Employment, Robbery, and Sacrificial Koolaid

The assumption of employment is all around us. I’m not knocking employment. Quite the contrary:

Rule of Work: Your work is not the venue. Whether your work is best conducted as an employee, contractor, entrepreneur, or volunteer, pursue the venue where you can derive from your work all the meaning you are intended to have.

But it’s sort of like my friend who has a Doctorate of Philosophy in Patristics from Oxford. He used to get asked, as a professor, by prospective employers in the U.S. for his transcript. He was typically met with blank, inflexible stares when he informed them that Oxford is an 800-year old university – it doesn’t issue transcripts. 75% of the doctoral candidates fail – if you make it, at all, that is the transcript. The assumption was that education is everywhere and always has been mass education, and rather than having to write books to graduate, you need to prove yourself by appealing to grades. Oxford is pass fail – for the degree, not for classes. For those interested in this topic,  you don’t even have to attend lectures (classes) at Oxford. You can sit under a tree all week and read, if you like, or just stay drunk all the time. What they require is that you read everything in your field, and take a final exam at the end that lasts about a week and is 100% written (essay form), and that you defend your thesis (which is what your book is arguing – your dissertation). That’s it. Read everything, write for a solid week intelligently discussing everything, and defend your own original idea expressed as a book which takes into account your knowledge of everything, and you get your degree. No transcript. Is it accredited? No, it’s 800 years old… etc. It’s like pulling teeth getting past assumptions.

The assumption of employment, though, is similar. It’s already been elsewhere observed that employees can get a home loan lickety split with two paychecks under their belts, or one paycheck and a letter from their employer. A self-employed person has to show a history of substantial profits on past years’ tax returns. That’s how the mortgage system assumes employment as the standard. Conversely, the tax system rewards self-employed people only if they show the least possible profit and claim the maximum possible deductions. That conflicts with the mortgage industry assumption and leaves lots of self-employed people without access to a mortgage, while showing up for a job for a month results in a home loan. The system is geared toward assuming employment is the norm. What do all the forms say – government forms, bank forms, even forms at the gym? Employer. What do employment applications ask for? Past employer. Sure, you write in your own company, but most people don’t seem to be aware that the relationship you have to your own company, as an entrepreneur might actually not be that of employee. Corporate structures are varied, and you might get shares, not paychecks. You might contract for your company, etc. You might be a “member”, a “partner”, and so on.

A pronounced example I encountered was when the market ate half of my 401K, because I foolishly listened to the “stay the course” crowd (i.e. Vanguard and the traditional investor braniacs who couldn’t acknowledge reality, only throw out doctrine, and tell the rest of us not to be “immature” investors who pull out our funds too soon and don’t stay in for the long haul. In other words – the people who told us it’s better to go broke than to question the received wisdom.) Honestly, the amateur hour stuff was not smelling the brimstone in the Judgment Day that was coming down all around them. Little devils kept saying, “Nah, this is just a “fluctuation” in the economic climate.  Let’s say I had $9000 invested, and I lost half, so $4500. My employer had matched at least half of my contribution, so someone actually said to me, “Well then you didn’t lose $4500. You basically lost nothing, because you still have what you put into it.” Now THAT, my friends, is a blind, dogmatic assumption of employment as the norm. But wait, it’s worse than that. A person who sees his services as valuable, something he ‘sells’ an employer, at best, knows that the matching contribution is part of his COMPENSATION. It’s part of the package of remuneration for his work.

In other words, if your employer cuts health care, you’re getting a pay cut. If your employer assigns you added responsibilities without added pay, you’re getting a pay cut (or at least getting snowed). I like that phrase they foist off on people young enough and inexperienced enough to believe it (or just craven enough to pretend they do) – “you’re investing in your marketability in the company” . Ha. The only thing you’re investing in is your reputation for price cutting – selling premium quantities and qualities of work for the lowest possible compensation. You’re the Walmart of employees. Or there’s the similar one, “because you care about the company”. Hey, caring is a two-way street – it’s like a marriage. Would you ask your spouse to do 100% of the housework and keep a full time job, because the spouse “cares about the family”? Not bloody likely.

But this isn’t even a pay cut. My example is one of robbery. The abject, and outright robbery of the system by (well you know who is responsible, if you’re paying attention – sure it’s AIG, but it’s more widespread than that – it’s an entire sector of society stealing from the other sector) – robbery that resulted in a LOT of us losing half or more of our retirement funds. Losing all of it, for those who left their money in until it hit zero. What they stole is the same as if they stole my paycheck. That money wasn’t legitimately lost to the “fluctuations of the market” – it was robbed by the looting and devastation and plundering and pillaging of the market. I know pretty much where it is. It’s driving around the Eastern seaboard with European leather and a blonde trophy wife in the passenger seat. It’s stopping to refuel on the way to a resort and spa where I can’t afford to eat the moisturizing cream it took a bushel of rain forest plants and a dozen children making a penny a day to produce for 3000% markup and some penthouse-dweller’s name on it. And on top of that, someone has the audacity to say, “but it wasn’t really your money.” “You didn’t really lose anything.” “Your employer *contributed* it to you. Like a gift. You can’t get upset over a stolen gift, now can you?

Well, it’s not a freaking gift. It’s one of the types of paychecks. It’s part of the compensation, part of the deal. Keep in mind, it’s taxable. Now or later, but it’s taxable.

The assumption is so strong that employment is the norm, that one easily forgets that the lingo you hear around the office isn’t real. A contribution isn’t really a gift. Caring isn’t really caring, it’s working for free. Marketability means gullibility. And ‘market fluctuations’, if you happen to work in the financial services sector, means causing a blackout, then coming to your house and stealing your TV set, then kicking you out of your house and taking that too (we don’t have an ARM, don’t worry), selling your home, and then offering you a credit card with a mafia-like interest rate so you can “rebuild” your “good standing” with the financial services industry. Oh, and lastly, telling you that none of what you lost was ever really yours in the first place. Equity meets late fees and cost of foreclosure. Finally, you blame it on an act of God, vibrations, hiccups, tremors, and “fluctuations” that no one could have prevented. So now you can’t even go to Church and pray about it without looking at your priest suspiciously, and he’s thinking “What did I do?” Good thing he lost his house too, but you’re all going to be moving into his apartment because you just lost your job, and your 401K is so devastated that pulling it out should just about cover the government “penalty” for pulling it out. Prison is starting to look good, but your Priest doesn’t like that idea, and they just told prisoners they have to pay for their own healthcare. You take your unemployment check to the bank, but they won’t open an account anymore without pulling your credit, and you know where that leads, so you give a chunk of that to the check cashing place, fill up with gas at double the price when this started, and drive home to watch TV shows about people living “successful” lives (as though nothing happened in the TV universe), and you figure all those guys work for AIG or had stock in munitions. And you fall asleep hoping you’ll get that temp job you applied for, where they “try on” employees, one after another, without having to give you healthcare or retirement benefits. And your only hope is starting your own Youtube reality show, except that everyone else is in the same boat and what, ordinarily might be fascinating, is now just banal and taken for granted.

