Admiration Means You Must Be Doing Something Right

March 10, 2013 By David Griesing 1 Comment

What the Chinese are thinking about us is no laughing matter if we’re listening to experts talk about how they are holding America’s mortgage with one hand and stealing our most valuable secrets with the other. But our worries could become more realistic if we also considered just how much the Chinese admire us and the way of life they think we have going on here.

There is always something valuable to be learned when others are both coveting and admiring what you have. As La Rochefoucand famously said: “Sometimes we think we dislike flattery, but it is only the way it is done that we dislike.” Thinking about what we like and don’t like about how many of the Chinese people view America today has some interesting things to teach us about ourselves.

I had the chance to visit China a couple of years back.

I’m glad I went when I did and probably wouldn’t recognize much of the place today. It was a few months before the Beijing Olympics, and the country was moving so fast you could almost feel the wind. But what I remember most was how excited regular folks—particularly young people—were that we had come all that way to see them.

They tried out their English on us and surrounded us for pictures. We were their chance to sample America, in the same way that they were already sampling KFC and Polo Ralph Lauren. At the time, analogizing their admiration to eating or wearing did not seem entirely misplaced.

This inkling got some support when I came upon a piece about “architectural mimicry” in China. While the copycat buildings that are springing up there aren’t always American buildings, easily the most duplicated structure in China today is the White House.

The building serves as the model for everything from seafood restaurants to single-family homes to government offices in Guangzhou, Wuxi, Shanghai, Wenling and Nanjing.

There are duplicate Chrysler Buildings and other Manhattan skyscrapers too.

That “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” is certainly part of it. But it’s more than this, and has many antecedents in this ancient civilization. Emperors regularly built parks with an Epcot Center of facsimile structures from remote lands. Both then & now, it is a pretty straightforward effort to enhance their legitimacy by demonstrating China’s de facto appropriation of the known universe.

Today, the Chinese are trying to swallow other aspects of the American way of life as well.

Much of the dynamism you can feel in China today results from a billion people embracing capitalism all at once. It was a forest of timeless bamboo scaffolding clinging to a mountain range of 21^st century construction projects that really brought this home to me when I walked around Beijing. Since almost everybody in China wants to become the next Bill Gates or Warren Buffett, it is hardly surprising that the American rags to riches fantasy has also been made available for mass consumption.

It’s been turned into the equivalent of a fortune cookie.

The Chinese love short motivational phrases even more than Americans do, if that’s possible. They have been a vehicle for transmitting community values from Confucius to Mao, and they are still in active use today. Only now it’s so-called American values that are being conveyed, and what’s being shared has a lot more to do with individual fortune than collective harmony.

Evidence of this comes from the apparently spontaneous rise of 20 or so “allocutions” or commandments that many people in China today believe are written on the walls of Harvard’s library. These commandments speak to the commitment, diligence and self-denial that are supposedly bolstering their counterparts’ remarkable performance here in the States.

One says, “Happiness will not be ranked, but success will—at the top,” while another envisions a slightly different, though related reward, “If you study one more hour, you will have a better husband.” Struggling through exhaustion to get where you’re going is key in this messaging: “Nodding at the moment, you will dream. While studying at the moment you will come true,” and similarly, “Most great achievements happen while others are dozing.” Perhaps most succinct of all is this commandment: “Please enjoy the unavoidable suffering.”

Wherever it comes from, this distilled wisdom about American motivation clearly haunts the Chinese imagination. In an article about the phenomenon by Robert Darnton, Harvard’s university librarian, we learn that:

the allocutions took root in China’s educational system and were widely used in primary schools, in English courses, on exams, and even in interviews for admission to Beijing University. They have appeared on bulletin boards, in newspapers, on telecasts, on a website of China’s Ministry of Commerce and on Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter. Above all, they have reached millions through the Internet, thanks to endless transmission by blogs, including one that registered 67 million hits.

As a result, it should come as no surprise that the most numerous queries on Harvard’s “Ask the Librarian” web page are about these allocutions, with many of the questions originating in China. When informed that no such commandments appear on the walls in any of Harvard’s 73 libraries, Mr. Darnton records the following responses: “Well my teacher has been using this fooling me,” and “Are you kidding? We grown up with these mottos.” Or even more interesting: “Thank you for liberating us” and “When I know the truth I can’t stop crying.”

Of course, there are both comforting and disquieting things about tokens of flattery like this, as well as the fact that Chinese people will probably be eating fried chicken in a mock-up of the White House later today.

