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?
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.
How you introduce yourself has everything to do with how you see yourself.
I am a writer. A speaker. A company starter and a dispute resolver. But that’s not all that I am. How others see me, and even more importantly, how I see myself, is contained in the words I use to describe myself. These words should include all the things that you are, including what you’re working to become: the dynamic as well as the static parts of you.
All of us are works in progress, tadpoles becoming frogs.
Fold to Assemble
That’s probably why it’s so limiting when people are summed up with adjectives that speak only to their former glories. Academy award nominated actress. Nobel prize-winning economist. President Clinton. What we hear is that you’ve already come and gone. Summed up, and no longer becoming.
Over-simplified packaging (even to honor) probably derives from our survival instincts. A stranger approaches: is she friend or foe? As we start learning more about her, we put her in one category or the other. Where is she in my pecking order, and where am I in hers? Today it’s no longer safety we’re most concerned about, but meeting the expectations we have for ourselves, and that others are busy imposing upon us.
What I’m talking about is scrambling those expectations in the ways that are best for you as soon as you start talking about yourself.
Doing so changes everything: the way you see your work, the way you think about your life. Because these are the words you are choosing to define yourself.
Social media has made tagging ourselves the very springboard for conversation. This wasn’t the case “in the olden days” where self-description was limited to more specific occasions (Resumes. A few lines in a yearbook. A short bio when someone was introducing you someplace).
Today, we are constantly introducing and branding ourselves. When there is truth in our marketing, these kinds of tags can move our expectations (and the expectations that others have about us) to the rich-with-promise places where they need to be.
I have a friend who describes himself as “the home inspector lawyer, professional speaker, and raconteur.” His promise is that he’ll help you with your home inspection problems, and that you’ll have fun while he’s doing it. Joe is many things, but first and foremost he’s an entertainer: happiest when he’s making you happy.
I am collaborating with a woman who describes herself as an “empire builder.” Whose empire, you might ask? The stated goal is that it’s mine, but (in truth) some of the best energy in our collaboration also comes from being a part of what Amy’s building for herself. And then there’s the software developer at a client’s company whose bio begins with “puzzle piecer.” When I read this, I see my fragmented jigsaw puzzle sprawling over a table and Jonathon’s getting a charge by helping me find that recalcitrant piece.
People like this who involve other people in what they’re doing—and with who they are—are influential people. There are even meters for tracking their influence (like Klout; PeerIndex; Appinions; and PeopleBrowsr, the creator of something called Kred). The endorsements of influential people are important precisely because there are all of us out here who want to be involved with them and learn from the choices they’re making.
Mark Schaefer, a Rutgers marketing professor, has put his finger on the way that influencers are creating buzz with their followers in social media today.
This is an entirely new marketing channel, and when’s the last time we had one of those? Done well, it can be enormously effective because you’re getting this advocacy [for whatever it is you’re offering] organically.
But organic marketing is really only part of it.
It’s not the reflected glory from past accomplishments that influential people are providing, but future promises. In the words they use, each of them is involving our expectations with theirs. Not by offering a static summary of who they are, but by opening a door that invites you into a shared experience you begin creating together: truly, a springboard into the future.
Think about defining yourself this way.
It’s more than just words, of course. But the right ones invite others into your work-in-progress—while putting your best foot forward.
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.”
We all like feeling rewarded for work that makes things better. Many of us are finding this kind of satisfaction in social benefit games. At the same time, we’re also learning how to bring transformative change into the world by getting some practice first.
Your rewards include feeling good about yourself because of all you’re accomplishing and the abilities you’re developing while doing so. In social games like WeTopia, you reap other rewards too. There is pride in the growing productivity of your community, empowerment from your ability to support those in need, and your own increasing prosperity.
Games like this also bring the best ingredients of the for-profit and non-profit worlds together.
They give you the virtual experience of work where you can do well by doing good. They stir your imagination, and get you thinking about new kinds of work that you could be doing right now in the real world.
On the other hand, it’s disquieting to feel that someone is “behind our screens” watching us and gaining insights about human behavior because of how you, me (and millions like us) are playing these games. These social scientists and marketers are looking at how we respond to different sounds, colors and kinds of movement. They are even changing the variables we encounter in these games while we’re playing them to see if we do things differently or faster or better.
What’s going on here, and where is the upside for us in this kind of scrutiny?
Kristian Segerstrale is an economist and co-founder of a company called Playfish that makes on-line games. In an interview, he described the difficulty social scientists have traditionally had gaining reliable information from behavioral experiments because they can’t control the variables that exist in the real world. By contrast, in virtual worlds:
the data set is perfect. You know every data point with absolute certainty. In social networks you even know who the people are. You can slice and dice by gender, by age, by anything.
Segerstrale gave the following by way of example. If your on-line experience requires buying something, what happens to demand if you add a 5 percent tax to a product? What if you apply a 5 percent tax to one half of a group and a 7 percent tax to the other half? “You can conduct any experiment you want,” he says. “You might discover that women over 35 have a higher tolerance to a tax than males aged 15 to 20—stuff that’s just not possible to discover in the real world.”
What this means is that people who want to sell you things or motivate you to do something are now able to learn more than they have ever been able to learn before about what is likely to influence your behavior.
Being treated like ingredients to be “sliced and diced” has risks for us, but also possibilities.
None of us want to relinquish our freedom and become automatons, manipulated into doing what others want us to do. We do well to remember national experiments in social engineering, like the tragedy of the Cultural Revolution in China and the choreographed death spiral in North Korea.
But we also need to recognize the potential in this brave new world for good.
The behavior of millions of men and women whose voices had never been heard before was changed by lessons learned on-line, ultimately producing the Arab Spring.
The behavior of individuals facing repression every day in places like Iran and Syria is fortified by the virtual support of those who are struggling with them.
Your behavior, and the behavior of millions of people who are playing these social games, is being shaped and reinforced in similar ways. It is a training ground for changing the real world with new and better kinds of work.
Social benefit games are giving us a recipe for transformation—and the ingredients are getting better all the time.