Ahem. Yes. Well, the point is this:

Rule of Work: Nothing is true if it confuses an exchange of value for value with a gift given to either party. See Ayn Rand. Corollary rule: If you got something as a result of honest work, taking it away from you without a fair exchange is always theft – calling it something else turns wages into slavery.

Yes, the assumption of employment as the normative form of work relationship prevails, but some of what comes with that assumption isn’t employment, it’s at best what the old South used to call “wage slavery” and, at worst, is just plain robbery, snake oil, machination, and exploitation. There’s nothing wrong with employment, if it’s honest, if both parties are exchanging fair value for fair value with their eyes open, in a transparent environment. But treating employment as a privilege, as though one should aspire to it independently of compensation, accept it as normal without reference to the entitlements governing every other form of trade (rhetoric venerating “the market” aside), is an additional set of assumptions that amounts to drinking the sacrificial Koolaid.

It’s bad enough to assume that life, ‘legitimate’ life, revolves around punching a timeclock or getting a salary, in contrast with the work itself. It’s unacceptable, though, to swallow down the notion that it’s really all about the love, and what’s in the contract is just Christmas gravy. Dunno about you, but I can get a turkey anywhere – I’m up for the gravy.

Confessions of a Quiet Home Office Worker

I do project work and consulting, and my office is one of the largest rooms in my home. Like a lot of home office workers (I prefer “home office professional”), I always have multiple projects at once. So working all the time is just part of the deal. If I’m not working on a client’s project, I’m working on one of my own. This is not a complaint – far from it.

Blast from the Past: Rule of Work #1: If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing as work. It’s a good life. A life of constant meaning.

That said, it can be hard to convey the particular circumstances of it to people looking in from the outside. It might be explaining to someone why you aren’t treating e-mail like chat and responding instantly, or why you’re selective about volunteer work and need to get paid for your core competencies (you know that auto mechanic who is always getting hit up to help with friend’s cars?), or just that yes, as a home worker, you are entitled to sleep, go to the gym, and spend time with your family – you’re not giving that up and sitting there waiting patiently for any word to drop from your various contacts, clients, and colleagues. My wife and I recently had to establish for her business that yes, it’s OK, and absolutely necessary for a hairdresser to take a couple of days off per week and get enough rest and down time. But aside from the basics – what your work is (avoiding mission creep), and when you do it (avoiding the “on call” nightmare),  the simplest way to define your work environment and work process is to outline your approach to the atmosphere of constant communication. So here, in brief, is how one office works. These are the terms of my self-employment:

Hours Flexible: I might be working at 3am or in bed by 9pm. I might sleep until 4pm, which might be sleeping 5 hours or 15. I work off of appointments. I make them, keep them, and then the rest is up to me. Of course there are deadlines, but they’re flexible. We’ve all heard “under promise and over deliver”. That’s deadlines, too. If I say something usually takes two weeks, it’s because it usually does. But if a blizzard wipes out the internet or power, then it is what it is – we don’t swear by deadlines, and we don’t miss them. Also, with any kind of project work, your own deadlines have to account for client deliverables. If clients hear “usually two weeks, assuming all your deliverables in place to start” and they send their pieces 13 days in, you tell them “about two weeks from now”. If you get it earlier, well and good, but fixed deadlines are a source of ruin – our deadlines are like our work hours – they’re movable feasts. Hours flexible and by appointment means too that I avoid phone tag. I set phone appointments and I don’t miss them (I’ve missed only one in the history of my business, it was with a friend, and I’m still embarrassed by it). There’s nothing worse than burning time for everyone by getting together with clients “whenever”.

Not On-Call: Personally, I never answer the phone, unless it’s my wife. I know that’s radical, but it works in my line of work. For one thing, I’d never get anything done – I’m actually working on clients’ projects, after all. For another, I’m a consultant, so I charge for phone time, and so I call outbound only, by appointment. Other than that, voicemail messages are transcribed instantly and sent to e-mail, where I respond to them while multi-tasking, without interrupting scheduled projects. I set appointments by e-mail, so everything goes smoothly. When I picked up the phone and answered all my inbound calls, I got unplanned (so un-billed) calls 24/7 – picking my brain, asking for advice, seeking a “how to” that “shouldn’t take long” (“you’re a mechanic, can you just listen to my engine for a sec – I know it’s a weekend…”), and I lost tons of hours I’ll never get back to “I just prefer to work exclusively by phone” – even for the most trivial matters. So I stopped. I’m not a call center. I can always hire one, but then the price has got to see a 400% increase. Seriously – I save bookoo buck for my clients by NOT putting Suzie or Jim or Karesh on that phone 24/7. So now when someone calls my business line, I get it as e-mail, and that also weeds out the spam calls, which is a nice bonus. And it converts a synchronous medium (“I want you *right now*!”) into an asynchronous one (email response: “I got your msg. The answer is yes.” or “Thursday works better for me – how about 2pm or 4pm your time?”). Besides, frequently I can actually respond faster – instead of wasting everyone’s time playing phone tag, I often get an e-mail response out without missing a beat (but again, I don’t promise it).

Blackberry Not Included: I don’t use mobile devices. Again, if I did, I’d never sleep, eat, or anything else. I’m not part of the Blackberry culture, and not because I’m somehow technologically challenged or old-fashioned. It’s because I don’t want to be stalked by every little concern, wish, or personal observation everyone in my “network”  might have. You’ve seen those commercials where someone introduces the crowd behind them: “this is my network”? Really, that’s exactly what it’s like for a lot of people. I can’t get work done that way. If you were in an office, would you hire the person who is always on their phone to work on your team? Neither would I. How about this: do you take your “device” into the john with you? That’s what I had to do when I answered my phone all the time – if I took e-mail along too, I’d literally have to shower with it. E-mail is in one room and waits until I see it. When I leave that room, it’s family time only. I don’t promise clients always-on response time, I don’t send out a general announcement just to take a day off to myself or with my family, and I don’t apologize “for just now getting back to you” after 8hrs because a lot of people treat e-mail like chat, spend all day in Facebook, and keep their earpiece on and Mobile e-mail vibrating in a holster. I treat myself as the busy president of my company, not the Blockbuster cashier of my company. The results are, I communicate effectively, selectively, and I accomplish things my clients need, generally by the time they have to ask. And above all, I get peace in my work.

