David Brooks asks the question in his New York Times column entitled, “The Sandra Bullock Trade,” if you were in Sandra Bullock’s shoes and could somehow choose between winning an Oscar for best actress or having a strong, supportive marriage, which would you select? He goes on to describe why you should select the strong, supportive marriage and then describes what I refer to as the force of connection, including how it affects so much in our lives from happiness to the productivity of nations.
Thanks to an introduction from David Bradley, owner of The Atlantic, David and met for lunch in Washington D.C. some years ago. We discussed my ideas on the force of connection and my concern that the decline of connection in market democracies was having a detrimental effect on well-being and economic productivity. A few years later I wrote about it in The Connection Culture: A New Source of Competitive Advantage that was published by changethis.com.
My heart goes out to Sandra Bullock. I’ve always liked her as an actress and she seems like a terrific person. In an earlier post , I heaped praise on Bullock’s tour-de-force performance in The Blind Side. Watching her acceptance speech for best actress at the Academy Awards, then, I was surprised to see her remarks and demeanor seemed bittersweet. Of course, at that time, I was not aware that her husband has been, as David says, “an adulterous jerk.” In hindsight, it would appear that she was struggling, as any of us would, to make it through a difficult season in her life. My hope is that Ms. Bullock has a group of close loving family members and friends who can help her through this. That’s the most important benefit of connection in my opinion. It helps us get through the inevitable difficult seasons in life, a topic I wrote about from personal experience in Alone No Longer.
