The 10 Things I’m Most Proud Of In 2012

December 31, 2012 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

I’ve written several times this year about why we need to take time to be proud of our accomplishments. That is, proud of what we’re producing for ourselves–of who we are becoming through our work. And proud too of the services were providing and the products we’re making for others, what used to be called “the fruits of our labor.” (It’s Time To Be Proud of Your Work)

I’ve spent some of this week between Christmas and New Years (a jumble of slightly deflated days between the festivities) trying to decide what I’m most proud of in my work this year. As it turns out, my accomplishments were not money-in-the-bank or shout-from-the-rooftops successes. Instead, they were smaller victories on the path to larger ones.

Thinking about your accomplishments, in this way and at this time, is like stringing together the best pinecones—recovered from where they’ve fallen, and hung up briefly once more—like a salute, or pennant in the wind after a good race. It’s part of what makes the journey worthwhile, this pause: short but necessary, before getting on with it.

So here they are, the 10 things about my work that I’m most proud of this year, in no particular order.

1. Achieving more economy in thought & word. Not that the richness of life, or its best lessons, can be captured in an elevator speech or tweet. But what we have to say can almost always be said more economically. I can see it in these posts. Maybe you can too. I’m proud that I’m getting there.

2. Realizing that editing is a worthy endeavor, in & of itself. Communicating isn’t just about what’s heard or read. Excising the newest favorite phrase or train of thought because they don’t carry your ball effectively is not only essential but also gratifying. Like polishing dull wood.

3. Learning how to tell more of the story through pictures. Pictures engage different parts of your perception, both in the taking and in the viewing. It’s Instagram & Pinterest, infographics & new forms of visual learning. It’s pictures of both altruism and tragedy and our responsibilities as viewers when we look at them. In this supremely visual age, I’m excited that I’ve gotten better at using this powerful toolbox.

4. Recapturing the adventure of great working partnerships. One of the best things about work is who you’re doing it with. When you define your work as broadly as I do, and your collaborations are as far-flung, there can be an amazing spectrum of rewards. It’s been years since I’ve been as open as I am now to cross-pollenizing work that is limited only by the reach of the networks I’m a part of.

5. Plugging in. There is a great passage in Ian McEwan’s Atonement where the woman of the house is lying in the dark connecting to its sounds: the creaking & hissing of a vast building’s central nervous system. For me, it wasn’t dark or just about the sounds, but when I participated in the #140 character conferences last summer I felt connected to a similar throb & pulse. To speak to hundreds while they are tweeting to tens of thousands is an exponential sensory experience with a half-life that keeps on tingling. That the conferences took place at the 92^nd Street Y, where so many thought leaders have climbed the mountaintop, was just the icing.

6. Toning the voice. Almost as important as what you say is how you say it. Words. Pictures. Sounds. A warning. A rebuke. A laugh. It’s the way you assemble them that adds up to your voice. I’m relieved that I can finally stand “listening” to mine.

7. Grounding message in service. It’s more of a rolling wave than a beginning this year, but helping smart & talented people find their life’s work has become an increasingly confident exercise, and therefore more satisfying than ever. Too few of us know how to think productively about what to do with our lives. It’s been great to figure it out together, and have fun while we’re doing so.

8. Seeing yourself in print. I’ve published in other careers, but most of my discussion about worklifereward has been via social media—until this year. An October op-ed in the City’s paper is the first of many forays into the traditional press.

9. Becoming more resilient. I wrote about the book Antifragile recently because one key to success today is learning how to respond robustly to the unexpected challenges the world keeps throwing at us. This is a life lesson I’ve taken to heart this year (and boy does it get easier when you do)!

10. Lightening up. Around a year ago when I started blogging, an old friend told me I was a lot more interesting & fun in person. I had worried about this in my first post, where I said values are serious stuff, but that I’d try to host a discussion “with some bubbles added, to give it a lighter finish when needed.” I’m proud that in much of what I’ve accomplished this year, I’ve tried to include those bubbles.

