David Griesing | Work Life Reward Author | Philadelphia

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The Dogs That Bind

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What connects us to other people is often as simple as a dog.

By the time Rudy died in April, I had lost touch with a whole new generation of dogs and the humans who’d be tagging along with them. By this time a year ago, Rudy’s “walks” were down to a slow amble from the back to the front of our house, so there were many times when his shorter paths crossed no one else’s at all.  As the web of sniffing and barking and “how was your day” gets smaller, a whole slice of giving and taking is reduced to almost nothing.

Rudy 2013

A new puppy changes all of that.

Like a gift that everyone wants to share, Wally has quickly taken his place in the webbing that knits these streets together. Being new and alive–always happy to just be here–he’s like a walking magnet as the evening shifts into its lower gears or the next morning starts to rev up. Every conversation is easier with Wally breaking the ice.

Wally 2013

When it comes to words, what a puppy initiates is not so different from what’s depicted in that classic scene from 1001 Dalmatians. You remember. It’s where the alarm goes out from one to a whole chain of barking dogs that something (in this case “something very bad”) is about to happen. The message that’s telegraphed:  Can’t one of you dogs out there mobilize your human “to do something” before it’s too late!

It’s been a gorgeous September in East Falls. While the dogs nip, lunge and roll on their backs, they’ve gotten their humans to find things to talk about, helping to shore up life and make it a home on this little hill next to one of Philadelphia’s great rivers.  In a big American city with many demands but little spontaneous conversation, this is no small thing.

“So hello Fritz, Otto, Jack, Dakota, Chase, Ajax, Coco, Lola, Peg. . . this is Wally.

It’s good to see you.”

It’s Time to Expand Your Range

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You’ve got a “bad boy” side, even if you keep it buried in a hole somewhere in the backyard. Whether you’ve repressed a little or a lot, you’ve probably walked a pretty straight road since you shoved it all down. If you’re feeling stuck, maybe that’s why.

To tap into the mix of inspiration and passion that leads to fulfilling work, the time you spend completely ignoring the straight-and-narrow can easily be as important as the time spent on it.  As I’ve noted before (and not entirely in jest), it may be why East Asian economies produce lots of hard workers but few innovators:  nearly everyone there is intent on finding a figure-it-out-once-and-for-all approach to life & work.

Maybe you’ve been following their lead.

Maybe you’ve tried to identify the 5 or 10 factors that motivate you to do your best. You read about successful entrepreneurs, hoping to find a formula embedded in their stories that you can make use of.  You poke around the wellsprings of innovation with the aim of capturing a secret sauce to take back to the office. But it’s likely that the recipe you’re after will only be discovered when you abandon the notion of a recipe altogether.

Of course, there’s paradox here, with a plan only becoming meaningful once you understand why all plans are useless.

But order depends on chaos.

Discipline learns the most from rule breaking.

So maybe at least some of what you’ve buried needs to be dug up.

William Blake, God Calibrates Chaos During Creation in “The Ancient of Days”
God Calibrates Chaos During Creation (William Blake)

To be happy-at-work doesn’t require you to start your own company. But if that’s your goal, you may need something that nearly all entrepreneurs have, namely, better hot wiring to your freer spirit.  It’s why you’re never too old to find happiness at work; it’s not your youth (or even your energy level or health) but the range of your life that matters.

With broader parameters, when you’ve identified a problem that needs solving in your marketplace, you don’t spend all your time with the conventional wisdom. When you’re confident taking risks and roaming widely in your personal life, you have no problem looking outside your business or even your commercial culture to find new ways of meeting your challenges. You’re not afraid of making mistakes or of defying the reigning masters.

You know it’s not just about sweat & ambition, and that insight in one area is more likely to come when you’re hard at work doing something else—or nothing at all. It’s why you stir replenishment (like smelling the clover) into your workday.

