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In the Wake of Charlie Hebdo: What We Hold in Common

January 11, 2015 By David Griesing 5 Comments

From a certain perspective, could those men who were shot by French police yesterday be any more inspirational?

Masked, sheathed in black, executioners pointing their weapons at a pleading, fallen policeman outside Charlie Hebdo’s offices just before they fired their fatal shots. An image on the front page of every newspaper in the world that said “You’re watching, we’re doing.”

We just walked into the offices of some of your grown-ups, men and women who made their livings mocking our beliefs. We shouted to God while we mowed the clowns down in a hail of bullets. Who’s laughing now?

I walked into a kosher market, because it’s better when there’s some punishment for the Israeli oppressors too. I called the authorities and said, “You know who I am,” and oh, by the way, “If you take down my brothers, I’ll kill more of these Jews.” Yes, we talk to one another and work together. In fact, we’ll will be talking for years about we’ve accomplished today, and how little you could do about it.

“How just three brave men who believed in martyrdom could disrupt an arrogant nation and rivet the world’s attention” is our story. We kept our heads down long enough to escape surveillance by your overburdened security systems. There are just too many of us now for you to keep track of. And you will be reminded again that we are out here waiting. You will be reminded again very soon.

If you and your family feel unwelcomed by society in the West, or are unemployed, undervalued, feeling bored or disrespected or both just about anywhere else, this is a way to take your talent, redeem your life, find your inspiration. Yes. Jihadist recruiters had their second best week after 9/11 this week, while we mostly responded with… sentiment.

If you and I are not afraid, surely it’s not because of our drones, or American advisors trying to mobilize frightened Iraqi troops, or even those women brigades of Kurdish Peshmerga warriors who are maybe the closest thing we have to our own “superheroes” in the battle against militancy.

But beyond our own adolescent yearnings for fast solutions and simple justice, there is surely fear along with the tug of something deeper that calls upon us to engage with this asymmetrical challenge more seriously–far more seriously than this week’s opportunity to set down some flowers and light some candles on blood-stained sidewalks. A pretty cheap response, when it comes down to it, because it costs us so little. In a clash of world-views, do we need any more reminding that three lone gunmen (and the legions behind them) are much more serious about the drift of the world than we are?

But still…in the coming weeks, we’ll be debating racial profiling (“I am Ahmed,” after all) and how no American college would allow its student newspaper to print politically incorrect cartoons like Charlie Hebdo’s.

Surely we’ll buy more guns (because after Sandy Hook, gun advocates said the tragic might never have happened if those first grade teachers had had their own guns), and just as surely someone will use theirs to shoot somebody who looks like the Enemy. Then, of course, we’ll have polarizing arguments about what it all means. But talk is cheap too. In the coming weeks, it will still be our sentiment and endless talk around those who want to annihilate the freedoms that give us the luxury of all this sentiment and talk.

We take our values for granted. We’re no longer even sure about the ones that we share. But Said and Cherif Kouachi and Amedy Coulibaly were not confused. Going forward, there will be plenty of people who want to provide for us a black & white moral clarity (Ms. Le Pen if you’re in France, fill in the blank if you’re in the U.S.). But wouldn’t it be better if we started re-learning for ourselves how to become clearer about the values that we’re committed to?

In a recent op-ed entitled “Democracy Requires a Patriotic Education,” former dean of Yale College Donald Kagan wrote the following about what he fears we are (and are not) being taught in our schools today.

We look to education to solve the pressing current problems of our economic and technological competition with other nations, but we must not neglect the inescapable political and ethical effects of education.

We in the academic community have too often engaged in miseducation. . .. If we encourage rampant individualism to trample on the need for a community and common citizenship, if we ignore civic education, the forging of a single people, the building of a legitimate patriotism, we will have selfish individuals, heedless of the needs of others, the war of all against all, the reluctance to work towards the common good and to defend our country when defense is needed. (emphasis added)

Maybe you cringed when you read the words “legitimate patriotism,” but Kagan is right.

