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The Discipline of Limits

August 5, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Creativity needs limits, like when it happens within a window frame. Accomplishing anything worthwhile needs limits too.  But it’s remarkable how little what we hope to achieve is constrained by our limited resources and true priorities. 
 
When you step outside and it’s 109 degrees in the full bloom of humidity, those limits are dictated by the weather—and it’s a sweaty, grungy mess to fight them. The only workable solution is to pare back, accept what you cannot change and adapt to it. What a relief it was recently to put some of my “To Do List” items into a box called “September.”
 
Our hopes seldom conform to reality however. In watching the presidential candidate debates this week, many of the visions on display seemed unconstrained by limits. Limited tax dollars. Limited attention spans. Limited appetites for 4 more years of disruption.  

30 seconds to respond to a complicated debate question deprives every answer of context, but even when you dig into these politicians’ policy pronouncements, they tend to be individual, grand proposals as opposed to a considered appraisal about how all of their promises could ever be realized. A workable vision says: “I’m going to try to achieve this one big thing with the understanding that I won’t be able to accomplish this, this and that.” Instead, with many candidates, it seems like they want us to believe that they’ll deliver every pie they’re throwing into the sky.
 
In one of the working chapters of my book, I ask readers to use their journals to list the 10 most important things they are working for. As examples, I propose things like: sending your kids to the right school, buying a home of your own, or having enough time each day to play with your dog. Limiting your choices to 10 is the challenge, because what doesn’t make your list is as critical as what does. Since none of us can “have it all,”  the reality (and the magic) comes from how you negotiate the trade-offs.  You are deciding what is most important to you and, by necessity, what is less so.  
 
While thinking about writing to you this week, I came across the following on Twitter. It is from the Collaboration Fund, a venture capital firm based in New York City that describes what it does with a clever tagline:  collaborative = (people x stuff) + new technologies ^ creativity.  On July 24, @collabfund posted these alternate ways of feeling rich:

Alt forms of rich: 

You can go to bed and wake up when you want to.

 
You can buy any book you want. 
 
You have time to read those books. 
 
You have time to exercise. 
 
A short commute. 
 
No dress code seven days a week. 
 
Liberal use of the thermostat.

Somebody @collabfund was using the month of August to look at what is important to them, and (it seems) what is less so.

When a motion detector senses someone passing by, the balls move in an accompanying wave motion. Dutch studio Staat designed this window (along with the others pictured here) for Nike at Selfridges in London.

Department store windows present endless opportunities to maximize creativity within limits. It’s what’s included and everything that’s not.

By necessity, you have to tell your story within the window’s frame, and one of the genius elements in this Nike campaign is how they’ve interactively included everyone who is walking by in their frames. The image on the top of the page shows the designers inviting passersby to stand on the illuminated spot, jump as high as they can, and see their effort—in comparison to every other effort—light up on the window’s scoreboard. The step-by-step wave action of the colored balls above is another demonstration of how much can be accomplished within the farther limits of a street-facing window.

This is also the genius in every values framework, whether it belongs to Montaigne, Spinoza or Henry Adams (three that resonate strongly with me) or in the working equivalents that everyone who grapples with a “most important to me” exercise comes up with. It’s a winnowing of priorities.
 
Frameworks like this generally start with one or two key values that dictate the kinds of things that people identify as foundational for them. If you start with a value like “personal freedom,” certain priorities tend to  follow. “Material security” would have you pursuing a very different set of goals with your limited time and effort, while “a healthy world” would yield other benchmarks, like lots of exercise and time outside..

Once you adopt a values framework that fits you, its discipline imposes the necessary limits. If I am focusing my energy and resources on this, I either cannot do this other thing at all, or have already accepted that it will be accomplished with the time and energy I have left. When it’s operational, a values framework imposes its equilibrium like a 109-degree day.
 
One of the reasons I became interested in ethics is that sometimes/ oftentimes I want to accomplish everything I’ve put on my plate. It’s a recipe for meltdown because you’re always behind your own 8-ball. So at the same time that I’m drawn to ambitious people with compelling visions, I’ve learned the hard way to be skeptical when it sounds like too many dreams and too little reality.
 
This hard-fought wisdom is why I loved parts of Christopher Demuth’s recent speech to conservative policy makers. Demuth is a distinguished fellow at the Hudson Institute, an organization that “challenges conventional thinking and helps manage strategic transitions to the future.”
Demuth’s speech was about the advantages of nationalism, and I found that it effectively challenged my more conventional thinking, particularly when he said:

An important virtue of the nation-state is that it is a constraint. The contemporary peaceable nation takes what it is given—its borders and territory and resources, its citizens and tribes, its affinities and antagonisms, its history and traditions and ways of getting along—and makes the most of them….
 
