Depth & Flow

The Good Sense of Joseph’s Pharaoh

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Remember when Joseph of the Hebrew Bible was imprisoned in Egypt for a crime he didn’t commit? While languishing in the dungeon, practicing dream interpretation on the unlucky cupbearer and baker, he got news of Pharaoh’s dreams. Because none of the hired magicians and wise men could interpret them, Pharaoh, at the recommendation of his cupbearer, summoned Joseph as a last resort. 

 

Fast forward, with the son of Jacob second in command, Egypt took on the seven-year project of storing grain against the dreams’ predicted seven years of famine. The stockpiling idea was Joseph’s. When food shortages spread, his estranged family traveled hundreds of miles from Canaan to purchase some of that wheat and barley. Not only did Pharaoh’s dreams save countless lives, they enriched the treasury of Egypt.

 

Pharaoh sees the bigger picture

 

God may deserve glory for both the dreams and their interpretation, as Joseph insisted, yet Pharaoh also deserves credit. For one, the ruler wasn’t dismissive of dreams, but received them as divine messages relevant to the flourishing of his kingdom. After all, he was Pharaoh and, by virtue of that ordained office, he was privileged to be first in line for the news — and why not in surprising forms like dreams? Having imagined his high office set beneath the assured stars of a divinely ordered world, he understood that authority existed within a grand spiritual architecture.

 

Pharaoh persists

 

Besides receiving dreams as important messages, Pharaoh deserves credit for yet another reason: he persisted in discovering their meaning. It wasn’t pleasant conducting interview after interview with all those costumed sages who could make nothing of the cows and ears of grain pictured in his dreams. Nor did it look politically endearing to be advised on a matter of state by a prisoner.

 

So why didn’t Pharaoh interpret those dreams of forebodement himself?

 

Symbolic Intelligence

 

He outsourced to Joseph, I submit, because he lacked what Jungian psychologists call symbolic intelligence. As with any type of intelligence, people possess it in differing degrees. Pharaoh demonstrated great administrative savvy when he delegated to Joseph the care of the grain crisis, but he couldn’t interpret his dreams, even stooping to be counseled by a convict.

 

What is symbolic intelligence? It’s the ability to harvest meaning from an image that expresses some aspect of reality present or to come. For instance, when Joseph reads the first of Pharaoh’s two dreams, he interprets the seven lean cows consuming the seven fat cows as a future famine consuming the abundance of seven earlier years. He similarly reads the second dream, in which seven thin ears of grain swallow the seven full ears.

 

Both dreams embed clues as to the what, where, when, and why, from which Joseph draws real-life equivalents. Pharaoh’s distress may also have guided his interpretations.

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Symbolic intelligence is also the ability to create symbols, metaphors, and allegories, as in the arts, and to develop strategic visions. When  raw spiritual or psychological reality is translated into form, the deeper meaning of things is made known. When Joseph proposed stockpiling grain, he was letting his symbolic intelligence build a strategic vision for action.

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Pharaoh’s intellectual humility

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Dreams are rife with symbolic imagery and, given their role in prophecy and revelation throughout the Bible, they might be said to speak one of the languages of God. It takes years to develop the skills and discernment required for dream interpretation. Pharaoh, it may be assumed, was too occupied to make a career of parsing the antics of his sleeping life, and so relied on the spiritual mastery of others.

 

More than for counting his dreams as a source of guidance to be pursued, Pharaoh should be celebrated for his plain good sense. His actions teach us that when you honor your calling, your calling will honor you — and may even reveal hidden knowledge through dreams.

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The Secret of a Fashion Legend

 

 

Holder of hundreds of patents for shoe designs, Salvatore Ferragamo (1898–1960) began his career as a shoemaker at the elfin age of nine. Before then, he spent evenings after school apprenticing himself to the neighborhood shoemaker in Bonito, Italy.

 

His career took a fortunate turn when, at twenty-five years of age, he opened Hollywood Boot Shop. After designing footwear for the movies and the movie stars, he settled in Florence where he opened a boutique and sold to Saks Fifth Avenue. Meanwhile, aiming for both comfort and style, he patented his revolutionary steel arch support and introduced eye-catching styles such as the “cage heel” and the “wedge.”

