The Power of Adam 2: Rediscovering the Value of Holistic Living in a World Obsessed with Productivity
As a game development producer, my charge as a leader is to facilitate the success of my team.
As a graduate student, my focus is to learn methodologies to make a team as productive and effective as it can be.
But as the semester went on, I realized I was getting plenty of head knowledge, but was still struggling to live out what is expected of a leader as heart knowledge.
Heart Knowledge
Jonathan Edwards wrote about this “knowledge of the heart” in this way:
There is a difference between having a rational judgment that honey is sweet, and having a sense of its sweetness. A man may have the former that knows not how honey tastes, but a man cannot have the latter unless he has an idea of the taste of honey in his mind.
In that same sense, people in leadership positions cannot truly be effective just by executing strategies and following playbooks. A deeper sense of understanding the realities of their team is essential: their work environment, individual sensibilities, wants and desires—everything that makes up what “work” means to them needs to be known.
But today’s society values the results of a team more than its make up; and that is leading us to a path of emotional bankruptcy.
Becoming Adam 2: Avoiding Becoming the Shrewd Animal
“Treat life like a game and you become a cold, calculating creature that slips into a mediocrity. Where you realize there’s a difference between your desired self and your actual self.” — David Brooks
Leaning into Joseph Soloveitchik’s concept written in The Lonely Man of Faith, we see how our society splits its views with two human natures: Adam 1, the man who seeks to maximize productivity from a purely functional standpoint; and Adam 2, the man who seeks not only to do good, but to be good.
Adam 1 is the worldly, external, ambitious side of our nature — built by building on your strengths. Adam 2 is the humble side of our nature — built by fighting your weaknesses.
Modern day America does a very good job prioritizing and teaching us how to grow and build up Adam 1, being innovative, productive, and successful in a world of fierce competition. But we are losing focus on the intrinsic side of our humanity.
It’s sadly reminiscent of Charles Dickens’ Hard Times, where the employees in a factory are referred to as “the Hands”. This language strips the individuals of their humanity — reducing them to the résumé virtues and productivity that each “hand” has to offer. We are living in a world that defines workers merely by what their hands can do. Many of us are clearer on how to build an external career than on how to build inner character.
Instead, we need to start strengthening Adam 2, and begin building out our “eulogy virtues”.
Résumé vs Eulogy Virtues
David Brooks, political and cultural commentator who writes for The New York Times, takes the Two Adam concept and redefines it in the modern age in his book, The Road to Character, as two areas of focus: résumé virtues and eulogy virtues.
Résumé virtues are those which are valued by the contemporary marketplace. Eulogy virtues are aspects of character that people speak of us when we’re not around: honesty, compassion, patience, and more; the things that will be said of ourselves when we’ve passed away.
Intrinsically, we know that people will not mention at our funerals how much money we earned, games we shipped, or high our GamerScore was. What gets mentioned are the characteristics we embodied and how we lived our lives out in respect to others. These eulogy virtues are of greater importance—as they even affect our teams’ capacity for success in the workplace.
Success and Emotional Intelligence
As noted by the famed author of Emotional Intelligence (1995) Daniel Goleman, emotional intelligence (EI) is a higher indicator of success than IQ. Additional studies have shown that “EI of leaders is positively related to the job satisfaction and extra-role behavior of followers”.
And this shouldn’t come as a surprise! Even now in my classes I can see how a muttered “I don’t care any more” from a lead can demoralize a team in a manner of moments. It is much harder to manage negative emotions to instead present a positive environment for all, even in the midst of hardship.
We should first grow ourselves in how we relate to our peers and team members, learning to embody the four basic dimensions of emotional intelligence Daniel Goleman shares:
- Self-Awareness (Emotional Intelligence Ch. 2): identify and understand our own values
- Self-Management (Emotional Intelligence Ch. 3): taking control of our emotions and responses to the world, especially in challenging situations
- Social Awareness (Emotional Intelligence Ch. 4): empathy and understanding of the emotions of others
- Relationship Management (Emotional Intelligence Ch. 5): building positive relationships with others; especially regarding working towards collaborative goals
Looking back at #4, the final and most pertinent part of emotional intelligence for teams, it perfectly aligns with the concept of eulogy virtues. The team isn’t going to care how good you were at using Jira or Excel, but they will care about how you use the skills you have to better those other than yourself.
That is how you build a holistic relationship with your team.
Finding the Value Balance
At the end of the day, we must carefully manage how much value we give to raw skills and knowledge versus the capacity and compassion to utilize them for the benefit of others. By going too far to one side or the other, we either risk becoming unfeeling machines or thoughtless blobs of ‘feel-good’iness.
But there will be times when we find difficulties in the process, yet we shouldn’t give up in the face of growing pains.
As Reinhold Niebuhr, prominent American theologian and public intellectual, wrote in the now famously referenced Serenity Prayer:
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.
May this mantra be a method for us all to realistically tackle our wants and desires while keeping in mind our need to grow our human character.
