Neil Armstrong, American astronaut and first man to set foot on the moon died this week. Many have eulogized him for his capability, his tenacity and his reluctance to seek out the spotlight. He certainly had all of those qualities.
Because of who he was and what he did, people listened to what Neil Armstrong had to say over the years, especially about what it was like to be part of the American space program in the 1960’s. Much that he said was recorded, and this is what he had to say about the work ethic of the tens of thousands of men and women who helped to extend our footprint into the new frontier of space during that era. (The quotation is from NASA’s Oral History Project):
Neil Armstrong
When I was working here at the John Space Center, then the Manned Spacecraft Center, you could stand across the street and you could not tell when quitting time was, because those people didn’t leave at quitting time in those days. People just worked, and they worked until whatever their job was done, and if they had to be there until five o’clock or seven o’clock or nine-thirty or whatever it was, they were just there. They did it, and then they went home. So four o’clock or four-thirty, whenever the bell rings, you didn’t see anybody leaving. Everybody was still working.
The way that happens and the way that made it different from other sectors of the government to which some people are sometimes properly critical is that this was a project in which everybody involved was, one, interested, two, dedicated, and three, fascinated by the job they were doing. And whenever you have those ingredients, whether it be government or private industry or a retail store, you’re going to win.
Those Space Center workers were “interested” because they were part of something bigger than themselves, “dedicated” because they were working for something they believed in deeply, and “fascinated” because they couldn’t believe their good fortune to have jobs that brought them both.
That’s the kind of work I’m writing about on these pages—work that all of us can do and should do, but usually aren’t doing.
Why do you think that’s so?
Is 21st Century America so different?
Why aren’t more of us working for our hopes and dreams, fascinated by the possibilities?
Tenacity with a little playfulness thrown in can be a powerful combination when you’re looking for—and finally doing—the work of your life.
If you were armchair running, swimming, paddling and shooting your way through the Summer Olympics like I was, I think you’ll agree: they gave us a lot to chew on when it comes to tenacity and playfulness.
Take gymnastics, for example. Or platform and springboard diving if you prefer. What’s so excruciating about watching these competitions is how often tight plus nervous ends in a lost opportunity. On the other hand, all you have to do is recall gymnast Gabby Douglas’ all-around performance to appreciate what can happen when tenacity makes room for playfulness. As soon as Gabby’s smile said “I’m enjoying myself,” the rest was pure magic.
GABBY DOUGLAS photo/Mike Blake Reuters
Sometimes playfulness is integral to the moment, as it was for Gabby and the purposeful individuals in my last post, The Power of Laughter at the Most Serious Times. Other times, playfulness follows the tenacity like a sigh of relief, and changes the whole meaning of the story.
As the Olympics rolled into their closing ceremony, the pageantry marked a triumphant end to what had been a long, hard year for London. You’ll recall the scenes exactly one year ago, when thousands of rioters smashed windows, looted stores and torched parts of the City. One of those looters burned down much of the 144-year old House of Reeves furniture store in the borough of Croydon. In the days and weeks that followed, the 5th generation Reeves brothers and their 81-year old father came to embody Britain’s World War II motto “Keep Calm and Carry On,” as they struggled mightily to put their business back together.
While the media was busy debating whether the riots represented class struggle or opportunistic criminality, the community summoned up its better angels to coalesce around the Reeves family as they got back on their feet. The lifeline extended to the family included over 4000 photographs from young people, holding up statements of encouragement and denying the hooligans the last word.
When their new showrooms opened this week, Trevor and Graham Reeves sat on a sofa outside their store, playfully gesturing to their storefront, which they had wallpapered with all of those photographs. It did more than express their gratitude. It provided a moment of effervescence: the grace note after a very hard year.
TREVOR & GRAHAM REEVES Photo/zuma press
Having the tenacity to find and do work that expresses your values can be serious business.
When you can laugh at yourself and the odds you’re facing along the way, and celebrate what you achieve with playfulness, your path will be easier, the crowds pulling for you larger, and the story you’re writing far more impactful.
Of course, values are not just something we should be talking about in our schools. We should be having conversations about what’s important to us—and how to act on our beliefs—with families, friends and colleagues so that we can boldly (and optimistically) face the difficult decisions that inevitably confront us all. When you know what’s important to you, a lot of the bad stuff that comes your way can be put in a proper context, liberating you to move forward in a way that makes sense to you in spite of all the challenges and uncertainties.
But that’s the serious part.
As with all of the #140 character conferences sponsored by Jeff Pulver, this one was an amazing collision of thought leaders and their thoughts, with results that managed to be playful one minute and profound the next.