 

The secret

 

Ferragamo was without doubt creative, responsible, hardworking, resourceful, even taking anatomy courses in Los Angeles to enhance his understanding of the foot. And yet, by his own admission, his secret was his "ear."

 

A master at responding to signals coming through his thoughts, emotions, hands, and the world around him, he knew what he wanted — and hunted it like a prize boar in the Italian hills. But it wasn't determination alone that accounted for his triumphs. He also leaned into the intuition that precedes conscious effort.

 

In the documentary Salvatore: Shoemaker of Dreams, he says:

 

“I have not followed any master. I have not followed any school. Where have I learned all that I know? I had a clear vision that my work had been done before. I have done it — but where? I do not know. But everything that I have done since my boyhood has been work which came back to me. All I have to do while I work is to sit down and recall what I knew about this work — and do it again.”

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Given that his activity is constructive rather than destructive, might his own hands be speaking forth the creativity of God through the Holy Spirit?

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"The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.

Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge" (Psalm 19: 1-2).

 

Inventiveness

 

Even when, in the 1930's, shoemaking materials like leather and steel were scarce, he continued to listen. Believing his shoes “talked” to him like living things, he refused to let shortages get the best of him and experimented with substitutions:

 

● Cellophane from candy and chocolate wrappers

● Fish skin in place of conventional leather

● Cork, which led to his revolutionary wedge heel

● Raffia, straw, and hemp cord, woven into shoe uppers

● Tree bark, including specially treated poplar bark

● Felt, nettle fibers, and fabric scraps

 

Even after the war, he continued his avant-guarde styles. For his famous Invisible Sandal, 1947, he used transparent fishing line. The inspiration came from an employee who had caught a fish using the newly invented nylon.

 

What is creative listening?

 

Creative listening is hearing internal and external signals in ways that serendipitously converge to generate creative insights and ideas. Since creativity binds together both actuality and potentiality, it can reveal what is and illuminate what might be in mysterious ways. When we consider life as Messenger, we become pervious to its messages -- for those who have ears. 

 

Just as Ferragamo knew beforehand how to design a shoe, so we also can produce with prescience.

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The takeaway

 

As Ferragamo's shoemaking suggests, receptivity can yield astonishing outcomes. When the messaging wisdom of our inner person and surroundings is allowed to help direct our plans, when we believe the world is ever talking to us and awaiting our response -- who knows what may happen.

 

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Beyond Empathy:

Leading with Mercy

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With today’s emphasis on empathy in the workplace, it can feel politically incorrect to confront an employee’s wrongdoing, let alone require restitution. Aren’t we supposed to feel for the “offender,” recognize their vulnerability, and let them off the hook?

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But empathy, when unchecked, can eclipse other essentials, like ethical reasoning. Identification with the offender may invite excessive leniency; identification with the injured party may invite excessive punishment. Neither response necessarily serves justice.

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A better way? Feel with empathy. Act with mercy.

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Mercy contributes something empathy alone cannot: it stays anchored to shared agreements and implicit moral standards, and doesn’t flinch at the truth. It considers person and circumstance without erasing the reality of the offense.

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Surprisingly, mercy may be more humane than empathy alone. Rather than reducing a person to their vulnerabilities or offenses, it recognizes their moral agency. Accountability needn’t diminish human dignity; it can affirm it.

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The Stoic philosopher Seneca, in On Clemency, distinguished pity from clemency. Pity responds to suffering; clemency exercises reasoned judgment about what is fair and good. Centuries later, Immanuel Kant connected human dignity to rational moral agency. To respect a person is to take seriously their capacity to make choices and answer for them.

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Mercy is not arbitrary leniency but principled restraint.

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Consider the founder of a national franchise (true story) who terminated his agreement with a franchisee because he kept his restaurant open on a day agreed on to be closed. While the proprietor’s reason was admirable (he hoped to fund his children’s college education), he broke policy. This story not only exposes the second-chance dilemma, but also the founder’s high valuation of trust.

 

What would mercy have required? A warning and an opportunity to restore trust? Or were there circumstances, like the restaurant's geographical distance from headquarters, that would make continued oversight impractical?

