Learning as Roadmap for Finding Your Life’s Work

July 12, 2012 By David Griesing 4 Comments

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?

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.)

Different Marching Orders for Work That Makes a Difference

May 23, 2012 By David Griesing 2 Comments

What we value is as different as we are. Our basic goals and commitments—indeed the fundamental ways in which we view the world—are as different as our individual life experiences. So it should come as no surprise that in seeking work that has personal meaning, the approaches we take to finding itare different too.

In recent commencement addresses this month, Barrack Obama and Mitt Romney recommended two very different approaches for graduates entering the workforce. Wherever you find yourself as a worker—just starting out, trying to improve your experience in the trenches, or thinking about a second or third act in your working life—their recent remarks can help you when thinking about your own “next steps.”

Romney watches proceedings during the commencement ceremony at Liberty University in Lynchburg — Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

Writing recently in the Wall Street Journal, columnist Daniel Henninger compared their messages in A Tale of Two Commencements. Henninger clearly preferred Mr. Romney’s. But rather than “either/or,” I see their approaches as speaking to broad (and sometimes overlapping) segments along a procession of worthy vocations: from personal service as a quiet witness to political struggle as an agent for change you can believe in.

As we search for purpose-driven work that can bring us genuine satisfaction, there’s a place that’s right for each of us somewhere along this continuum.

Mr. Romney’s address was at Liberty University, the largest evangelical Christian school in America. Lincoln’s “doctrinal statement” says, in part:

We affirm that the Holy Spirit indwells all who are born again, conforming them to the likeness of Jesus Christ. This is a process completed only in Heaven. Every believer is responsible to live in obedience to the Word of God in separation from sin.

In other words, Mr. Romney was speaking to individuals who had already committed to living their lives in a particular, value-centered way. Most if not all in his audience already understood that transforming the world begins (and ends) with transforming yourself.

For Mr. Romney, your work in the world is not dictated by the social problem to be solved.

The great drama of Christianity is not a crowd shot, following the movements of collectives or even nations. The drama is always personal, individual, unfolding in one’s own life. . . [Here] men and women of every faith, and good people with none at all, sincerely strive to do right and lead a purpose-driven life.

“What we have, what we wish we had — ambitions fulfilled, ambitions disappointed; investments won, investments lost; elections won, elections lost — these things may occupy our attention, but they do not define us,” he continued. Those things happen within us. For Mr. Romney, making the world a better place through your work is the result of “conscience in action,” and the never-ending commitment that it takes to always be ready for it.

As many of you already know, Mr. Obama spoke last week to my daughter’s graduating class at Barnard, one of the colleges making up Columbia University.

obama barnard — Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP

His speech was a different from Mr. Romney’s as his audience.

For the President, the application of your values to your work is similarly self-defining. But while your career may lead to internal changes, his approach to work focused almost exclusively on value-driven engagement in the external world of politics. In other words, it is by transforming the world that you transform yourself.

The graduating women of Barnard have their own commencement as well as a larger ceremony with the other university schools. Until recently, Columbia College graduates received apples with their diplomas to symbolize the “core” curriculum they had studied. That is until someone removed the fruit because year after year Columbia men delighted in pelting Barnard women with their apples. Barnard women understand the politics of gender on their campus, and Mr. Obama connected with this understanding when talking about how values should inform their working lives.

“Remember, making your mark on the world is hard,” the President said. You need “to fight for your seat at the table.” Only by doing so will you be able to “earn equal pay for equal work,” and “fully control decisions about your own health.” Somebody told Labor Secretary Hilda Solis that she wasn’t smart enough to go to college, but she didn’t let others hold her down, and you shouldn’t either. There will always be “those who oppose change, those who benefit from an unjust status quo [and] have always bet on the public’s cynicism or the public’s complacency.” [D]on’t accept somebody else’s construction of how things ought to be.”

In their commencement addresses, Mr. Romney and Mr. Obama offered fundamentally different marching orders to those approaching the work of their lives. In their starkest forms, one approach is about internal transformation, the other, external struggle. Think about these differences as you examine the work you have, and the work you want.

In his Journal column, Mr. Renninger found “less tooth and claw” in the Romney speech than in Obama’s. I think it depends on your worldview, and where the animals that need your taming reside.

Base of Operations

May 11, 2012 By David Griesing 2 Comments

Thinking differently about your work means thinking about different kinds of work.

We all know what we’ll to be doing today. But where are the people passing us on the street going to work, and what will they be doing when they get there? Wondering about it, talking about it with some of those people, maybe even tagging along with them for a day can blow out the walls when thinking about what you should be doing with your own work life.

cuzco-twelve-corner-stone-1 — TWELVE CORNER STONE – CUZCO

Unfortunately, our “wondering” tends to be pretty timid. That’s because our focus usually gravitates to people who look a lot like us (are they more successful, making more money?), or who seem higher up the ladder (are their lives easier and more satisfying than mine is?). But what about looking less timidly, so that it’s not simply confirming what you already know, but about building your thinking around entirely different foundations?

