The new problems of the world require fresh approaches. They require our ingenuity and our careful, creative consideration. You and I know this, but still most of us don’t often get meaningfully involved.
Why is this?
I think there is a collective feeling that these problems are too big for any of us to make a real difference. We doubt our ability to influence important matters when there are well-connected lobbyists, businesses with billion-dollar budgets and political parties firmly wedded to their own notions. And these doubts seem perfectly warrented.
There is a great paragragh in Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent, about what keeps us from being politically active:
Very few people are going to have the time or the energy or the commitment to carry out the constant battle that’s required to get outside of the [mainstream media]. The easy thing to do you know — you come home from work, you’re tired, you’ve had a busy day, you’re not going to spend the evening carrying on a research project, so you turn on the tube and say its probably right, or you look at the headlines in the paper and then you watch the sports or something. That’s basically the way the system of indoctrination works. Sure the other stuff is there, but you’re going to have to work to find it.
This is the challenge we face. Even if your beef is not with the media, you don’t have the time or the energy for it (whatever that ”it” is for each of us) at the end of the day. We take care of our families, feed our cat, mow the lawn and then there’s not much left over. So, our hard-won university degrees in Geo-Chemistry or Post-Feminist Neocollonialism stare down at us from the wall, while we avoid eye-contact and look for a new episode of the Family Guy.
But the tide is turning my friends
Individuals (as committed, educated and interested as they were) have found the system stacked against them for hundreds of years. It had to do with the challenges of organizing. It was the basis of Marx’s optimism (‘If ONLY we could organize!’) and every major world leader benifited from the fact that they couldn’t. Organizing was very hard.
Back in the day
Consider how hard it was to even share a newspaper article with a friend:
You had to get your own copy of the newspaper and cut the article out with scissors
Then, find an envelope
Then, copy out your friend’s address
And then get a stamp and go outside to find a place where you can send the letter
It wasn’t THAT hard, but it was hard enough that you probably wouldn’t bother. What WAS hard was forming a group. You would need to get the word out somehow (maybe by letter again) and have a place to meet. It took a considerable amount of time and effort and at least a little funding. The internet has removed a lot of these barriers.
The major challenege to mass-participation for hundreds of years has been the difficulties involved in organizing. I recently finished Clay Shirky’s hugely-underrated Here Comes Everybody,which asks the question: ”what happens when people are given the tools to do things together, without needing traditional organizational structures?” (The mailing a letter example above is adapted from his book).
Today we can group together almost effortlessly; we can organize and coordinate asynchronously, in muliple groups at the same time –without geographical or financial constraints.
So today it’s mostly a question of leadership. If your vision is strong enough, if your idea is important enough, a lot of us can and will happily join you.
You have the power!
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Randy Komisar is a good guy. He’s a Silicon Valley CEO. Listening to him speak is like being sat down by your down-to-earth uncle, who wants to give you career advice. Komisar is good at giving interesting advice about ‘following your passion’ without sounding trite or overly motivational. A lot of us get stuck on questions like “what is my (one) passion in life?!” Rather than worrying about the right answer to that question, he recommends thinking of your passions as a portfolio of interests. Then just try to match your interests to the opportunities in front of you. As long as you’re moving in the right direction you’re getting there.
(If you only have time to watch one of these, watch the first one).
In this second video, Komisar discusses staying balanced. The balance changes as your priorities change. He talks about money, opportunity and power (the 3 things people always wish they had in the career) don’t always come in the same package. We need to be careful that our career doesn’t take up too much of our lives and sometimes it’s worth it to say, sacrifice money and power in order to increase opportunities.
He also suggests that we should never put ourselves in a situation where we can’t say no, by handcuffing ourselves to too many obligations (i.e. having too many time or money expenses). Keep your eye on the ball (your values) and, as much as possible, give yourself the freedom to make the changes that respect the balance.
Reality check: When Komisar cut back in his life he went from being a full-time CEO to a doing part-time-CEO-temping. He made heaps of money as a CEO and, when he cut back, he made slightly-smaller heaps, but still probably more than you and me and everyone who will ever read this post combined. It’s easier making financial sacrifices when doing so doesn’t mean you’ll have to make any real sacrifices at all.
Still, I think he’s giving us some good advice here.
Seth Menachem is an LA director who, in his spare time, asks elderly strangers for advice. I grew up far away from my grandparents and I’ve lived overseas, away from my own parents, for a long time. Maybe this is why I love these clips from Life Advice from Old people.
These are two of my favourites:
:
Day-to-day I’m a very happy person, but I worry A LOT about making the right choices. I worry that I’m not spending enough time with my family. That I don’t write enough. That I don’t spend enough time outdoors or take the time to cook better meals. That I don’t know where in life I should settle down. That I work too hard. I think the good life is about sharing meaning and enjoyment, so to me what Seth is doing seems right on the money.
Also, listening to these clips makes me feel like when I was a kid and my dad would sit me down at our creeky old dining room table and tell me something important about life. It made me a stronger person. –well, everything except for that Birds and the Bees talk. That one confused me for years!
