Faith in a Blog about Work

Look, here’s the point: I have more than a couple of jobs, but I limit what I discuss to two, so we don’t have to waste time with the “you’re a freak” discussion. I often hear people talk of: “putting in long hours”. As opposed to what? I was going to work anyway. If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing as work. People talk of “work-life balance” but why does work need to be balanced? Work *is* life. Work is balance. “Work and play?” Work is the way that I play. People say, “You do what you have to, so you can do what you want to do.” But work *is* what I want to do. I don’t get it.

Work is supposed to be the source of meaning. That’s the whole point of this blog. If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing as work. It’s worth, in other words, taking seriously, making the work of your hands, the work of your life. And whatever isn’t worth that much, you set it down for what is.

A fundamentalist lecturer who spoke extensively about work has said “the good things are the enemies of the best things, if only for lack of time”. We have so little time, so little life left to us in our mortality, to establish what it is we’re supposed to be doing with our lives. If you’re reading this and you’re over 30, your life is half over, statistically. Maybe you’re optimistic – ok, so even if you’re life is 1/3 over, and you’ve only got 2/3 left, if you’re not doing what you’re supposed to be doing, then when?

I used to teach a class in which I’d begin with a bonding exercise – ask each participant to answer a seemingly simple question: If we paid all your bills, alleviated all your debts, met all your obligations, and gave you the car you want, the home you want, the title you want, etc. – what would you do with the rest of your life? The goal was to bypass some of the social armor we put on, the defensiveness of new environments, and coming from diverse backgrounds, and see a little bit of the person in each other, just a little beyond the veil. And you see it, because you see in each person the universal search for meaning – meaning that can be understood in the context of work.

But it’s amazing how few people spoke of something resembling work. Some spoke of traveling or of learning/studying (both of which represent the search for meaning) – a small minority spoke of engaging in some particular profession or launching a business. The exercise proceeds by asking the question “why” until you get at the reason behind the reason (not just a restatement of the original). Suffice it to say that answers broke down (without people saying it explicitly) into either “I have no idea what my life means, so I would search for meaning” or “I know exactly what I’m supposed to do, and it’s work”. The final question – either way – was, “So, even given limited resources and time, what steps are you taking, on a constant or daily basis, in that direction?”

The goal was to accomplish a bit of inthinking – thinking together about a shared problem that’s uniquely held by each participant. The result is the creation of a much more effective learning environment, because further activity becomes attitudinally focused around the mutual acquisition of meaning that work constitutes in the first place. In short, this implied bond quickly created more cohesive work groups with a discreet understanding of what our work actually is. Minds were open to finding meaning through the work we were bound to do together. People still come up to me in crowds and tell me the turning point in their attitudes about their work was those classes. Those were sales classes too – full of professional skeptics. It’s not me, though – work really can be like that.

The answers to that last question, though – “what are you doing to go in that direction now?”, ranged from “You’re right. I will (or I am)” to the challenge, “What about you? Are you doing what you’re meant to do?” – to which I would always answer categorically “yes”. And indeed I was. And without belaboring the details, that’s still true. As much as I can, and I am trying to make more “can”. What I can’t bring myself to do is just whittle away the hours. Even reading a book is work. The best quotation on reading I’ve read is “When you read, make to do lists instead of notes – if you can’t do that, you’re reading the wrong books.”

Your work is holistic – it involves the whole person – what you put in and what you put out. Your work, the work of your life, the work of your hands, is too important to leave to the merely adequate, to a placeholder, to be in fact anything other than the source of meaning in your life. Even in religion, the word “liturgy” (the Christian worship service) means “the work of the people”. If it’s worth doing, it’s worth taking quite seriously. If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing as work.

In fact, Christianity provides a very useful fork for attitudes about work: one attitude views work as a curse – a kind of necessary evil – a blight upon one’s life that one should rather escape if one can. This view has generated a generation of slackers – decades, in fact, of drop-outs, and beatniks on the Kerouak model. Work, in this experience, is the source of frustration, not the locus of joy, much less the means of salvation. And this is often thought to be the Christian model.

