It’s Time to Expand Your Range

August 28, 2013 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

You’ve got a “bad boy” side, even if you keep it buried in a hole somewhere in the backyard. Whether you’ve repressed a little or a lot, you’ve probably walked a pretty straight road since you shoved it all down. If you’re feeling stuck, maybe that’s why.

To tap into the mix of inspiration and passion that leads to fulfilling work, the time you spend completely ignoring the straight-and-narrow can easily be as important as the time spent on it. As I’ve noted before (and not entirely in jest), it may be why East Asian economies produce lots of hard workers but few innovators: nearly everyone there is intent on finding a figure-it-out-once-and-for-all approach to life & work.

Maybe you’ve been following their lead.

Maybe you’ve tried to identify the 5 or 10 factors that motivate you to do your best. You read about successful entrepreneurs, hoping to find a formula embedded in their stories that you can make use of. You poke around the wellsprings of innovation with the aim of capturing a secret sauce to take back to the office. But it’s likely that the recipe you’re after will only be discovered when you abandon the notion of a recipe altogether.

Of course, there’s paradox here, with a plan only becoming meaningful once you understand why all plans are useless.

But order depends on chaos.

Discipline learns the most from rule breaking.

So maybe at least some of what you’ve buried needs to be dug up.

William Blake, God Calibrates Chaos During Creation in “The Ancient of Days” — God Calibrates Chaos During Creation (William Blake)

To be happy-at-work doesn’t require you to start your own company. But if that’s your goal, you may need something that nearly all entrepreneurs have, namely, better hot wiring to your freer spirit. It’s why you’re never too old to find happiness at work; it’s not your youth (or even your energy level or health) but the range of your life that matters.

With broader parameters, when you’ve identified a problem that needs solving in your marketplace, you don’t spend all your time with the conventional wisdom. When you’re confident taking risks and roaming widely in your personal life, you have no problem looking outside your business or even your commercial culture to find new ways of meeting your challenges. You’re not afraid of making mistakes or of defying the reigning masters.

You know it’s not just about sweat & ambition, and that insight in one area is more likely to come when you’re hard at work doing something else—or nothing at all. It’s why you stir replenishment (like smelling the clover) into your workday.

A study that tends to validate time spent off-road came out last month by economists Ross Levine and Yona Rubinstein. They found statistically significant correlations between risky, even illicit behavior and wealth generation by individuals who went on to start their own companies (people they call the “incorporated self-employed”).

In addition to the most successful entrepreneurs being smart and coming from stable, well educated families, the authors found that as teens they were more likely to have broken the rules by drinking, smoking pot, dealing drugs, stealing, gambling, even being violent.

[A]s teenagers, people that incorporate [their own businesses] later in life tend to score higher on learning aptitude tests, exhibit greater self-esteem, indicate that they aspire to be managers/leaders later in life, and engage in more aggressive, illicit, and risky activities than other people. Moreover, it is a particular mixture of pre-labor market traits that is most powerfully associated with entrepreneurship. People who both engaged in illicit activities as teenagers and scored highly on learning aptitude tests have a much higher tendency to become entrepreneurs than others without this particular mixture of traits.

While entrepreneurial success later in life may correlate with a higher tolerance for risk acquired early on, I think it’s more than that. It’s having learned that you’ll not only survive but also thrive with less certainty & security that delivers the work/life pay-off.

If this is right, the answer isn’t upstanding citizen by day, criminal by night. For most of us, an ethical perspective evolves with maturity. Moreover, how we end up striking the balance between risks & rewards is too individual for a self-improvement formula, recipe or secret sauce.

Some of us extend youthful indiscretion into middle age before the pieces fall into place. Some spend 6 months “on the road” and 6 months off. Others of us allow for episodes of genuine chaos and total digression in our work before looping back. Or we have key people (“interrupters”) who regularly knock us out of our routines so that we return better, stronger.

It’s finding your own range—your rule-breaking margins whatever they are—so that whatever you’re doing everyday is feeding the force that enables you to come alive.

The Jobs Project Revisited

August 10, 2013 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

The movement of our work was captured by a troupe of gifted Philadelphia dancers in a performance last May called The Jobs Project. When I first posted about it, I promised footage of the ensemble when it became available. Now it is. You can follow this link to the current RealLifePeople(in)Motion newsletter, which includes a video excerpt.

According to the program notes, the dancers’ movements were “in a conversation with” recorded comments by an assortment of local workers about what they do, and remarks from the dancers themselves about their gainful commitments beyond dance.

I was behind one of those interview voices, and can tell you this: while there’s nothing quite like sitting in a darkened theater and suddenly hearing your voice coming through the speakers, the experience jumps several levels when highly accomplished performers start responding to what you’ve just said.

At the time of my interview, I’d just written a post called I am a Work in Progress. It was on my mind that day and the gist of it was captured in one of my recorded comments during the performance. It was these words, along with those from several others, which provided the counterpoint to moves you can now get to see for yourselves.