Visiting Dubai, a few years ago, I had a fascinating discussion with our cab driver. I asked him if he hoped his country’s economic growth would lead to democracy. He replied without hesitating, “No. We don’t want democracy here. The government takes care of us. They run the country; we don’t have to worry about it.” Here my wife pressed my hand in a way that said, why don’t you just leave it at that honey.
“Yes,” I said, “But if they change something and you don’t like it, or if they refuse to listen to you… you’ll have no power to do anything about it.” He smiled, but didn’t respond. I hadn’t convinced him.
We can all agree that freedom is a good thing. And more freedom = more happiness. But is this always the case? Recently I’ve been reading Psychologist Barry Schwartz’ The Paradox of Choiceand it makes me wonder. The book offers a variety of examples of how more freedom of choice can actually decrease our happiness. Let’s look at a couple of the reasons:
Firstly, there is “adaptation” –after making a decision we can take for granted the benefits involved with our choice. We adapt. The great new promotion we accept at work becomes new norm and we stop appreciating it. We adapt to the rate of pay and are quickly back where we started from. People generally return to the level of happiness that is normal for them.
Also, many options also makes choosing difficult. A lot of us agonize over choices and then focus on what we gave up when we accepted, for example one career path instead of another. (I.e. I should have gone to medical school!).
Don’t worry
So Schwartz doesn’t suggest trying to maximize our happiness by continuously looking for better options and things to change. Instead he recommends “satisficing” –looking for a job that is ‘good enough’ and then, he says, you should do your best to appreciate it
But wait!
Is Schwartz presenting a false-choice? Basically, he is saying we can either give-up (striving for a better life) and be happy (with what we have), or else we can struggle for something better for ourselves and be miserable. I went searching for a different approach, or at least some middle ground.
The creative person basically has two kinds of jobs: One is the sexy, creative kind. Second is the kind that pays the bills. Sometimes the task in hand covers both bases, but not often. This tense duality will always play center stage. It will never be transcended. (Source)
This very practical approach balances pragmatism (don’t quit your day job) with the need to try to make things better for ourselves (take a risk or do something you we love as a hobby). We don’t need to strive for perfection in all areas at once. This is advice our cab driver would have appreciated.
Update: I just watched this old commercial from Monster.com and thought it would go form a good P.S. on this post. Don’t loose track of what you REALLY want to do.
Okay, one more video. This one won’t help you with your career at all. It’s just funny.
Or would you prefer to have an important, challenging job?
Timothy Ferris (in The 4 Hour Work Week) basically advocates the no-work option. What could be better than doing nothing all day and still getting paid? Personally I wouldn’t refuse being paid to laze around the pool of the luxiourious Candado Plaza Hotel (which is how and where I read the 4HWW). I know if I found myself retired I would want to go to a place like that and at least take 6 months to gatehr my thoughts.
However, retired people, those who actually have the option of lazing around as much as they want to, say they’d rather be working. (Well, 78% of New Zealand retirees say that anyway.) They say they would prefer to work, as long as they job allowed them to work with more flexibly.
I find this just a little bit surprising. I can understand wanting to make yourself useful, but why not take on a non-job or two instead? I’m looking forward to retirement as a time to build community, indulge my creativity and maybe catch up on my life list. Not to go back to work.
Gretchen Rubin over at the Happiness Project got some insight on this from American Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. O’Connor says that the secret of happiness is simply this: Work extremely hard at something worth doing. That’s it. It’s not relationships. It’s not peace of mind. Do good work and the good life will follow. I’m not sure I agree entirely. Statements like that remind me of the episode of Cheers where one of them sagely explains what life is all about, “the meaning of life my friends: comfortable shoes.” Comfortable shoes are good, but maybe there is just a little more to life.
But I still can’t completely figure out why New Zealand retirees don’t want to stay retired. A recent 60 Minutes news show discussed the fact that Millennials (Generation Y) make exceptionally difficult employees. They are a new breed, say the commentators. They refuse to work if they don’t understand the purpose of the work. They won’t do busy work, even when working for minimum wage. They need to be negotiated with. The show, clearly appealing more to the over-40 crowd, presented this as entirely unreasonable. Where do these young people get the nerve to try to work on their own terms?!
No one wants to waste their lives doing meaningless work.
It seems that the answer is not about working hard or not; it’s the reason for the work that matters.
Maybe it’s not actually freedom that we long for at the summit of our careers. For most of us it’s not really about money either. The real challenge is about finding work that we feel is meaningful, so we don’t waste our time –in retirement, and even before we retire.
So the question becomes: how can we find or create some meaningful work?
A good place to start is to try to lead a tribe, try to gather around you people who have similar interests and work with them toward something worthwhile. Or, if you’re more of a lone wolf, get stuck into your own creative practice. We should all make sure that, by the time we reach retirement, we are seriously involved in work we find exhilarating and important.
I love talking to people about their aspirations. I really do. But there is a dark side to goals and what we often think of as “motivation.” I have a lot of goals. Last week I confessed that I wanted to be a doctor, a pilot, a CEO, and a Senator before I die. I admit […]
The new problems of the world require fresh approaches. They require our ingenuity and our careful, creative consideration. You and I know this, but still most of us don’t often get meaningfully involved.
effortlessly; we can organize and coordinate asynchronously, in muliple groups at the same time –without geographical or financial constraints.
