David Griesing | Work Life Reward Author | Philadelphia

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Learning as Roadmap for Finding Your Life’s Work

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How do you decide what you should do with your life?  How do you figure out what “a good life” would look like for you?

How do you sort through the possibilities and choose the kind of work you will do?  After years of working, how can you transition from a deadening job to work that will energize you?

What happens if you never learned how to think and feel your way through questions like these?

Why aren’t we getting more help here?

One thing is certain: our schools should be doing a better job preparing our kids to lead good and satisfying lives at work and in their communities.

Unfortunately, our students aren’t prepared, because our schools aren’t helping them to identify what they value the most, or showing them how their values can transform the work they will do into a vocation. Increasingly, our kids are left to figure out “how best to live” with no real guidance from educators at all.

Every student is seeking information that will give their lives direction and meaning. But instead of providing this information in a user-friendly way, students get a lesson here (a glimpse of the heroic in English class) and a lesson there (on the football field, in the lab, or from a counselor), but are generally left to put these assorted pieces together on their own. As a result, most students never manage to assemble a roadmap they can follow when they go out into the world.

What follows should not be surprising.

Our kids spend time doing this and that, and dream impossible futures, but they are increasingly unable to discover a path in life that will bring them genuine satisfaction. (For years, Stanford education professor William Damon has discussed why so many young people “fail to launch” in books like The Path to Purpose (Free Press, 2008))

While it won’t change everything, there should be a class in every school that will help students identify what they value the most, and how to apply those values to the decisions they are confronting everyday.

–       Students could be given tools like the Rokeach Value Survey to identify their most important terminal and instrumental values.

–       They could learn about the value choices made by peer groups and admired individuals, and consider how making different values their lodestar (like “equality,” “fairness,” “freedom” or “security“) can influence their choices about life and work.

–       They could learn how their values will change over time as their value awareness improves, and how those changes relate to new goals they will start identifying for themselves.

–       They could learn how their behavior and decision-making is guided by their values, not in the abstract but by considering decisions that are being made around them everyday:  about allocation of school resources (new equipment for the football team vs. a new chemistry teacher), school conflicts (like bullying) or a political issue polarizing their community.

There might be an institutional drive to combine these value-choice exercises with resume writing or work-interview101—an extension of what guidance counselors are doing in our schools already. That’s ok, because this curriculum has everything to do with the work you will do after school. But it is not just about finding A Job, it is about ultimately finding or creating The Right Job for who you are and what you value the most, so you will gain fulfillment from your effort and maintain a life-long sense of purpose.

To help ensure this result, “resume writing” and “mastering the interview” modules could be combined with an extended exercise where each student prepares his or her own plan for the future. It would be a practical exercise on where their individual values might lead them in the real world. (I’ll elaborate in the next post.)

Why aren’t we giving our kids this kind of learning experience today?

image/kolenya

Most students leave school without a compass for navigating the working world. Having only vague ideas about the kind of work that will bring them satisfaction or how to go about getting it, a tremendous effort goes into finding any job—any kind of paycheck. But it doesn’t have to be this way. When students truly want to do something, know why they’re suited to do it, and understand the value to themselves and others that will be gained by doing it, their goals aren’t random and ill-defined, but specific.

Our schools need to be helping students to identify what they value the most, how to identify real-world work that vindicates those values, and how to bring their strongest competencies into their working lives.

What kind of coursework could be more relevant to them or to the challenges they face in the world?

When our schools start integrating their disparate lessons into a curriculum that helps students find their vocations in life, they will be providing our young people with a valuable roadmap that points the way to working lives with both meaning and purpose.  And as teachers, Americans, inhabitants of a troubled planet, we would get something too:  a chance to mold a hopeful and energized generation to go forth and make the world a better place.

(I’ll be talking about values and education at the #140edu conference, which will be taking place at the 92nd Street Y in New York City later this month. Join me by registering today.)

 

Let the Crowds Fund Your Work

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We all want to do work that matters. But, as often as not, you won’t find that kind of work in the want ads.  It’s rarely work that somebody else gives you to do.  As often as not, you need to give yourself the kind of work that will change the world.

Early on in my forthcoming book WorkLifeReward: Following Your Values to Fulfilling Work is the line:

 If you want the world to be a better place, you need to help it become that better place.

The main way to do so, of course, is through the work you do.  So if you don’t think the work you’re doing—that is, your selling whatever it is that you’re selling today—is making the world into the kind of better place you want it to be, maybe it’s time to think about working at something that will make that kind of difference.

These posts are about encouraging you to think differently about your work.  They aim to raise what I call “value awareness,” so you have a clearer view of the color and texture of the better world you’d like to encourage with your efforts.  Sometimes they aim to help you become the most effective spokesperson you can be while striving to achieve your goals.  And sometimes the discussion here is about ways to make the productive work you want to do easier.

This post is about one of those booster rockets. Something has gotten a lot easier.

SEED CAPITAL

Creating a business model for a better world, where you and your co-conspirators are doing work that matters, takes energy, creativity, vision, tenacity, luck.  And it takes money that either you provide, or that people investing in your vision of a better world put in your hands.

