At least in the West, we too often hear these lessons through the voice of individual character.People have a thirst for knowledge and for lessons they can internalize-lessons that might make them better individuals, better family members, and better members of larger communities. Wright Mills was onto something, and Confucius likely would have agreed with him.Live your work, and then share it with others. Don’t sit on the sidelines, and don’t check out after a good day’s work. Then mull it over, talk about it, and dive into more analysis. Sense that “this thing” over here and “that thing” over there might be related. Risk having loose, sloppy, and first-draft-style ideas.

“Go all in,” Mills almost shouts at his readers.Such imagination feeds on every experience that we have, and it goes so far beyond simply earning a living as to be in a different category of entrepreneurship altogether. They are always thinking, always reflecting, and always learning new things about a changing world. Mills says that truly, deeply imaginative social thinkers cannot, will not, and could never close it down. Mills continues by underlining how essential this combining of ideas that he described really is-and how subjective (and sometimes even unacademic) it all feels.

In other words, real imagination and creativity had to be a full-time occupation. In this slender volume, Mills writes about his work not as if it were a job for Mills, his work seemed to be an all-encompassing outlook on the world.

Wright Mills’s The Sociological Imagination is a classic of social thought.

In this lecture, Professor LaFleur helps us navigate through the book’s tangle of questions, answers, and observations by introducing us to the world of Confucius’s imaginative ideas about living in society.Īn outline of the content in this lecture: Imagination and Engagement

Think about it, ponder it, and find elements of lasting reflection even in the simplest of daily activities. Live your work (and certainly don’t just work to live, if you can help it). He offers invaluable insights on how to live your life.ĭon’t just earn your keep and rest on your days off – look, learn, imagine, teach. Confucius’s critics dismissed him as a narrow-minded pedant, but he was anything but that.

That one word sums up Confucius and the influence of his teachings.

Confucius and the analects