Doing is Learning

August 27, 2017 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

I come from a world of careful preparation.

Dot was an anesthesiologist who knew that you always got 8 things ready before you did the 9^th thing, even when it was going to the beach. Frank was an engineer who was carefree to the point of irresponsibility in his off-duty life, but methodical in his professional one. I don’t remember my parents throwing themselves into projects and learning while they went along. Not even once.

Sometimes, though, preparation can be an impediment, even an excuse to avoid jumping in and figuring out how it all fits together.

Judging when you’re ready to “just do it” is part science and part art. The art is in knowing when jumping in could be good for you—that you’re talented and resilient enough to profit from the experience. It comes from the suspicion that learning it while you’re doing it will get you where you’re going a whole lot faster. So whether you take this advice also has to do with self-confidence, or your lack of it.

I don’t know whether Frank Wilczek knew that he was headed for a Nobel Prize when he took his leap from mathematics to physics with little of the necessary groundwork, but he certainly wanted to get someplace in a hurry. This is what he said about jumping into his new discipline in a recent essay:

“My approach was different. I hadn’t taken many physics courses, so my preparation had gaping holes. I could manipulate the physics equations as abstract mathematical symbols, but I often had only vague notions about what the symbols meant. Conversely, if you told me about a situation in the physical world, I might have trouble figuring out which equations applied.

Nevertheless, I resolved to leap right to the frontiers of research. I found a great thesis advisor… and an important problem, and I went for it. I picked a subject area where nobody really knew what they were doing, so I didn’t start so far behind. I learned or improvised what I needed as I went along, made lots of mistakes –and got my thesis done quickly.” (emphasis added)

Wilczek didn’t recklessly jump off a cliff, but hedged his bets in a new area “where nobody really knew what they were doing” so he wouldn’t be so far behind. (That kind of judgment is pure art.) He also jumped because he didn’t know about either the meaning or the application of what he did know already, and that more preparation wasn’t going to solve either problem. (That kind of feeling seems more like instinct.) Wilczek sensed that what your actions mean and how your knowledge can be applied will only be learned by doing it.

In 2004, Wilczek won physics highest prize for a subject I can name—asymptotic freedom in the theory of the strong interaction—but not describe. When it may have counted most, his talent and ambition were undeterred by his lack of preparation for achieving it.

Sometimes you write to yourself as much as to others.

I’ve often risked the death of a good idea by over-preparing instead of just grabbing it and running as fast as I could for the horizon. I call it the eat-first-jump-later phenomenon, because the eating almost always makes you too full to jump. I’ll do it later, after a nap and a walk with the dog, even though I know that it’s better to jump on an empty stomach.

So I’ve often been over-prepared and under-experienced, like I suspect many introverts are. Too much time spent in our heads and not enough outside of them.

There’s fear in over-preparers too, of course. What if I get it all wrong? (Nobody gets everything wrong.) What if I embarrass myself? (What, in front of the bystanders who aren’t risking much of anything?) I mean: what if ALL I show is how much I don’t know? (Well that dimension of embarrassment can spur your effort to avoid more of the same the next time around.)

Little experience jumping into action can also make you oblivious to the likely consequences when you finally do have the impulse or summon the courage. You’ve simply never learned how it’s best to feel and act in the heat of the moment.

Many years ago, I remember tripping and falling on an uneven sidewalk at the Penn campus. A group of West Philly teenagers watched me fall, and one started shrieking with laughter. I got up, approached, and with the side of my shoe upper cut her ample butt saying: “What’s wrong with you?” Of course, it was about what was wrong with me, but I couldn’t help myself. How much better if I’d been able to go over and thank her for giving me the best reason yet to watch where I was going. It would have demonstrated my self-control, and probably startled her more than I did with the bounce of my foot.

Mistakes are not excuses for your anger or confrontation. Instead, they’re lessons (gifts really) to learn from. I could merely have said, “Thank you young lady,” if I’d had more experience, on the ground, both making mistakes and handling their consequences.