Because of the range of its take-aways, and still finding myself a little hung-over from “that amazingly broad moment,” I’d like to share with you a couple of stories (one from the conference, and the other from half a world away) because of what they have to say about the power of laughter at the most serious times.
In the “recovery room” outside the auditorium of the 92nd Street Y where the #140edu presentations were occurring in a fire-hose of 10-minute intervals, I found myself talking with a young teacher. I quickly discovered that she needed to make an immediate decision to quit or keep her job in a Bronx classroom before the next school year starts. We weren’t three lines into our conversation when she said: “I can’t imagine going back.” What she didn’t say was: “I’ve been sitting on this fence for awhile, and I don’t have another job.” Her school had plainly done nearly everything it could do to make her feel devalued.
I appealed to the serious-grounded-thoughtful-and-obviously-talented part of her by saying: “The best decisions I’ve made in my life were like jumping off a cliff with no sense of the bottom or how horrible it could be. But if you believe in yourself and in what you are trying to do, you will land successfully—stronger and better—and never look back. At least it had always worked that way for me.”
At this penultimate moment of seriousness, she looked at the huge nametag they had given me and said: “Don’t you find it ironic that we’re here at an education conference and your name is spelled wrong?” Of course, I hadn’t sensed the irony because I hadn’t noticed. Because I hadn’t, and because of her inability to be anything other than a “teacher correcting misspelled words” during a conversation about a key decision point in her life, all of our seriousness deflated into laughter.
Now there was a glimmer of hope in her eyes! At that moment, her laugh made my jumping-off-the-cliff advice seem like it would really work for her—and there’s a good reason for that. Realizing goals you truly believe in is a whole lot easier if you can also manage to see the funny things that are happening around you along the way.
At around the same time we were talking, but a half a world away, another collision of the dead serious and truly playful was going on.
Sweden is close enough geographically that some of Belarus’ wafting stench led two of its courageous citizens, Thomas Mazetti and Hannah Frey, to try and do something about it. Their goal a few days ago was raising awareness, challenging indifference, and expressing their solidarity with the human rights activists in Belarus, whose very small voice is barely heard outside their troubled country.
Thomas Mazetti & Hannah Frey
Mazetti and Frey believed enough in the values of freedom, courage and responsibility that they spent $184,500 of their own money to rent a plane, personally fly it over Belarus, and drop 879 teddy bears with parachutes bearing human rights slogans into the country.
While they managed to fly into and back out of Belarus without being shot down, killed, or imprisoned, there is no question that they put their lives at risk for something that was of the utmost importance to them. But notice how they did it. They alleviated their serious moment with teddy bears, and as a result, every news organization in the world picked up their story.
The #140 character conferences, a young teacher in the Bronx, and two Swedish activists all have something to say to us about finding a place where the most serious purpose can spend time with laughter and a sense of humor.
I’d love to hear your stories about when you’ve found a way to bring either laughter or lightness into your deepest commitments—and while doing so, made it far more likely that you would reach your personal goals.
Schools have their own values, but those values alone are not enough to guide our kids to fulfilling lives and work. Actively providing students with this kind of direction is something all of our schools should be doing.
When it comes to values, schools most commonly foster environments where I should respect you and you should respect me. Extraordinary schools extend this by encouraging you to care for me and for me to reciprocate in a caring way towards you. Tolerance for another’s viewpoints is another school value, as is encouraging active engagement as citizens in the community.
What schools are aiming for with these positive values is something that looks a lot like this—with the well-meaning community outreach going on in the distance.
THE PEACEABLE KINGDOM by Edward Hicks
What our schools are not doing is actively helping students identify what is most important to each of them, in terms of their values?
That many of our schools are providing a righteous and nurturing environment is certainly a good thing, but positive environmental factors alone don’t help students connect with their most basic operating principles. Because most schools aren’t helping students “to make sense” of their education at this level, more and more rudderless young people are leaving our classrooms and stumbling their way into work and into life.
Most school values, like respect and tolerance, don’t leap into the hearts of students, providing clarity around questions of life and work. Instead, they essentially provide a warm bath where a student can feel safe and supported enough to potentially identify what he or she believes in. While the kind of active, mutual caring championed by education scholar Nel Noddings could lead to purposeful living and working, few schools today can help to ensure that if you care for me I will care for you back. As a transmittable value to students, mutual caring seems unrealistic in all but the most intimate school environments.
Encouraging civic engagement in the ways that Thomas Sergiovannihas talked about it also would not work as a vehicle for transmitting values from school to student in most of our schools. For Sergiovanni, students become “virtuous” by actively practicing virtues (like hope, trust, civility and piety) while working with “moral teachers.” As with “mutual caring,” a student’s own value choices are more actively encouraged in “the virtuous school,” but this model also seems unworkable in all but the smallest and most elite institutions.
