When Experience is the Best Teacher

September 27, 2012 By David Griesing 3 Comments

You’re at work thinking: I’ve got to get out of here.

Maybe you’re feeling a persistent ache (I’m wasting away here), or the pain is impossible to ignore (this job is killing me!)

It’s that trigger moment when you’ve not only had enough, but also start thinking about what to do next.

But even before the plan emerges, you hesitate. I can’t do anything I want to do without going back to school. I need a degree, and it will take two, three or four years before maybe I start getting what I need to be getting out of my work. (That is, all those things that you’re not getting now.) Will investing more time and money in your education be worth it?

Maybe. But then again, maybe not.

Paying for school used to be the relatively reasonable cost of getting where you wanted to go. No more. Graduates are struggling to find jobs that pay them enough to cover both their loan payments and the most basic necessities. For this reason alone, it may be time to consider whether more education is truly worth it.

Some are also questioning whether the education system is the primary driver of American innovation and wealth creation. Gregory Ferenstein argues that America’s economic success is due to the huge numbers of high performing (that is, “smart”) people in the U.S., a continuous influx of the most talented immigrants, access to the world’s best research facilities, and the largely unfettered economic opportunity all of us enjoy in this country.

Research has consistently shown that on nearly every measure of education (instructional hours, class-size, enrollment, college preparation), what students learn in school does not translate into later life success.

Instead, “[d]etermination, raw intelligence, and creativity are the measures of a successful college student and employee [and] none of those factors are learned in school.”

At this point you may wonder: instead of spending more time and money preparing to do what I want to do, why don’t I just do it?

20 or so students recently did just that, dropping out of top schools to take their business plans directly to market as recipients of a Thiel Fellowship. This highly competitive program pays them $50,000 a year while they work at road-testing their innovative ideas. It also provides them with a network of valuable contacts to help their start-ups to succeed.

These men and women are not “the average person” choosing the lessons of the marketplace over more time in a classroom. With its annual payments, this two-year fellowship is not the classic School of Hard Knocks. But comments made after these young people abandoned their degrees at places like Princeton and M.I.T. speak to those times in all of our lives when experience may be the best teacher.

In recent interviews, the Fellows talked at length about “getting a shot at a better education” by “diving into the real world of science, technology and business.” They had pent-up energy, and couldn’t wait another day to pursue their dreams. “I was antsy to get out into the world and execute on my ideas,” said Eden Full, whose aim was to market a low-cost solar panel. In her real world classroom, she had to learn to count on strangers for help and to become more flexible by finding daily workarounds for unexpected obstacles to get her business off the ground.

Laura Demming was looking to develop medical therapies that target damage from the aging process. She learned that persistence and belief in her ideas were essential to overcoming a string of early failures. The mother of one of the fellows was initially terrified when her son dropped out of school, but ultimately found herself amazed by his trajectory. “This is stuff you don’t learn in a classroom,” she said. “He’s blogging, he’s teaching, he’s writing software.” The father of another student said: “I can’t think of a worse environment than school if you want your kids to learn how to make decisions, manage risk and take responsibility for their choices.”

Wherever you are in your career, there are times when more skills and more knowledge will be essential for what you want to do in your next job. But there are other times when you have enough skills and knowledge already, times when more education is simply a way to postpone what the real world is waiting to teach you.

When you’re sitting at work, hating your job, and thinking about those things that you always wanted to accomplish, consider taking a chance on yourself and your ideas by completing your education in the real world. Your reward could be the empowerment that comes from facing risk, overcoming failure, and gaining practical experience in ways you never imagined.

The Power of Laughter at the Most Serious Times

August 3, 2012 By David Griesing 1 Comment

I just returned from the #140edu conference in New York City, where I talked about our needing to have a discussion about values in our schools so that our kids have “toolboxes for living and working” when they go out into the world. (You can find much of what I had to say in posts I’ve filed here over the past month on values training, on learning your vocation, and on a school’s values being the beginning, not the end, of the discussion.)

