 |
|
|
|||||
Below, Ann Tashi Slater shares five key insights from her new book, Traveling in Bardo: The Art of Living in an Impermanent World. Slater has published fiction, essays, and interviews in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Guernica, and Granta, among others, as well as in The Penguin Book of Modern Tibetan Essays and American Dragons (HarperCollins). Her speaking and teaching engagements include Princeton, Columbia, Oxford, the American University of Paris, the Rubin Museum of Art, and Asia Society. Whats the big idea? Traveling in Bardo interweaves explorations of impermanence in our everyday existence with Slaters girlhood in America and time spent with her Tibetan family in Darjeeling. Like her great-grandfather before her, she spreads guidance about bardo between-states, or periods of life transition, to Western audiences. Change is inevitable, can come at any moment, and only by growing our acceptance of uncertainty and endings can we live more fully. Tibetan bardo teachings help us navigate and embrace life in its sorrow and joy. 1. Between-states offer great possibilities for transformation. We experience between-states, or bardos, in every area of our lives, from friendship and marriage to children and parents to work and creativity. These periods of transition may be eagerly anticipated (a move to another city, the birth of a child) or painfully challenging (the end of a relationship, the loss of a parent). Whatever the case, they give us a chance to reset our compass and find new perspectives as we discover that the only thing we can be sure of is change. The transformative possibilities of between-states are imprinted on our psyches from an early age. Fairy tales are all about metamorphosis: After slumbering for a hundred years, Sleeping Beauty awakens; Hansel and Gretel defeat the witch in the forest and return home; Cinderella endures the cruel treatment of her stepmother and stepsisters and becomes a princess. We also see it in the natural world: a moth emerging from a cocoon, a flower blooming after the long winter. Were drawn to the potential for evolution that is found in between-states, but can we experience transformation as we ourselves go through times of transition? Its possible if were open to it. 2. Its not change that threatens us, but our resistance to it. Were wired to shy away from change, resist endings, and cling to what we know. Are you holding on to a job that has lost meaning? Or a belief system or way of living that no longer serves you? Perhaps youre denying your parentsor your ownaging and mortality? My grandmother told me once about a funeral she attended in Tibet in the 1920s where the dead man wanted to reenter his body. We couldnt see him, she said, but the high lama there saw that the dead man was trying to bring the corpse again to life. This story is a striking metaphor for our resistance to change. We struggle and grieve, deepening our suffering by trying to hold on to what is lost to us. I experienced this when my father died suddenly, and Im going through it again now as my mother disappears into dementia. There are endings we can do something about, like a job thats no longer right for us, and ones we cant, such as an aging parent. Regardless, only when we accept the reality of our situation can we open ourselves to the sorrow we naturally feel and move forward, instead of remaining trapped in denial. Its our resistance to changerather than change itselfthat most threatens us, hindering the flourishing of our mind and spirit in a world where impermanence is the only certainty. 3. What we pay attention to becomes our reality. In life, we may drift aimlessly through the months and years, immersed in thoughts and reveries. What our distracted minds perceive turns into our reality, and we have the strange feeling that were dwelling in a parallel universe, able to sense our real lives but not live them. We worry that something is missing, or that were missing out, and we wonder if well ever find ease and joy. Were like the hungry ghosts in Tibetan cosmology: skeletal beings with throats as thin as a piece of hair and stomachs as big as the Grand Canyon (never enough drinks or eats for them, my grandmother used to say). The mind is like a team of horses that, given the chance, will charge off in different directions. The challenge is to take hold of the reins. As the bardo teachings tell us, the mind can be guided like the controlling of a horses mouth by means of a bridle. When conscious attention becomes our way of being in the world, we undergo a profound shift in our experience of life. Instead of feeling insatiable hungry ghost cravings, we reside more fully in each moment. As that becomes our way of being, we find the contentment that eluded us. 4. Karma is action, not fate. We often think of karma as fate. It was my karma to buy that house, or, It was my karma to not get along with my daughter. But karma isnt just about things happening to us beyond our control. Its about how what we do, think, and say