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HOW BIG CAN YOU THINK?

I think this is the most important question today for several reasons:

 

  • My own travels in and studies of cultures around the world have shown me that any single culture is only a sliver of our human wealth and potential for creativity.
 
  • The acute dangers we face from climate change, pandemics, and the possibility of nuclear war require us to evolve to a way of seeing the world which will fully appreciate its inter-connectedness and human richness.
  • We have the potential to develop much more rewarding ways to think, which see all cultures as lights shining on each other in patterns whose varieties are unlimited. This way of thinking can positively influence all aspects of human life, including health, personal relationships, career, politics, and the environment. It can also bring all people together so that we can build a more harmonious, equitable, and ecologically friendly world.
 
  • As AI has become ever more powerful and widely used, mythologies have developed which see it as the wellspring of all knowledge. Although it’s enabling rapid progress in several important fields, including medicine and energy, it has severe biases. Thousands of cultures exist and thousands more thrived in the past, but most are poorly represented in the digital world. By learning about different cultures, storing that knowledge in our own heads, and regularly reflecting on it, we can enjoy mental spaces that are independent from AI, expand thinking beyond its biases, and retain our human identity.
Big thinking is often used as a buzzword. It often means the next step ahead. But considering the variety of cultures around the world, we can expand it off the scales.
 
So this website explores a new way to think, which can enable us to appreciate all people equally, help us maximize each other’s creativity, find enchantment in everyday things, enjoy more beauty, and avoid becoming enslaved to AI. In short, we can create a global civilization based on wonder and love.
An excellent way to start creating such a world is to look At/With/Beyond. I explain this in detail in my books, Thinking in a New Light and Teaching the Mind to Dance. Most of us look at the world without questioning why we see it in the way that we do. But we can combine:
 
  • Looking At (perceiving and thinking about something according to your culture’s conventions),
  • Looking With (examining how your culture developed these conventions and why it has emphasized them), and
  • Looking Beyond (exploring other cultures’ conventions).
 
This deceptively simple extension of thinking, if repeated so that it includes ever more cultures, can enable us to gain more perspectives, synthesize a wider range of ideas, enjoy more types of beauty, feel empathy with more people, and savor the infinite richness in societies, people, and natural landscapes.
I think this is the best time in history for developing new perspectives of the world’s cultural wealth, given the diversity of cultures, the number of historical periods to reflect on, and our abilities to access growing amounts of information. We’ll look At/With/Beyond our human landscape in the articles on this site, and my books detail this way of thinking more systematically.

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Hi, I'm Brian Holihan.

I got bitten by the book bug while in college and began reading as much as I could about ways in which different societies view the world. Since business and technology are key aspects of cultures, I got my degree in business and became a Silicon Valley head hunter and résumé writer. Since then, I’ve always enjoyed mixing business and cultural studies for more creative insights about both.

 

Outside of the office, I kept reading as much as I could about the world’s cultures. Over the last 28 years, I’ve deeply studied and traveled in: Europe (from antiquity to the postmodern age), India, China, Southeast Asia, The Middle East, Africa.

 

I’ve studied all these areas through many fields, including history, business, art, religious studies, philosophy, music, geography, anthropology, psychology, and literature.

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