a strong foundation and minimize the risk of overlooking crucial details.
Moreover, focusing on the basics often leads to more elegant and sustainable solutions. When we strip away unnecessary complexities, we can identify the core issues and develop targeted, efficient approaches. Simpler solutions tend to be more productive due to their easier implementation and reduced risk of errors. And that is exactly what motivational speakers aim to do.
Sorry But I think here I am going in a wrong direction.
Interested to hear what parts of what Sinek mentioned stood out to you the most or you found most applicable to your team. I skimmed through it (for now), but really I'm interested more in your takeaways/applications.
Revisiting and reinforcing basics is important, even if folks dont know or dont have the time for the original form sources.
You find some building blocks on some matter, then you realise just how much folks get distracted by circumstances, contexts and even coincidences. But human emotions lend to that outer layer first....it was first contact and impression and dictates lot of perceptions that make deeper dispassionate delve harder or less interesting + less important to many folks in the end.
The linearity of Newton's F=ma is "good enough" in vast bulk of day to day cases of our localised use. Similar to how I explained to joe recently that we can treat the world as flat in our local reference, whether it actually turns out to be curved in reality.
We've similarly over many 100s and 1000s of years made use of discretization as this was much more readily harnessed and tangible to us compared to the continuous.
Putting aside the RGB (well ROYGBIV, though my mom taught it first to me as VIBGYOR) I think I mentioned earlier visually (and putting aside Newton's very consequential development here too.... bridging Descartes+Fermat with Maxwell and Einstein downstream)....with our (arguably 2nd most important sense) ears we segregate a continuous spectrum of sound for the intrinsic reasons we do into an octave and its bands C D E F G A B + C and a few intermediaries based on this (sharps and flats).
I explained these (briefly to friends in various places) one set of building blocks to make an endless number of arpeggios when you have just one instrument (or one range) at hand...but even with this "constraint" ....there are some distinct aesthetics connected with patterned-separation that pop up (chords, progressions keys et al)....connected to some deeper truths (that then take much more time to explore).
Then it is all a matter of what imprints by some chronology and circumstance particular to us in the end....from that "outside" as it first intersected with us from our initial tabula rasa.
It is instructive even with just the constrained form....the guitar I play, the chords and arpeggios that most struck out to me....their earlier sound during the lute era for example and the andalusian cadence of the western ear that was formative for so much.
I told a buddy one time, one of our favourite bands (regarding a song that reminisces about a place growing up) using E C A as its basic progression hits the mark so well by its simplicity even taking the vocals away. But it was the vocal style (copied a few years after) by another band that brought up a court case (a lesser known one compared to some others in music)....the infringement stuff discussed earlier brought this to my mind just now heh. But the 2nd song also elects a similar progression (more conventional - E G A) and aesthetically sounds similar (i.e the basic reason of why E and A sound good) if you have the ear for it. Then the lyrics do their bit to further contrast, separate away and disguise what is more connected in fundamental essence....though even here something of an inverse relation is built up.
You add more sets of instruments (especially that searing sound of bowing a string rather than just plucking it...and the somewhat mellower hybrid a piano does with its string hammering)...and all kind of aspirated instruments too (for whatever ensemble - orchestra you can expand this with)..... you can start to add more complexity and contrast as Bach did taking counterpoint to the new levels and richness he did....so much so that the andalusian cadence got submerged to a substrata (though it has re-appeared+re-invigorated maybe mostly due to American music "back to basics" in its new world context).
i.e its really up to a person's interest to explore the earliest contours or to really grasp finer detail in the long form development of underlying theory and history....in most modern praxis its good enough if they know and can use and have their conceptualisation of building block importance past that.
i.e This linearity + discretization is essentially inbuilt in our perception, non-linear and continuous forms of the same spectrum and essence simply end up being lot harder and more noisy in comparison, at least without time invested into it.
Hence building blocks being important as larger phenomenon.
This connects with some of my earlier replies as to the math side of things..... all the way from why certain archetypes appear in number theory (as to why the building blocks of the smallest integers end up dictating what and where certain things break down in higher dimensional spaces that say algebra and geometry visualise and explore more) and all the way to its connective aggregation in say the pareto principle (80% of outcomes coming from just 20% of the causes).
