Just read a superb profile piece on Dr. Atul Gawande- surgeon, health policy expert, and journalist for The New Yorker.
My take-home for the day was how Gawande embraces diverse knowledge streams to inform his medical writing- below is his take on blushing
What is this peculiar phenomenon called blushing? A skin reaction? An emotion? A kind of vascular expression? Scientists have never been sure how to describe it. The blush is at once physiology and psychology. On the one hand, blushing is involuntary, uncontrollable, and external, like a rash. On the other hand, it requires thought and feeling at the highest order of cerebral function. “Man is the only animal that blushes,” Mark Twain wrote. “Or needs to.”
The rich undercurrents of philosophy, history and literature in Gawande's writing transform a routine description into something magical. It got me thinking-As a marketer, how can I expect to create game-changers if I'm only looking to other marketers for inspiration? I'd do well to leap into fields such as art, design, and medicine to challenge myself, and conjure up new playgrounds in which to discover.
