A Hero in a Poor Season for Heroes

January 6, 2013 By David Griesing 1 Comment

We’re just about done thinking about 2012, but not quite.

As always, there were many small heroes this year, but Groundbreakers? Galvinizers? Healers? Those who stood before us with clear eyes and quiet confidence: there were almost none of them. Perhaps these men and women will come out of their private worlds when we’re closer to bottom, when our need will be great enough to recognize & welcome them & finally decide to stand behind them. This year, leaders like this were leaving us, not striding onto the stage.

Neil Armstrong left the stage he was never really comfortable on for the last time this past August. My post about him was one of the year’s most read, perhaps because it’s not just moths that are drawn to the brightest lights.

Surely, some of it was that his life recalled a different America when we were able to pull together to accomplish something amazing, whereas today we can’t even agree to come together and make sense. But it’s also about a man who took us with him on a great adventure, didn’t get in the way when we got there, and then gave everybody else the credit when it exceeded our dreams.

One way to take the measure of Neil Armstrong—in all his Mid-Western matter-of-factness—is to eavesdrop on an interview he gave in 2001 as part of the Johnson Space Center’s Oral History project. (His interlocutors are historians Stephen Ambrose and Douglas Brinkley.) His thinking is also a good way to clear our heads for another muddled year ahead.

On who gets to be the first man on the moon:

AMBROSE: It is part of the popular perception, I guess, and it appears in some of the literature that the other astronauts have put out, that there was a lot of jockeying for position.

ARMSTRONG: Yes.. . The goals, I thought, were important to not just the United States, but to society in general. I would have been happy doing anything they told me to do. It’s probably true that I was less inclined to be concerned about just what job I had than some were. I think they’re all different people, they all had different kinds of views on that subject. It wasn’t as obvious to me as some of the stories I’ve read have portrayed it. (49)

Foundation instincts: steady, confident & clear:

AMBROSE: But you made a decision [after serious technical problems] and you got back to Earth. I spend a lot of my life talking to men who have made big decisions, and in this case your life and others’ were at stake…

ARMSTRONG: Well, I can’t make too much of it. I think generally you try to keep going as long as you safely can and try to save the flight, the objectives, and try to put everything back together. At some point you just have to make the decision that, “I can’t take the risk of pursuing my goal further, because I have to go back to the foundation instincts”, which is save your craft, save the folks, get back home, and be disappointed that you had to leave some of your goals behind. (55)

The results also come from:

ARMSTRONG: I think it predominantly is experience over training. Training certainly helps, but having been in flying machines for many years and faced a lot of difficulty, [pilots] become accustomed to being required to solve problems as they arise …, and particularly test pilots who get a higher percentage of things going wrong than normal pilots. And I’m not saying that we did it perfectly in every case; I’m sure we didn’t. But the experience that we’d had in flying a variety of different kind of machines in difficult circumstances certainly enhances your ability to look at a situation, … analyze it and determine what your probable best course is and how much latitude you have to deviate from that best course. It’s not an easy subject to describe adequately, but it seems to have worked. (57)

The important things: the task at hand, the shoulders you’re standing on, and pride in your work:

BRINKLEY: …Apollo 11…was perhaps the most watched event in the history of….the world. [Y]ou didn’t treat it differently mentally at all, [only] as you would…one of your previous missions?

ARMSTRONG: I was certainly aware that this was a culmination of the work of 300,000 or 400,000 people over a decade and that the nation’s hopes and outward appearance largely rested on how the results came out. With those pressures, it seemed the most important thing to do was focus on our job as best we were able to and try to allow nothing to distract us from doing the very best job we could. And, you know, I have no complaints about the way my colleagues were able to step up to that.

AMBROSE: Let me interject here that you share a quality with General Eisenhower. When reporters would come to him during the war and want to get a story, he would always say, “Go talk to [General Omar N.] Bradley. Go talk to [General George S.] Patton [Jr.]. Go talk to a sergeant. That’s where the real story is. This is a team effort,” and he would never allow it to concentrate on him…And you just spoke about the hundreds of thousands of people that have been working for so long to make this happen, and I invite you to make a reflection on the team nature of the Apollo 11 mission.

