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?
Tenacity with a little playfulness thrown in can be a powerful combination when you’re looking for—and finally doing—the work of your life.
If you were armchair running, swimming, paddling and shooting your way through the Summer Olympics like I was, I think you’ll agree: they gave us a lot to chew on when it comes to tenacity and playfulness.
Take gymnastics, for example. Or platform and springboard diving if you prefer. What’s so excruciating about watching these competitions is how often tight plus nervous ends in a lost opportunity. On the other hand, all you have to do is recall gymnast Gabby Douglas’ all-around performance to appreciate what can happen when tenacity makes room for playfulness. As soon as Gabby’s smile said “I’m enjoying myself,” the rest was pure magic.
GABBY DOUGLAS photo/Mike Blake Reuters
Sometimes playfulness is integral to the moment, as it was for Gabby and the purposeful individuals in my last post, The Power of Laughter at the Most Serious Times. Other times, playfulness follows the tenacity like a sigh of relief, and changes the whole meaning of the story.
As the Olympics rolled into their closing ceremony, the pageantry marked a triumphant end to what had been a long, hard year for London. You’ll recall the scenes exactly one year ago, when thousands of rioters smashed windows, looted stores and torched parts of the City. One of those looters burned down much of the 144-year old House of Reeves furniture store in the borough of Croydon. In the days and weeks that followed, the 5th generation Reeves brothers and their 81-year old father came to embody Britain’s World War II motto “Keep Calm and Carry On,” as they struggled mightily to put their business back together.
While the media was busy debating whether the riots represented class struggle or opportunistic criminality, the community summoned up its better angels to coalesce around the Reeves family as they got back on their feet. The lifeline extended to the family included over 4000 photographs from young people, holding up statements of encouragement and denying the hooligans the last word.
When their new showrooms opened this week, Trevor and Graham Reeves sat on a sofa outside their store, playfully gesturing to their storefront, which they had wallpapered with all of those photographs. It did more than express their gratitude. It provided a moment of effervescence: the grace note after a very hard year.
TREVOR & GRAHAM REEVES Photo/zuma press
Having the tenacity to find and do work that expresses your values can be serious business.
When you can laugh at yourself and the odds you’re facing along the way, and celebrate what you achieve with playfulness, your path will be easier, the crowds pulling for you larger, and the story you’re writing far more impactful.
Anthropologist Margaret Mead (1901-1978) once said: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
People who go on to make a real difference have one thing in common. They have prepared themselves for it by becoming more “thoughtful” and “committed.”
The process begins by developing your value awareness, discussed in the last post. While our schools can provide an ideal environment for deepening your understanding of your values, values training can be undertaken at any time or place in your career. So can planning for the transition from where you are today with your work to where you want to be. You plot your course to energizing and fulfilling work by making a plan, and then following it.
I learned about personal business planning from a mentor in the venture capital community early on in my career. I was getting ready to launch a start-up, and kept talking to him about how I wanted my business to help people. He pulled no punches when he said at the time: “make your money first, and once you make enough of it you can do all the helping you want.”
My expression then (and after similar exchanges) must have told him I was unconvinced. As a last resort, he suggested I prepare a personal business plan to get a better grip on my motivations. Maybe that exercise would straighten me out.
Well it did, but not in the way he intended.
Values are your fuel
The deeper I got into this planning exercise, the more my initial goals were confirmed, and the clearer my future direction became. What did I most want to do and why? What am I “best at,” and what were the most revealing demonstrations of the “highest and best” roles I had played—both at work and outside of it?
The goal of the plan was the job I was seeking. To identify it, I needed to know why it was the right job for me. In other words, that I’d be accomplishing something I felt was important and that I’d feel fulfilled at a very basic level while doing it. While this required familiarity with my principles and improved “value awareness,” it also required identifying real world opportunities where my values could fuel my work.
What was my right job? Could I find it or would I have to create it? This required research. What are people I admire doing? How did I see myself helping people? What is the work that’s already being done to help in this area, and where are the opportunities for me? What do I need in terms of salary and job security? Questions like these: I needed to find answers to all of them.
My skills would be my work tools. For me, advocating, organizing, visualizing, problem solving, all were on my skill list, so I had to come up with examples of each that demonstrated my qualifications for the work I wanted to do. I needed to take my best shot proving the first part of the equation: that I could do it.
Experience (the flipside of the equation that said “I had done it—or something like it—already”) would be described in terms of roles I had played. Times when I had had some success as a coordinator, prime mover, creator, or gatherer of resources to get something done—often after work, since many of us spend more time excelling in our personal lives than we do in our working ones.
Planning plots your course
Skills and experience: two different ways to illustrate what I had to bring to the party.
A personal business plan aims at lining up what you’re best at and what you’ve done in your life that you’re most proud of in order to demonstrate your suitability for a job that will bring you similar measures of pride and satisfaction.
Instead of trying to shoehorn yourself into a job you don’t want to do, you are actively pursuing work that you have already been getting ready to do during the most centered and accomplished moments of your life.
That may well be your definition of work that matters.
As such, it is work that is worth striving for.
Learning how to become more “thoughtful” about the work you should be doing, and more clearly “committed” to its goals has everything to do with preparing yourself for it.
Personal business planning is a valuable way for you to become more thoughtful about your work.
(I’ll be talking about values and education at the #140edu conference, which is taking place at the 92nd Street Y in New York City later this month. Join meby registering today.)
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 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.