We need to figure out how to stand together again, what we hold as precious in common and would be willing to champion together. They are the values that we would be willing to fight and even die for. Try to imagine what they are if you can. Try to imagine us coming together as citizens and finding the collective spirit to fight a war like World War II today (with all hands-on-deck, not just a few “volunteers”) and you can sense the gulf between our illusion of shared purpose and the reality.

We need to bridge this divide—moving from sentiment and debate to principles we share (whatever they are)—and do so quickly, before others jump in to do it for us when we’re even more afraid. After all, is there anyone who doubts that there is a gun pointed our way, and that it could be any of us there on the ground, pleading for life?

What is necessary is not cheap, but the alternatives, well we are starting to see the alternatives.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

(William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming)

Lemmings

September 24, 2014 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Entrepreneur and investor Peter Theil was in Philadelphia on Monday sharing some of his contrarian views. One that he expanded upon at length affects innovation, education as well as our careers. Theil described it as “people acting in lemming-like ways.”

Lemmings are tiny hamster-like creatures that live near the Arctic Circle. Our image is of them frantically following one another to coastal cliffs in places like Scandinavia where they jump to their deaths in the frigid waters below. While we’re wrong to characterize lemming migration as mass suicide, there is no denying the herd-mentality that characterizes their movement from one place to another. It is the tendency we all have to jump off the same cliff that Theil was complaining about.

His impatience comes from wanting to nudge the world in a better direction if he thinks he can. As a result, Theil tends to be optimistic about innovation’s impact on the future and impatient with those who are failing to make the most of it. For example, on CNBC last week, he described Twitter as a “horribly mismanaged company” given its possibilities (“a lot of pot smoking going on there”), and took on Harvard Business School during the talk I attended, expressing his puzzlement about the games that are played there while accomplishing so little. Among entrepreneurs, his concern is that almost everyone is intent on “riding the last wave.”

“Big Data.” “The Cloud.” Whenever an idea gains some cache as the next big thing, everyone rushes in to contribute to what he calls “1 to n,” the adding of endless variations to something that has already been done. He called it the tendency “to ape” in the sense of imitating. Much harder but much better is to solve problems that no one else is thinking about in the way that you are. In other words, it is being able to go from Zero to One, which is also the title of a new book that captures his in-class discussions about entrepreneurship.

PETER THEIL / photograph by Olivia Poppy Cole

“Theil, who co-founded PayPal and was the first outside investor in Faceboook, is probably the most successful—and certainly the most interesting—venture capitalist in Silicon Valley,” notes a recent piece about him in the London Telegraph. Whatever people are doing at Twitter or Harvard Business School or in places where the topic is innovation, Theil gets exasperated whenever they seem more intent on climbing onto one another’s bandwagons than in thinking for themselves.

For some people, going to the best schools you can get into for four or more years after high school is just where the herd is headed. In Philadelphia, Theil admitted that he might still have gone to Stanford for college and then on to law school, but “would have thought about it a lot differently beforehand.” I know what he means. When a high school student has a more individualized sense of direction, why should she follow everyone else into higher education? So Theil started the 20-under-20 Fellowship Program, now in its fourth year, an admittedly rarified experiment in personal and professional development that I’ve talked about here before.

With a propensity to learn by doing, the fellows work with mentors that Theil has assembled in a 2 year, paid program that helps them to launch their own companies. When he was attacked by Larry Summers and others for what they viewed as his anti-college stance, Theil responded:

I didn’t think it would hit this sort of raw nerve. I mean, how fragile is the education system when 20 talented people leaving and doing something else is somehow enough to threaten it? My only claim is that not all talented people should go to college and not all talented people should do the exact same thing.

Which brings us to the work that we do. The career path that leads from the best possible kindergartens to the best possible colleges and professional schools is clearly the path that most young people want to be on. And they’re paying for the privilege with record student loans and crushing debt that hangs over them for years, if not decades. Is it worth it? Here too, the road less travelled—where you sit with yourself and figure out what you need and want from your work instead of simply following everyone else—has much to recommend it. Wherever it leads will not only make you happier, but also vastly improve the chances that your career could take you (along with the rest of us) from Zero to One.