Rule of Work: It is always, always the goal to work on, by, and according to your own terms. You’ll compromise, but if there’s no end to that, it’s not work, it’s servitude.

Terms of Self-Employment: So, when I hired myself full time, those were the terms I accepted and I have insisted on abiding by them. It’s different than how a lot of self-employed people work, I know. I don’t begrudge them their e-mail holsters, as long as they’re not doing it while driving – and then of course I think they’ve got a screw loose (look at how they’re weaving over the line). We’ve each got to define our own office rules – the terms of our own self-employment – how free we are, how harried, how much of our lives belong to who and what. How effective we’re going to be vs. how thinly spread. My wife finally deciding on two days off to reset, means she’s stellar all the time, not stellar for 10 hrs and tired for 2. Maybe, though, by drawing a circle and defining some time as exclusively ours and our families’, some part of our lives as immune to the interests of others – by not defining self-employment as a modified form of wage slavery, where anyone with a communication device can wind it up and make you jump as surely as a foreman in a yard – where you’ve traded one boss for hundreds – maybe we’ll all encourage one another to hold the line for the dignity of our professions in the face of all the incessant yacking. If you don’t think about communications, you’ll spend so much time on the phone and in e-mail that may have stopped doing what you love. And what good is that?

Rule of Work: How you handle communications will determine whether you do what you love or merely talk about doing it.

Reclaiming the Meaning of Money & Time

A friend and I were talking the other day about how we’re so used to thinking, as employees, of everything as net. The company takes out taxes and healthcare, and what’s left – that’s what you live on. But when you’re self-employed, you pay self-employment tax on top of your income tax, and you have to bank that out of every deal. So If you made $400, you really only made $200. And then you’ve got to buy healthcare out of that. If you made $400 only 10 times a month, and sock away half for taxes, and pay $250 for your half of the insurance (that’d be really cheap),  your $400 is now $150 “net”. $150 of employee-equivalent pay.

A lot of employed folks would look at this as a good case for not going out on their own. It’s actually the best case for why freelancers need to charge high rates. You just can’t do it for nothing. And what, freelancers aren’t supposed to have healthcare, or savings, or be able to eat? So, the goal is to figure out how to bring those fees up. Seth Godin offers a great quotation (don’t remember his source): “There are two kinds of companies: those that want to lower prices, and those that want to raise them.” Those who shoot for the bottom, price-cutting, price-selling, appealing to price shoppers, and those who look for ways to add value, be the best, and raise prices. I’m with the latter. And I encourage my family members to hold the line on that, too.

I looked in on a conversation in LinkedIn where a person offered a service for $100, no conditions, to anyone, regardless of criteria. I provide the same service, and I can tell you it’s twice that, minimum, to do it right and do it consistently. I didn’t respond – no need – the entire community of freelancers jumped on him, asking if he realized that this wasn’t sustainable, that by aiming for the bottom he’s just appealing to the guy that wants it at $95, and encouraging the person who’ll do it for that, and not have healthcare, and not eat right. They ate his lunch – I couldn’t believe the amount of traffic pounding this guy down. He didn’t get it either. Bills himself as the president of his company but made a crass, rookie mistake in public, and should have copped to it quickly but wouldn’t. Who hasn’t done that kind of thing in one form or another? So you have to feel sorry for him, but wow – he made the 2nd mistake too: he just kept holding the line. “If someone doesn’t want my services, they don’t have to buy them.” He was missing the point.

A lot of us have had a prospect walk away because the price was obviously too low. And they’re right to. You can’t sustain good, consistent work that way, and companies that are in this for real want good, consistent work. They don’t want to watch a price cutter self-destruct, which is where it leads. A family member is a hairstylist, and a friend of hers comes from the Supercuts environment. The price difference is shocking. And you can’t invest in growing your business if you’re geared for the bottom. And once you do that, it’s really hard to break out of it. You can’t win, without retooling, infusing your business with some funds and a lot of effort, and changing the way you do business, willing to lose some clients. It’s a rough road to hoe if you’re taking care of a family and depend on repeat business; I don’t envy it. But that’s what Supercuts, superstores, super-anything does to an industry – it leaves its people scraping the bottom for the cheapest prospects there are, without decent health care, with an impoverished diet that takes years off their lives, and having to explain to people that work is worth something.

There’s a related principle. Not only is the compensation model for freelancers really fundamentally different than for employees… and we all know this, but when you’re rearranging your life accordingly, it’s something to meditate on and ponder… but so is this model for time. If you spend 8hrs at the office, your ‘work’ is presumably done, because your work is defined by the man. Your work is your job. But it’s really not done. You still have to pick up the kids, wash the car, buy the groceries, go jogging, and all the other things you do. What the freelancer realizes is that these are work too.

Occasional clients think a freelancer should be waiting at his desk at all times, when they get back to their office, ready to respond in an instant. “Where were you yesterday?” You don’t take vacations, don’t take a day off, don’t go to the gym. You work when they work, and you work when they sleep, because 24-hour turnaround is in demand, too. But that’s not sustainable. What, freelancers shouldn’t get 8hrs sleep or go to the gym? You can’t hire an assistant to work out for you, or get proper rest so you stay healthy for another day. The real story is that the model of work has been distorted somewhat by separating it from the home. I’m not suggesting there’s something inherently wrong with office work, just that it doesn’t explain, describe, or account for everything. The truth is that when a freelancer cooks the meals, provides the transportation, goes to the gym to stay healthy, or just engages in personal hygiene (how long does your full regimen, day and night, take from your day?), that’s work.

And there’s nothing wrong with that. Work is what you do when you wake up, and what you do before you go to sleep. Not that there’s not room to go read a book and rest, but that rest is part of the work, too. If you read, it’s fuel. If you rest, it’s preparation to work – it’s restocking the shelves. When you relax, it’s to be ready for the intensity and energy. Same thing if you blog, folks. That’s the truth. In my case, without it, I can’t think at the pace that’s necessary to do what I do for clients. We’re *whole* people, and we need a *whole* life, sustained by work, involved in work, and linked to our work. This is yet another reason work had better be a primary source of meaning your life.

