Crowd-Sourcing Your Job Freedom

January 13, 2013 By David Griesing 4 Comments

Oftentimes, it’s the talented, motivated and grounded people who struggle the most getting to the work they should be doing. It’s like the burden of their gifts weighs them down, placing an unhealthy gravity on the decision to strike out and make a change for the better.

But beyond the over-complicated knots we tie ourselves in are the practical barriers that confound us. One of them is not having the financial freedom to do the kind of work that we need to be doing right now.

In this regard, there’s good news for everyone who has an entrepreneur inside of them, struggling to get out. Your pitifully small bank account is no longer a roadblock to your success as long as you have a good idea and an equally good story to tell. For the first time ever, millions of strangers are funding small business ideas that never had the chance to get off the ground before. All you have to do is sell them on your dream.

With crowd-funding, it’s the small amounts, quite literally “the seed funding,” that can not only get you off the proverbial dime, but also a cheering section of people who truly believe in you. Where once you needed a rich uncle or well-healed friend, the “kindness of strangers” now provides a way for you to get in the game. (I last wrote about crowd-funding in July.)

You always wanted to ____ (fill in the blank). You’ve never understood why somebody hadn’t figured out how to ___, so you’ve figured it out. Tell the crowd about your idea. Tell them how much cash you need to realize it. Tell them how they’ll get to share in your success. Convince them that you deserve their vote of confidence and they just might give it to you.

Historically, because tiny businesses rarely attracted outside financing, they just as rarely got off the ground. Today, a whole new class of entrepreneurs has a chance to strut their stuff. Spreading like some positive contagion, crowds are nurturing brave little start-ups everywhere there is access to a funding network. Years from now, when some of our leading companies can trace their origins to networks like Kickstarter, I think we’ll recognize that the true democratization of innovation began in our time.

What this gives you is an opportunity that simply wasn’t available five years ago. But you still have to believe in what you’re setting out to do, and get that cheering section to buy-in too. Indeed, it’s your ability to inspire (on the one hand) and the desire of total strangers to be inspired (on the other) that makes this bargain work.

In the world of crowd-funding, the desire to be part of an appealing stranger’s quest to succeed is nearly universal. She talks about how she’ll change the world. You learn about how he’ll make our lives better, easier, smarter. They share their stories with us, and we in turn see some of ourselves (and our hopes) in them. We like & admire them & look forward to sharing in their success. The ticket for the adventure is modest given the upsides, so we buy it.

For investors, it helps too that you’re not the only one who’s buying. It may be dozens or hundreds or even thousands of others who are similarly inspired. With crowd-funding, you find out early and often how many others are getting on-board with you. The infectious rush of fellow believers is essential to the dynamic.

But what’s really unique (and special) here is that the entrepreneur’s energy & inspiration and the investors’ psychic & financial support are joining together for the sake of economic productivity. We’re building a business here after all.

Maybe it’s your business.

On Having Courage and Dignity Under Fire

June 22, 2012 By David Griesing 1 Comment

You pursue work that matters because you want to leave the world a better place than you found it. By doing so however, you

inevitably run afoul of those who want to keep everything more or less like it is.

Attracting controversy also pushes you into the spotlight. With the lights in your eyes and a welter of voices clamoring around you, the heat of the moment calls upon you to say and do things that can either advance your goals, or set them back.

How you’ll respond at such times is important. It’s helpful to think about it, start visualizing how you want these moments to play out before they arrive.

While there are many who have handled these situations badly, there are also those who have summoned up the kind of amazing grace we can learn from. This past week brought just such a lesson.

Margaret Farley is a nun, a member of the Sisters of Mercy, and the emerita professor of social ethics at Yale Divinity School, where she has taught for 40 years. Throughout, she has been a celebrated teacher as well as the author of numerous books and articles, including Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics (New York, 2006).

Last week, after concluding an investigation that had lasted 3 ½ years, the Vatican’s Magisterium (or Teaching Office) condemned Just Love, because it “affirms positions that are in direct contradiction with Catholic teaching in the field of sexual morality” and therefore “cannot be used as a valid expression of Catholic teaching, either in counseling or formation, or in ecumenical and interreligious dialogue.”

In other words, the views Margaret Farley expressed in her book put her outside the boundaries of her faith. Her teaching itself—through argument and discussion in her book—was found to be an improper path for believers to follow in seeking either truth or understanding.

A half century ago, Margaret Farley chose to commit her life to a religious vocation of teaching within the Church. Since then, her work and her life have been united by this spiritual purpose.

Given her choices, the judgment she received last week is different than the rebuke of an employer, on the one hand, or the criticism of vested interests you are challenging, on the other. In each instance, what she has faced is more extreme.

The leaders of her own community of believers have publicly found that her work is incompatible with those shared beliefs. They have defined her as standing separate and apart from them. For a citizen, the word would be “traitor.” In a community of believers, it is usually “heretic.” Imagine standing where she stands today.