The medium of voice, music & dance was the message–and a very powerful one at that.

At Work I’m a Dancing Machine

May 19, 2013 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

We hear a lot about work, how it’s wearing us down, or covering the bills, or how much it lets us “contribute to the economy as consumers.”

Less attention is paid to looking at our bodies at work: the rhythm of routine, the mesh of collaboration and the reach of accomplishment. It’s how we’re sometimes reduced to a fist by what others think of the work we’re doing, or elevated to a higher state by the sense of purpose it gives us. It’s man as Icarus but also as machine.

The Jobs Project, playing in Philadelphia through today, is a bold, imaginative, and sharply executed dialogue in words and movement that captures familiar and unfamiliar truths about the work we all do.

We say it with paint or poetry or sculptural forms because they open up levels of meaning that are simply not available any other way. This is true of dance too, but The Jobs Project from a company called RealLivePeople(in)Motion, gets its singular edge by also being a hybrid. It pairs the cadence of one to six dancers with recorded comments from men and women about their work, and mid-dance interviews with the performers themselves about what they do when they’re not dancing—or do so that they can dance—all to an hypnotic score by Ilan Isakov.

This inspired mash-up of inputs provides take-aways about the workplace that add both layers and textures to what we think we know about what happens there every day.

The Jobs Project is the brainchild of Gina Hoch-Stall, its richly gifted choreographer and director. Gina dances too, with the precision clockwork of a troupe that includes Molly Jackson, David Konyk, Sara Nye, Mason Rosenthal and Hedy Wyland.

Ingredients essential to the whole were provided by others too, like Andrea Calderise (artist), Megan Quinn (dramaturg), Patricia Dominguez (costume design), Maria Shaplion (lighting) and those joining Ilya on the sound score (Four Tet, Garth Stevenson, Michael Wall, Nathan Fake and The Books). Grassroots support for a performance that’s been building for more than a year was given a welcomed assist by the Puffin Foundation (“continuing the dialogue between art and the lives of ordinary people”), the Latvian Society (by hosting) and Yards Brewing Company (by wetting the whistle).

Like a start-up company, almost as breathtaking as anything here was the ability of this dedicated core to make something this wondrous come to life.

You can see a bit of the magic for yourself in the rehearsal footage here (with some or all of the piece to be posted later). While you’re watching, I invite you to imagine an element in the performance that made one of the most important points of all.

The Jobs Project was crisp and precise, but improvised and spontaneous too, like the best work. It is one of the dancers, Mason Rosenthal, who interviews the other dancers as they crisscross the space. The fun he had throughout, and how his seemingly off-the-cuff comments both relieve and accentuate the rigor of the forms around him, said something essential about the work we all do.

That it can and should provide a measure of fun while you’re doing it.

Hats off to all!

Get Ready for the Work of Your Life Everyday

September 5, 2012 By David Griesing 3 Comments

You’re back to work after Labor Day, after one of the calendar’s great punctuation points. It’s a time for putting the pedal to the floor, to use some of the gas you’ve been storing up for the sprint to December.

When the weather starts ventilating in the stretch formerly known as Indian Summer, it brings not only the promise of cooler days but also of harvests to come. For most of us, change for the better “is in the air.”

This is the annual time (along with post-New Year’s resolutions) when you put to the test all those ideas you’ve been saving and plans you’ve been making during the lull in your work calendar. It’s when you start getting valuable feedback from what you’re doing differently. It’s the season of possibilities, of successes/failures, of two steps forward and one back. You can learn something everyday about whether you’re making your work what you need it to be—as long as you’re open to that deep learning experience.

No lessons are more important than what you find out from putting your ideas into action and your plans into practice. It’s essential to give yourself time to absorb those lessons so you can be more effective tomorrow and the day after. But it can be hard to give yourself more time when it seems that you’ve just given yourself so much time.

However effective summer downtime was at replenishing you—that is, however much sun and water you managed to soak up—taking small intervals of time off everyday once your “back to work” can be just as essential. It is these daily allotments of time-for-yourself that will enable you to integrate what you’re learning as you strive to realize your work goals.

For example, should you double down on the path you’re set for yourself, tack a little to the left or right, or start moving in a whole new direction? These are questions you should be asking yourself everyday when you’re actively road-testing your plans to become happier and more productive.

Since there is an opportunity to be more effective when you’re trying to get where you want to be, why not take advantage of it? Some simple suggestions.

Most of us are creatures of habit, particularly when it comes to looking forward to something. My dog Rudy (who is somewhere north of 100 in human years) still manages to remember to come over for a treat—same time/same place every night. We’re like this too once the rewards start coming for us. The confidence that comes from having more control of the work path you’re on will be that reward for you.

As a creature of habit I recommend that you give yourself 15 minutes of quiet, uninterrupted time at the beginning, middle and end of every day. Thinking of yourself as an engine, these are the times to:

1. Prime Your Engine,

2. Re-Charge Your Battery, and

3. Recalibrate.

It’s a daily effort to learn, to replenish and most of all, to integrate by putting it all back together.