Cheers!

A Holiday Present Worth Asking For

December 22, 2012 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

The path to fulfilling, purposeful work is hard to walk alone.

Too often, even the smartest, seemingly most accomplished people don’t know how “to get out of their own way” to figure out what they should really be doing with their lives. The push towards clarity usually needs to come from the outside. Who that someone is, of course, is everything.

Most of my work has been inauthentic. I studied things, took jobs because of what others told me I should be doing with myself. I can’t believe that at this age I’m still living somebody else’s version of my life! The lens that looks beyond the here & now is unfocused. I squint, but still can’t see what I’m aiming for. I can’t see past my day-to-day to a more satisfying future. Well of course you can’t. Because you’ll never be able to see clearly through the fog of, say, a parent’s vision for you, through eyes that have always played an outsized role in what you think and feel about the world around you.

So the helpful holiday present I’m recommending may seem, at first, to come from exactly the wrong direction. While a skillful stranger with none of the presumptions you grew up with can provide the catalyst for rethinking your life’s work, you’re probably going “home for the holidays” in a couple of days. As incredible as it may sound, you might also find someone there who can help you out with this.

I’m relying solely on anecdotal evidence mind you, but in my family and in nearly every family I know anything about, it seems that similarities in personality and perspective skip a generation. Now admittedly, some of it may be due to the concerted efforts of daughters not to become their mothers, sons their fathers, and so on, but I think it goes much deeper than this. That great aunt, great uncle or grandfather may have a lot more in common with you than any of the others around the holiday table, and this family member has a present with your name on it.

All you have to do is retrieve it.

What richer or more familiar repositories of stories, life lessons and family traditions are there than the older relatives you’ll be spending time with in coming days? I’d start with the one you always connected with most naturally, because you’ll cover more territory when your conversation with them starts to roll. And roll it will.

As in other situations, you can help your luck along here by thinking beforehand about what you’d like to find out from them, and then doing a little research so you know more about his life or her career when they were your age. You might be surprised at how someone with similar wiring confronted hurdles like the ones you’re facing. You also might be surprised by how much you’ll learn about yourself when you start tapping into all that accumulated wisdom.

What’s less surprising is how few of us ever get around to asking.

Karl Pillemer, who teaches courses on human development at Cornell, wanted to do something about that, while also preserving some of what was being lost. He is the guiding force behind the Legacy Project, whose website and YouTube channel provide access to life lessons collected from hundreds of older adults on topics ranging from marriage and parenting to their careers.

In his own life and work, Professor Pillemer has also come to appreciate the personal benefits that are realized on both sides of the Q & A, and certainly on the answering side. In a recent interview, he offered this simple advice:

Ask them for their life stories, but try to tap their life’s wisdom. If you ask a person for advice, it empowers them. It honors a person’s life experience.

Who helped you along the way? What mistakes did you make? How did you make ends meet? Did you ever want to settle for less? Why didn’t you?

With the holiday season upon us, and New Year’s resolutions ahead, being home for the holidays may provide you with an unexpected opportunity to think productively about the future direction of your life and work. But the present won’t be given to you unless you ask someone for it.

Just Plain Funny #2

December 16, 2012 By David Griesing 1 Comment

I like a newspaper I can hold in my hands because sometimes the stories across the folds can talk to one another in ways that never seems to happen on a screen. That kind of exchange took place in my newspaper today.

For as long as I’ve been reading it, the Wall Street Journal has a funny, odd or just plain ridiculous story at the bottom of Page One. At some point, the Page One editor must have decided that stories like this are good antidotes to the calamities, logjams and shenanigans chronicled above. These daily stories always froth over to the last page of the “news” where they brush up against the beginnings of the “commentary” section on the other side of fold. It’s here that strangely compatible bedfellows sometimes meet.