 

Sometimes dismissal is necessary to protect others or preserve the integrity of the organization. Even then, the leader can act without humiliation or vindictiveness.

Mercy isn’t the abandonment of justice. It presupposes a judgment about what is deserved and considers whether a consequence can be moderated. Nor does mercy forget those who have been harmed. Their dignity matters, too.

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In all cases, mercy honors both principle and person. It holds fast to the truth of what happened while empathizing with the complexities behind it.

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Delight:

The Unacknowledged Genius

 

 

Spanx founder Sara Blakely endured repeated rejection by manufacturers before finding one willing to produce her invention. James Dyson created 5,126 failed prototypes before his bagless vacuum disrupted a global industry. J.S. Bach's music lay largely in obscurity before Felix Mendelssohn helped to revive it almost a century later. Emily Dickinson published fewer than a dozen poems in her lifetime. Vincent van Gogh sold a handful of paintings.

 

The creativity guru

 

All of these dramatic reversals expose the fundamental limitation in Mihály Csíkszentmihályi's widely accepted definition of creativity. In his book Creativity, he argues that "an idea or action must be both new and valued by the culture."1 

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But how many creative works have been deemed worthless, only to be rescued by a later generation?

And the reverse can also happen. Thomas Hood, once a beloved English Victorian poet, is now largely forgotten, with or without Seamus Heaney's arguments for his poetic achievement.

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Shaped by unstable forces like war, fashion, marketing, and politics, cultural values have always been in flux. What's “valued by the culture” can change dramatically.

If cultural values are too inconsistent to reliably judge creative worth, then how do we arbitrate between cultures with different values?  

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Rather than remove "valued by the culture" from the famous definition, I propose we refine it. After all,  the phrase does acurately describes culture's role as an arbiter of creative recognition, however changeable or immoral its judgments may be.

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Might there be a criterion that resists caprice -- the tribal consensus, the gatekeepers' imprimatur, the advertising ingenuity? Whether we measure the creativity of a business model or a symphony, might there be a truth that keeps cultural values in touch with their universal ambitions? 

 

To the rescue

 

I suggest the answer is “delight” — an unlikely word given its current unpopularity. Now cliché and having reached its lowest recorded frequency around 1980,  "delight" didn't make the list of 27 distinct emotions identified by the 2017 UC Berkeley study.3 

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Why? The study recognizes joy, amusement, aesthetic appreciation, surprise, and satisfaction, but not delight. Are we to understand delight as merely an amalgam of these emotions?

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But like Ursa Major with its constituent stars, delight is experienced as a unified whole. Given the term’s long circulation as an emotion in its own right, delight has developed a gestalt that transforms its multiplicity into something unified and all its own. Delight is no hodgepodge, but a kind of recognition irreducible to its parts.

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The power of charms

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So what makes delight distinctly itself — more than joy, amusement, aesthetic appreciation, surprise, or satisfaction combined?

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The word’s phonetic structure gives us a hint. Unlike most multi-syllable English words which stress the first syllable, delight moves its accent to the final one — de-LIGHT — giving the word an upward energy that shouts vitality. Deliciously, the embedded word “light” suggests illumination, perhaps hinting at delight’s capacity to guide us toward our heart’s desire.

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The value of delight is not just acoustical. Its etymological ancestry leads us to the Latin delectare — to please, allure, or charm. In fact, charms were attempts to enlist unseen powers on behalf of human desire. Through incantations and rituals, amulets and herbs, they expressed hope for health, wealth, protection, fertility, and love. 

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Whatever we make of their supernatural claims, charms disclose the human longing for the desirable to come into being. When seen as appeals to faith in a world that's fundamentally good, they ground us in vital possibility. At their best, they encourage us to pursue what is ours by hope.

 

In this sense, creative effort is also a kind of charm — a gesture toward the unseen made palpable by belief.

In sum, delight possesses an ancestry that leads toward attraction. It supplies a motive force that joy, amusement, aesthetic appreciation, surprise, and satisfaction cannot individually explain. The magic deserves to be named in the mystery of creativity.