in each moment determines our path forward. If our actions are positive, thats all to the good, but if not, we make ourselves miserable through habitual behavior that is, in Buddhist terms, unskillful, like getting into power struggles with your child, having the same pointless arguments with your partner, or staying silent when you should speak up. We can transform whats making us unhappy by changing our activities of body, mind, and speech. This may sound daunting, but it can be a small action, such as praising your partner rather than criticizing them, or expressing your opinion about something thats important to you. Our actions in this moment are influenced by our past actions and, in turn, influence our future behavior. The more we choose the positive (kindness, honesty) or, conversely, the negative (disparaging others, lying), the more likely we are to keep acting in these ways. Its up to us whether we slog on through trials of our own making or move into an awakened way of living that brings us the happiness we seek. At each moment, we have choice. Instead of tending the same old garden, we can till the soil for a new one, planting seeds and letting them flourish. 5. We confirm our humanity by living the life thats ours to live. If were lucky enough to come into this world as a human (rather than, say, an ant or a tree), we possess the unique capacity to make the most of our lives, spurred by the knowledgeagain, uniquely humanthat we are mortal. Making the most of our lives in this fleeting, beautiful universe means living the life thats ours to live. A tulip is a tulip, a tiger is a tiger. Tulips and tigers dont lose sight of what they are and end up being something else, like: I ended up a daffodil when Im really a tulip! Or, How did I turn into an aardvark when Im actually a tiger? The capacity to live inauthentically is, unfortunately, all too human. Be yourself sounds so simple, doesnt it? But we care too much about what others think, and when our last day arrives, we wonder why we cared so much and regret that we did. A wonderful aspect of authenticity is that its not about creting your essential self. Your self is like the wide blue sky, sometimes obscured by clouds but already and always existing. It becomes visible as we let go of unskillful ways of being, as we shed false personas and allow who we are to emerge. There are questions we can keep in mind that help us do this: If you found out you were going to die soon, what are some things (like others approval) that you would stop caring about? What would make you feel free? This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.
Category:
E-Commerce
Digital tools are a necessary part of work life for just about any office gig. But using too many apps, communication platforms, and other tools can be massively frustrating. And according to newly released research, switching back and forth between online systems is also a time thief. Localization platform Lokalise recently surveyed 1,000 U.S. white-collar workers from 11 industries to examine how digital tools impact professionals and how they feel about using a variety of online systems. Overwhelmingly, the report found that workers are frustrated by having to use many different platforms. Some 17% of workers say they have to switch platforms more than 100 times in a single workday. All the back and forth is time-consuming. On average, workers lose 51 minutes per week to tool fatigue. Yearly, that’s a loss of about 44 hours of work. The time loss makes sense when you consider just how many platforms the average modern employee has to navigate. The majority of workers (55%) are using three to five platforms each day. Almost a third (31%) say they’re using even moreas many as 6 to 10 platforms daily. The most time-consuming tools, according to employees, are email (47%); messaging platforms like Slack, Discord, and Teams (35%); video conferencing tools (22%); and calendar and scheduling apps (17%). In terms of apps, specifically, Outlook leads to the most fatigue (35%), with Microsoft Teams trailing closely behind (29%), followed by Gmail (24%) and Zoom (15%). Of course, workers don’t feel great about all that time lost to digital tools. More than half (56%) say their workday is negatively impacted by an excessive number of platforms. But regardless of how workers feel about having to navigate so many different tools, or how much time it takes to do so, they say their company hasn’t addressed the issue. A whopping 79% say their company hasn’t taken steps to cut down on all the tools or stave off worker fatigue.While the workday can be made more overwhelming due to digital tools, sadly the fatigue doesn’t end there. Employees say they feel pulled to respond to alerts even when they’re supposed to be off the clock. The majority of workers (60%) say they feel pressure to respond to pings outside of working hours. With that in mind, it’s no wonder professionals are fed up with digital tools that aren’t just complicating their workdays but also their personal lives.
