Neil Armstrong, American astronaut and first man to set foot on the moon died this week. Many have eulogized him for his capability, his tenacity and his reluctance to seek out the spotlight. He certainly had all of those qualities.
Because of who he was and what he did, people listened to what Neil Armstrong had to say over the years, especially about what it was like to be part of the American space program in the 1960’s. Much that he said was recorded, and this is what he had to say about the work ethic of the tens of thousands of men and women who helped to extend our footprint into the new frontier of space during that era. (The quotation is from NASA’s Oral History Project):
Neil Armstrong
When I was working here at the John Space Center, then the Manned Spacecraft Center, you could stand across the street and you could not tell when quitting time was, because those people didn’t leave at quitting time in those days. People just worked, and they worked until whatever their job was done, and if they had to be there until five o’clock or seven o’clock or nine-thirty or whatever it was, they were just there. They did it, and then they went home. So four o’clock or four-thirty, whenever the bell rings, you didn’t see anybody leaving. Everybody was still working.
The way that happens and the way that made it different from other sectors of the government to which some people are sometimes properly critical is that this was a project in which everybody involved was, one, interested, two, dedicated, and three, fascinated by the job they were doing. And whenever you have those ingredients, whether it be government or private industry or a retail store, you’re going to win.
Those Space Center workers were “interested” because they were part of something bigger than themselves, “dedicated” because they were working for something they believed in deeply, and “fascinated” because they couldn’t believe their good fortune to have jobs that brought them both.
That’s the kind of work I’m writing about on these pages—work that all of us can do and should do, but usually aren’t doing.
Why do you think that’s so?
Is 21st Century America so different?
Why aren’t more of us working for our hopes and dreams, fascinated by the possibilities?
We all want to do work that matters. But, as often as not, you won’t find that kind of work in the want ads. It’s rarely work that somebody else gives you to do. As often as not, you need to give yourself the kind of work that will change the world.
Early on in my forthcoming book WorkLifeReward: Following Your Values to Fulfilling Work is the line:
If you want the world to be a better place, you need to help it become that better place.
The main way to do so, of course, is through the work you do. So if you don’t think the work you’re doing—that is, your selling whatever it is that you’re selling today—is making the world into the kind of better place you want it to be, maybe it’s time to think about working at something that will make that kind of difference.
These posts are about encouraging you to think differently about your work. They aim to raise what I call “value awareness,” so you have a clearer view of the color and texture of the better world you’d like to encourage with your efforts. Sometimes they aim to help you become the most effective spokesperson you can be while striving to achieve your goals. And sometimes the discussion here is about ways to make the productive work you want to do easier.
This post is about one of those booster rockets. Something has gotten a lot easier.
SEED CAPITAL
Creating a business model for a better world, where you and your co-conspirators are doing work that matters, takes energy, creativity, vision, tenacity, luck. And it takes money that either you provide, or that people investing in your vision of a better world put in your hands.
In the good old days the money came almost exclusively from your own bank account or from friends and family. (It was the era when those who already had money were usually the ones making more of it.) On top of that, only a tiny percentage of new ideas—whether promising to change the world or not—managed to find venture capital. So if you or a rich uncle weren’t providing the cash, even your brilliance, best intentions and limitless energy were often not enough to overcome the funding constraints all new companies that produce work need in order to survive.
But there’s some good news. It’s a brand new day!
Today, crowdfunding websites give you the ability to make a direct appeal to individuals or groups who may be interested in supporting what you’re doing—because your kind of work is work that matters to them too.
You tell your story. You identify your goal. The crowd decides whether to invest in it. Usually harvested in small dollar amounts, it is hundreds, even thousands of small investments funneled through the crowdfunding site that can put the financial fuel in a new company’s tank.
As an entrepreneur, you promise to give your investors a tangible return on their investment. It could be a letter from a grateful child your company has helped, a picture of the tree planted “because you invested,” or, if you are producing a brave new product or service, periodic updates on solutions to problems no one had gotten around to tackling before.