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Witnesses to delight as a creative state

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Delight not only sparks creativity; it sustains the creative state. Historian Natalie Davis, for instance, chooses to study only what elicits her "curiosity and delight."4 Biologist E.O. Wilson5 observes that delight in “certain activities and mental operations” ought to be strong enough to survive change of place or fortune.

Astronomer Vera Rubin may hate the grind that precedes discovery, but anticipation pulls her through it. She writes, "What is remembered [is] the delight at stumbling on a solution that makes an unsuspected order visible." 6

 

Remarkably, when Csikszentmihalyi approaches Creativity's conclusion, he reveals his own blind spot. He writes “Creative individuals are childlike in that their curiosity remains fresh even at ninety years of age; they delight in the strange and the unknown. And because there is no end to the unknown, their delight is also endless.” 7

 

Although he and his protégés consistently give primacy to curiosity in discussions of creative traits, here he hints that delight in relation to creativity is the truer spark. 

 

Curiosity may kill the cat, but delight is made for eternity.

 

Toward a richer definition of creativity

 

And so, delight's etymological association with charm suggests something beyond its supposed composite nature: a distinct emotional identity animated by attraction that affirms and enriches life. Charm’s mysterious presence not only unifies the experience of delight, but also adds the longing for what thrives. We are charmed not just because something gives us joy, amusement, aesthetic appreciation, surprise, and satisfaction, but because we feel its life-affirming power. 

 

The delight I mean is not momentary gratification, but an attraction toward creative possibilities whose promise we recognize even before their value has been socially established. It's a kind of intuition.

 

This understanding of delight as charm allows us to refine Csíkszentmihályi's definition of creativity. Instead of creativity being merely "an idea or action that is new and valuable to the culture," I'm inclined to express it as an idea or action that is new, valuable to the culture, and inspires delight.

 

The added phrase further grounds creativity in constructive, flourishing behavior. When delight is added to the formula, Csíkszentmihályi’s “new and valuable to the culture” takes on a rounder meaning. 

 

Just as delight disciplines “new” by challenging the pernicious assumption that newness automatically makes an idea or action good, so delight disciplines “valuable” by resisting social or political whim. Similarly, "curiosity" is purified of its nefarious applications.

 

Adding inspires delight to Csíkszentmihályi’s definition of creativity introduces something missing from his formulation: the power of attraction. Delight helps us recognize creative worth beyond mere novelty, base curiosity, and the quicksilver judgments of culture, drawing us toward what promises to enrich us.

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1 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity, Chapter 2: Where is Creativity?

2 According to the Google Books Ngram Viewer

3 Cowen, A. S. & Keltner, D. (2017). Self‑report captures 27 distinct categories of emotion bridged by continuous gradients. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(38), E7900–E7909

4 Creativity, Chapter 3: The Creative Personality

5 Creativity, Chapter 11: A Naturalist with Steely Ambition

6. Creativity, Chapter 1: Setting the Stage

7 Creativity, Chapter 9: The Creative Personality: Csíkszentmihályi uses "creativity" 64 times but "delight" only 9 times — and it does not appear in his index.

 

Author’s Note: All quotes from figures like Vera Rubin, E.O. Wilson, and Natalie Zemon Davis are cited as they appear in Csíkszentmihályi’s Creativity. Although the book gives the impression that all such insights were gathered through direct interviews, several appear to have been drawn from the subjects’ own published works. I cite them accordingly but encourage readers to consult the original sources where possible.

 

 

Making the Brain Sing

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I spent $10K on performance neuroscience. But what if the best biohack is . . . ?

 

Some cherry-picked. Others chose the full buffet. The school where we studied Performance Neuroscience taught 29 biohacks.

 

PN isn't a scientific discipline, but a training method intended to trigger and sustain flow. Armed with the right biohacks, this natural state of heightened focus was supposed to become reliably accessible. Flow is especially conducive to creative thinking.

 

What is "flow"?

 

A term introduced by the Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1934–2021), flow describes a state of deep absorption in an activity, when skill and challenge are closely matched and action proceeds with unusual ease. Whatever flow's precise neurochemical ensemble, we feel this focused action almost as a music. When flow scatters, we experience disharmony. 