So I’ve come to appreciate that the best antidote for the over-preparers and under-experienced is practice in taking those first steps into the relative unknown. Each time is an occasion to trust that your instincts, know-how and better angels will help you make it to the other end.

Just like learning how to cook one simple meal instead of learning “how to cook,” the first step can be a simple one and, by hedging your bets, you can improve your chances of building self-confidence and overcoming your fears when the next opportunity beckons.

As a line from one of our Nobel laureate’s fortune cookies famously said: “The work will teach you how to do it”—in ways that preparation never can.

The Inner Cultivation of an Ethical Life

July 16, 2017 By David Griesing 2 Comments

The long tail of summer always provides an opportunity to consider your life and work before it’s September again.

Taking a step back before stepping forward sometimes happens in the Christmas to New Years week too, but between then and now it’s easy to get caught up in your daily distractions until time-off slows you down into someone who can reflect again.

Heat, sand and ocean are lead characters in summer’s pause, particularly the ocean. Its surface moves, sparkles, crests and breaks: a skin of hyperactivity that endlessly draws your attention with its clutter of ridges and crashes, smells and spray. But diving in is something else again. Below its surface, the ocean is quiet and calm enough to leave the sand where it is. It’s a suspension of deeper, darker, blue, that doesn’t draw your attention as much as holding it.

So perhaps it’s fitting that The Dalai Lama wrote to America in the Wall Street Journal this week. (Sometimes when the mountain won’t come to you, you have to go to the mountain.) He probably knows that it’s best for him to visit at this time of year, when people are slowing down and might be more receptive. He writes because he’s alarmed by how little of our lives or work have been grounded in our obligations to love, be fair, seek justice, act generously, or respect the earth. He writes as if our connection to broader purposes had broken altogether.

Today the world faces a crisis related to lack of respect for spiritual principles and ethical values. Such virtues cannot be forced on society by legislation or by science, nor can fear inspire ethical conduct. Rather, people must have conviction in the worth of ethical principles, so that they want to live ethically.

Unfortunately, many don’t care, while others will say that they don’t have time.

The Dalai Lama knows this, of course. And there’s another thing he’s sure of. Wanting to live ethically requires “inner cultivation.” But, neither caring nor desire can be cultivated while you’re ricocheting from one demand or diversion to another. There’s simply no space for it.

When your days are like balls in a pinball machine, you work, you recover from your blows, you work again and recover some more, until it’s mid-July or the day after Christmas or you fall down broken.

When your days are like warm baths in small pleasures—amuse me/ shock me/like me, buy something/eat something/watch something—and the gratification is only interrupted when you’re pretending to work, there is no place for an inner life either.

Of course, you can be captivated by, literally be “a captive of” what’s happening on the surface in other ways too, but this part of summer always offers a chance to escape from whatever wheel of distraction you happen to be on.

A place for “inner cultivation” stands apart from the rushes of stimuli that are so easy to get lost in every day. It’s a space for wondering whether there are deeper satisfactions than the ones that you have now. It’s a time to explore whether you have the desire for anything more.

The “ethical conduct” that the Dalai Lama commends can only be found by leaving the sparkles, reflections, and wave action at the surface for the deep blue quiet that lies below.

It is where the active, noisy, and uneasy mind can find enough silence and calm to cultivate a future that can fill you out.

It is the only place where you can hear your wholehearted life beckoning.

You Are What You Do

July 9, 2017 By David Griesing 1 Comment

The story about Cowtown and Grant Harris, as told in this week’s Yeti sponsored video, plays like a bedtime story. It grabs you by the emotional lapels at those first shots of galloping horses far below. And it never lets go.

Once upon a time and somehow, improbably, up to the present, the oldest rodeo in the United States just happens to be 7 miles from Exit 1 on the New Jersey Turnpike, or 20 odd miles southeast of Philadelphia as the crow flies. It launched in 1929 to attract bigger crowds to the Salem County Fair, and with a few fits and starts during the Depression and War years, is still going strong.