During his Philadelphia whistle stop, Theil said that we all tend to underestimate what is different, those people and things “that don’t have a comparable.” When someone as different as Theil himself achieves conventional success, it allows him to trumpet “the unique perspective” in front of Philadelphia’s management class. For those of us who seek the courage to be different, he connected the personal benefits to the opportunities it can give us to change the world in often breathtaking ways.

Job Training for Yourself

September 1, 2014 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

The on-ramp into a better job isn’t what it used to be. Gone are the days when you show up and get trained to do what the boss expects from you. In other words, if you can’t demonstrate that you’re qualified to do the job on the day that you start, you probably won’t be hired in the first place. (“Companies want workers to arrive job ready.”)

In a weak economy, jobs continue to go unfilled because fewer employers are teaching the skills they require in training programs. Of course, when employers limit their hiring to people who are already doing that job, they narrow the pool of potential hires “to almost no one.” You face this kind of constraint whether you’re looking for your first job, want to advance within a company, or to find a job somewhere else. Increasingly, you’re expected to learn the skills required on your own dime in on-line courses, unpaid internships, or community colleges, in short wherever you can find or pay someone to show you the ropes.

As hard as it may sound, an even bigger training hurdle may confront you after you find a job. The challenge is to remain sufficiently engaged in what you’ve been hired to do that you never stop wanting to advance by improving the skills that you’re gaining.

Unfortunately, your co-workers probably won’t be helping you out here. In Gallup’s most recent State of the Workforce Study, 70% of all employees in North America are “disengaged” in their jobs, which it defines as “lacking in motivation” and being “less likely to invest discretionary effort in organizational goals or outcomes.” Working on auto-pilot and waiting passively for training instead of maximizing the opportunity that every job presents, will confine many of those who are in the workforce with you to jobs that barely seem worth doing.

On the other hand, when being engaged in your work (and refusing to become disengaged) is a personal priority, you have a chance to discover the parts of your job that bring you satisfaction as well as value in the marketplace. It’s a foundation (however small) that you can build on to move up to something better.

With this kind of mindset, you also seize whatever opportunities are available to become more proficient in the work areas where your satisfaction and marketability intersect. When no training opportunities are offered, you still go out and find them for yourself. That’s because they are personal investments that are tied to your feeling both productive and valued. It is partly about career advancement, but even more about self-worth. It is actively avoiding the deadening effects of opting out at work.

Among other things, this requires looking more closely at the components of your job. For example, what are you doing when you feel most proud of yourself at work? Is it when you’re presenting, selling, convincing, organizing, writing, learning new things, mobilizing people, being creative, or helping others? It is whatever makes you shine.

What gives you the greatest feelings of accomplishment? Solving a problem before anyone else, earning the praise of someone you respect, providing real value to a customer, improving a process, or doing more with less?

In your field (and related fields), what is the value of the skills and experiences that you’re gaining? What are the job descriptions where you might use the foundation you’re building for an even better fit? In a work environment like we have today, it is always time to think like an entrepreneur and do more research to understand the job market that you’re in.

When you’re continuously looking for opportunities to improve your pride, sense of accomplishment, and value in the workforce, training becomes less about what employers happen to be providing and more about the kinds of returns that you want for yourself in terms of growing capability, continuous satisfaction, and the ability to shape your own future.

Moreover, when these are your qualifications, it becomes easier to move from one job to another. Your natural allies become the men and women who made the same kinds of investments and share the same work priorities, even though they happen to be one or two rungs above you on the job ladder. Your way into conversation with them is your common interests, talents, experiences and rhythms of work. They will hear your commitments when you have them, feel your engagement when you are engaged. They will tell you whether you can find what you’re looking for in their jobs or industries, or where you should be looking if it’s somewhere else.