Income, though, is not what’s left over after the things that sustain your life are taken out – like healthcare. Income is what you use to take care of your whole life, including your health. When you short the one, you’re shorting the other. Likewise, time for work is not the time spent on a task someone else makes you do, or a task that you have to drive to get to, or a task that directly impacts your client. Time for work is time spent on the entire person, the *whole* source of work, your whole life. It needs to be balanced, thought out, and reasonable – you can’t just sleep for two days every week and expect, in most freelance scenarios, to be successful. Even if that’s the sum of leftover time, what about riding your bike and, again, personal hygiene, etc.? Time spent on work is, appropriately, time spent on your whole life, precisely on *keeping* it in balance, keeping it functioning at optimum, and in keeping with the very things you need to get paid for. I get paid so I can buy healthcare. I spend time and the gym so I can stay healthy. You can’t throw either one over your shoulder.

Get paid a lot, work 16 hours, not 8 (or acknowledge that it’s work) and, though you’ll then realize that our taxes really are obscenely high, you’ll at least be able to explain what you do without feeling quite as harried. A little harried maybe, but not because there’s no reason for half of it. And no, you’re most likely *not* overpaid.

Fear, Loathing, Escaping the Cube

So when I first started building my business, I took a ‘day’ job. It was partly fear. It was. It’s hard to turn down a steady paycheck, healthcare, and the lascivious knowledge that somehow society supports your decision, where they seem to be bewildered by people who  break away from corporate life. It wasn’t a terrible decision, though. A job is a great way to capitalize your business. It’s a great way to shore up your resources, build your emergency fund, get your feet under you, and lend capital to your startup.

It was supposed to be for 10 months. A “contract” job, by which they mean you get benefits, you’re a full-time employee, but it’s essentially temporary – for a project. In this case, right up my alley – designing and training software and processes and being the face of the software rollout on the ground with the end-user population. As these things often go, though, it became two years. The business suffered. It suffered because I had to turn some clients away. I didn’t get to give it the kind of attention it needed. I throttled its growth, so I could keep doing what I was doing.

When the day gig started winding down, the temptation to look for another job was strong, I can tell you. For the same reasons. After all, you can never have enough capital, never really have enough in the emergency fund (it keeps getting hit by life’s emergencies), and when your primary peer base is employees who support what you’re doing – being an employee – you start sort of feeling the pressure to cave.

At some point, though, you have to cut the cord. Corporate life is like a mother that feeds you, true enough, but also ensures you never stray outside the front yard. As the project started ending, people would get sort of gentle and weepy-eyed on my behalf – you know, the kind of sympathy you get at funerals. “Are you going to be all right?” Imagine that too quiet, too soft voice like someone has died.  I have a low tolerance for that. What makes anyone think I’m all right being an employee? Is that what it means to be all right?

People respond differently when you tell them you’re leaving corporate life to do your own thing. Some like to insert the if’s everywhere they can. “IF you’re able to make it float. IF you’re able to last in this economy (they don’t realize that every economy is an opportunity).” etc. Others like to sort of glaze over and patronize, as though you’ve told them you’re quitting college to be an artist, or running away to join the circus. They figure it’s a phase, an expression of despair, loss, and grief at “losing” your job. Have they never been in a contract before? The whole point is for you to finish it, and for it to end. But the point is that they think you’re doing something self-destructive, like moving in with your mom and drinking a fifth of vodka every day, while you refinish wooden boats. Come to think of it, if it’s good vodka, that could be a business.

The thing is, at some point you either have to keep strangling your own business, or business plan, keep relegating it to the theoretical, actually lending creedence to its fairytale status, or you do in fact have to sack up, cut yourself loose from the dock, and float your boat out to sea. The sea is choppy, the sea is wild, that’s what they warn you about. It’s true. So true. But if you listen, what they’re really saying is, “the sea is scary”. They’re asking you to be afraid. They’re asking you to share in their own fear, to be afraid with them. After all, if we’re all afraid together, huddling in our cubicles – our cells, dreading the axe, the chances are some us will get a pardon. Gosh, I just can’t bear any longer to look at the world of work that way. Work is the fruit of a man’s loins, so to speak. Work is the product of his heart, his head, and his hands. It’s a glorious, sacred thing. The notion that fear enters into it, or somehow helps us, protects us, keeps us sane, stable, and safe is for the fainthearted who plan to spend all their lives living on another man’s dime.

Don’t get me wrong: if someone wants to be an employee, that’s fine. Some people prefer that you give them their work. I’ve no qualm with it, ultimately. I much prefer to be a contractor or self-employed or both. Contractors *are* self-employed, if they do it right. But the notion that the employee has to choose being an employee out of fearfulness cheapens being an employee. If you’re that, and you want it, do it without fear. When you’re laid off, when your project is finished and you have to move on, when your company goes out of business, you know that’s part of the deal. Don’t be afraid, be ready for it. Be on top of it. I’ve seen successful employees do this. I’m not knocking it. I’m knocking terror in the sacred place of our talents and the product of our souls. People say they don’t feel afraid, until you see the boat start to rock, and then it all comes gushing out.

But in the same way, fear has no place in the heart of a contractor or a self-employed person. It’s an enemy, a slow poison. Sometimes, not so slow. It’s like being chained to some invisible, impotent thug who only wishes to be a weight that holds you to the mundane, stifles your imagination, and does its best to convince you to be like other men – to join and imitate the huddle. And that fear will stifle your business, where taking a temporary gig to fund it and build it, in and of itself, won’t do so.

To those who are shaking their head in sadness for my departure – you can rest assured I’ll be fine. Quite fine. I’ll land on my feet, because I know where they are. And if I ever get hungry, I’ll see you again, using a job to pack my bank account for a business makeover, or a rebuild, or a new birth. But the very idea that I’d fail presumes only one thing – that I lack the heart to keep running at it, determined to prosper. I have a much harder time buying that fairytale. I don’t even see *how* one can fail if you only determine never to stop, never to give in, never to let up, until you have what you are after. And what’s the worst case scenario? That someone like me does this all his life, running at it, making a new start, pushing at it, building, building again if it gets knocked down, until his last breath. Frankly, that’s a heroic way to live. I’m pretty comfortable with that. I don’t plan on that to be the story, but I wouldn’t mind it and, honestly you don’t have the emotional stamina to put yourself to work if you don’t have the heart to work that hard.

I do. You do, some of you. Or want to. How on earth do people think these things get done? I’ve heard the myth – every business that survives and enriches its owners is the creation of pre-existing wealth or is an accident of history in a far off place where someone else – always someone else – stumbles accidentally upon an idea or a process that makes them ‘successful’. It takes a lot of faith to believe fairy stories like *that* one. Any decent survey of startups that have lasted a few years will show you that it’s *not* true. That happens, yes, but a lot of businesses, quietly making it, are just the product of someone so cantankerous, so obscenely arrogant, that he wouldn’t give up, wouldn’t stop, and didn’t care what you thought about him (unrealistic dreamer and blowhard), even if he seemed pleasantly congenial during “team lunches”.