 

While it's true that sleep, recovery, focus, and good nutrition help create conditions for flow, it's also true that the brain sends signals in the moment -- even when the usual preparations fail.

 

The BS

 

Like many people, I’d experienced flow early on — first as a child at play, and later as a musician. Even during 17 years of starting work at first light, I found my way into flow when composing music during lunch breaks. Whatever the demands of my working life, my creative currents hadn't disappeared, even if not yet named.

 

For my own situation, then and now, most of the school's biohacks have proved unnecessary or too effortful to sustain. And some, like the Wim Hof cold plunge, carry risks, although, and I believe him, Tony Robbins swears by its ability to make him "feel like a million bucks." In Performance Neuroscience, individual fit is everything.

 

Even so, it's interesting that artists, crafters, builders, philosophers, and scientists were entering the flow state centuries before anyone designed a course!

 

Recovery & discovery

 

Since completing the $10K program, I've replaced most of those 29 biohacks with the practice of intentionally connecting to my brain as body. The brain is not some abstract, vaporous ghost. It's made of real, divinely created flesh that sends signals in real time.

 

Flow, I've discovered, is best supported by somatic listening. Just as we respond to our emotions, so we can respond to the sensations in our head. I suggest the brain, as a creaturely thinking thing primed to receive divine messages, also makes itself felt.

 

When my brain "hurts," I ask myself:

 

Interruptions?

Fatigue?

Erratic processes?

Rumination?

Digital conundrums?

 

The not BS

 

Once the source of my brain's discomfort is named, I can adjust my actions accordingly. Only when these adjustments become tools for better habits -- like systematizing tasks for efficiency -- do biohacks reveal their value. 

 

When embodied attentiveness comes before technique, technique becomes bespoke.

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The Whisperings behind the Mirror

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Even if your work demonstrates creative thinking, even if colleagues affirm your vision, even if you believe your work expresses the imago Dei -- and yet you doubt yourself -- you may be operating under a sagging self-perception.

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Self-perception acts as a belief system: it's the foundation of your inner architecture and the guiding star of your decisions. Because it writes your narrative behind your back, it's the story you follow without question, like an Atlas road map.

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But how does that narrative get written in the first place?

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Philosophy has perennially defined experience not as an event, but as the interpretation of an event. Taken a step further, the meaning you ascribe to what happens profoundly shapes how you see yourself.

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Research into creative self-efficacy suggests how much belief matters:

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• If you believe you're creative, you're more likely to take the necessary risks.

• If you follow your creativity, you're more likely to pursue fresh solutions.

• If you trust your ideas, you're more likely to endure the trial-and-error periods.

• If you identify as creative, you're better equipped to resist doubt and even rejection.

 

While we can't change market trends or choose the gatekeepers, we can reconsider which interpretations are allowed to write our self-perception. All the concern about how we see ourselves means little until we understand the whisperings behind the mirror.

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A first step? Name your vulnerability.

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By vulnerability, I mean the challenges specific to you. Rejection? Disrespect? While these sensitivities may issue from a specific wound, the question remains: How will you keep your vulnerability from governing your self-perception? 

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One way is to realize that the power of vulnerabilities often stems from interpretation rather than from fact. If, say, your work provokes a slamming door, must it mean it's bad? If your idea is said to need a rethink, must it mean those who rejected it are stupid?

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While you can't control outcomes, you can superintend what you believe about yourself. After all, the authority of an interpretation is not the same as its truth.

 

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The Problem with Puzzles

 

 

A holiday brilliance

 

One Christmas, as my family gathered by the tree to open gifts, my cousin unwrapped a Rubik's Cube given by his father. I'd never handled a Rubik's Cube before. The cube was casually passed around to all thirteen of us, including two Mensa-geniuses. Nobody could manipulate the cube to align each face into a single color. Distracted by the merry dialogue and rustling paper, I took up the challenge after everyone had disappeared into the kitchen.

 

The fire flickering in the hearth, I as a young teenager picked up the Rubik's Cube and let my fingers go. Lost in a flow state, in what seemed like a blink of an eye, I solved it. 

 

I now recognize my advantage. The only musician in the family, I played the piano.  Finger dexterity, hand-eye coordination, music memorization, spatial reasoning, problem-solving, and the enabling neurological flow had primed me for the puzzle.