ARMSTRONG: Each of the components of our hardware were designed to certain reliability specifications, and far the majority, to my recollection, had a reliability requirement of 0.99996, which means that you have four failures in 100,000 operations. I’ve been told that if every component met its reliability specifications precisely, that a typical Apollo flight would have about [1,000] separate identifiable failures. In fact, we had more like 150 failures per flight, [substantially] better than statistical methods would tell you that you might have.

I can only attribute that to the fact that every guy in the project, every guy at the bench building something, every assembler, every inspector, every guy that’s setting up the tests, cranking the torque wrench, and so on, is saying, man or woman, “If anything goes wrong here, it’s not going to be my fault, because my part is going to be better than I have to make it.” And when you have hundreds of thousands of people all doing their job a little better than they have to, you get an improvement in performance. And that’s the only reason we could have pulled this whole thing off. (78-79)

We give heroes our best because they take us with them to a whole new world.

Godspeed, Neil Armstrong.

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.

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.

On Being Part of Something Bigger Than Yourself

October 7, 2012 By David Griesing 4 Comments

For your work to be fulfilling, it should further goals that mean something to you.

Of course, goals that are important to you have everything to do with your values. Do you want to be more generous to others, more productive, more creative? Is your work goal to become richer, improve your status, give your family a better life, or heal the world?

You may want all of these things, but some of them you want more than others. Personal ethics ranks what is most important to you, so that you are able make decisions with real consequences even when your values are competing with one another.

In several posts, I’ve argued that it’s essential to develop your ethical decision-making skills before you have to use them (e.g., posts on preparation for life and work in school and how to respond to child abuse). It’s far more difficult to learn how to weigh your values and act upon them when you’re facing hard choices, under pressure.

One way is to have conversations that reproduce what some families used to have around the dinner table: regular talk about morally ambiguous situations that arise everyday, and how your personal values would lead you to respond to them.

For some, religion also provided a regular framework for considering how values should play out in our lives, although for many of us this is no longer true. But the line between being religious and non-religious is rarely a bright one. Some of us believe more during the holidays, around birth, illness, or death, or during transitions in our lives. Looking at it this way, many of us are still tied (at least somewhat) to a community of shared values that enables our decision-making.

On the other hand, when you cut your ties to a believing community altogether, where does that leave you?

This past week, there was an extraordinary article by Hanna Pylvainen, reacting to a new reality show about a group of Amish young people “as they forgo horses and buggies for New York City’s taxis and subways.” The show follows in the wake of earlier programs like “Jesus Camp” and “Sister Wives” that aimed to shock, mock, and entertain a “more enlightened” audience about the oppression of religion. The article’s aim was not to provide grist for that mill, but to give voice to what these young people had given up when they left a community of shared values.

The author herself had left a fundamentalist community. As a child, she chaffed against its rules and when she could leave, she did so. She’s now recalling the “comfort” she had once gained from being “unshakably tied” to “these people.”

In leaving the church when I was in college, I soon saw I had not stepped into anything else. My admittance into a dubious form of atheism merited no special membership. Atheism seemed, if anything, a community that eschewed community, that strove to preserve the strength of the individual. Thus I clung to anything that might provide stability—a boyfriend, school friends, professors. But these relationships, good as some were, were largely transient—friendships that swelled and faded in response to the changing mileage between us.

This isn’t to say the world has not been kind to me in its own fashion, that I have not found my own freedom valuable—but it is a lonely place, bound to nothing but what I bind myself to. And I find myself worrying, always, that these ties will not be lasting enough. (emphasis added)

To put it simply, Hannah Pylvainen’s experience made her sad for the Amish boys and girls in the new TV show.

Communities where there are shared values about what to do and how to live come in different colors and flavors, in religious as well as non-religious versions. At their best, they are extensions of those dinner table conversations described above.

When you bring your values into your work, the support of a community that shares your values where you work, play and give thanks can mean—quite simply—everything.

If you are still connected to a community like this, appreciate what it is giving you.

If you are not, think seriously about building one around the values that you have brought into your work.

Neil Armstrong on Work

August 28, 2012 By David Griesing 4 Comments

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 21^st Century America so different?

Why aren’t more of us working for our hopes and dreams, fascinated by the possibilities?

And what does that says about our future?