Page One’s dollop of the day today was about a long-standing West Point tradition celebrating the graduating cadet, who by academic and other standards, finishes dead last in his class each year. Because of some “informal” information sharing, everyone but The Goat knows who he is on the big day, and when his name is called out from the graduating roster, the cadets erupt into the loudest cheer of the day.

There are two kinds of Goats, according to a disappointingly dry piece in a publication called Failure Magazine. There are cadets who labor through the muck to the bitter end, and those who take the experience just seriously enough to fall inebriatedly over the finish line. Of course, several of the Good Time Goats were actually pretty smart and went on to make history (Generals Custer and Pickett, for example). Several middling cadets did pretty well too. (Eisenhower reportedly said: “If anybody saw signs of greatness in me while at West Point they kept it to themselves.”) But it’s the ones who always struggled to do their best, while barely making it to the end, who are the real heroes of the story.

Unclear whether to be embarrassed or proud of their accomplishment, most of these Goats eventually seem to settle into being good sports about it. For example: “In my class, no one else can say that they’re the Goat and no one else can say that they’re part of this special lineage that dates back so far,” said good sport Roberto Becarra, Jr. in 2007. Somewhat earlier, the bespeckled Goat (below) seems to have had a similar reaction.

When asked about these persevering Goats by the Journal reporter, James S. Robbins said:

The tradition of the Goat is important because it kind of encapsulates that American spirit of—yeah, you’re going to have the top and they’re going to get recognized and they’re going to get stars by their names and all that other stuff. But, you know what? The guys further down, they have their chance too, and they can succeed too and it’s important to recognize them.

While his insight might have been more penetrating had he been a psychologist or meteorologist instead of an historian, Robbins’ remarks did manage to counterpoint similar observations about the value of “keeping your head up” and “putting one foot in front of the other” on the facing page of the paper, where a Journal writer reviews a new book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb called Antifragile.

Taleb’s singular perspective is that theories follow practice instead of the reverse. It’s not “the Soviet/Harvard notion that birds fly because we lecture them how to.” We learn by doing it first, and make up the theories that contain all of our how-to-do-it wisdom later on. It is, as the reviewer notes, “a startling [chicken v. egg] insight,” because what Taleb’s debunking allows is a flat-out celebration of the creativity involved in doggedly keeping at it. The many virtues of trial and error.

Taleb makes up the word “antifragile” to mean not only hardy, but also something that has been improved through repeated failures, becoming more resilient in the process. From this perspective, the persevering Goats are not just plodders: more than a few of them embody the adaptation that is at the beating heart of natural selection. As Taleb’s reviewer notes:

If trial and error is creative, then we should treat failed entrepreneurs with the reverence that we reserve for fallen soldiers.

This is why experience is the best teacher. It’s why “A” students who master the theory often work for the “B” and “C” students who rightly suspect that the magic lies elsewhere. It’s why rigidity and too much seriousness is always a bad idea. And it’s why the loudest cheer really should go to somebody who has not only failed most prominently, but also has the spirit to get up and keep trying.

modern-times — CHARLIE CHAPLIN IN “MODERN TIMES”

Not that it’s always so easy.

Time to Push Back!

December 6, 2012 By David Griesing 1 Comment

Bringing your values into your work means that you understand what your values are, and are prepared to take the positions that your convictions require.

Value-centered living and working means being connected to your most basic power source. By determining your motivations, values are the source of tremendous personal power. When you are wired this way, it is no longer possible to “keep quiet” when something offensive is happening around you. You not only feel complicit (because you know better) but also motivated (because you are able to do something about it).

Moreover, where people of principle are concerned, there is tremendous strength in numbers—and the good news is that you don’t need too many others to raise their voices with you. In a quiet room, those who speak up can always be heard, and a couple of voices can drive the conversation.

