Benefiting at work from Brain Based Insights

A few years ago, I built a Thoreauvian or a thinking room onto my home, and  last weekend I walked around Thoreau’s beloved Walden Pond with my daughter and son-in-law.

What an experience – and I left the State reservation with questions about today’s rush for growth that tends to tread on the simplicity that most people crave. There must be a better process where growth and nature merge….



Is it possible that with all the advancement we support, we need more simplicity to understand Thoreau’s challenge that …

“Things do not change, we change.”  

There in Concord MA, I caught a keener sense of Henry David’s Thoreau’s love for naturalistic intelligence, for instance. His work as writer, lecturer, and surveyor changed through his encounter with the simplicity expressed in nature. Could nature change your workplace and your mind?

Check out Thoreau’s legacy -  in written calls for conservation of the mind and of nature – and showed how these can mix together at the best organizations. It gave Thoreau courage to help runaway slaves find shelter in Canada and provided a voice for conservation and political issues at the time.

Walden Pond dips to 102 feet on sprawling 2680 acres , called Walden Woods, and finds people fishing, hiking,  and swimming … much as Thoreau did there in July 1845.

Would you have lasted the 2 year experiment in simplicity?

The tiny one room house, where Thoreau lived for two years, studied, wrote and gardened was the same place he spoke out against financial injustice and dammed discrimination among people of other races.

What benefits might a simpler life bring to people where you work?



Thoreau showed an anatomy of a simpler life

when he wrote…

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan- like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion."

You?