The self-described “Best Show on Dirt” runs every Saturday night from May to September. Its roster includes 7 separate events: bull riding, bareback riding, saddle bronc riding, steer wrestling, girl’s barrel racing, team roping and tie-down roping.

In saddle bronc riding, the cowboy holds on with one hand while keeping the other raised towards the heavens in the hope that he can stick to the saddle for the whole 8 seconds. A smooth, rhythmic ride is what scores the best. In girl’s barrel racing on the other hand, the prize goes to the fastest. Riders enter the arena at full speed, rounding each barrel in a cloverleaf pattern before galloping to the finish line. Timed to a hundreth of a second, the Cowtown tag for this event is “Nothin’ beats pretty girls and fast horses.”

All two hours come with non-stop commentary from the master of ceremonies (“Talk about closer than a coat of paint! Let’s put our hands together and appreciate a good ride!) and banjo playing by groups like Dave and the Wranglers, as reported by an erstwhile anthropologist writing for the Times.

Grant is fourth in a line of cowboys named Harris to run the Cowtown Rodeo. But while he was born to it, he grew to become a champion bull rider out West when his father decided to sell the place. The stamina and skills that win rodeos on a competitive circuit are far different from those it takes to run a business with rosters of weekly competitors, stalls full of livestock, a couple dozen employees, and a village of buildings sitting on hundreds of acres. Should he leave a job he was good at to become the CEO of a rodeo?

It was the first time that Harris had to grapple with his statement: “What we do is what we are. I don’t know how to do anything else.”

Harris not only returned to run the institution that his dad was leaving, he also had to adapt the Rodeo to changing customer tastes. When he got involved, Cowtown’s weekly competitions were seen on TV, but as Americans left its farms for its cities, Harris needed to keep the crowds coming. And succeed he did. First time visitors are always surprised at the length of the lines, the enthusiasm of the crowds, and how red-and-white signs for establishments like Russ’s Electric of Pennsville, Farmer’s Bank of Mullica Hill, Pole Tavern Equipment identify the regular viewing boxes that are filled with locals.

Today though, at 62, Harris faces another quandary. It’s about what will become of his life’s work. His daughters Courtney and Katy grew up in saddles right next to him. But they’re grown now, and as we learn from the clip, Courtney marries a cowboy and moves out West, while Katy stays closer to home, marrying an electrician named RJ. You can see how capable his wife Betsy is—what a working partner she’s been—but how are they going to carry on? Should they sell their land and business to developers when the interest on what a sale is likely to net would be more than the Cowtown Rodeo clears in a year?

Each Harris family member has to decide given how each has lived. Because what we’ve done and will continue to do is who we are.

After some bare knuckles truth telling—in the form of Harris counseling RJ that he and Katy “would have a difficult time growing together in their marriage” if he doesn’t get involved with the Rodeo’s operation—the family decides to stay put, with Katy and RJ continuing the tradition. Harris says that he needs no more money than he has already. But in the family members’ tear-filled eyes, there is a deeper calculus than that.

Nothing else we can imagine doing could ever bring us more.

Some of this story is about passing on a legacy. Who will care for the garden I’ve grown? Who will go on meeting the needs that my work has met? Who will fill my shoes and my reputation when I’m gone?

Some of this story is about furthering a legacy. How much is the work that you’re offering who I really am? Does my talent, skill, and experience “fit” this role, or would it be more fitting to do something else? What does my head say? My heart?

And finally, some of what Cowtown is about is good storytelling. Long before Yeti made videos like this one, it was selling coolers that people thought improved their status so much that they reportedly were stealing them out of one another’s boats and trucks. (Particularly in the South and Midwest, “if you’ve got Air Jordan or Lululemon money, but prefer to unwind by bass fishing and deer hunting, you can say it with a Yeti.”)