My aim here is not to take a side in this controversy but to comment on how Margaret Farley has conducted herself and continued her work in the midst of it. It is her courage and dignity—not her scholarship—that is teaching us today.

Her response was: Simple. Straightforward. Clear. Amidst a blizzard of media commentary (including in the New York Times and Washington Post) Margaret Farley issued one statement and gave one interview. She said her book was never intended to express “official Catholic teaching” but rather to help people “think through their questions about human sexuality.” It was an effort to move away from “taboo morality” and bring “present-day scientific, philosophical, theological, and biblical resources” into the discussion.

Not Angry or Contentious, but Disappointed about issues never addressed and opportunities lost. The Church said: “Sister Farley either ignores the constant teaching of the Magisterium or, where it is occasionally mentioned, treats it as one opinion among others.” She, in turn, asked: “Should power settle questions of truth?”

If we come to know a little more than we knew before, it might be that the conclusions we had previously drawn need to be developed, or even let go of. [To say that wasn’t possible] would be to imply that we know everything we need to know and nothing more need be done.

Not Seeking the Spotlight, but Standing her Ground once she was in it. Because the Church “is still a source of real life for me, it’s worth the struggle. It’s worth getting a real backbone that has compassion tied to it.”

Margaret Farley was my teacher at Yale. I know her as humble and earnest: engaged like the best teachers, careful like the best scholars. I sense enormous reluctance in her notoriety: for her to be taken as a champion for divorce or gay marriage, or even as a spokesperson for believers who are drifting from their Church because of its difficulties addressing questions of gender and sexuality. But her reluctance does not preclude her resolve—and this is where we find her today.

Once Margaret Farley was thrust into the spotlight, she knew what to do.

Dance Card

February 7, 2012 By David Griesing 3 Comments

Sitting here at the collision of two startling streams of information got me thinking about being inspired by powerful individuals, and how their inspiration can affect our work and our lives.

A high school reunion in October revived a network of old friends, as well as some new ones I never really knew back in the day. This connectivity has been unleashing a torrent of lines and images about missed classmates, things we have forgotten, and how great it is to remember. The other night I tossed a “whatever happened to my most memorable teacher?” into the stream of recollection.

She taught English. I had her for only a quarter of my junior year, but her class and all she brought to it had left its mark. In the volley that followed, I explained her with these words:

I had never met a woman like that before. I can still feel the longing so many students had for her (like moths trying to merge with a flame), and how almost abandoned I felt when she did not return my last year. But I never thought our school was enough to contain or sustain her. She was too far ahead. Like a comet. I have a soundtrack in my head with the Sixties in it, but she in many ways was its personification. I don’t remember much about the class I took with her or what I read. It hardly mattered. It was really just about her. A whole new world burning through her eyes.

I expected to hear that she had gone on to conquer new mountains, to stir up dust in bigger corners, and change more lives. An old friend who knew the story better dissolved this simple future with a couple of quick sentences.

I know a good bit about Portia and her somewhat tragic life after leaving Branford. She and her husband Tom owned beautiful land in Massachusetts. They had a daughter, who was named Shelburne after the land, and Portia was expecting their second child. Tragically, while ice skating and sledding on a pond, Tom was pulling Shelburne on a sled and the rope snapped. The sled skidded onto thin ice and it broke through, taking the child beneath it. When Tom attempted to rescue her, they both ended up dying in the freezing water. Two weeks later, Portia gave birth to Lucia.

My friend knew that another relationship and daughter eventually followed, and that Portia had stayed with the memory on that beautiful land, but little more. I learned that in the intervening years she has also been farming and selling her harvest, has written a children’s book and edited multiple volumes of literary criticism with Harold Bloom and made jewelry. But the fulfillment of her promise cannot be so easily framed.

Your work and your life have gone on courageously, but how could the heat of your comet not have changed when so many cold mountains had come into your heart?

Answers are less important (how much can we ever know, how much do we need to know?) than the energy that the thought of her still throws off.

She is felling trees up there to the thunder of Romantic music—how could it be otherwise?—her mane of unruly hair still catching the light, but perhaps with more minor notes and intervals of shadow now, more summoning up of both brass and wind than once would have been necessary before striding forward to claim new destinations.

It was also the stab of unexpected tragedy that brought me back into the story of Steve Appleton.

Until last Friday, when Appleton (51) died after his single engine airplane crashed in flames following a mechanical failure, he had been the chairman and chief executive officer of Micron Technologies, a company I knew for years as the last American competitor in the semiconductor industry. It was a distinction the company enjoyed largely because of him.