One of the most arresting features of modern life in the rich democracies is the pervasive rejection of the idea of natural constraint. One sees this throughout culture high and low, social relations, and politics and government. Where a boundary exists, it is there to be transgressed. Where a hardship exists, it must be because of an injustice, which we can remedy if only we have the will. Today’s recipe for success and happiness is not to manage within limits and accommodate constraints, but to keep one’s options open….
 
I do not know where this impulse came from. Perhaps wealth and technology have relieved so many age-old constraints that we have come to imagine we can live with no constraint at all. Whatever the cause, it is a revolt against reality. Resources are limited. Lasting achievement is possible only within a structure. My own favorite field, economics, is out of favor these days, but it has at least one profound truth, that of opportunity cost: Everything we do necessarily involves not doing something else….
 
The American nation-state is rich, powerful and less constrained than any other, yet it is much more constrained than we have led ourselves to believe. Thinking of ourselves as a nation-state is, as Peter Thiel has observed, a means of unromantic self-knowledge. National conservatism, by directing our attention to our nation as it is—warts, wonders and all—is a means of reminding ourselves of our dependence on one another in the here and now, and of facing up to the constraints that are the sources of productive freedom.

Does this mean we can’t aspire to do better within our national boundariess? Of course not. At the end of the day, it simply means that in governance—as in our lives and work—it is a question of advancing productively on what’s most important to us much closer to home.

In this regard, I’d argue that those who aspire widely and dream expansively in politics are like the dissenters in my June 3 and June 10, 2018 posts, pulling “the less-decided middle” in their direction. On the other hand, these dissenters are rarely the ones who can also bring enough citizens together so we can move forward and actually accomplish something. That kind of consensus building requires a different skill set entirely, and it’s that unromantic man or woman who can help us “manage within our limits” that I’m hoping to find in the current crop of candidates.
 
As for my priorities as a citizen, I believe that above all else the franchise that is American democracy needs to be re-built. While one exception for me to Demuth’s nation-focus would be climate-change (given its global reach and implications), my over-arching citizen priority is to rebuild this country’s internal dynamics. To do so, economic policies that actively support thriving communities and families need to be implemented, with active contributions coming from businesses and employers in the ways that they used to after World War II. I agree with several of Oren Cass’s and Shoshana Zuboff’s observations in these regards, discussing his ideas in A Winter of Work Needs More Color and both of their ideas in The Social Contract Around Our Work is Broken, posts from earlier this year.

Within the frame of thriving communities and families, we’d go to work rebuilding our public infrastructure of roads, bridges, dams, harbors, airports and other mass transit because we depend on our built environment everyday–and it’s falling apart. Our social foundations could also be strengthened in various ways by new, clean energy policies.

Wall Street Journal columnist Greg Ip recently argued for pursuing cleaner energy through market mechanisms like taxes and emissions caps instead of massive government interventions that gamble (often wrongly) when picking winners in a complex marketplace like this and end up being many times more costly.

To many Green New Deal advocates [who want to eliminate fossil fuels altogether in the short term and throw the full weight of the government behind that effort], this isn’t good enough. Replacing coal with natural gas only reduces carbon-dioxide emissions; it doesn’t eliminate them. [However,] this misses the point. The climate doesn’t care if we eliminate a ton of carbon dioxide by replacing coal with natural gas or solar power. But taxpayers and consumers do care. So long as money is limited, each dollar should purchase the largest emission reduction possible. And the market will always be vastly better at this than regulators because it will find solutions that regulators have never thought of.

Once again, his argument is for acting as productively as possible within our limits.  Not only will taxpayers appreciate the thrift in this approach, but with the appropriate policy signals, more local jobs can also be created as clean energy companies learn how to grow within these new policy boundaries, producing financial benefits (like fuller employment and better jobs) along with non-financial ones (like confidence, optimism and greater well-being) for American communities and families.
 
In the end, my priorities may not be your priorities—and they don’t have to be. What’s essential is deciding “what’s more and less important to you” and identifying leaders who will practice the art of the possible while realizing your shared priorities.

It’s a discipline of limits that frames the good work of every citizen.

At the point of this extravagant plume: one of Nike’s sneakers.

If you’re interested in the creativity within limits that was achieved in the window displays that Staat designed for Nike, here is a link to a video that shows some of their interactive elements.
 