 

The Plonker

 

Recently, I tackled another puzzle, the nine dots problem. It supposedly measures creative intelligence. Without lifting the pencil, you must unite 9 dots with 4 straight lines. Well, I failed. Even had I travelled in a time machine and attempted it in the glow of that same Christmas fire with a much younger brain, I doubt I would have triumphed.

 

If we look more closely at the famous nine dots problem — connecting 3 rows of 3 dots with 4 straight lines — we might agree that it's condescendingly genius. The puzzle can make the smart feel stupid.

 

Although the dots only suggest a box, most of us canonize the square shape, forcing our pencil to remain inside its holy boundaries, when the answer depends on utilizing the box's outside. In addition, as I did, we impose the kindergarten habit of connecting each dot twice, when only once will often do. 

 

As the 20th-century psychologist Norman Maier famously said, to figure out the puzzle, you must refrain from assuming limitations and think outside the box [of those limitations]. Cognitive scientist Dr. John Vervaeke takes another angle: you have to engage in both frame-breaking and frame-making to find the answer. 

 

The most salient insight is that, like any puzzle, the Nine Dots doesn't tell you what the solver's skills need to be. 

 

The hidden truth

 

Unlike Ernő Rubik, who was interested in artistic problems (like me), Sam Loyd, the nine dots puzzle maker, was interested in chess and geometry (not me). It's unlikely that the high-ranking chess player and mechanical genius had handled clay or marble much in his life, or even played the violin, just as it's unlikely that Rubik dedicated his evenings to chess games. Could it be that puzzles mirror their designers?

 

My connect-the-dots kindergarten skills, remember, worked against me, and I lacked complex geometric-type skills to override the impulse to connect all the dots twice. In happy contrast, it appears that my music skills helped me ace the Rubik's cube. Unlike the rich correspondences between the Rubik's cube and my music, zero correspondences bridged the nine dots and my experience. And yet it was me, the same person, working both puzzles! Am I to believe that puzzles are reliable measurers of my intelligence?

 

Even if we argue that puzzles test different kinds of brain power, what finally matters is that puzzles are made in the image of their makers, and we are not made in the image of puzzles.

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Creativity under Pressure:

from Duomo to iPhone

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For all the boutique talk about “intrinsic motivation” — as if the drive to pursue something for its own sake could only be accomplished in comfortable and leisurely conditions— many of the world's most creative accomplishments were forged under fire.

 

Consider competitive pressure, like Brunelleschi’s vying with Florence’s finest for the right to design the Duomo. Or financial desperation, like the young, impoverished J.K. Rowling who created Harry Potter with baby in tow.

 

Business crises brought Howard Schultz back to Starbucks to save it. A public health emergency led Jonas Salk to develop the polio vaccine. 

 

Political pressure produced George Orwell's 1984 under the shadow of totalitarian regimes, while Dmitri Shostakovich encoded resistance into his music, appearing to conform to Stalinist demands.

 

Wartime necessity drove Alan Turing and the young Wrens to crack the Enigma Code, Marie Curie to develop X-ray units for WWI battlefields, and Hedy Lamarr to co-invent a "secret communication system" that laid the groundwork for modern Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and GPS.

 

Facing permanent deafness, Beethoven composed some of his greatest works, while Frida Kahlo’s paintings channeled heartbreak and the chronic pain of an old injury.

 

Cultural pressure inspired James Baldwin to expose truths about race, identity, and belonging during America's civil rights era.

 

The pressure of illness drove Franz Schubert's astonishing output during his last 18 months of life.

 

Death itself loomed over the condemned Boethius as he wrote The Consolation of Philosophy, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer as he penned his Letters and Papers from Prison. Even in the Gulag, Irina Ratushinskaya wrote poems with a matchstick on soap — memorized before washing away the evidence. And after a grim cancer diagnosis, Steve Jobs ushered in Apple’s most iconic era with the iPhone.

 

Each of these creators answered life's perilous call. Promised no rose garden, they stepped into high-stakes territory in pursuit of something greater. 

 

Creativity might appreciate a little pressure after all.

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