In the good old days the money came almost exclusively from your own bank account or from friends and family.  (It was the era when those who already had money were usually the ones making more of it.)  On top of that, only a tiny percentage of new ideas—whether promising to change the world or not—managed to find venture capital.  So if you or a rich uncle weren’t providing the cash, even your brilliance, best intentions and limitless energy were often not enough to overcome the funding constraints all new companies that produce work need in order to survive.

But there’s some good news.  It’s a brand new day!

Today, crowdfunding websites give you the ability to make a direct appeal to individuals or groups who may be interested in supporting what you’re doing—because your kind of work is work that matters to them too.

You tell your story.  You identify your goal. The crowd decides whether to invest in it.  Usually harvested in small dollar amounts, it is hundreds, even thousands of small investments funneled through the crowdfunding site that can put the financial fuel in a new company’s tank.

As an entrepreneur, you promise to give your investors a tangible return on their investment.  It could be a letter from a grateful child your company has helped, a picture of the tree planted “because you invested,” or, if you are producing a brave new product or service, periodic updates on solutions to problems no one had gotten around to tackling before.

You get the idea.

For providing the conduit between you and your new investors, crowdfunding websites like MicroVentures, peerbackers, and IndieGoGo are generally paid a small percentage of what you collect—sometimes as little as 5%, when you hit your fundraising target.

LINE UP YOUR INVESTORS photo/John Cooper

What’s news this week (according to the Wall Street Journal) is that crowdfunding has its first “poster child.”

The Cinderella story is about how a little company called Pebble Technology developed a “smart” wristwatch that can display apps and connect to your smart phone to notify you about incoming tweets and Facebook updates.  But 26-year old Eric Migicovsky was almost out of money, living and working with his only employee in a rented condo, and ready to call it quits.

He took his case for financing the manufacture of his smart watch to crowdfunding site Kickstarter, looking for $100,000.  The ROI: everyone investing $115 would get one of his watches.

In its first 28 hours on Kickstarter, Pebble raised more than a million dollars. By mid-May, it had taken in a total of $10.27 million from 68,929 people!  Now Eric’s problems involve things like working with a manufacturing facility in China to produce all those watches.  But it also looks a lot like his work dream has become a reality.

Everybody needs to make a living.

What sometimes seems like the impossibility of getting both a paycheck and fulfillment from your work makes many of us reluctant to leave our paychecks for work that gives us the opportunity to make a living and to truly live.

Crowdfunding is reducing that risk.

Your Pictures Help Tell Your Story

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I’m moving from my ungainly house of 25 years to a flat in the sky. It’s a misty time, leaving the ground. Among other things, I’m saying goodbye to lots of flowers outside, and to many sweaty hours helping them grow.

The arc of this gorgeous spring has turned it into a long and very satisfying goodbye. Almost every day brings camera-phone pictures that will one day be joined into a visual feast of yard things from the final year.

(It also makes me sad to think that one day soon I may use these smiling flowers as part of a sales pitch – that advertising our home’s value in this way will turn these children of mine into pretty little prostitutes. Only over time does this saner parent admit the many contributions they still make, and how happy they’ll be if they can help me to find them another caregiver for those seasons when I’m gone.)

I’m outside again this morning, just returned from a conference where I kept being pulled into the orbit of people like Matteo Wyliyams (@mouselink) and Alan Weinkrantz (@alanweinkrantz) talking excitedly about how they are using their phones like wands to tell Stories That Enrich Their Own with Instagram.

Every picture you share tells some of your story, they said.

(A few weeks back this same flowering spring, the story was that Mark Zuckerberg determined the price he’d pay for that photo-sharing company by naming the pizza delivered into his living room negotiations “Facebook,” and then figuring out how big a “slice” of its value Instagram should command.)

A lot, they agreed. And worth every penny according to my new conference friends: way more than a thousand words.

(But for Instagram’s founders, the story never told and the pictures never shared were about how saying good-bye to a company you grow is not so different from saying good-bye to a flower. The irony: that we never got to see the play of light, or their unique point of view at that moment in time – and what it would have told us about them.)

Today I’m working on the final curation of my yard, and of my last days in it, through the many screens of nature around here.

I’m calling the pictures I’ve started sharing “screentests”.

TODAY’S PAPER – SELLING SOMETHING

They’re another part of my story.

On Having Courage and Dignity Under Fire

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You pursue work that matters because you want to leave the world a better place than you found it. By doing so however, you

inevitably run afoul of those who want to keep everything more or less like it is.

Attracting controversy also pushes you into the spotlight. With the lights in your eyes and a welter of voices clamoring around you, the heat of the moment calls upon you to say and do things that can either advance your goals, or set them back.

How you’ll respond at such times is important. It’s helpful to think about it, start visualizing how you want these moments to play out before they arrive.

While there are many who have handled these situations badly, there are also those who have summoned up the kind of amazing grace we can learn from. This past week brought just such a lesson.