Grit and sheer life force had enabled Appleton to rise from Micron production worker at 22 to its front office less than ten years later. He also was notorious for pushing the envelope of life outside of work. A qualified stunt pilot, he flew in air shows performing loops and rolls at altitudes that were often below 100 feet. He surfed. He raced. When asked a couple of years back about the high energy levels he brought to everything he did, he said: “it is kind of a cliché, but I’d rather die living than die dying.”

Many analysts predict that Micron will continue to thrive because of the strong organization he has built and the competitive advantage it still retains in the industry. Maybe the success he had in business came because he knew not only how to rev things up, but also how to slow them down: a range that was as useful for dodging bullets as it was for seizing opportunities. Appleton told a reporter in 2011: “For me, it is something like the movie ‘The Matrix.’ The [memory chip] business is in slow motion in comparison to all the other things I do.”

So I wonder, in your dance with life and death, when the music finally stopped, did you reaffirm the bargain you had struck? Did you have second thoughts?

Again, it hardly matters that this final lesson from his life is one his on-lookers and admirers can never learn from. But the other take-aways are more than enough.

You had been fully awake since you were a child. You said it was sticks in grade school, knives in junior high and guns in high school that made you face death but claim life. The music I hear is an anthem reverberating through the last fire.

We remember those who have inspired us through the gauzy lenses of time, the fragmented updates we have of them, and the suddenness of breaking news. In the remembering, we fast-forward their found energy into our lives and into our work. They encourage us to accept the invitation, to get up, and to dance.

Two Cents

December 29, 2011 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

On the heels of my last post, some additional observations about finding a job that will make a difference. . . .

What’s Right for You

Finding fulfillment in our lives and in our work requires deliberate choices. It includes looking critically at the easy choices that often present themselves so we are reasonably confident that the choices we make are determined by our priorities, not someone else’s.

We often pursue the path somebody else lays out for us after convincing ourselves that it will improve our options, make it more likely that right doors will open for us down the road. But too often this is just putting off a hard decision in the misguided hope that somehow we will manage to find the right door on the wrong road. Figure out what you need and what your world needs today, and then pursue whatever lifetime of work lies ahead of you because of who you are and the factors that make your life worth living.

In her Yale Daily News article, Marina Keegan correctly notes that finding your vocation is “not exactly a field with an application form”—and certainly not one that someone else will be handing you. It is an opportunity that you have to give yourself. Deciding to pursue the job of your life includes being level-headed about the choices you do have—even when those choices are limited—and learning how to say “no” to work that can never provide you with the right kinds of returns.

Some thoughtful students at Stanford felt strongly enough about resisting the “siren call” of certain kinds of high-paying work that they started Stop the Brain Drain, a national organization with the following mission statement:

Three years after the Great Recession, we are still experiencing a jobless recovery and need our most innovative and creative minds to build new companies, technologies, and industries.
Every year, however, up to 25% of graduates from top universities are hired to work for financial institutions – reducing our nation’s supply of job-creating entrepreneurs, scientists, and public servants, and weakening America’s economic dynamism.
Enough is enough: it’s time for America to stop the Wall Street brain drain.

Of course, it is not just about financial institutions recruiting on elite campuses. It is about the work that needs to be done today, and that you need to be doing—whatever it is.

Envisioning What Your Work Will Look Like

In my last post, when Philadelphia’s newest Rhodes scholars talked about realizing their ideals through politics, what both wanted to learn was how to make a difference through public service. To do so, they will (among other things) be studying the lives of individuals who have broken through the political log-jams of their own times in an effort to give their principles staying power.

Politics isn’t for everybody. But there is wisdom we can all gain from the lives of extraordinary public servants whose values were in creative tension with the decisions and compromises they were called upon to make every working day.

Whether you are trying to find the right job after years of work or are just starting out, other’s life stories can often provide “both shape and form” to what your own working life might look like. Two such working-life stories, involving principled engagement in political worlds very much like our own, are told by Marcus Tullius Cicero and Edmund Burke.

Cicero and Burke each wrote extensively about how their ideals served as both catalysts for change and constant reminders of how little they had actually achieved after the political dust had settled. What this kind of “push and pull” might look like as a career is suggested in Mary Ann Glendon’s “Cicero and Burke on Politics as Vocation.”

In her essay, Glendon’s most telling observation is that while Cicero and Burke both saw themselves primarily as political actors, neither of them could have achieved nearly as much if they had not also been men of ideas. In fact, their ideas were like a compass that kept them on track. Her quote from one of Burke’s biographers applies with equal force to both of them:

No one has ever come so close to the details of practical politics, and at the same time remembered that these can only be understood and only dealt with by the aid of the broad conceptions of political philosophy.

We learn from the lives of Cicero and Burke that while the public person must be engaged today, the private person needs to be thoughtful about his actions tomorrow.

None of us has to be either a politician or a philosopher, but if you want to make a genuine difference in your world, it is probably not enough to simply be engaged. Those committed to changing the world also bring their ideas to their engagement.

Best wishes for the New Year.