I heard Charles Alan Murray speak at Bryn Mawr the other night. Among other things, he illustrated how the bubbles we inhabit with all our preconceptions are fortified by the ways we live.

In many of our neighborhoods, nearly everyone is, for all intents and purposes, the same. The education we’ve had. The cars we drive and stores we shop in. The TV shows we all watch (or don’t watch). The sameness of our surroundings bolsters the image we have of ourselves. But it can be pretty thin gruel after awhile.Aren’t we confident enough to open the windows around our certainties, allowing our lives to be enriched by what can be learned by living and thinking a little differently?

Murray talked about looking, years ago, for a place to locate his young family around his research job as a political scientist in Washington D.C. The usual suspects were the affluent, inner ring suburbs like MacLean Virginia, where the well educated and upwardly mobile were looking for “good schools” and a mirror of their hoped-for success. Murray made a conscious choice to look elsewhere, choosing a small town of a couple of hundred people in rural Frederick County. He did so because he wanted to school his children around people who worked with their hands, ran small stores, didn’t have degrees from Harvard and MIT like he did. “More enriching for me and for them,” he said.

Murray was also scrambling the expectations others had about him.

Earlier in my career I helped run a civic organization with a board that was up to its neck in prominent Philadelphians. I got to know many of them well, and thought they were learning something about me too. They knew I lived with my own young family in the City, but despite telling them that our home was in East Falls (a part of town with a near-perfect slice of Philadelphia’s demographic, from projects on up), none of them could accommodate that I lived anywhere other than the one or two City neighborhoods they knew best. So wedded were they to where “I belonged,” I just stopped correcting them after awhile.

The prison I’m talking about is one that you, as well as others, busily maintain for you.

I recently had a candid conversation about this kind of straightjacketed thinking with Timothy Rub, 2½ years in as director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. As he’s discussed elsewhere, the museum director’s challenge is to bring the past into “fruitful conversation” with the present so that it’s possible to imagine different futures. In this, a great museum’s “present purpose” is to be “the foundation stone, indeed the catalyst for innovation and creativity” in the community. But in this (as in so much else), it comes down to the people involved: to his stewardship and to those who hold that trust with him. How, he wondered, can we breathe new possibility into great institutions when so many of our stewards seem unwilling to think differently?

art museum — THE PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM OF ART by irraa@Flickr

There’s little to be lost, and the promise of a better world gained, when you re-open basic questions you thought you’d answered—once and for all—a long time ago.

Broadening your base of operations can support better work, a richer life, and more consequential futures.

It’s time to start thinking outside your box.

Recipe

March 29, 2012 By David Griesing 1 Comment

We all like feeling rewarded for work that makes things better. Many of us are finding this kind of satisfaction in social benefit games. At the same time, we’re also learning how to bring transformative change into the world by getting some practice first.

Your rewards include feeling good about yourself because of all you’re accomplishing and the abilities you’re developing while doing so. In social games like WeTopia, you reap other rewards too. There is pride in the growing productivity of your community, empowerment from your ability to support those in need, and your own increasing prosperity.

Games like this also bring the best ingredients of the for-profit and non-profit worlds together.

They give you the virtual experience of work where you can do well by doing good. They stir your imagination, and get you thinking about new kinds of work that you could be doing right now in the real world.

On the other hand, it’s disquieting to feel that someone is “behind our screens” watching us and gaining insights about human behavior because of how you, me (and millions like us) are playing these games. These social scientists and marketers are looking at how we respond to different sounds, colors and kinds of movement. They are even changing the variables we encounter in these games while we’re playing them to see if we do things differently or faster or better.

What’s going on here, and where is the upside for us in this kind of scrutiny?

Kristian Segerstrale is an economist and co-founder of a company called Playfish that makes on-line games. In an interview, he described the difficulty social scientists have traditionally had gaining reliable information from behavioral experiments because they can’t control the variables that exist in the real world. By contrast, in virtual worlds:

the data set is perfect. You know every data point with absolute certainty. In social networks you even know who the people are. You can slice and dice by gender, by age, by anything.

Segerstrale gave the following by way of example. If your on-line experience requires buying something, what happens to demand if you add a 5 percent tax to a product? What if you apply a 5 percent tax to one half of a group and a 7 percent tax to the other half? “You can conduct any experiment you want,” he says. “You might discover that women over 35 have a higher tolerance to a tax than males aged 15 to 20—stuff that’s just not possible to discover in the real world.”