Historically, it is anything but. For one thing, the Christian view is that, when God pronounces a curse, it is an act of love, which is actually designed for the salvation of the individual – for union with God, rather than alienation from God and all things. It is saving man by putting a boundary on his despair (the opposite of meaning). The idea of a curse in the occult sense of a malevolent force of destruction is foreign to Christian tradition. Secondly, the tradition is that all things blighted with death – with frailty and frustration – all things deprived or distorted of meaning – are being redeemed, deified, transformed into vessels of meaning, conveyors of salvation. Work, in the Christian view, while it is uncomfortable because of the death inflicted on mankind and the world, is meant to be a means of overcoming death. In fact, without one’s work, one cannot be saved, according to the Christian gospels. If one reads the parables of the talents and of the minas and of the vineyard and the other Christian teachings on the mystery of work, it is a primary means of union with God. The alternative is “weeping, outer darkness, and gnashing of teeth” – that’s despair.

A common misconception is that the Christian scriptures say that work is a curse. Far from it; they say that the ground is cursed – the environment, the context of work – not work itself.

Cursed is the ground because of you, In sorrow you shall eat of it all your days. It will bring forth thorns and thistles, and you shall eat the grain of the field: by the sweat of your brow you will get your bread, unil you return to the ground, for you were taken from it. For you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

In fact, the curse is that things will frustrate your work (e.g. “thorns and thistles”) – the implication is that work itself is a holy thing confronted by disaster which it and we must overcome for rightful ends. We’re not much on proof texts here, but that’s what the words actually say and that’s the attitude that Christian tradition actually preserves, pop-religion aside. Keep in mind that the first thing God said to man was to work- the work of rulership over the earth jointly with the work of tending and protecting and replenishing the earth and making it peaceful:

And God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and rule over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” And God said, “Behold, I have given you every seed-bearing plant on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed-bearing fruit; to you it shall be for food. And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to every thing that creeps upon the earth that lives, I have given every green plant for food”. And it was so. And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. . . . And the LORD God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to tend it and to keep it.

It’s interesting that the very next thing God said to man was to fast, – it was a rule – to not eat up all the earth, or eat even of everything in it, even if man could consume it all, and even if it was designed as food, and even if it was in his care; but the implications of that is a different discussion for a different venue. We’ll stay with work. If you look closely at the Christian telling, work is the life of paradise, and the very deprivation of meaning from work, which came when Death fell upon it, is the very thing from which the curse is designed to save us.

There is, in our culture, a certain audacity in “bringing religion into” a discussion on work; it’s a faux pas – and I don’t violate it because I’m unaware of it. I’m a pretty smart guy – when I break a social rule, it’s intentional – I just have a reason that’s discreet and not readily apparent, or I’ve weighed the cost against a more desirable object and acted accordingly. I’m breaking this rule, because the rule itself – the separation of religion from work is, in part, based upon the very separation of work from meaning, and indeed upon the historical misunderstanding of the Christian view of work which is embedded in contemporary Western culture. Obviously, if work is thought of as a curse, the resultant “religious” ideas are not really smoothly compatible with an effective or thriving workplace. Keep in mind, I’m suggesting that’s part of the reason for the social taboo. Don’t believe it? What do people talk about on Monday morning and Friday afternoon – escaping from work – perhaps “having” to work during the weekend – sounds to me like they think it’s a curse. It’s culturally ingrained. So I break the taboo on religious talk at work to redefine the curse inherited from a religious misconception that’s breaking work for so many people.

The other causes for which I’m violating the norms of a professional blog are that: I find Faith to be the richest and most powerful and widely familiar source of metaphor to augment a discussion about meaning and about work, and also because we’re talking here about history. Historically, sociologically, anthropologically, these ideas have shaped our society in one way or another and are still latent within its cultural assumptions. What economist or historian or student of work completely throws Max Weber (The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism) – over his shoulder? It’s required reading in the academies for any such professional, and ignorance of its thesis on the results of a particular work ethic is a basic failure of general education. One could cite other such discussions, but the point is, the faux pas only survives as such when we are not conversant in the breadth of discussion happening in most other places in our culture and in the world. The world is bigger than that rule, bigger than that supposed norm – and, frankly, this blogger always feels free to use ideas from anywhere anyway.