That was the first good story that Yeti told. But over time, the company also came to see videos like Cowtown as a way to connect with customers whose passions it shared. And it seems to be working. Since Cowtown (its latest) launched a couple of days ago, it has had 53,000 views on YouTube, which doesn’t include people like me who caught it in a social media feed.

Now I can’t wait to go and live part of this story too.

Lemmings

September 24, 2014 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Entrepreneur and investor Peter Theil was in Philadelphia on Monday sharing some of his contrarian views. One that he expanded upon at length affects innovation, education as well as our careers. Theil described it as “people acting in lemming-like ways.”

Lemmings are tiny hamster-like creatures that live near the Arctic Circle. Our image is of them frantically following one another to coastal cliffs in places like Scandinavia where they jump to their deaths in the frigid waters below. While we’re wrong to characterize lemming migration as mass suicide, there is no denying the herd-mentality that characterizes their movement from one place to another. It is the tendency we all have to jump off the same cliff that Theil was complaining about.

His impatience comes from wanting to nudge the world in a better direction if he thinks he can. As a result, Theil tends to be optimistic about innovation’s impact on the future and impatient with those who are failing to make the most of it. For example, on CNBC last week, he described Twitter as a “horribly mismanaged company” given its possibilities (“a lot of pot smoking going on there”), and took on Harvard Business School during the talk I attended, expressing his puzzlement about the games that are played there while accomplishing so little. Among entrepreneurs, his concern is that almost everyone is intent on “riding the last wave.”

“Big Data.” “The Cloud.” Whenever an idea gains some cache as the next big thing, everyone rushes in to contribute to what he calls “1 to n,” the adding of endless variations to something that has already been done. He called it the tendency “to ape” in the sense of imitating. Much harder but much better is to solve problems that no one else is thinking about in the way that you are. In other words, it is being able to go from Zero to One, which is also the title of a new book that captures his in-class discussions about entrepreneurship.

PETER THEIL / photograph by Olivia Poppy Cole

“Theil, who co-founded PayPal and was the first outside investor in Faceboook, is probably the most successful—and certainly the most interesting—venture capitalist in Silicon Valley,” notes a recent piece about him in the London Telegraph. Whatever people are doing at Twitter or Harvard Business School or in places where the topic is innovation, Theil gets exasperated whenever they seem more intent on climbing onto one another’s bandwagons than in thinking for themselves.

For some people, going to the best schools you can get into for four or more years after high school is just where the herd is headed. In Philadelphia, Theil admitted that he might still have gone to Stanford for college and then on to law school, but “would have thought about it a lot differently beforehand.” I know what he means. When a high school student has a more individualized sense of direction, why should she follow everyone else into higher education? So Theil started the 20-under-20 Fellowship Program, now in its fourth year, an admittedly rarified experiment in personal and professional development that I’ve talked about here before.

With a propensity to learn by doing, the fellows work with mentors that Theil has assembled in a 2 year, paid program that helps them to launch their own companies. When he was attacked by Larry Summers and others for what they viewed as his anti-college stance, Theil responded:

I didn’t think it would hit this sort of raw nerve. I mean, how fragile is the education system when 20 talented people leaving and doing something else is somehow enough to threaten it? My only claim is that not all talented people should go to college and not all talented people should do the exact same thing.

Which brings us to the work that we do. The career path that leads from the best possible kindergartens to the best possible colleges and professional schools is clearly the path that most young people want to be on. And they’re paying for the privilege with record student loans and crushing debt that hangs over them for years, if not decades. Is it worth it? Here too, the road less travelled—where you sit with yourself and figure out what you need and want from your work instead of simply following everyone else—has much to recommend it. Wherever it leads will not only make you happier, but also vastly improve the chances that your career could take you (along with the rest of us) from Zero to One.

During his Philadelphia whistle stop, Theil said that we all tend to underestimate what is different, those people and things “that don’t have a comparable.” When someone as different as Theil himself achieves conventional success, it allows him to trumpet “the unique perspective” in front of Philadelphia’s management class. For those of us who seek the courage to be different, he connected the personal benefits to the opportunities it can give us to change the world in often breathtaking ways.