Conversations like this can also be your best guides through the unending thicket of job training. Those who see some of themselves in you are also more likely to give you sound advice about the training you’ll need to do their jobs, as well as the best places to find that training. The connection you make with them can sometimes be powerful enough that they offer to bring you on and train you themselves. That’s how much you’ll stand out in today’s workforce.

Knowing the most marketable and satisfying aspects of your work—along with why you need your work to be engaging in the first place—are always the keys to a better job.

The fact that employers are providing less training today will never stand in your way as long as that way of thinking is your guide.

Grace Note

July 11, 2014 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse in the Middle East, a mother’s voice cuts through the terrible din. The words belonged to Rachel Fraenkel, whose son Naftali had recently been kidnapped and murdered in the West Bank along with two other Jewish Israeli teens. In apparent revenge for these three deaths, Mohammed Abu Khdier, a Palestinian teenager, was kidnapped in Jerusalem and allegedly burned alive.

Fraenkel statement came after the traditional week of mourning for her son, and just hours after Mohammed’s funeral.

Even in the abyss of mourning for Gilad, Eyal and Nafali, it is difficult for me to describe how distressed we are by the outrage committed in Jerusalem—the shedding of innocent blood in defiance of all morality, of the Torah, of the foundation of the lives of our boys and of all of us in this country. . . No mother or father should ever have to go through what we are going through, and we share the pain of Mohammed’s parents.

You had to be listening to hear Fraenkel’s words over the bloodlust, the recrimination, the political exclamations, and the missile volleys between Israel’s cities and Gaza. It was a voice crying in the wilderness.

L’Chaim.

Samuel and Pearl Oliner began their book about rescuers of Jews and other victims during World War II with the following observation:

That people act in the service of their own self-interest is a maxim we are quite likely to accept. We are not even startled when they behave demonically. What we find difficult to accept or explain are behaviors that appear self-transcendent. (Preface at xviii)

Some of what is difficult “to accept or explain” comes from our reluctance to imagine the painful place that Fraenkel spoke from—to inhabit that sense of loss with her as she crossed a seething divide to grieve for another child who is tied by the cruelest of circumstances to her own. Because we hope it will never happen to us, that we’ll never have to find out what this kind of pain is like, we don’t take the five or ten minutes to envision for ourselves the possibilities that might exist beyond the pain. If we could be better at imagining “all the way through,” self-transcendence might be less of a puzzlement.

Sadly and far more often, graceful words and actions don’t break though the 24/7 overload to register with us at all. It’s the daily static of boredom, casual neglect, being hungry, bus exhaust, general shabbiness, deadlines, rudeness, fallen trees, gossip, bike riders yelling at cabdrivers, humidity, horniness, office chatter, cell phones, somebody complaining, body odor, feeling insecure, TV. The transcendent rarely breaks through it all, which means that on those occasions when it does, its break-through probably deserves its own place and time.

Prayer is partly the contemplation of exemplary stories, like Rachel Fraenkel’s: maybe on Sundays, or Friday nights after sundown, or at the end of the day before you go to sleep. Prayer never required a religion or specific words, but always calls for believing in something bigger than yourself, something that pulls you into a broader web of connectedness, and helps you to transcend the regular stuff of life.

Being quiet with your own ruminations is also required for prayer to happen, which reminds me of Tony Robbins tweet yesterday, that “Men prefer an electric shock to being alone with their thoughts.” (Silence is never as easy as it sounds.) Finally, it helps if you can recognize the intervals of grace that flutter like butterflies across everything else that clamors for your awareness.

They are often the places where hope can be found.

Characters Find a Theme

June 27, 2014 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

In 1921, Luigi Pirandello wrote the play “Six Characters in Search of an Author.” A half-dozen actors show up in the theater as incomplete characters looking for someone to finish their stories. In this absurdist masterpiece, the completion they find is disavowal, suicide, an accidental drowning, a great deal of confusion, and the playwright’s wondering why he ever agreed to get involved in the first place. Who would have thought that unfinished characters showing up today could find a more meaningful sense of completion in the most mundane of life’s details, but the characters in a pair of one act plays called “Sweating” and “Sleeping” (staged as part of Philadelphia’s on-going Solofest) did just that.