A study that tends to validate time spent off-road came out last month by economists Ross Levine and Yona Rubinstein. They found statistically significant correlations between risky, even illicit behavior and wealth generation by individuals who went on to start their own companies (people they call the “incorporated self-employed”).

In addition to the most successful entrepreneurs being smart and coming from stable, well educated families, the authors found that as teens they were more likely to have broken the rules by drinking, smoking pot, dealing drugs, stealing, gambling, even being violent.

[A]s teenagers, people that incorporate [their own businesses] later in life tend to score higher on learning aptitude tests, exhibit greater self-esteem, indicate that they aspire to be managers/leaders later in life, and engage in more aggressive, illicit, and risky activities than other people. Moreover, it is a particular mixture of pre-labor market traits that is most powerfully associated with entrepreneurship. People who both engaged in illicit activities as teenagers and scored highly on learning aptitude tests have a much higher tendency to become entrepreneurs than others without this particular mixture of traits.

While entrepreneurial success later in life may correlate with a higher tolerance for risk acquired early on, I think it’s more than that. It’s having learned that you’ll not only survive but also thrive with less certainty & security that delivers the work/life pay-off.

If this is right, the answer isn’t upstanding citizen by day, criminal by night. For most of us, an ethical perspective evolves with maturity. Moreover, how we end up striking the balance between risks & rewards is too individual for a self-improvement formula, recipe or secret sauce.

Some of us extend youthful indiscretion into middle age before the pieces fall into place. Some spend 6 months “on the road” and 6 months off. Others of us allow for episodes of genuine chaos and total digression in our work before looping back. Or we have key people (“interrupters”) who regularly knock us out of our routines so that we return better, stronger.

It’s finding your own range—your rule-breaking margins whatever they are—so that whatever you’re doing everyday is feeding the force that enables you to come alive.

 

It Only Takes One to Take a Stand

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There was a remarkable photograph in the papers on Thursday, taken as Egyptian troops were leveling the encampment of Muslim Brotherhood supporters in Cairo. It depicted a solitary woman standing between a military bulldozer and a wounded man on the ground.

We’ve seen this all before, but it never gets old.

There was a similar confrontation in Tiananmen Square in 1989, with a lone protester blocking a column of Chinese tanks. That picture still speaks to the courage of saying: “Stop.” “No, you cannot do this any longer”—even when no one else is standing with you.

On its anniversary this year, China’s leaders continue to suppress any discussion of the uprising of the human spirit that took place 24 years ago. It is a continuing exercise in “thought control” aimed at ensuring that those who were alive then start to forget, and those who came after never manage to find out. But some of the power in pictures like this is that they won’t go away, and in their permanence will always call to those who can recognize a part of themselves there.

 

Indeed, I think we linger over images of solitary personal courage because we hope that someday we’ll be up to doing the same. We keep looking because the individuals depicted are standing in for the best part of each of us too.  We wonder:

Will I have the courage to seek out the circumstances, 

and when those circumstances require it, stand up for what I believe in,

even when there’s no one else is around?

The “thousand words” in these pictures speak about a life force that won’t be pushed down any longer. It caused a woman in Cairo and a man in Beijing to leave the relative safety of their homes behind so they could speak their particular truths to power.  It’s what many children do with far greater ease than us grown-ups:  the ones who know what’s important to them and don’t fear the consequences of putting themselves on the line.

Maybe we have such children, were such children.

However what experience has taught us over the years is how to protect ourselves from risks & confrontation, to sidestep & keep our heads down. Our experience teaches us almost nothing about taking a stand for what’s essential in our lives and work.

That’s some of what these pictures do.

They help us find the power of a child, when playing an adult’s game.

Lego Tank Man 456x314

 

The Jobs Project Revisited

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The movement of our work was captured by a troupe of gifted Philadelphia dancers in a performance last May called The Jobs Project.  When I first posted about it, I promised footage of the ensemble when it became available. Now it is. You can follow this link to the current RealLifePeople(in)Motion newsletter, which includes a video excerpt.