America today is far more quiet than it should be, not about politics certainly, but about how we should be living and working. Among others, Charles Murray recently said that those with knowledge and conviction need to determine whether to “engage themselves and their children in the rest of America or whether they should isolate themselves from it.” It becomes a lowest common denominator community when the unacceptable is tolerated. Freedom has its limits, and those who know better need to raise their voices and push back.

The common denominator went a bit lower this week. I think we collectively crossed an unacceptable line. One of New York City’s key sources of information, the New York Post, put a picture of a man about to be killed by an oncoming train on Tuesday’s cover.

Too many eyes have already looked at the Post’s so-called “photo journalism,” and I won’t give it any more play by putting it up here. But not nearly enough of us have looked into the face of Ki Suk Han who died this week at a station on 49^th Street, and perhaps we should.

ap-subway-push-death-4_3_r560 — SERIM HAN HOLDING A PICTURE OF HER HUSBAND ON WEDNESDAY
Photo by Berbeto Matthews/AP

My last post was about what could be called “altruism tourists.” It also featured a picture taken in NYC, that time of a policeman giving a homeless man a pair of boots he had bought for him on a cold night. A woman with her cell phone was nearby and in a flash the picture reached millions. In that post, I wondered whether viewers actually learned something from this gracious act or merely enjoyed a brief “feel-good” sensation, their vicarious dose of generosity for the day.

This time a picture is also about the rest of us.

Much ink has been spent this week talking about the ethical obligation of a photographer (“to document or to assist?”) given the tragic circumstances presented in that subway station. The consensus among experts on “the ethics of visual journalism” is, not surprisingly, that “you’re a human being before you’re a journalist,” with an obligation to help if you’re in a position to do so. The photographer here said he was too far away to help Mr. Han. Ok, perhaps he was, but….

But what happens in a situation like this: in the split seconds between deciding to help or deciding to take your picture? What are your motivations? Are they driven by the value you place on human life or on what your picture is likely to bring you from a tabloid like the Post?

Which, of course, is where we all “get in the picture,” I think. A picture like this has a value that can compete with the value of a human life only because we want to see it.

Still, in the largely quiet room around this issue there is power to influence what’s happening, not just complicity in the way things are.

If there were less of an appetite for shock or revulsion, if we acted more like adults and less like children, if we were not so tethered to the temporary sensation—and knowledgeable voices were actually raised to say so—we’d be a lot better off.

Just someone or two of us saying so would be that powerful.

It’s a visual age. There will be lots more pictures to talk about. They too have incredible power. Look again at the image of Serim Han holding the picture of her husband and try to tell me that they don’t.

Nice, But What’s the Conversion Rate?

December 1, 2012 By David Griesing 2 Comments

There was a story in the Times this week about a policeman who came upon a barefoot man lying outside on a cold night and bought him a pair of boots. I know about this for several reasons including multiple, near-simultaneous postings of the story on my Facebook page, and because several additional friends and family members sent it to me.

There’s no question that what happened here embodies acting on your values through your work. It was heartening that so many people I know were touched by the story. It was also noteworthy for its rarity.

Not that these things don’t happen all the time (they do) but because most Good Samaritans (in my experience anyway) prefer not to be noticed, and they usually get away with it because there’s not a tourist with a camera eager to capture their kind act (as there was here). What happened between the New York City cop and the homeless man was a rarity because we got a chance to see it—and millions of us looked. (You can read the Times story and see the now famous picture here).

My question is: how many of the millions who thought this story was “wonderful” actually learned something from Officer DePrimo? About what he did and we could do too. Or about his modesty (since I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we’ve never seen his face).

A recent study by Japanese researchers suggests that looking at pictures of kittens and puppies relaxes us and improves our concentration for other things later on. Was this tourist snapshot more or less like that: a post-card to share with friends so that they could have some of the warm and fuzzy that we’re enjoying too?

During this season of giving, it seems worth asking: What was the conversion rate on this Good Samaritan advertisement?

Which of us onlookers went on to buy?