Steve Gravelle has hyperhidrosis, a condition characterized by excessive perspiration. We learn that one in 20 individuals is a chronic sweater, but Gravelle didn’t find anyone else who would admit to the condition until well into adulthood, so he mostly bore the stigmata of near-constant wetness alone. That kind of humidity can do something to you.

Standing in a basement under a cluster of blazing stage lights, he told us just what it was like in a series of funny, sad, profane, and revelatory vignettes, each concluding with his changing his shirt. As our own moisture gradually merged with his, it became like a crowded sauna down there, brilliantly setting the stage for Gravelle’s description of his time in a sweat lodge with a group of Quakers who had taken the ancient Indian ritual for their own. Gasping from breathing in and being nearly consumed by the intense heat, the experience ultimately produces a calm euphoria—a visceral arc that each of us got to travel with this very physical actor.

The sweat lodge story may have been the first time that sweating was good for Gravelle, but in a further advance towards acceptance, his marriage ceremony became another. In Philadelphia, the end of July better come with air-conditioning if you’re going to host a wedding reception here. But in a laugh from the gods that was aimed directly at him, electrical transformers exploded, turning the reception hall into its own kind of sweat lodge.

Instead of resignation to the absurdity, Gravelle had wrestled with his flowing pores for so long that (in this most sacred of life-moments) he ended up accepting his fate in an abandon of joyous dancing. My only regret was that he didn’t do more to show us his abandon in a rhythmic whirl of cast-off droplets, like a congregation’s blessing during Asperges.

Sara Nye is Gravelle’s wife, and the angle she claimed to illustrate her life was the tendency to fall asleep at the most inopportune, embarrassing and occasionally appropriate times. These one act plays were staged in a South Philadelphia brownstone, and for “Sleeping” the audience repaired from cellar to upstairs bedroom with chairs arrayed in similarly claustrophobic manner, this time around an ample bed. Nye is a dancer and collaborator in the creation of spoken soundscapes that envelope a dancer’s movements. The recording of her soft-spoken narration here was underscored by lilting, almost hypnotic music, dotted (at least in the beginning) with strange exclamations and cries, presumably from somewhere in her unconscious.

Nye used the bed the way painter Francis Bacon locates his figures—as a stage for tremendous physicality. She gyrated, tented herself beneath the sheets, draped her torso over a corner, cosseted herself like a queen in the comforter, thrust her legs into the air, and caressed the sleeping pillow of her husband: all to illustrate how whatever she’s doing can be so easily overtaken by the oblivion of sleep.

While Nye’s precision was always supported by her gorgeously mesmerizing soundtrack, her reach was particularly assured when she read passages from Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, only to have his beautiful cadences repeatedly broken off in mid-sentence by the doze that everyone who has taken freshman English knows only too well. In a nearly sublime conclusion that echoed the recent wedding epiphany below, the last time that Nye falls asleep, Gravelle tiptoes in to (quietly & tenderly) escort everyone but his sleeping wife out of the darkening room.

We’d all like a theme to make better sense of our lives. What did these unexpected viewpoints tell us about living, or tell the performers about themselves?

Sweating and sleeping in these ways set the players apart from the social norm, left them no choice but to see themselves as singular and slightly askew, and the places where they are supposed to belong differently. In tribal cultures, it is a common rite of passage to go out into the wilderness alone for a time, to think about your new role (as adult or wife, a recent hire or holy man) and what it will be like for you when you return. Each of these plays was a similar act of meditation. A deeply personal way to go out, so you can come back in and have it all make a little more sense.

In the Wake of Charlie Hebdo: What We Hold in Common

Lemmings

Job Training for Yourself

Grace Note

Characters Find a Theme

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