You Prime Your Engine when you first wake up: before coffee or other interruptions. Go somewhere that’s quiet and dim. You still have access to what your unconscious and sleepy mind is telling you. Listen to it. Think about what your dreams and “your gut” are saying to you about the day before and the day ahead. Don’t force it. Just relax and let it come. Have a pad handy and jot down notes if you want. Then go about doing whatever you do everyday. 15 minutes, and you’ll have some marching orders.

When you throw yourself into work the way I do, you don’t need to eat at mid-day as much as you need to absorb and relax. A great way to Recharge Your Batteryis by taking a short walk outside, either alone or with others, where you can be flooded with nature. A park, a garden, the woods out back: what you want is detail for your senses to body surf through. Look at it, smell it, feel it and let you mind wander through it as your walking. The sense-awakening effects of nature will help you to absorb the morning and start looking forward to the afternoon. Try it. You’ll be surprised. (And then have lunch.)

You Recalibrate Your Engine just before bed. Research in neuroscience is confirming that your mind continues to process while you sleep and dream—especially issues with an emotional component. What are you afraid of? What is the piece of the relationship puzzle you’ve been unable to find? In the lights-down-low/quiet-time before sleep, “give your dreams a path to follow” a question to resolve, a barrier to get around. You’ll pick up the thread the next morning.

We don’t give ourselves enough quiet time, enough time alone, or enough time with nature. I’ll talk about these different stages of Engine Maintenance—and some of the thinking behind them—at greater length another day.

In the meantime, no day is better than today to start taking regular time with yourself to get ready for the work of your life.

Open the Door

April 30, 2012 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Discovery results—as often as not—from our ability to combine the familiar with the unexpected into a new way of doing things. It’s as true about the challenges we face at work, as it is about figuring out what kind of work we should be doing in the first place.

If you want to start seeing your work differently, there is no better way than to break down your preconceptions about yourself as a “worker,” and put everything back together with the leavening agent of new information.

Shake it up. See new possibilities in familiar territory. Recognize how ideas that seem to have nothing in common (like “producing social benefits” and “profit-making”) can be brought together in an exercise of the imagination to provide you with work that is as productive for you as it is for others.

But what if we’re so ensconced in our little worlds that unexpected combinations—the raw materials for insight—can rarely, if ever happen?

That many of us choose to live in a limited world when we have an unlimited world at our fingertips, at first seems to make little sense. Our smart phones give us near-instant access to almost everything. But instead of using that outlet as an opportunity to learn new things and to grow, too often we use the most powerful tool we have ever held in our hands to do little more than validate what we already know.

Much of it is fear—a key by-product of what Alvin Toffler called “future shock.”

Barraged by more-information-than-ever that risks confusing our most cherished beliefs, there is a strong pull to retreat into our comfort zones in order to (as we see it) feel more in control and function more effectively.

But how effective are we (either for ourselves or for others) when everything we think about and do is dictated by our preconceptions about what is “real” and “true,” and what is not?

Making the glut of available information manageable doesn’t require closing ourselves off from conflicting information. To do so confines us in a too-small world, because it’s precisely this kind of information that contributes the most to insight and change, to personal growth and tolerance.

Jonathan Swift, the great English author of Gulliver’s Travels, famously said: “He was a bold man that first ate an oyster.”

It’s not easy to be bold and try something new. It certainly required an altered state for me to dive into that first sushi platter 30 years ago with my friend Mitch, eager to give me a taste of what he was learning from his Japanese clients. But once you start opening doors, your days huddling around “the old and settled” seem limiting and lifeless. It’s about stepping out and being fully human.

You can get a powerful glimpse of the thrust to evolve and fling open the doors to possibility in schools committed to innovation, like the Institute of Design (or “d-school”) at Stanford and the MIT Media Lab. These learning centers get students out of their silos of specialization by making all courses interdisciplinary, so that unexpected combinations start taking form. The goal at such places isn’t getting good grades or parroting the “right” answers, but risking the “stupid” question, learning from your mistakes, and sometimes entering a new frontier.

Of course, reaching boldly through reluctance or fear and towards possibility can have benefits everywhere.

If you think of your work in the same old ways, you will have the same old work. When you believe only what you’re accustomed to believe and tune out the rest, how could it be otherwise? You’re living in an echo chamber.

You don’t have to be like everyone else, stuck in conventional ways of thinking about your work.

It’s not just about finding “a job,” but finding “the right job for who you are.”

It’s not just about making money, but getting a better mix of rewards from your work—including a sense of purpose.

It’s not just about products and services the market already demands, but also about creating new markets.

It’s not just about someone else giving you a job; sometimes it’s about creating the right job for yourself.

If you’re not open to new (and better) ways of thinking about your work, you will never be able—step by step—to breathe life into them.

Open that door.