I have started a MOOC on Coursera called Know Thyself by the University of Ediburgh. I’ve always been a fan of these online courses (despite a lot of people bagging them out) because as a self-driven learner, I like how the course is free – and that it is set out in a way that you can do it in its entirety or just pick and choose the elements that you want to do.

It also provides you with some excellent resources online that you may never have otherwise come across.

I started this course as a way of understanding self reflection and introspection which I guess I have been doing all my life.

I’ve always wondered if my perspective – and how aligned I felt with the Socratic view – has impacted my professional life.

That is, I have always believed that in Learning and Development, if WE weren’t learning OURSELVES then we had NO right to tell, drive or direct others to do the same. And yet, the consulting business model is predicated on ‘being the expert’.

I’d get peeved at this idea that we were expected to “market ourselves” in business rather than take more humble, introspective view and I had written about it in Rhetoric on Marketing and Greek Philosophy.

I really hated the idea that in order to have a livelihood or to get ahead, you had to be a sophist consultant rather than a philosopher.

I’d take being the philosopher over a being the sophist any day. (What the Ancient Greeks used to call the consultants who got paid for travelling around Greece sharing the philosophies but not actually coming up with anything themselves. Hello? Has anything changed??)

Philosophising means asking questions, looking within and understanding. That’s not what the majority of people want to do. It’s too hard for them or it could be bad for business.

“The easiest and noblest thing is not to be crushing others, but to be improving yourselves”

[Socrates: Apology Speech – which really isn’t an apology speech]

Here’s the full script of Socrates speech.

And so, I’m now doing this course that gets us to think, “is an unexamined life worth living?”

https://existentialcomics.com/comic/100