The primary subject matter of this blog is a synthesis of collective wisdom and individual insight on work. If Christendom had nothing significant to say, that in itself would be a profound commentary, and worth examining in that light. When it comes to work, we listen everywhere.

In any case, that’s the deal with the blog: This author deems a false construct that dialectical opposition of work with various avenues of life that are brimming with meaning. Work *is* the vehicle of meaning. Work isn’t opposed to family, to Faith, or to fun. One person commented on an earlier post that “hobbies” were invented, more or less, as attempts to survive the dualism that occurs when you oppose work with life in the mind. As reasonable and meaningful reactions to conflicting internal-mental and external-societal and cultural demands, I can’t speak against them quite so vehemently. But I can say, in my experience, they fade away when you find yourself doing what you’re meant to do with your life. Someone might say, “Well, I’m meant to play.” Perhaps you are – go play; I’m not – me, well, I’ve got to go to work.

The Rules of Work

1. If I’m awake, I’m working.
2. Power-shakes beat carbs; they take less time, and don’t turn you into a slut for food.
3. If it fits in a pocket or an office, it’s a tool, not a master.
4. If a thing doesn’t cooperate, switch tasks; come back when it’s ready to be nice.
5. Nice, means it’s helping me work.
6. Being effective means failing to contemplate the trivial, and always noticing the relevant.
7. Money is good for a few things: protect your family, liberate the poor, and make more money.
8. Spots teach the leopard to stalk, legs teach the stallion to run; find the cloth you’re cut from, and let it teach you your work. Then don’t let anyone take it from you ever again.
9. Your work is too important to be a sideline to anything. If you need a job to get started on your work, do it. But don’t ever confuse the two.
10. Hobby is a dirty word for wishing you had another life.
11. Work/life balance is another way of saying you don’t love your job.
12. Get enough sleep. This is inviolable. Athletes don’t run without rest, and every day you are groggy is a half-day. Half days are lost days. No pretenses. Not getting enough sleep is as stupid as ruining your credit. It’s not true that “money never sleeps“.
13. Don’t oversleep. Too much sleep is like too much alcohol; it makes a fool out of you and your business. It robs you of initiative. Set a time, get out of bed.
14. Don’t eat crap. You can fast, you can eat veegan, be a flexitarian, whatever. But you absolutely cannot make fast food and processed food a significant part of your diet. If it comes in foil or a “drivethru” window, or contains items from your chemistry set, it isn’t food.
15. Too much caffeine is punk energy. Get enough sleep, eat real food, and take vitamins. After one or two cups of coffee or glasses of soda, you’re not as smart as you think you are. Burning the candle at both ends is a rookie mistake. If you need to wake up, turn on CSPAN or something controversial to stimulate your intellect. Do this right, and you’ll be able to jump out of bed. Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross: “Coffee is for closers.”
16. Lunch kills momentum. Lunch is about as valuable as a meeting, or a meeting with yourself. In other words, do it if it’s work – if you have to have it, but don’t have lunch just to have lunch. Michael Douglas on the phone with Fidel Castro in Wall Street: “Lunch? Lunch is for wimps.”
17. All gluttony is the enemy of your work. Sugar, chocolate, alcohol, sleep, food in general, even sex. Excess kills motivation and destroys intelligence.
18. The ability to ignore pain and defy discomfort, when not taken to excess, is essential. Aches, bruises, scrapes, soreness, rashes, itches. The body is essential, but it mustn’t be allowed to assume hegemony. If you’ve got a sniffle, get well or get to work.
19. At the same time, if you’ve got significant health issues, deal with them. Eat herbs. Take medicine. Get it from Canada, whatever you have to do. Imagine closing the deal of your life and not being around to enjoy it.
20. Pain from sloppy tools, the tools of your work, is not to be tolerated. If you don’t have a comfortable desk, chair, space, or whatever tools your work requires, do what it takes to build, borrow, or buy them. Loss of productivity from uncomfortable tools is like printing a great resume on cheap paper.
21. Paper is cheap. My dad taught me that. Scribble, jot, write – don’t conserve paper, or you’ll end up conserving ideas.