The book I’ve been writing is an extended conversation on how your work ethic determines the work that you do (and don’t do) and how working within the limits of your priorities energizes your life, even when you’re not working.

Thanks for your reactions to these posts every week. Thanks too for continuing to recommend this newsletter to friends and colleagues. I’ll see you all next week.

This post was adapted from my August 4, 2019 newsletter. When you subscribe, a new newsletter/post will be delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning.


Filed Under: *All Posts, Building Your Values into Your Work Tagged With: Christopher Demuth, citizen work, creativity within limits, ethical framework, ethics, Greg Ip, limits, priorities, values, work ethic, work priorities

We Are Making a Difference

January 20, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

When we set out to make a difference with our work, we usually are. It empowers us by doing it and empowers others who are trying to change the same things. It’s the belief in possibility that makes a new year, well…doable.
 
I came upon a guy last week who begins his day reading these phrases:

This is the beginning of a new day. You have been given this day to use as you will.
 
“What you do today is important because you are exchanging a day of your life for it.
 
“When tomorrow comes, this day will be gone forever. In its place is something you have left behind…let it be something good.

However “make the most of it” that sounds, it’s about whether we dare to face forward and declare ourselves because none of us has an unlimited number of days ahead of us when we can.
 
Historian David McCullough has written a dozen or so highly acclaimed biographies about Americans like Teddy Roosevelt, the Wright Brothers and John Adams. (You may also know him as the sonorous voice behind some of Ken Burn’s public television documentaries.) When he was interviewed about Truman, McCullough discussed this same quandary:  whether to bother standing up for what’s important when it’s so easy to give up before you’ve even started.
 
The interviewer began by noting that “your writing makes readers feel like they are there,” and McCullough replying that his writing this way is deliberate.

What I’m trying to do is show readers—especially young readers—that things didn’t have to turn out as well as they did. I want them to know that life felt every bit as uncertain to people back then as it does to us today. 
 
There were these moments when they had to be thinking, there is no way we can get this bridge built, or get this canal dug. But things worked out—because individuals behaved in certain ways, with integrity and resilience. They figured out how to work with other people, and they tried to do the right thing. 
 
And my hope is that these stories will inspire some readers to behave the same way in the face of the uncertainty in their lives.

I found the immediacy and uncertainty before what happens next to be most compelling in McCullough’s 1776.  But for tiny acts of imagination and courage all coming together 250 years ago, America would never have happened.  And I can be a part of the same miracle today—if I choose to.

In a strange twist of fate several years later, McCullough found himself talking with his new internist about the Truman interview, about how today is no different than it was in the past, and the amazing things we might accomplish by acting despite today’s uncertainties.

I try to make that point in every interview. It’s really the main reason I do the work I do.

McCullough’s rationale for his lifetime of work is sharing this knowledge. Everyone who went on to accomplish something important could just as easily have sat it out, yielding to fear or inertia  It’s not just a perspective for the young but for those at every stage of life who have a limited time ahead to leave behind something that they can be proud of. And finally, It’s not only advice for opinion writers or biographers, but for everyone who employs their skills on the gamble that they just might achieve a good result.

Writing this morning, it is easy to see 2019 as a gathering mess. No wonder people are looking for “unicorns” like Beto O’Rourke “to save the coming day for us” so we don’t have to get down into the trenches and do the hard work ourselves. But why not be a part of it, putting the faith in our own judgments instead of in a savior’s, particularly when so much that’s good has already been achieved in our lifetimes?

I can’t be reminded enough about the positive side of the ledger that’s laid out in Steven Pinker’s books like Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (2018) (according to the data: life, health, prosperity, safety, knowledge, and happiness are all on the rise, and not just in the West, but worldwide), which builds on his earlier The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011) (that we’re living today in the most peaceful era in history).  Like David McCullough, the perspective of time helps me to overcome my excuses and failures of nerve.

In the last couple of days, there was also Greg Ip’s helpful column looking both back at the past year and forward into the new one in the Wall Street Journal. Ip called it “The World is Getting Quietly, Relentlessly Better,” and he begins it with a promise:

If you spent 2018 mainlining misery about global warming, inequality, toxic politics or other anxieties, I’m here to break your addiction with some good news: The world got better last year, and it is going to get even better this year.

But what I liked the most about the column was his conclusion after reviewing the data about rising incomes and global progress. 