Of course, values are not just something we should be talking about in our schools. We should be having conversations about what’s important to us—and how to act on our beliefs—with families, friends and colleagues so that we can boldly (and optimistically) face the difficult decisions that inevitably confront us all. When you know what’s important to you, a lot of the bad stuff that comes your way can be put in a proper context, liberating you to move forward in a way that makes sense to you in spite of all the challenges and uncertainties.

But that’s the serious part.

As with all of the #140 character conferences sponsored by Jeff Pulver, this one was an amazing collision of thought leaders and their thoughts, with results that managed to be playful one minute and profound the next.

Because of the range of its take-aways, and still finding myself a little hung-over from “that amazingly broad moment,” I’d like to share with you a couple of stories (one from the conference, and the other from half a world away) because of what they have to say about the power of laughter at the most serious times.

In the “recovery room” outside the auditorium of the 92^nd Street Y where the #140edu presentations were occurring in a fire-hose of 10-minute intervals, I found myself talking with a young teacher. I quickly discovered that she needed to make an immediate decision to quit or keep her job in a Bronx classroom before the next school year starts. We weren’t three lines into our conversation when she said: “I can’t imagine going back.” What she didn’t say was: “I’ve been sitting on this fence for awhile, and I don’t have another job.” Her school had plainly done nearly everything it could do to make her feel devalued.

I appealed to the serious-grounded-thoughtful-and-obviously-talented part of her by saying: “The best decisions I’ve made in my life were like jumping off a cliff with no sense of the bottom or how horrible it could be. But if you believe in yourself and in what you are trying to do, you will land successfully—stronger and better—and never look back. At least it had always worked that way for me.”

At this penultimate moment of seriousness, she looked at the huge nametag they had given me and said: “Don’t you find it ironic that we’re here at an education conference and your name is spelled wrong?” Of course, I hadn’t sensed the irony because I hadn’t noticed. Because I hadn’t, and because of her inability to be anything other than a “teacher correcting misspelled words” during a conversation about a key decision point in her life, all of our seriousness deflated into laughter.

Now there was a glimmer of hope in her eyes! At that moment, her laugh made my jumping-off-the-cliff advice seem like it would really work for her—and there’s a good reason for that. Realizing goals you truly believe in is a whole lot easier if you can also manage to see the funny things that are happening around you along the way.

At around the same time we were talking, but a half a world away, another collision of the dead serious and truly playful was going on.

Belarus, one of the former Soviet republics, has one of the most deplorable human rights records in the world.

Sweden is close enough geographically that some of Belarus’ wafting stench led two of its courageous citizens, Thomas Mazetti and Hannah Frey, to try and do something about it. Their goal a few days ago was raising awareness, challenging indifference, and expressing their solidarity with the human rights activists in Belarus, whose very small voice is barely heard outside their troubled country.

Mazetti & Frey — Thomas Mazetti & Hannah Frey

Mazetti and Frey believed enough in the values of freedom, courage and responsibility that they spent $184,500 of their own money to rent a plane, personally fly it over Belarus, and drop 879 teddy bears with parachutes bearing human rights slogans into the country.

While they managed to fly into and back out of Belarus without being shot down, killed, or imprisoned, there is no question that they put their lives at risk for something that was of the utmost importance to them. But notice how they did it. They alleviated their serious moment with teddy bears, and as a result, every news organization in the world picked up their story.

The #140 character conferences, a young teacher in the Bronx, and two Swedish activists all have something to say to us about finding a place where the most serious purpose can spend time with laughter and a sense of humor.

I’d love to hear your stories about when you’ve found a way to bring either laughter or lightness into your deepest commitments—and while doing so, made it far more likely that you would reach your personal goals.

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.

Yale Student Blues

December 2, 2011 By David Griesing 7 Comments

It was like ice-water-in-the-face when I recently read a hundred, mostly negative responses to Yale student Marina Keegan’s thoughtful New York Times piece called “Another View: the Science and Strategy of College Recruiting.”

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?