For example, we may like it that the Chinese think we’re this successful, but disquieted by their distortion of us into sleep-deprived automatons. It’s like Eleanor Roosevelt’s ambivalence about one of her tributes: “I once had a rose named after me and I was very flattered. But I was not pleased to read the description in the catalogue: no good in a bed, but fine up against a wall.”

The good news about admiration is the often accurate perception that there is something about us worth admiring.

Even when it is somewhat alarmingly expressed, flattery indicates that somebody out there still thinks you’re ahead in the big game.

But there can be another message too.

Whenever there’s a gapping hole between what’s being hungered for and what is actually true, it may be time to torque up that big game of yours before it’s too late.

(On this last day of the Chinese New Year, great prosperity to all!)

Trial & Error

January 29, 2013 By David Griesing 6 Comments

Whenever I do something over and over again until I figure it out, I think of my first video game called MYST. The goal of the game was to wander around an otherworldly feast of an island until you “figured it out.” I still can’t believe how much time I spent there, totally immersed. It doesn’t surprise me at all that MYST is now called “a classic,” a “first.”

Twisting dials, wandering off the path to check out that glimmer over there. Detecting patterns, finding keys (or clues to keys) until the door opened or the book closed or the light finally came on. All you needed was your cursor, some bandwidth, and a stretch of time. It was the embodiment of trial & error, and you kept at it because with ingenuity and tenacity, you were always rewarded—sometimes delightfully.

My work everyday involves figuring things out. For example, my aim in talking about values and work is to find that slightly different angle that allows you to finally “see” how fulfilling it can be to feel proud of what your doing at work and clear about why you’re doing it. So I keep spinning the dials and pushing the levers until I think I’ve gotten it right, or at least better than I got it the last time.

Trial & error is what made some of the Goats such an inspiration (Just Plain Funny #2). They kept at it, got it well enough, grabbed the finish line, and were (I think) a lot better for the effort than those who glided or stumbled over it.

Gaining mastery at your work takes lots of trials and nearly as many errors. You’ve got to want to keep coming back, over & over again, and taking another shot–maybe 10,000 shots. But as we lay down new tracks in our brains along the way (check out Daniel Coyle’s wonderful book The Talent Code about these new tracks) mastery will not only come. It will feel like a breakthrough. New territory.

Because that’s what mastery feels like. A whole new world.

What Good is My English Degree?

November 25, 2012 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

What kind of job are you going to get with an English degree (or a degree in History, Classics, Religion, Music, Art History, Anthropology, Philosophy or French)? You’re wondering. Maybe your parents are too.

Or then again: you studied the humanities and now you’re 10 or 15 or 25 years out of school. But every workday, you feel like you need a crash course in technology, social media, marketing, engineering and accounting? Why does what you studied seem to have so little value? Why do all these other things seem so important?

What you learned by studying the humanities does have value—tremendous value. But there are many reasons you might not think so, and a brief look at some of them might be helpful before discussing how the humanities can bring the greatest value to your job today.

The Industrial Revolution kicked off an explosion of technological advancement that has only accelerated in our lifetimes. (It’s x amount of memory on that chip today, twice as much tomorrow, and so on.) At the same time, advances in science created an experiment-based way of explaining the world that clashed with—and has now largely overtaken—a faith- or story-based worldview, at least in so-called “advanced societies.” (It’s less church attendance and more individualized spirituality, when faith remains a part of our lives at all.)

In their upward trajectory, technology and science were also vastly improving our standard of living. At the same time that questions of meaning and purpose became more personalized, many of us were also feeling that we no longer needed the humanities to improve the quality of our lives. Technology and science were attending to our material comfort along with our wellbeing.

Or so we thought.

Several writers have lamented the sidelining of the humanities. For example, Anthony Kronman has argued that as the arts have lost their prominence in our schools, we have almost lost the ability to develop an important dimension in our lives.

Where education used to mean exposure to a canon of Western thought to help students determine “how I should live my life,” that canon has increasingly come under attack. Some viewed it as propaganda from a group of white, Eurocentric oppressors, while others challenged these texts for presenting “subjective” interpretations of reality instead of the “objective” (and therefore more reliable) view that science and technology provides.

So in the face of this powerful onslaught, where is the value in your English degree?

Its value is to give you something that science and technology never can: a personal story that gives your life as well as your work both meaning and purpose. Despite our human flaws and ultimate mortality, the story you’re writing recounts how you can make a difference for yourself and others in your community by what you chose to do everyday. Through the humanities, you have lifelong access to role models and ideas that help you to live a good and fulfilling life.