To those who think I’m unrealistic, what is real? Isn’t it what someone is actually doing? What I’m doing is real – it’s not imaginary. And what I will do will be real when I really do it. I’m not asking you to believe anything, let alone believe in what you can’t see. I’m not asking for anything at all. That’s the point. Be sympathetic, if you want. Be dubious, if you like. Just don’t be in my way when I’m working, because that and only that will give me concern. Just don’t call me late for dinner, in other words.

Now, in a blog about work, I’m not the point, per se. Not really. Nor is my personal history, and that’s not why I’m recounting it. Nor am I the paragon, holding himself up to suggest you live the righteous life that I myself am living. I’m writing a somewhat personal story because I think many of us are in the same boat, sharing the same goals and are surrounded by many of the same attitudes and… sympathies. And if nothing else, this is about more than encouragement. The blog is called Rules of Work. It’s about the principles of what we’re doing, and how we achieve it. We’ve written about fear in the past. “The mind killer”, as they say on Dune. So I won’t articulate that rule again. People who don’t get it just say “yeah, whatever, blah blah blah” (yes, I got such an e-mail). People who do, just need to know that many of us are unafraid. That courage is there to be found, to reach for. And that the fears of others aren’t the rule that must govern our lives. We are free of others’ anxieties, if we want to be.

You don’t have to burn every bridge. Like I say, I’ll get a job again, if I get hungry enough, and I’ll use it to fund a rebuild of my business. But you also don’t have to stay in the big “safe” boat (the news anywhere lately should tell you it was never safe and certainly isn’t going to be any time soon – smart people at least put a second iron into the fire). You can cut the rope, including the rope to all that emotional baggage that comes from other people, and just serves as an anchor to weigh you down. Nothing profound, perhaps. Just an alternative story – a different mythos than the one that’s coming over the top of the cubicle walls, or is in the mournful goodbyes if you’re leaving your gig. Be a rock star. Leave the stage just as well as you walked on.

Lead from the Front, not your Rear

Who hasn’t had the opportunity to either experience leadership (good or bad) in action, or to exert leadership in some setting? Some basic observations from both sides of that experience can translate into effective rules for successful leadership.

A leader motivates through encouragement rather than ridicule or intimidation: Motivation involves the personal goals of the participants, not just the leader’s goals. Smart leaders try to help participants attain their personal goals, knowing that this will result in high achievement for team goals and project goals. Ridicule or intimidation are thought to be a shortcut to motivation, actually they undermine it and cancel it out. They’re a form of defeating the soldiers on your own team, and threatening the others. Effective leadership understands and equips team members with what they need for success.

A leader doesn’t favors power over control: Power doesn’t need to exert control, it is confident enough that it can afford to persuade. When one reaches for control, it’s actually a denial of power, a confession that one doesn’t have it, and it’s to relinquish power in that area. Controlling people reduces them to ‘monkeys’ – anyone can go read a presentation for you but, if they’re not motivated, how likely is it that they’re going to win your audience and turn them into evangelists for your product? In most cases, anyone can meet the basic requirements and job description, and deliver what you ask on time. Whether or not they will be amazing, exceed your expectations, and deliver a ‘wow’ at the end is based largely on motivation, interest, and their own personal sense of meaning and success. It has to mean something to them and, if it does, and you know what it is and how to ensure they have that meaning, you don’t need control – you have power. Power is the power to create vehicles of meaning – which is why a master presenter can close the deal for your product in the hearts and minds of your audience. It’s not because he reads a powerpoint in the voice of Charlton Heston – it’s because he thinks about the sources of meaning for his audience.

A leader welcomes challenges rather than basing authority on absolutes: The ‘my way or the highway’, ‘what I want, and I don’t care about the rest’ approach is often thought to be authority. Respect for authority is said, in bad leadership, to be jumping on-demand like a wind-up toy, to whatever one is told. But real authority (real leadership) isn’t based on absolutes. Real authority comes not from cancelling discussion, even after you’ve made up your mind, but from continually listening, considering alternatives, and welcoming constructive challenges. Authority that expects to be followed without question or challenge is actually undermining its own effectiveness. The role of the best minds on a team or project is to ‘push back’ when something may affect outcomes – if you silence that when you’ve made up your mind, you silence it for the future when you’ll need it to ensure your own success. That’s not authority – that’s absolutism. A leader with authority frees his people from burdens by letting them know the concern has been heard and documented, and that the responsibility for deciding against it is on the leader.

A leader doesn’t ask you to accept responsibility without control: A leader doesn’t leave it on others if we fail and on himself if we succeed. There are many forms of this. If you’re given a goal and a deadline, but then a number of other things are piled on, and the deadline isn’t moved, that’s a form of responsibility without control. “Just get it done.” isn’t the answer of leadership – it’s the answer of someone who intends to blame others for failure. If you can’t go to a leader with, “I can do what you ask, based on this time frame, or moving these things around – which do you prefer?” — not without invoking anger, frustration, and threats – then it isn’t leadership, it’s dumping on you. An effective leader gives you control over the things for which you are responsible.

A leader cultivates respect by giving respect rather than shame or fear: An effective leader doesn’t confuse cowed people who offer up the rituals of deference with loyal people who are working for you because it’s a joy to do so. The latter will work through hard times, rough waters, and pour their particular genius into the project. The former will do what you say. Would you prefer someone who does what you say or what you intend? Leaders who try to use fear and shame as motivators have a belief in their own infallibility. But leaders who recognize their fallibility are more effective, and know that what they need are fully-engaged minds, who wed their hearts to their work. This is accomplished by creating an environment of mutual respect. Often you’ll get schizophrenic environments where intimidation and ridicule are coupled with praise and pats on the head. For one thing, pats on the head aren’t the same thing – if you don’t mean it, no matter how ‘good’ you think you are, and how much your people pretend, deep down the best ones will know it. For another, on-again off-again respect-riducle fame-fear motivation attempts turn your team dynamics into a vending machine of self-serving detachment. If you want to win the nods but lose the will, use shame and fear to ‘master’ your team members. Effective leaders honor contributions with daily consideration.