In most schools, student engagement in civic affairs is limited to activities that leave everyone “feeling good” about themselves at the end of the day, but encourage neither commitment nor personal growth from the participants. It’s planting the community garden, reading to the elderly in a rest home: low impact activism that requires minimal effort for minimal impact. Schools, students and parents can pretend that some kind of value training is going on here, but everyone knows that it’s not.
So while schools often provide students with a warm Petri dish of tolerance and respect in the hope they’ll flourish, most fail to add the critical ingredient—which is actively teaching our kids how to cultivate their values so they can integrate what they’ve learned in school with what’s most important to them as individuals.
Earlier this month, I talked about some of the things schools can do in terms of building value awarenessand helping students planfor their lives and their work. Exercises like this give students a roadmap that can help them to seize their futures instead of wandering aimlessly into them. We’re doing a very poor job providing our kids with this kind of preparation. It’s a problem for students leaving school at all education levels, and as I’ve written about before, even for the best and the brightest among them.
This is a tragedy that can be avoided.
It has profound implications for families, employers, communities, and most importantly the students who are graduating into life unprepared for its most basic challenges and opportunities.
Why are we so passive about this as parents?
Why aren’t we more concerned about this as teachers?
Policymakers and business correctly provide financial support and expertise for our non-performing schools. Why aren’t they also concerned about the purposeless students coming out of our performing schools, and the associated opportunity costs for our nation and our economy?
Anthropologist Margaret Mead (1901-1978) once said: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
People who go on to make a real difference have one thing in common. They have prepared themselves for it by becoming more “thoughtful” and “committed.”
The process begins by developing your value awareness, discussed in the last post. While our schools can provide an ideal environment for deepening your understanding of your values, values training can be undertaken at any time or place in your career. So can planning for the transition from where you are today with your work to where you want to be. You plot your course to energizing and fulfilling work by making a plan, and then following it.
I learned about personal business planning from a mentor in the venture capital community early on in my career. I was getting ready to launch a start-up, and kept talking to him about how I wanted my business to help people. He pulled no punches when he said at the time: “make your money first, and once you make enough of it you can do all the helping you want.”
My expression then (and after similar exchanges) must have told him I was unconvinced. As a last resort, he suggested I prepare a personal business plan to get a better grip on my motivations. Maybe that exercise would straighten me out.
Well it did, but not in the way he intended.
Values are your fuel
The deeper I got into this planning exercise, the more my initial goals were confirmed, and the clearer my future direction became. What did I most want to do and why? What am I “best at,” and what were the most revealing demonstrations of the “highest and best” roles I had played—both at work and outside of it?
The goal of the plan was the job I was seeking. To identify it, I needed to know why it was the right job for me. In other words, that I’d be accomplishing something I felt was important and that I’d feel fulfilled at a very basic level while doing it. While this required familiarity with my principles and improved “value awareness,” it also required identifying real world opportunities where my values could fuel my work.
What was my right job? Could I find it or would I have to create it? This required research. What are people I admire doing? How did I see myself helping people? What is the work that’s already being done to help in this area, and where are the opportunities for me? What do I need in terms of salary and job security? Questions like these: I needed to find answers to all of them.
My skills would be my work tools. For me, advocating, organizing, visualizing, problem solving, all were on my skill list, so I had to come up with examples of each that demonstrated my qualifications for the work I wanted to do. I needed to take my best shot proving the first part of the equation: that I could do it.
Experience (the flipside of the equation that said “I had done it—or something like it—already”) would be described in terms of roles I had played. Times when I had had some success as a coordinator, prime mover, creator, or gatherer of resources to get something done—often after work, since many of us spend more time excelling in our personal lives than we do in our working ones.
Planning plots your course
Skills and experience: two different ways to illustrate what I had to bring to the party.
A personal business plan aims at lining up what you’re best at and what you’ve done in your life that you’re most proud of in order to demonstrate your suitability for a job that will bring you similar measures of pride and satisfaction.
Instead of trying to shoehorn yourself into a job you don’t want to do, you are actively pursuing work that you have already been getting ready to do during the most centered and accomplished moments of your life.
That may well be your definition of work that matters.
As such, it is work that is worth striving for.
Learning how to become more “thoughtful” about the work you should be doing, and more clearly “committed” to its goals has everything to do with preparing yourself for it.
Personal business planning is a valuable way for you to become more thoughtful about your work.
(I’ll be talking about values and education at the #140edu conference, which is taking place at the 92nd Street Y in New York City later this month. Join meby registering today.)