According to the program notes, the dancers’ movements were “in a conversation with” recorded comments by an assortment of local workers about what they do, and remarks from the dancers themselves about their gainful commitments beyond dance.

Movement 1051x783

 

I was behind one of those interview voices, and can tell you this:  while there’s nothing quite like sitting in a darkened theater and suddenly hearing your voice coming through the speakers, the experience jumps several levels when highly accomplished performers start responding to what you’ve just said.

At the time of my interview, I’d just written a post called I am a Work in Progress.  It was on my mind that day and the gist of it was captured in one of my recorded comments during the performance. It was these words, along with those from several others, which provided the counterpoint to moves you can now get to see for yourselves.

The medium of voice, music & dance was the message–and a very powerful one at that.

The Essentials of Productive Work

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(1) Productive work provides people with goods and services that actually improve their lives.

(2) It provides adequately for your needs and for the needs of your loved ones.

(3) Productive work makes you more capable while you’re doing it, and your labor more valuable.

(4) A primary goal in any community should be to help ensure that productive work is available to everyone who is willing & able to do it.

On this page, these 4 essentials have been my grounds for attacking un-productive work (such as contributing to the churn of consumer products no one needs), and challenging economic forces that inhibit or eliminate productive work (wherever that work is being done).  Examples include these recent posts: Who Bears the Cost of Low Prices? and How Everyday Low Prices Hurt Us All, about why it’s in our interest for employees at the big-box stores we shop in to make “a living wage,” and What We Don’t Know Can’t Change Us, about how our consumption of “fast fashion” links us to recent manufacturing tragedies in Bangladesh.

It’s the essentials you commit yourself to—whatever they are—that drive not only your point of view but also the decisions you make about important issues.

It’s where you take a stand.

It’s where changing your life and work starts.

Andy Goldsworthy - Japanese Maple Leaves
Andy Goldsworthy – Japanese Maple Leaves

 

Affirming the essentials–our collective priorities–is equally important as we emerge from the economic setbacks of the past 5 years and try to regain our productivity as communities and as a nation. It is necessary too for great but crippled institutions that are trying to seize the future with clarity and purpose. This is why his bold affirmation of the essentials was the most significant part of the pope’s visit to Brazil last week.

Francis was thinking out loud about the foundations of the Catholic Church when he spoke to Brazil’s bishops last weekend. (The full text of his remarks can be found here.) He was trying to uncover the rock the Church was built on, buried beneath sex scandals, bureaucratic turf battles, and too many unhelpful words. His aim was to turn the tide on the Church’s increasing irrelevance.

Perhaps the Church appeared too weak, perhaps too distant from [people’s] needs, perhaps too poor to respond to their concerns, perhaps too cold, perhaps too caught up with itself, perhaps a prisoner of its own rigid formulas, perhaps the world seems to have made the Church a relic of the past, unfit for new questions; perhaps the Church could speak to people in their infancy but not to those come of age.

He advocated a new “grammar of simplicity” to address universal human needs, such as:

the loss of a sense of life’s meaning, personal dissolution, a loss of the experience of belonging to any ‘nest’ whatsoever, subtle but relentless violence, the inner fragmentation and breakup of families, loneliness and abandonment, divisions, and the inability to love, to forgive, to understand, the inner poison which makes life a hell, the need for affection because of feelings of inadequacy and unhappiness, the failed attempt to find an answer in drugs, alcohol, and sex, which only become further prisons.

And he gestured to the natural world of Brazil’s Amazon Basin, urging:

respect and protection of the entire creation which God has entrusted to man, not so that it be indiscriminately exploited, but rather made into a garden.

It is here, in a simple dialogue with these essentials, that “God always enters clothed in poverty, littleness.” (An earlier, related post about Francis’own simplicity can be found here.)

To recover faith, to find productive work, to live a fulfilling life: all begin by declaring the essentials.

Meaningful change never happens unless you start here.

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