The Masters forum November 19, 2006

Dan Pink (8:30 - 10:00)
A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age.

What used to be important isn't. The future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind. That's what Dan Pink explained in a book that Tom Peters called "a miracle" and Seth Godin recognized as "one of those rare books that marks a turning point."

Pink sees that the analytical "left brain" minds that got us to where we are today are already giving way to six "right brain" qualities that will be the sources of meaning in the near (and distant) future. He not only describes those six qualities (design, story, symphony, empathy, play, and meaning), he will show you how much fun you can have developing them and then applying them to enrich your life and understand everything going on around you.

Daniel Gilbert(10:30-noon)
Stumbling On Happiness: Why things rarely turn out the way we thought they would.

We humans like predicting the future. It gives us a feeling of being able to shape things so we'll be happier with what we get from life. Twenty-five years of research have convinced Dan Gilbert that things don't really work that way: Left to our own devices, we tend to be terrible at predicting what will make us happy.

He's researched the subject every which way from his prestigious posts as Harvard College Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and Director of Harvard's Hedonic Psychology Laboratory, and he keeps seeing more traps we fall into when trying to make ourselves happy. You wouldn't really want to get a lethal disease or become a quadriplegic, but it turns out that people with those conditions are no less happy - and often are more optimistic about the future - than big-bucks lottery winners and others who momentarily think their dreams have come true.

We're even wrong, a lot of the time, about how things that we have already experienced will feel when they happen again. As Gilbert says, "We still expect the next car, the next house, or the next promotion to make us happy even though the last ones didn't and even though others keep telling us that the next ones won't."

He's not some kind of "happiness guru," Dr. Gilbert. No six-point programs or happiness-generating self-talk routines. But he'll provide insight after insight about the foibles of being imperfectly but irrepressibly human. What you make of those insights will be up to you.

Daniel Gilbert is the author of the 2006 bestseller, Stumbling on Happiness. The Washington Post calls it "giddy fun," Amazon.com proclaims it "the best nonfiction book of the year," the New York Times praises its "goofball brilliance," and Freakonomics author Steven Levitt insists, "This absolutely fantastic book will shatter all your most deeply held convictions about how the mind works."

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