Margaret Farley is a nun, a member of the Sisters of Mercy, and the emerita professor of social ethics at Yale Divinity School, where she has taught for 40 years. Throughout, she has been a celebrated teacher as well as the author of numerous books and articles, including Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics (New York, 2006).

Last week, after concluding an investigation that had lasted 3 ½ years, the Vatican’s Magisterium (or Teaching Office) condemned Just Love, because it “affirms positions that are in direct contradiction with Catholic teaching in the field of sexual morality” and therefore “cannot be used as a valid expression of Catholic teaching, either in counseling or formation, or in ecumenical and interreligious dialogue.”

In other words, the views Margaret Farley expressed in her book put her outside the boundaries of her faith. Her teaching itself—through argument and discussion in her book—was found to be an improper path for believers to follow in seeking either truth or understanding.

A half century ago, Margaret Farley chose to commit her life to a religious vocation of teaching within the Church. Since then, her work and her life have been united by this spiritual purpose.

Given her choices, the judgment she received last week is different than the rebuke of an employer, on the one hand, or the criticism of vested interests you are challenging, on the other. In each instance, what she has faced is more extreme.

The leaders of her own community of believers have publicly found that her work is incompatible with those shared beliefs. They have defined her as standing separate and apart from them. For a citizen, the word would be “traitor.” In a community of believers, it is usually “heretic.” Imagine standing where she stands today.

My aim here is not to take a side in this controversy but to comment on how Margaret Farley has conducted herself and continued her work in the midst of it. It is her courage and dignity—not her scholarship—that is teaching us today.

Her response was: Simple. Straightforward. Clear. Amidst a blizzard of media commentary (including in the New York Times and Washington Post) Margaret Farley issued one statement and gave one interview. She said her book was never intended to express “official Catholic teaching” but rather to help people “think through their questions about human sexuality.” It was an effort to move away from “taboo morality” and bring “present-day scientific, philosophical, theological, and biblical resources” into the discussion.

Not Angry or Contentious, but Disappointed about issues never addressed and opportunities lost. The Church said: “Sister Farley either ignores the constant teaching of the Magisterium or, where it is occasionally mentioned, treats it as one opinion among others.” She, in turn, asked: “Should power settle questions of truth?”

If we come to know a little more than we knew before, it might be that the conclusions we had previously drawn need to be developed, or even let go of. [To say that wasn’t possible] would be to imply that we know everything we need to know and nothing more need be done.

Not Seeking the Spotlight, but Standing her Ground once she was in it. Because the Church “is still a source of real life for me, it’s worth the struggle. It’s worth getting a real backbone that has compassion tied to it.”

Margaret Farley was my teacher at Yale. I know her as humble and earnest: engaged like the best teachers, careful like the best scholars. I sense enormous reluctance in her notoriety: for her to be taken as a champion for divorce or gay marriage, or even as a spokesperson for believers who are drifting from their Church because of its difficulties addressing questions of gender and sexuality. But her reluctance does not preclude her resolve—and this is where we find her today.

Once Margaret Farley was thrust into the spotlight, she knew what to do.

What Work Is

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I’m not afraid of poetry, but I don’t read it as often as I should. Somebody mentioned What Work Is, a poemby Philip Levine on the radio today.


I read it, then heard him read it, then wanted to share it with you for what it has to say about the work we do. Here it is:

We stand in the rain in a long line
waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.
You know what work is–if you’re
old enough to read this you know what
work is, although you may not do it.
Forget you. This is about waiting,
shifting from one foot to another.
Feeling the light rain falling like mist
into your hair, blurring your vision
until you think you see your own brother
ahead of you, maybe ten places.
You rub your glasses with your fingers,
and of course it’s someone else’s brother,
narrower across the shoulders than
yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin
that does not hide the stubbornness,
the sad refusal to give in to
rain, to the hours wasted waiting,
to the knowledge that somewhere ahead
a man is waiting who will say, “No,
we’re not hiring today,” for any
reason he wants. You love your brother,
now suddenly you can hardly stand
the love flooding you for your brother,
who’s not beside you or behind or
ahead because he’s home trying to
sleep off a miserable night shift
at Cadillac so he can get up
before noon to study his German.
Works eight hours a night so he can sing
Wagner, the opera you hate most,
the worst music ever invented.
How long has it been since you told him
you loved him, held his wide shoulders,
opened your eyes wide and said those words,
and maybe kissed his cheek? You’ve never
done something so simple, so obvious,
not because you’re too young or too dumb,
not because you’re jealous or even mean
or incapable of crying in
the presence of another man, no,
just because you don’t know what work is.

You can also hear Philip Levine introduce his poem and then read it.

Levine is a Pulitzer prize-winning American poet, who is currently the poet laureate of the United States. He frequently writes about life in working class Detroit. His life story left me thinking about a different era in American life, of dustbowls and Woodie Guthrie and photographs by Dorothea Lange. About waiting for work and the opportunity to be productive.

We are in our own hard times. There is no less nobility in the work that we’re doing, and waiting to do.

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