You get the idea.
For providing the conduit between you and your new investors, crowdfunding websites like MicroVentures, peerbackers, and IndieGoGoare generally paid a small percentage of what you collect—sometimes as little as 5%, when you hit your fundraising target.
LINE UP YOUR INVESTORS photo/John Cooper
What’s news this week (according to the Wall Street Journal) is that crowdfunding has its first “poster child.”
The Cinderella story is about how a little company called Pebble Technology developed a “smart” wristwatch that can display apps and connect to your smart phone to notify you about incoming tweets and Facebook updates. But 26-year old Eric Migicovsky was almost out of money, living and working with his only employee in a rented condo, and ready to call it quits.
He took his case for financing the manufacture of his smart watch to crowdfunding site Kickstarter, looking for $100,000. The ROI: everyone investing $115 would get one of his watches.
In its first 28 hours on Kickstarter, Pebble raised more than a million dollars. By mid-May, it had taken in a total of $10.27 million from 68,929 people! Now Eric’s problems involve things like working with a manufacturing facility in China to produce all those watches. But it also looks a lot like his work dream has become a reality.
Everybody needs to make a living.
What sometimes seems like the impossibility of getting both a paycheck and fulfillment from your work makes many of us reluctant to leave our paychecks for work that gives us the opportunity to make a living and to truly live.
We’ve all had the feeling in the pit of our stomachs. Somebody asks you “What do you do?” They seem to think they’ll learn a lot about you by asking, but you’d rather they never had.
Maybe your job needs too much defending or explaining. Or you’d rather not have to think about “what you do” when you’re not doing it. Maybe you don’t have a job to talk about. Maybe it’s just an inadequate measure of who you are.
It doesn’t have to be.
“What do you do?” is usually a stranger’s second question. (The first—“Where are you from?”—is just an icebreaker, before getting down to business.) As he sums you up, he can already see your age, sex and race, and how well you present. Your job provides all the remaining information he thinks he needs for his snapshot of you.
Because it’s a demonstration of your worth. It gives him your rung on the social ladder. He thinks he’ll learn something about how hard you’ve worked and how smart you are when you tell him. You don’t have to let the question sum you up so easily.
Never just say: “I work at ___,” “I’m a ___,” or “I’m studying to be a ___.”
Tag yourself differently. Take the opportunity this question presents to define yourself in the ways that you want to be defined.
I was struck the other day by a column about work in my local paper entitled “It’s Not All That We Are.” The writer had been watching her co-workers, who had lost their newspaper jobs, leave for the last time. They got some final applause when they left the newsroom from the employees whose jobs—like hers—had been spared. Then she wrote:
“When the applause ends, a dreadful silence sets in.”
In this moment-after, when you could hear a pin drop, the importance of a job like writer or copy editor “takes on mythical proportions.” Indeed, when it’s gone the void can seem so huge that it’s hard to find what’s left of the person who held it.
At times like this, a job can seem like all that we are. The dread hangs in the air over those who have been left behind, silently wondering what the applause would sound like for what remains of them.
It’s not just that our work is too important in our lives. It’s that the other things that are important about us are not more front and center—holding their own with our jobs as essential and obvious parts of who we are.
It’s those things about us that can’t be taken away when a job is.
While the question “what do you do” is looking for a quick summary of your utility in the world, your answer should always speak to your contributions and your value in broader ways.
Your answer should no longer be a label or a tag, but a very short story.
It should speak to yourpresent but also yourfuture. (I am this, working to be that.) It should speak to your commitments. (I write or draw or raise dogs, I travel, sing or climb, I help my elderly neighbors, I march in parades.) It should speak to your spirit. (I live for the silence after a snow has fallen, or for the roar of twenty thousand baseball fans.) You need to put this kind of information out there too.
A very short story in 3 parts that says: my job is only part of “what I do.”
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.
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 thepublic 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.