It is the insight gained from these stories that business needs the most today.

In his “How to Avoid a Bonfire of the Humanities,” Michael S. Malone notes that since the best products and services aim at meeting real human needs and making our lives better, the best way to bring them to market is with stories that resonate in people’s lives.

Given the dominance of science and technology and its associated impacts today, fewer people know how to find what’s meaningful on their own, and fewer still can deliver it to them. Asked what made his company special, Steve Jobs said: “It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough—it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing.”

Think about it. It’s not what the product is that makes you buy it, or how you use it, but why it makes your life better. (Simon Sinek’s much-viewed TED talk is about just this point.) Your humanities degree has economic value precisely because it enables you to understand “the why.”

Where the English major is needed is at the intersection between the company and its customers. Having studied “humanity,” you have the ability to focus your company on meeting basic human needs in ways that neither science nor technology ever can. It is a priceless perspective that is needed in marketing, sales, and customer service, but also at every stage of product development and design. Again: Apple ads, Apple stores, and Apple products satisfy Apple customers as much as they do because of Apple’s English majors.

Malone concludes his “Bonfires” article by noting that in the future the market advantage will go to companies like this:

that can effectively employ imagination, metaphor, and most of all, storytelling. And not just creative writing, but every discipline in the humanities, from the classics to rhetoric to philosophy. Twenty-first century storytelling: multimedia, mass customizable, portable and scalable, drawing upon the myths and archetypes of the ancient world, on ethics, and upon a deep understanding of human nature and even religious faith.

The humanities have been undervalued and shunted aside, but what they have given us is more essential in the best jobs than ever. Far from putting you at a disadvantage in the workforce, they give you a powerful advantage. And the places where you should want to be working know it.

When Experience is the Best Teacher

September 27, 2012 By David Griesing 3 Comments

You’re at work thinking: I’ve got to get out of here.

Maybe you’re feeling a persistent ache (I’m wasting away here), or the pain is impossible to ignore (this job is killing me!)

It’s that trigger moment when you’ve not only had enough, but also start thinking about what to do next.

But even before the plan emerges, you hesitate. I can’t do anything I want to do without going back to school. I need a degree, and it will take two, three or four years before maybe I start getting what I need to be getting out of my work. (That is, all those things that you’re not getting now.) Will investing more time and money in your education be worth it?

Maybe. But then again, maybe not.

Paying for school used to be the relatively reasonable cost of getting where you wanted to go. No more. Graduates are struggling to find jobs that pay them enough to cover both their loan payments and the most basic necessities. For this reason alone, it may be time to consider whether more education is truly worth it.

Some are also questioning whether the education system is the primary driver of American innovation and wealth creation. Gregory Ferenstein argues that America’s economic success is due to the huge numbers of high performing (that is, “smart”) people in the U.S., a continuous influx of the most talented immigrants, access to the world’s best research facilities, and the largely unfettered economic opportunity all of us enjoy in this country.

Research has consistently shown that on nearly every measure of education (instructional hours, class-size, enrollment, college preparation), what students learn in school does not translate into later life success.

Instead, “[d]etermination, raw intelligence, and creativity are the measures of a successful college student and employee [and] none of those factors are learned in school.”

At this point you may wonder: instead of spending more time and money preparing to do what I want to do, why don’t I just do it?

20 or so students recently did just that, dropping out of top schools to take their business plans directly to market as recipients of a Thiel Fellowship. This highly competitive program pays them $50,000 a year while they work at road-testing their innovative ideas. It also provides them with a network of valuable contacts to help their start-ups to succeed.

These men and women are not “the average person” choosing the lessons of the marketplace over more time in a classroom. With its annual payments, this two-year fellowship is not the classic School of Hard Knocks. But comments made after these young people abandoned their degrees at places like Princeton and M.I.T. speak to those times in all of our lives when experience may be the best teacher.

In recent interviews, the Fellows talked at length about “getting a shot at a better education” by “diving into the real world of science, technology and business.” They had pent-up energy, and couldn’t wait another day to pursue their dreams. “I was antsy to get out into the world and execute on my ideas,” said Eden Full, whose aim was to market a low-cost solar panel. In her real world classroom, she had to learn to count on strangers for help and to become more flexible by finding daily workarounds for unexpected obstacles to get her business off the ground.