22. Tools are the vehicle of ideas that carry them from theory to action. Don’t mess around with productivity; have tools. They don’t have to be luxurious, like a $200 filofax, but you have to have them. If you’re reading this on a one-monitor PC, add a second monitor, and double your productivity.
23. At the same time, if you’re work is worth anything, you’ll write on brown paper sacks if you have to. Never underestimate the value of napkins.
24. Buy only those tools your job requires, and not until it requires them. Not everyone needs a desk or a filofax. The punk thing to do is load up on extra notebooks and pens when you haven’t worn out the first ones. Don’t get the storefront until the customers are lined up in your driveway. Overhead without demand is the stench of a dying business.
25. Don’t rest on your laurels. Don’t give yourself the weekend off. People that have a plan don’t sit around on patios drinking longnecks and talking about work – they’re working.
26. Don’t be a tough guy. Tough guys tailgate and make a point of cutting you off in traffic. Tough guys learn one thing and then show contempt for the non-specialist. Tough guys have time to brag and show off their “success”. Be a tougher guy. A tougher guy has the chutzpah, the courage, and the arrogant indifference to break with the pack.
27. Don’t be a showboat. Showboats drive fancy cars and blather about another man’s nametag inside their suit. A car is a tool not a spa. Not knowing the difference is the sign of a vain masturbator. Work involves knowing what a thing is for and using it that way, putting it to better use, or not using it at all.
28. Don’t let women distract you. Don’t slow down to look at women. Don’t put down your work for flirty conversations with women. Find one woman who supports your energy and drive and stick with her. If you’re already stuck, be honorable and stick with her anyway. A man that hasn’t got that much courage and decency isn’t worth a damn in business, either. When you abandon the honor in your soul, you depart from the wellspring of your work.
29. Don’t compromise your ethics. If you can’t respect what you do every morning when you get out of bed, you’ll never have the stamina, the guts, the endurance to do it for real. If you’re not in a situation where you “have that luxury”, know absolutely that you’re in the wrong situation, and work full bore to take back control of your own soul.
30. Never look for work. If you know what your work is, do it. If you don’t know, then you’re not looking for work, you’re looking for your soul.
31. Your identity is not about your job, but it sure as hell better be about your work.
32. Catalog your vocational mistakes, so you don’t repeat them. If you took a wrong turn with your work, even 35 years ago, back up that far and start again. If you’re not willing to do that, you’re making the biggest mistake of your life.
33. News is crap. But follow business news anyway; it’ll tell you what people think is real.
34. Always multi-task. If you’re doing anything and there’s a pause, look at what you can be doing in the meantime. You should never have to look back on a moment and realize that what you were doing was waiting. Patience is a virtue, but patience isn’t about waiting, it’s actually about knowing when not to wait.
35. Work standing up. How much of our lives is spent waiting in lines and counters. Use it to cross off things in your filofax, write checks, calculate expenses, tally receipts. For goodness’ sake, don’t be a cow led to slaughter. And if you catch yourself, say “moo” – it’ll teach you to be a bull next time. A quote from Gigli (one of the great under-rated films): “In every relationship, there’s a cow and a bull.” When it comes to the world, to the lines of society, be the bull.
36. Being a bull doesn’t mean being a bully. Have conversations with service people (even if it makes them nervous). But if you’ve got a problem, smile, ask them to listen, and tell them discreetly without drawing attention, but don’t ever rat them out to their bosses. A bull’s horns are for competing with other bulls, not for taking advantage of the weak. Let lesser beasts prey on cornered game.
37. A house is a tool, not a prison. If it’s holding you in one place, and you need to move, sell it.
38. Do we really even have to say that too much TV, music, gaming, “texting”, and other forms of dissipation are the antithesis to work? Any obsession that isn’t your work is the personality turned in on itself and made senile with its own abandonment of meaning. You are either consumed with meaning or consumed with flatulence.