Things bad leaders say:

• “But you don’t understand what it takes to lead in this environment. This is different.” (the ‘it was war, and war is Hell’ argument – excusing bad leadership by appeal to context)
• “It’s because you’re difficult to manage. Sometimes I have to do things I ordinarily wouldn’t do, just to get through to you.” (the ‘you made me beat you’ argument – excusing bad leadership by blaming the followers)
• “I do what I have to do – if you don’t like it, feel free to leave.” (a combination of the ‘leaders aren’t subject to standards for means, just for ends’ and the ‘love it or leave it’ arguments)
• “You have to do what you’re told. That’s all there is to it.” (an appeal to absolutes – to control disguised as authority – excusing bad leadership by silencing anyone who thinks differently)
• “Don’t complain and stop asking questions. Just get it done.” (the ‘make bricks without straw’ response’)

As much as a leader may talk about knowing how to motivate people, what it takes to be successful, and delivering the end result, these are just excuses for doing it badly. And it doesn’t work. The results of this kind of ‘leadership’ is that you stress out your most diligent workhorses, you create an amoral “every man for himself” atmosphere that expresses itself in gossip, tattling, backstabbing, and other social dysfunctions – bad team dynamics, and you de-motivate your most dedicated people – decreasing their loyalty and their concerns for keeping all the pieces together – you create silos. These things are the inevitable results of bad leadership that covers for, makes excuses for, and exalts itself, and blames others.

Leadership books are a dime a dozen. But there are few of them that recommend the techniques of bad leadership mentioned above, and most of the rules above would be considered basic to human motivation. That means even a wet-behind-the-ears assistant manager at a burger joint, or a green corporal may command more successfully than a veteran ruler with six figures and some initials in his title. But you would rather be that person? Or would you rather be that person and be effective?

The cost for bad leadership in a corporate millieu where bad leadership is ubiquitous seems relatively small. So yes, you may not pay for it all that much, and may prefer to take little lumps than do the work of being a decent human being, which is all a good leader really is – a decent human being in the context of leadership. How many “nice” people would turn into little monsters if they took on the mantle of command? This is the key point: I’m not going to try to tell you that you’ll suffer greatly and endlessly if you don’t follow these rules – you’ll achieve a mixture of mediocrity and success that will likely get you promoted through to retirement. I’m not using the fear of punishment as a motivator, here. Instead, I’m saying if you want to be amazing at it, want tremendous success, want silly levels of honor as a leader, then follow the above rules like they were gospel.

Things effective leaders say:

• What do you need from me in order to be successful? (This should be something you hear periodically.)
• What do you want in the context of this team and this organization? What are you working towards? (Assesses individual motivators. A good leader will help his people achieve these.)
• What am I doing well as a leader, and what can I do better? (Invites openness about personal and professional development, leads by example)

Not everyone is cut out to stand at the front of an organization structure; some are the right hand or the left or the rear guard or the avante garde. Leadership, though, as a conscious set of efforts to be effective, is useful in a lot of venues. The same person who is your right hand man, may be a leader at home, his church, in a non-profit, or in a small business for which he moonlights. The lessons from that are: an effective leader can often lead from behind the scenes (he doesn’t need constantly to be recognized as a leader), if you’re an ineffective leader, your mistakes are likely to be obvious to a whole range of people you don’t suspect, and leadership, effectively, is shared – it doesn’t demand sole exercise of the leadership role. Take away what you will, but leadership is everywhere; in any crowd of 100 people, it’s more likely that 75 will be leaders than 10. And we’re watching, and discussing this. Good leaders are icons and bad leaders are bywords in the effort to understand and use the rules of effective leadership. If nothing else, we can observe the successes and mistakes of others and the consequences of them, and hone our own skills. So lead on… lead from the front, and not your rear.

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.

47 Lawnmowers

Office environments can spawn an odd kind of possessiveness. “Why did you throw that away in my trashcan, not yours?” (One was closer than another). “Those are my paperclips. Why don’t you get your own?” (They all come from the same place). You could attribute it to the personalization of space, but I personalize and yet I still look at all the basic instruments as community property. In fact, they come from the same community supply closet, so how do they become protected possessions on the way to your desk? I think, it’s a general phenomenon in a culture obsessed with personal property.

In a song called “47 Lawnmowers”, a musician critiques the fact that if you drive down an average residential street, you’ll find 47 lawnmowers: stored in 47 little sheds or garages, representing a tremendous investment, and used once a week. There’s no concept of having a community toolshed where expense, storage, and maintenance are shared, and you use what you need when you need it. Each house has to have it’s own box for its own mower for its own lawn, get 47 tuneups, 47 oil changes, fill with 47 gascans, and so on. It’s a commentary on our culture’s attitudes about stuff. True, it’s different in condo living where you share a large public space and split the cost of having one guy mow it. But from the suburban US you have a value system of . . . how did the gulls in Finding Nemo put it? . . . “Mine. Mine? Mine!”

When we start viewing office apparatuses like lawnmowers, we’ll either clutch them as though they represent the dream of personal ownership, or else look at them as tools to be laid aside when idle, shared as needed, and utilized when relevant to the goals of the enterprise, but not sources of meaning in and of themselves. It depends on your values. Mine is work. The work is the thing, and the stuff is just a means of working. Turned on its head, we end up working for paperclips, office supplies, and pretty new tape dispensers – not very enticing incentives in my book.

Stuff. It’s transient, not absolute. It’s made to serve your sense of meaning, not be a source of meaning. Yes, I know art is different; in general, though, stuff is the detritus of life, not life itself. The worst and yet most illustrative equation you can bring to the table is stuff vs. people – or, more accurately, Stuff > People. From there flows all the other ills of property: Stuff > Work, Stuff = Meaning, |Stuff| = ∞. You get the point.

I’m not attacking property rights – though I think they need to be reconceptualized in an era of digital media. It’s not communism I’m suggesting, either. I don’t think someone should come and take away your lawnmower and give you back 1/population of it. I’m simply saying that our attitudes about property can determine and reveal our attitudes about more important things, and frequently get in the way of them.

Addendum 8/8/08: This goes to the issue represented in Google‘s office mentality over Microsoft. Google envisions a document as an online object to be shared, mutually contributed to, etc. Or else what is it’s purpose? A diary? One word answer: blogs. Microsoft still thinks of documents as static objects to be sent to one another in e-mail and held on our hard drives. Documents that are not designed to function in the community, or not built on a platform with that in mind, cannot be edited by multiple people without threatening confusion over versions (“Is the one you e-mailed me the one I sent you, or does it have your changes?!?”).

