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.
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.
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.
Ostensibly, her article was about how sad she felt that her classmates had come to New Haven with dreams about changing the world but, 3 ½ years later, had found themselves with something far less than that, like jobs in “consulting” or the banking sector.
What her article was really about was how difficult it is for Keegan and many of her peers to find their way to work with meaning and purpose. It was the ostensible part of the article that garnered Keegan most of her negative responses. Comments ran the gamut from how spoiled and naïve she is after prep school and now Yale (so take off your rosy glasses), how many students have no job prospects, let alone high-paying ones (so quit your whining), and what great “real world” skills you can build by working in jobs like banking (so seize the day you’ve been given and stop finding fault with it). But most of the venting missed the truly provocative question Keegan was asking: for those in her generation who want to make a difference in the world, how can you get a job that will enable you to start doing so?
Keegan had done an informal survey of her fellow students before putting her ideas out there, findings she had reported earlier in the Yale Daily News. Later in the Times piece, she said:
Maybe I’m overly optimistic, but I think most young, ambitious people want to have a positive impact on the world. Whether it’s through art or activism or advances in science, almost every student I spoke to had some kind of larger, altruistic goal in life. But what I heard again and again was that working at J P Morgan or Bain or Morgan Stanley was the best way to prepare oneself for a future doing public good.
Keegan also was effective at describing the basic challenge (how to go about finding a job, any job) and how easy it is to get diverted from finding the right one.
What I found was somewhat surprising: the clichéd pull of high salaries is only part of the problem. Few college seniors have any idea how to “get a job,” let alone what that job would be. Representatives from the consulting and finance industries come to schools early and often – providing us with application timelines and inviting us to information sessions in individualized e-mails. We’re made to feel special and desired and important.
I know what she means because it was much the same when I was finishing law school, and only the big corporate law firms came to recruit. Both the professional success they seemed to embody and the attention they were paying to me triggered a range of reactions: I was flattered, relieved at how simplified my job search had suddenly become, and how approving “the world” would be if I took the high-paying road that was opening up before me. I was attracted, and then hooked.
In 1981, it required deliberation, first to counter the lure of easy choices, and then to find alternative roads, particularly meaningful ones. It is much the same for new workers 30 years later.
Keegan’s hopes for meaningful work belong to many, if not most in her generation. Unlike mine, squarely confronting the challenge may produce more positive results.
This past week, there was an article about two local kids who had been awarded Rhodes scholarships, a high honor conferred on only 32 American college graduates each year. In talking about what he hoped to make of this opportunity, Zachary Crippen, who is in his last year at the Air Force Academy, said he hoped to study the place in our society where ethics, politics and the law come together and use that information to build a career. Nina Cohen, at Bryn Mawr College, said almost the same thing. Her plans are to study political theory, in particular, how ethical beliefs can be reconciled within a liberal democratic framework
After spending a couple of years in England thinking about these issues, will Crippen and Cohen gain for themselves more information than Keegan seems to have now about how to find the work of their lives?
Others at Yale have thought about the quality of the information we need when making the most important choices in our lives. One is Anthony Kronman, who makes a persuasive argument about developments in higher education that contribute to the deep-seated uncertainty graduates feel today, and what needs to be done about it. He presents that argument in Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life (2007).
In the past 50 years, Kronman argues that our institutions of higher learning have largely abandoned their role providing students with “the accumulated wisdom of our civilization.” College students no longer study the West’s great minds who, throughout the centuries, have thought long and hard about lots of things that all educated people should know something about, including how to live a meaningful life. I whole-heartedly agree with his case for the return of a core “humanistic” curriculum, and will talk some more about why in a later post. I also think that our newest Rhodes scholars are on to something by deciding to take a closer look at both their ideals and how they can play themselves out in the rough and tumble of a political culture.
What I’m afraid of is that they may be the lucky few. For the rest: A weak economy. A need to pay the bills and gain some personal independence. An unfocused, scattershot education. Unhelpful college career services. And will more education and better information to base decisions upon be enough, even for them?
How does a generation that wants to make a difference find itself the right kind of work?