Job Training for Yourself

September 1, 2014 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

The on-ramp into a better job isn’t what it used to be. Gone are the days when you show up and get trained to do what the boss expects from you. In other words, if you can’t demonstrate that you’re qualified to do the job on the day that you start, you probably won’t be hired in the first place. (“Companies want workers to arrive job ready.”)

In a weak economy, jobs continue to go unfilled because fewer employers are teaching the skills they require in training programs. Of course, when employers limit their hiring to people who are already doing that job, they narrow the pool of potential hires “to almost no one.” You face this kind of constraint whether you’re looking for your first job, want to advance within a company, or to find a job somewhere else. Increasingly, you’re expected to learn the skills required on your own dime in on-line courses, unpaid internships, or community colleges, in short wherever you can find or pay someone to show you the ropes.

As hard as it may sound, an even bigger training hurdle may confront you after you find a job. The challenge is to remain sufficiently engaged in what you’ve been hired to do that you never stop wanting to advance by improving the skills that you’re gaining.

Unfortunately, your co-workers probably won’t be helping you out here. In Gallup’s most recent State of the Workforce Study, 70% of all employees in North America are “disengaged” in their jobs, which it defines as “lacking in motivation” and being “less likely to invest discretionary effort in organizational goals or outcomes.” Working on auto-pilot and waiting passively for training instead of maximizing the opportunity that every job presents, will confine many of those who are in the workforce with you to jobs that barely seem worth doing.

On the other hand, when being engaged in your work (and refusing to become disengaged) is a personal priority, you have a chance to discover the parts of your job that bring you satisfaction as well as value in the marketplace. It’s a foundation (however small) that you can build on to move up to something better.

With this kind of mindset, you also seize whatever opportunities are available to become more proficient in the work areas where your satisfaction and marketability intersect. When no training opportunities are offered, you still go out and find them for yourself. That’s because they are personal investments that are tied to your feeling both productive and valued. It is partly about career advancement, but even more about self-worth. It is actively avoiding the deadening effects of opting out at work.

Among other things, this requires looking more closely at the components of your job. For example, what are you doing when you feel most proud of yourself at work? Is it when you’re presenting, selling, convincing, organizing, writing, learning new things, mobilizing people, being creative, or helping others? It is whatever makes you shine.

What gives you the greatest feelings of accomplishment? Solving a problem before anyone else, earning the praise of someone you respect, providing real value to a customer, improving a process, or doing more with less?

In your field (and related fields), what is the value of the skills and experiences that you’re gaining? What are the job descriptions where you might use the foundation you’re building for an even better fit? In a work environment like we have today, it is always time to think like an entrepreneur and do more research to understand the job market that you’re in.

When you’re continuously looking for opportunities to improve your pride, sense of accomplishment, and value in the workforce, training becomes less about what employers happen to be providing and more about the kinds of returns that you want for yourself in terms of growing capability, continuous satisfaction, and the ability to shape your own future.

Moreover, when these are your qualifications, it becomes easier to move from one job to another. Your natural allies become the men and women who made the same kinds of investments and share the same work priorities, even though they happen to be one or two rungs above you on the job ladder. Your way into conversation with them is your common interests, talents, experiences and rhythms of work. They will hear your commitments when you have them, feel your engagement when you are engaged. They will tell you whether you can find what you’re looking for in their jobs or industries, or where you should be looking if it’s somewhere else.

Conversations like this can also be your best guides through the unending thicket of job training. Those who see some of themselves in you are also more likely to give you sound advice about the training you’ll need to do their jobs, as well as the best places to find that training. The connection you make with them can sometimes be powerful enough that they offer to bring you on and train you themselves. That’s how much you’ll stand out in today’s workforce.

Knowing the most marketable and satisfying aspects of your work—along with why you need your work to be engaging in the first place—are always the keys to a better job.

The fact that employers are providing less training today will never stand in your way as long as that way of thinking is your guide.