What this means is that people who want to sell you things or motivate you to do something are now able to learn more than they have ever been able to learn before about what is likely to influence your behavior.

Being treated like ingredients to be “sliced and diced” has risks for us, but also possibilities.

None of us want to relinquish our freedom and become automatons, manipulated into doing what others want us to do. We do well to remember national experiments in social engineering, like the tragedy of the Cultural Revolution in China and the choreographed death spiral in North Korea.

But we also need to recognize the potential in this brave new world for good.

The behavior of millions of men and women whose voices had never been heard before was changed by lessons learned on-line, ultimately producing the Arab Spring.

The behavior of individuals facing repression every day in places like Iran and Syria is fortified by the virtual support of those who are struggling with them.

Your behavior, and the behavior of millions of people who are playing these social games, is being shaped and reinforced in similar ways. It is a training ground for changing the real world with new and better kinds of work.

Social benefit games are giving us a recipe for transformation—and the ingredients are getting better all the time.

Playground, Imaginarium, Laboratory

March 9, 2012 By David Griesing 2 Comments

You really want to know what it feels like to be rewarded for work that makes the world a better place.

Where’s the job that will pay me “a living wage” for producing social benefits?
Where’s the job that will leave me feeling proud of what I’ve accomplished—both for myself and for others—when my workday is over?

There’s nowhere you can think of where you can bring your energy and talent to a job and get these kinds of returns.

Sure, there are plenty of opportunities “to give your time away.” Places to volunteer. Worthy causes. You can knock on doors. Call strangers up at dinnertime for donations. Play your guitar in a hospital room. There are many things good people do “after work” in your community.

That is, after they do what they have to do.

Because they’ve got to put food on the table, pay the bills, keep the wolf at the door. They want, and you want your work to have an impact, but how do you “make a living” and also accomplish something worthwhile?

Can you really afford to do work that makes a difference?

You never thought it was possible that your work in the store or office, in your car, on the phone or behind a counter could be about healing the world and, just like any other job, that you’d be paid well for your time, your effort and your talent.

You always thought it was “either/or.”

There was charity and there was business, but not the business of doing good.

The world you can preview in a social benefit game like WeTopia is neither a non-profit nor a for-profit world. It’s a mixture of both.

It’s surprising how fulfilling it can be to see your work combine with your friends’ work to help not just one child, but a whole school full of children. You’re surprised at how satisfying it can be—even in a game—when work that’s this fulfilling also comes with a paycheck, a home, and a happy community.

It’s the virtual experience of a business model for a better world.

As such, social benefits games like WeTopia give you a glimpse of something that may be difficult to find where you live and work. Games like this fire up your imagination with new possibilities, and get you thinking about blueprints for different and better kinds of work. Work you can do solving real problems that are crying out for solutions right now, all around you, where you live.

Beyond the learning-by-doing discussed in my last post, this is an additional promise of a game like WeTopia.

To imagine your work differently.

It’s a promise that the sponsoring advertisers, the sellers hocking virtual goods, and those IPO-hungry Facebook investors are all helping to bring to your interactive screen. And in the final analysis, that’s not such a bad thing. Because when all is said and done, the merchandising is really pretty benign. It won’t impair your enjoyment or diminish the game’s virtuous effects, and it’s easy to navigate around (if you want to) on your way to having fun.

No, all the selling and buying is not where we’ll find the greatest danger, or the greatest promise for that matter, in this brave new world.

Think for a minute of that showstopper in The Wizard of Oz where (of all things) it’s Dorothy’s little dog Toto who triggers an at-first thundering but-then almost conversational:

“Don’t pay any attention to that man behind the curtain.”

(That’s Toto down there in the lower right. Yes it required lots of dog biscuits, but it produced his biggest scene.)

And just like it was in Emerald City, there is a man behind the curtain in most of these social benefit games.

Of course there is. We couldn’t live in this age and not suspect. But who is he exactly, and what is he doing there?

He’s a social scientist who has never had more real time information about how and why people behave in the ways that they do (not ever) than he can gather today by watching hundreds, sometimes even millions of us play these kinds of social games.

Why you did one thing and not another. What activities attracted you and which ones didn’t. What set of circumstances got you to use your credit card, or to ask your friends to give you a hand, or to play for 10 hours instead of just 10 minutes.

There’s a lot for that man to learn because, quite frankly, we never act more naturally or in more revealing ways than when we’re at play.

(“We’re not in Kansas anymore.”)

So what could possibly be in it for you, for me, for any of the lab rats?

It’s certainly not the thrill of being analyzed when we’re at our most unsuspecting.

At play and under a microscope.

(“Run Toto, run!”)

(Well not just yet.)

We’ll take a brief look at the downside, and then try to find the real upside together—next time around.