Posts tagged as:

Balance

How to save the world

March 22, 2010

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:

  1. You had to get your own copy of the news­pa­per and cut the arti­cle out with scissors
  2. Then, find an envelope
  3. Then, copy out your friend’s address
  4. 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.

Randy Komisar’s book is The Monk and the Rid­dle: The Edu­ca­tion of a Sil­i­con Val­ley Entre­pre­neur.

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Caring Advice from Old People

December 18, 2009

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! ;-)

Related: Last time I saw my Nain (Nain is the Welsh word for grand­mother), she gave me some great advice.

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Taxi ManVis­it­ing 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.

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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 Choice and 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 mid­dle ground

Car­toon­ist Hugh McLeod (see gapingvoid.com) has an idea he calls “the Sex and Cash The­ory;” it’s about how to make it as an artist.

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.

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Would you rather get paid to do nothing?

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 com­mu­nityindulge 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.

(Image care of Rebel Shoots).

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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 […]

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