When the primary vehicles of our work are not based on the concept of a collaborative community, is it any wonder we guard our staplers so avidly?We’re working within a business culture that (overall) isn’t yet treating documents as community objects but, in a lot of cases, is still at the stage of using shared network drives and sending a lot of things back and forth in e-mail. We don’t make it a priority to have online project spaces in which to collaborate, though excellent out of the box extranets for that purpose have been available for decades.

The first thing I do, whenever I’ve started a team, is create a shared space for collaboration and communication – for sharing project resources, information, ideas, feedback, and keeping each other’s work on everyone’s radar.

We will evolve, because it just doesn’t make sense not to, and the business forces will push us there. In the meantime, though, when the primary vehicles of our work (documents), and the primary platforms on which we work (computerized offices) are not based on the concept of a collaborative community (for all the rhetoric about “good teams”), is it any wonder we guard our staplers (think Office Space) so avidly?

The Rules of Safe Driving

There were four friends, one of whom died in a car accident. The other three (let’s call them Jim, John, and Bob) decided to take a road trip in his memory, but vowed to be safe drivers from then on out. Jim sat behind the wheel of the car for a while, but wouldn’t drive. He reasoned that there was some danger at any speed, so there couldn’t really be such a thing as safe driving. He later sold his car and never drove again. John agreed that all driving is dangerous, which is why he said there was no point taking any precautions – you might as well drive as fast as you want, seatbelts off, because there’s nothing you can do to avoid danger anyway. Later in life, John was also killed in a car accident. Bob was the one who drove for the road trip. He listened to the others politely, shrugged, and then simply drove as safely as he could. Over time, he learned more general rules of safety and actually averted several accidents, and eventually assisted with CPR on a crash victim, saving his life, and thereby honoring the memory of his lost friends.

One can reason that, because there are exceptions to nearly any rule, there are no rules: there are only incentives and deterrents. Typically, we live with a generation that rejects overall principles of life. The twin results are paralysis, bewilderment, rampant anxiety, and nihilistic indifference.

A person with no law can be a coworker, but never a colleague.I find that exceptions underscore the rules, as the old adage suggests. The logic of this is inaccessible to those driving this generation. It can no longer be grasped. “The exception demonstrates the rule.” I once knew a man who couldn’t believe in anything, because he couldn’t find anything perfect. He’s the non-driver – the man whose life is typified by an absence of realities larger than the immediate, and by a flight to pseudo-realities in which rules are consistent and ‘believable’.

I’ve never been able to befriend the other kind of non-believer – the nihilist. There’s simply nothing there that can be shared since, for him, nothing is really there at all. I’ve watched, though, the tragedy left in his wake.

I identify with the person who has some rules, whether rules of work, aesthetic principles, ethical propositions, or what have you. As a rule, a person with no law can be a coworker, but never a colleague.

When people reject the notion that there is any law to life – any order – any general principles by which to live, think, interact, contribute, create, work, etc… by their logic, we should never give anything to the poor, because we won’t give everything to the poor (You can actually observe this principle of skeptical nihilism at work – it’s quite telling). Same thing with environmental impact: the notion that because we won’t reduce our carbon footprint to zero, indeed cannot, then we shouldn’t be overly concerned with reducing it at all. This is a kind of skeptical nihilism that hobbles this generation’s ability to function in any but the most narcissistic fashion. It has reduced them to people of faith – whose faith is that nothing is truly real, pure, sacred, right or wrong, or worth radical changes to your life.

In fact, I look at most “pocket philosophies” coming out of the current culture as merely justifications for avoiding radical change to one’s life, whether it be consumption, luxury, culture, religion, work, or what have you. Most modern men and women will always arrive at a philosophy that protects the status quo, tho they will convince themselves that it’s what they really believe, rather than that they’ve simply chosen to believe it. Beliefs, like preferences, and indeed all effects, have causes. Another minority will arrive at some extreme effect on the other end of the spectrum – paralysis.

What people have a hard time accepting is what I’d call the Principle of Death: that the world as we know it is not an absolute – not necessarily “natural” and not therefore “normal” in that sense, and that we are unlikely to arrive at perfection within it, but that we must still strive toward perfection from our imperfection. A futile cause, arguably, because indeed the world is subjected to futility, but a cause that makes us fully human. Indeed, this is our work here – it is the genus of all that we properly call work.

[for reference, see Driving as a Mental Skill in this article]

Work vs. Hip Hop

I just came back from the gym where they were playing such rap classics as “Get up out of my face” and “I’m going to knock you out” over the PA system. You know, hip hop culture asserts that the fire in the belly lies in narcissism, not putting up with anything, and superior capacity for violence. The average rap lyrics are about, “I’m exalted over you. Don’t mess with me. I’ll hurt you (threats, threats, more threats). I won’t allow anyone to disrespect me. I’ll hurt them too. My style and my pose should make you understand this. Oh, and I expect lots of sex and money to come from my attitude.” etc. Now, true, this is drivel for the socially pathological mind – meaning, these days, about a quarter of the populace. But it’s interesting to note how it encourages a culture in which one’s sense of self and one’s energy and prowess come not from work, but from the parasitical reliance on others’ adulation and fear – it’s an alienation from the self. One has to feel sorry for people who live and breathe this way. I feel sorry for them, just looking at their wardrobes – baggy pants, sports paraphenalia, and oversized everything. It’s clear that they aren’t prepared at all for a culture of work – indeed they’ve repudiated work, having denied meaning altogether. When have you ever heard a rap song about the joy one derives from one’s vocation? They’re lost.

The pimp, the gangster doesn’t work; he draws his living, self-image, and gratification solely from the labor of others. He’s the antithesis of the entrepreneur.Lyrics from someone who lives in his work would probably bore a youth culture obsessed with personal image, brutal violence, and the tyranny of unintelligent demagogues: “Sorry, I don’t have time for lyrics; I have work to do. Are you offering to pay me; perhaps I could refer you to one of my colleagues? Yes, I’m sure you are very important, and a pimp, and a gangster and all, but I really have to focus on my clients; perhaps you’d like to schedule a free consultation. No, I’m not disrespecting you; I’m busy. Yes, well, I don’t really know anyone who deals in hoes or farming implements in general. Sorry, I couldn’t help. Yes, have a good day.”