39. Ego and narcissism are as different as life and theatre. The world is teeming with people who have a deficit of personality, and call it pride or arrogance (and far worse things) when they meet someone who is neither bewildered nor afraid. Agree with them; it’s irrelevant. The only real question is whether to work with them or work around them.
40. There’s no time to be afraid, only time to be rational, and you can’t do both at once.
41. Your work consumes “the most productive hours of the best years of your life”. If you should be doing different work, you should at least be doing the work to get there. (This rule is borrowed and loosely quoted, and I can’t find the source.)
42. Your mind, your determination, your integrity, and your joy: these are the soul of your work, just as they are your own soul.
43. When you can look at the best activity of your soul, whether the world wants it right now or not, and say “so be it”, then you can begin to plan for the work of your soul and move out of soulless employment. Christian Slater in Pump up the Volume: “So be it”.
44. They don’t have to want it; they just have to respect it; when they respect it, they’ll want it. What if they don’t respect it? Wrong audience. Sniff out your kind, or make a loud noise, and they’ll come to you. At a recent meeting: I roared a little and found two more while the herd grew restless.
45. Work is a calling, if for no other reason than that it is holy. Jobs are transient, temporal, and fraught with unimportance (even if the job itself is vital). Work is sacred. The work of one’s life is transcendent and recapitulates a life’s activity in a soteriological way. There’s a reason why the word liturgy means work of the people. The sacred activity of one’s unique vocation, the work of the individual, is also salvific. It is a thing beyond.
46. Nothing external can validate your work. E.g. I don’t want a “career”. “Career” is a word that means society gives me security. It means I’m afraid to lose it. It means there’s something larger than my work that envelops my work and gives it validation and significance. A career coopts work. I repudiate all things that presume to be external criteria for validating or lending significance to my work.
47. Gossip, rumor-mills, tattling: these things can never be given face by anyone serious about work. They’re the luxuries of those with enough time to pick out office supplies or spend the hour before lunch pondering what to eat. They’re the trademark of those who have gutted the economy with inefficiency. Gossip, rumors, tattling – they’re just another form of malingering.
48. If you’re not willing to resign, you’re not willing to take your work seriously. It has become a job.
49. Contempt for the antitheses of work is the proper homage and respect to work itself.
50. Regulation, centralization, and obsolescence can impact any venture, abbreviating it’s viability, so the most important trait in entrepeneurship is the ability to continually invent and reinvent businesses on a changing landscape.
51. The entrepreneur is never really concerned with authority; he’s concerned with success. When someone brings up “authority” (as in “so and so has a problem with authority”), they almost never really mean authority. Genuine authority is an expression of superior capability or competence, as in “Bob is an authority on grammar” (Power is likewise an oft-confused concept that never actually needs refer to itself at all.). So what do most people mean by the canard of “authority”? They mean a system in which pride takes precedence over competence and capability – it’s a system that is essentially pro-job and anti-work. This is why functional teams, in contrast to dysfunctional ones, distribute roles without compensating by centralizing “authority”: they’re based on the assumption that responsibility without control is the death of effective work groups. The only reason it’s hard to see how such a team works, is that most people have never seen such a team. We did it that way at MYTHOLOG for five years, and it was exceedingly effective. Decentralization, then, is one of the key traits of success, and the entrepreneur is the ultimate expression of both.
52. Work is fundamentally ascetic (an ascesis). You learn not to lie in bed awake. You stop luxuriating in long showers. You fast from excess food and sweets and drink – fast from excesses of all kinds. Ultimately, the path of work will always lead you to the desert and peace.
53. If you have to read a book on how to enjoy what you’re doing, be committed, or develop the right attitude, you’re involved in the wrong thing.
54. If your primary concerns are getting yourself noticed, carving out a corporate niche, or milking the system, stop reading now, because I sure as hell can’t help you. These are the “other” rules of work.