Category:
E-Commerce
OpenAIs announcements at its third annual developer conference told a lot about where the company is in its evolution. In the past, the companys executives talked mainly about new models that were smarter, cheaper, or more efficient. At the event in San Francisco on October 6, the companys leaders said relatively little about their latest models, and nothing about AGI or superintelligence. Instead, they discussed new ways to make the AI do real work that matters. Building functional agents One of the keys to enterprise customers realizing a return on their investment in AI is the creation of intelligent agents capable of completing complex business tasks. To that end, OpenAI announced AgentKit, which it said is a complete set of tools for developers and enterprises to build, deploy, and optimize agents. The tool kit has three main parts: an Agent Builder that offers a visual canvas for piecing together agents, a Connector Registry that manages how the agent connects to data and tools, and ChatKit, which lets developers create agents that users can talk to. During the keynote, OpenAIs Christina Huang used the Agent Builder to add a conversational agent that helps users find content within a website. The agent used some complex workflows, consulted documents, deployed a widget to stylize the agents colors and syntax, and pulled in pre-built privacy and security guardrails. Then she pushed the new agentall in under eight minutes. OpenAI said it has seen developers and enterprises use the AgentKit tools to build agents that do deep research, customer support, IT support, and sales functions. Apps, take two Importantly, OpenAI is also taking another shot at its App Store Moment. After launching its GPTssmall, customized versions of ChatGPTin late 2023, the company did surprisingly little to promote or enhance the program. On October 6, OpenAI announced a new kind of app that can be used entirely within ChatGPT: a chatbot that can suggest apps based on what the user said in the chat. For instance, it might suggest a Coursera app if the user said they want to learn more about some new skill. Or the user can ask for an app by typing its name into the chat. The apps themselves can take natural language directions or requests from the user, as well as display videos or interactive content within the chatbot. OpenAI provided developers with a new software development kit for building the apps. For developers, it’s a chance to get their apps in front of OpenAIs 800 million ChatGPT usersjust when a need for the app arises. Booking.com, Canva, Coursera, Figma, Expedia, Spotify, and Zillow all made apps while participating in a pilot program. In the big picture, ChatGPT is becoming far more than a chatbot. Its more functional, and apps and agents are a big reason for that. ChatGPT now has 800 million weekly users, and its popularity is growing fast. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, said during a Q&A session with reporters that the chatbot is evolving toward becoming something like an operating system. Codex, too A fierce competition has unfolded among the big AI companies to offer the best coding tool. OpenAIs entry in the race is Codex, which the company said is no longer a preview and is now generally available to all developers. Codex also now interoperates with Slack, so that developers can delegate tasks to, or ask questions of, Codex directly from a team channel or threadjust like they would a coworker. But most importantly, Codex is now powered by GPT-5, OpenAIs most advanced reasoning model, which has allowed the company to make the coding assistant aspect of the product far more capable. For developers, it feels like theyre teaming with a junior software engineer who works independently on specific tasks, then reports back with the results. These new applications of AI could help enterprises bridge the gap between a desire to deploy AI models and actually seeing some real return on investment from doing so. That may be just what OpenAI needs right now. Cash crunch The company is burning through cash to pay for model training and new data centers, a burn thats expected to accelerate over the next few years. Meanwhile, the company is likely making most of its money through ChatGPT subscriptions, not enterprise business such as API fees. CFO Sarah Friar told Bloomberg a year ago that 75% of OpenAIs revenue comes from consumer subscriptions to ChatGPT, implying a 25% share of revenue for the enterprise business. Theres little to suggest that the enterprise business contributes much more than a quarter of total sales today. Still, OpenAI probably needs to see substantial growth in enterprise business to hit break-even in the next five years. The enterprise was our first focus even before ChatGPTour first product was an API, OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap said during a press briefing on October 6. From day one we saw the desire on the part of businesses, but I think a few things were missing. Lightcap said that for much of the companys history, its models werent good enough to take on business tasks reliably. OpenAIs reasoning models, an important component of agents, showed just last year. In the enterprise you need to be able to execute business processes, so you needed this kind of shift toward agentic AI so that it could just do things for you, he said. Lightcap said business agents also need to be able to connect with other services (such as databases and tools), and that agents are just now getting the capabilities and technical standards (like Anthropic’s MCP protocol) to do that. Finally, enterprise users need to become familiar with agents and how they work. Lightcap said OpenAIs announcements represent real progress in overcoming those barriers: I think what you saw today is an evolution in every one of those areas.
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||