Perhaps it…feels irresponsible to celebrate the many ways the world is quietly getting better because it distracts from the fight against things that are loudly getting worse: polarized and authoritarian politics, deadly opioids, nuclear proliferation, and most of all, a warming climate—a consequence of all those new middle-class entrants burning fossil fuels.
 
Yet obsessing over [these remaining] perils is how we’ll likely solve them.

Ip is saying that with focus and forward momentum—we can do this, and I happen to believe he’s right. We still have the hard work of planting the seeds that are there, but the ground is also in better shape than our sky-is-falling fears like to admit.

I wrote several posts last year about the threat of technology that arrives and is widely embraced before its downsides are known or anyone has had a chance to put reasonable safeguards in place. Social networks and smart phones today, with drone deliveries and autonomous vehicles soon to follow. The ethicist in me kept asking: “Just because we can do it doesn’t necessarily mean that we should, at least before we understand more of the implications than we do now.”  So last year felt like frantically catching up with the aggregators who are selling our personal data and the too-big-for-our-own-good companies that no one worried about soon enough. Much of the time, it felt like not having enough fingers for the holes in the dike.

But still I railed against the privacy profiteers like Facebook and Google (for the sake of our ability to make decisions without manipulation) and monopolists like Amazon (because the free flow of goods and labor really is important). And all the while, others with similar sensibilities were jumping into these trenches too, with no certainty that anything would come of it. Well, this past week saw several news stories about progress that is being made where I doubted it ever would.

A story on January 11 announced that AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile would no longer be sharing their users’ location data with those who are selling it to trackers because of privacy concerns that had been raised. Yesterday, Sprint followed up with the same decision. It was a victory (for now) over some of the tech giants with a brand new cohort of privacy advocates behind it. 

Last Friday, there was a news report that customers, investors and employees are challenging Amazon’s facial recognition software because of similar privacy concerns. A group of nuns who are also investors have submitted a resolution for a vote at Amazon’s annual shareholders meeting. The company has refused thus far to halt the sales of personal data generated by its software, but it has been forced into a dialogue it would never have had without widespread pushback.

My favorite marker from last week also speaks to the critical mass of individual voices that have been building, one by one, against Facebook even when the odds against them seemed most daunting. Roger McNamee, an early investor in the company, was one of them. Despite becoming rich, having a personal relationship with Mark Zuckerberg, sitting on Facebook’s board for a time, and being a prominent member of the insider’s club in Silicon Valley, McNamee was one of the first to challenge Facebook’s excesses that nobody could ignore. It took his early critical statements along with the past 9 months of populist backlash to culminate in Time’s cover story this week—a testament to how voices both big and small can coalesce into a wave.

I want to mention something else too. I’m hardly a frontline tech commentator, but Roger McNamee signaled me through Twitter yesterday after I profiled his essay in Time. I’m not telling you this because it’s cool that he did but because taking a stand in your work, however you can, often puts you in the company of those you can be proud to be associated with. The experience of this kind of solidarity also helps me to forsake the safety of my fence and dive into the fray even when I’m reluctant to do so in the work that stares back at me every day.
 
It’s not just pushing the same rock up the hill, only to have it roll back down to its same old place. There is progress when I look for it, and I’m almost never alone.

More Seed Pods This Week

There’s a wooden arch at our backyard entrance. It’s heavy with wisteria branches that are hung (as if for the holidays) with seedpods. 
 
A few years ago, when Brendan Ryan’s painting crew was here gentrifying the place, I was outside, by this archway, talking to one of his painters when a prior generation of seedpods started popping like firecrackers, propelling their seeds loudly and with amazing velocity in all directions. It happened in March, with some change in temperature or water pressure that neither of us could feel triggering the explosion. We laughed when we realized what was happening, and eventually fell into quiet to absorb the miracle of it.
 
The wisteria was thrusting itself into the future.
 
Of course, we need more than nature’s rhythms to motivate us to get up and keep doing good work for another day or year. Plants also don’t make excuses, or have the luxury of feeling hopeless when their time has come. 
 
But there are markers that bolster optimism when I bother to look, that help me to believe that I’m neither Sisyphus nor going it alone. Perspective. A record of progress. Occasions of solidarity. It’s about winning the game in my head so I have another day’s worth of fortitude to win it outside.

This post was adapted from my January 20, 2019 newsletter.

Filed Under: *All Posts, Being Part of Something Bigger than Yourself, Being Proud of Your Work Tagged With: David McCullough, Greg Ip, hope, momentum, moving from thought to action, optimism, perspective, Roger McNamee, solidarity, Steven Pinker

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