Laura Demming was looking to develop medical therapies that target damage from the aging process. She learned that persistence and belief in her ideas were essential to overcoming a string of early failures. The mother of one of the fellows was initially terrified when her son dropped out of school, but ultimately found herself amazed by his trajectory. “This is stuff you don’t learn in a classroom,” she said. “He’s blogging, he’s teaching, he’s writing software.” The father of another student said: “I can’t think of a worse environment than school if you want your kids to learn how to make decisions, manage risk and take responsibility for their choices.”

Wherever you are in your career, there are times when more skills and more knowledge will be essential for what you want to do in your next job. But there are other times when you have enough skills and knowledge already, times when more education is simply a way to postpone what the real world is waiting to teach you.

When you’re sitting at work, hating your job, and thinking about those things that you always wanted to accomplish, consider taking a chance on yourself and your ideas by completing your education in the real world. Your reward could be the empowerment that comes from facing risk, overcoming failure, and gaining practical experience in ways you never imagined.

Work That Produces Continuous Reward

September 11, 2012 By David Griesing 1 Comment

You spend time everyday getting yourself ready for work because you want your sweat equity to provide you with more than just a paycheck. It takes regular priming, recharging and calibrating of your engine (see the last post) to obtain regular returns like empowerment from your work.

We all spend a sizable chunk of our lives working. As a result, you want to benefit as much as you can from the huge investment of time and energy you’re making. When your workday’s over, you want the satisfaction that comes from learning new things, stretching yourself, and becoming more capable. You also want your work to make a positive difference in ways that are consistent with your values because tremendous personal satisfaction comes from that too.

Becoming the best version of yourself. Helping to make the world the kind of better place you want it to be. These are the essential ingredients of fulfilling work.

But work that provides a return like this demands something from you as well. While it helps to get ready for it everyday, you also need to be “in the game for the long haul,” so that your work produces continuous reward for you and for others. That means you’ll also need a plan to disrupt the tendency we all have to fall off our best game and settle into complacency.

You generally know when you’re coasting and what it feels when you’re in a rut. Before long it becomes boring, predictable, pretty lifeless and ultimately pretty unsatisfying, right? So what can you do about it?

To continuously breathe new life into your work, one solution is to introduce new skills and perspectives into your job before you start slipping into your “comfort zone.” In their terrific article “Throw Your Life a Curve,” Juan Carlos Méndez-García and Whitney Johnson literally show us what this would look like.

The authors use a familiar graph that illustrates how innovative products rapidly penetrate markets to show us how bringing new knowledge or innovation into our jobs can change our individual work experiences just as dramatically. The graph they re-purpose to make their argument is called the S-curve.

When an innovative product like the iPhone is introduced, it takes off gradually (from lower left). However, when it hits a tipping point of awareness in the marketplace, the product enjoys a near vertical upturn in sales, until it approaches market penetration, when sales taper off at the peak of the curve.

Méndez-García and Whitney argue that something similar happens when you shake things up at work by bringing new ideas and skills into your job.

As we. . . mov[e] up a personal learning curve, initially progress is slow. But through deliberate practice, we gain traction, entering into a virtuous [upward] cycle that propels us into a sweet spot of accelerating competence and confidence. Then, as we approach mastery, the vicious [downward] cycle commences: the more habitual what we are doing becomes, the less we enjoy the “feel good” effects of learning: these two cycles constitute the S-curve.

What you need to do when the “feel good” effects start tapering off is the most interesting part.

As a worker, you essentially do what Apple has done so successfully as a company. While you are still enjoying the empowering effects of mastery in your current S-curve (or for Apple, while its current iPhone is still selling), you make the “jump” to the next curve by, once again, bringing new skills and knowledge into your job. Jumping from one curve to another in this manner can allow you to continue “the virtuous cycle” in your work in the same way that it allows Apple to enjoy continuous profits when it introduces its next generation iPhone.

As a worker, you risk loosing your competitive edge if you don’t continuously shake things up with new information. But as importantly, you risk loosing the empowering rush that comes when you’re in the “sweet spot of accelerating competence and confidence”—a phrase that perfectly captures what’s best about personal growth on the job. As the authors conclude:

[T]hose who can successfully navigate, even harness, the successive cycles of learning and maxing out that resemble the S-curve will thrive in this era of personal disruption. (italics added)

This is one roadmap for maintaining the flow of satisfaction, and even exhilaration on the job. Simply shake things up by introducing new (and wisely chosen) ways of thinking into your work whenever you find yourself approaching your comfort zone.

When you take active responsibility for the quality of your work like this, continuous reward for you, and for the company that’s lucky enough to have you, are sure to follow.