No, the preference for image over meaning, the desire for respect without character, the insistence on preference without contribution are hallmarks not of the culture of work, nor really the culture of anything – they’re a rejection of culture. A glance at the top ten rap songs of all time paints a fairly bleak picture of what’s going on in the minds of your basic hip hop fan. And those who say the lyrics don’t matter – they just like the music, have repudiated something just as deep, when it comes to art, though they’d never realize it. Work may be seen as the enemy, or at least the ultimate inconvenience, but real work is actually the cure for this deprivation. Finding the work of one’s life, so that you have no time for posing and demanding attention, for whining about respect, and for being terrified that someone isn’t thinking highly enough of you, for singing anthems that amount to how other people don’t matter. Work is the cure, and not making the journey toward your work is “dissing” yourself. This is why the “pimp” and the “gangster” are the icons of hip hop. The pimp, the gangster doesn’t work – he draws his living, self-image, and gratification solely from the labor of others. He’s the antithesis of the entrepreneur, and the pied piper of a generation who doesn’t know how to derive significance or happiness from work. The lost follow the lost.

I get the impression I’m at the gym for an entirely different set of reasons than my hip hop loving counterparts.

Mumford: film about work, sort of

I watched Mumford again the other night (that’s the film by Lawrence Kasdan, not the magician on Sesame Street). The key figure, Dr. Mumford, is what most people would call a fraud. He helps people by listening to their problems, and they pay him for the service; the problem is his diploma and license for psychology are fake. You know, in this era we’ve categorized, standardized, and cookie-cutter produced “wise men”. The licensed variety are called psychologists (or other soft scientists), the unlicensed variety are priests, pastors, and preachers. As Ahmad ibn Fadla would say, “things were not always thus”. Still, there’s a third type of “wise man” that we employ, and he is the vestige of the ancient shaman, inhabiting still the discreet world of the visionary, and accumulating his wisdom as much like the esoteric scholars as from the academies. He’s called… “the consultant”.

The consultant needs neither license nor ordination, though he might have either or both. He can be anyone who knows what or how or why or when or where or who you don’t know. Or he may be the one who knows how to know, how to acquire the desired wisdom. In an information age, he’s not just the purveyor of information, he’s the merchant of meaning – he knows what the information is telling us that it hasn’t explicitly told us. He’s not licensed, because his work crosses fields too numerous to bother about credentials. He’s not ordained, because he doesn’t claim a divine resource, even if he has one. His work is the world. If Dr. Mumford had been a psychological consultant, they still might have tried to crucify him, but he’d have had a better case.

He’s working on the project of his life that will change everything and gives it up when he finds an albeit wonderful woman. And no one even blinks!In Mumford, the man is doing what he’s meant to do, and part of the scandal is that he had the audacity to abandon what many would consider a good job, a lucrative and respectable field, though we’re meant to see it as tawdry (He had been an IRS investigator). Dr. Mumford took the accelerated version of the standard hero’s journey. A little time in a remote (Southwestern) monastery – again, this is the accelerated version – and he walks out with a new identity and a new career.

Dr. Mumford’s friend, in the film, Skip Skipperton (Jason Lee from Chasing Amy) is the skateboard-riding billionaire-entrepreneur big-kid founder of Panda Modems (supplier of 25% of the world’s modems – today it’d be routers and switches). It’s a romance film and, while I like those, you’re always flirting with danger when it comes to work (you know the crap about ‘you spend too much time at the office and not enough with your kids’, but they live in an enormous house and drive new high-end cars, and she’d throw a fit if their income took a nose-dive). In this one, sure enough, he’s working on the project of his life that will change everything and gives it up when he finds an albeit wonderful woman. And no one even blinks! Then, of course, Mumford gets caught (otherwise you’d have thousands of shrill, angry, therapists complaining) and realizes he was “wrong”.

So, on the one hand, the film is about entrepreneurship and throwing off a job in favor of your work (hurrah!), but it’s also a betrayal of work in favor of love and licensing. This is what the culture has to say about work:

• It’s OK to exchange a job for your work, as long as we can stamp it, approve it, and regulate it back into being a job.
• Your work and your job are always in conflict with your romantic life – the two can never really be in perfect harmony. You either have to give up happiness in one or the other, or remain forever in limbo between them.

On this latter point, when people ask me what is more important, my wife or my work, I tell them I don’t understand the question. It’s the same when they try to suggest a conflict between my work and my Faith; I tell them I don’t see the difference — the distinction: yes, but the conflict or contradiction: no. Of course these comparisons and contradictions are possible, but the error they’re making is assuming a necessity. That assumption is stamped all over pop culture, including films like Mumford.

Still, there’s enough good in the film, and enough delight, that I recommend it. I just expect, like all romantic comedies (and this one is a cut above even being dropped into that genre), an affront to work and relationships at the same time, and more of the bewilderment of the culture on these supposedly contrasting topics.

“Fear is the Mind-Killer.”

I went to a meeting and watched the fear in the room: grown men cowed and bowed down, looking for leadership from other fearful men made only slightly more confident from being near the center of the herd. I have a lot to say about a society built on fear, or a society built on corporate cultures that are built on fear. Fear of being unneeded. Fear of being unliked. Fear of too much attention or too little. Fear of the less competent or the more competent. Fear of being accused. Fear of being evaluated. Fear of being undervalued or disrespected. Fear, as a way of life. As a way of business. I have a lot to say about the order of a society that could create such fears in men, and deprive them of heart. Could even make them pretend to be afraid, just to earn a check. No doubt I will say more soon. But for now, I’ll offer these rules:

• Never fear losing what another man can freely take from you. Only fear losing what can never be taken by another man: the inviolable self. The world will present choices between the two, constantly, occasionally, or once for all. Be ready; be unafraid.
• Never be afraid of losing something given. If you’ve earned it, it’s robbery to take it away, and there’s an appropriate recourse and mourning. If it has been given, never set your heart on it in the first place.
• Never be afraid of losing a job. The only thing more demoralizing than losing a job you’re afraid to lose, is having a job you’re afraid to lose. Believe in those entirely personal qualities and skills that will always procure your survival, or else set immediately upon the path of discovering them. Be unafraid, or be finding your way out of fear.
• Money goes a long way against fear, so save money. But remember, it never goes long enough; death is coming for us all, all at once or by degrees. The real freedom from fear is freedom from the fear of death.
• When men claim not to be afraid, look at their rules, even if they pretend not to have any. Think of what they do and don’t in terms of rules. If the rules are designed for self-protection instead of self-expression, then they are fearful men.
• No one can be unafraid for you. You can look at the courageous and take heart, but some day you’ll wonder if they’re just too foolish to be terrified, or else think you can never be like them. Being courageous requires you to find your own values, but to dig even deeper and find your secret self. There is the heart of your courage, not another man’s courage. When you find it, insist that it live, guard and nurture it until it can stand on its own, and you will soon find it is the strong, fearless man you want to be.
• Freedom from fear will invariably be called arrogance. Don’t be afraid of being thought arrogant, where arrogance is simply absence of fear.

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.