Alexandersmap

    Category: Career

    • The Siren Call of More

      Energy. Vibrancy. Concrete, glass and steel. Traffic. Relentless traffic. Fit achievers marching to close the deal or set a new PR. Steakhouses and pizza and other temptations tip the scale. Look up and you see money reaching for the sky. Look down and you see the homeless trying to get a leg up or having given up. Urine stains on concrete sidewalks. Sewer system reminds you that there’s another world under that sidewalk.

      Taxis and buses and Uber this way and that. Roar of engines, wail of sirens, honking of horns. This world clamors for attention. Like many big American cities Chicago won’t wait for you. “Be better” it calls. “More!” It cries. As the old business cliche warns, “If you’re not moving forward you’re falling behind.” So get moving already. Play the game or get out of the way.

      It’s easy to get caught up in this crazy world of “more”. The siren beckons… But “less” has its own call.

    • The Rules of the Game

      Pre-dawn magic time once again on Buzzards Bay. Up early today, but not earliest this time. My brother-in-law, who owns a hardware store, was busy on his laptop in the kitchen as I headed out for the light show. A barge drifted past delivering oil to Boston. Yes, even on this Labor Day many people are hard at work keeping the world moving forward. And as I watch the rest of the world wake up, I’m pondering a few quotes on this Labor Day in the United States. This may be thought a day of rest for the common man, and I surely am that, but instead I contemplate the game of work, and the challenges that lie ahead.

      “If you don’t build your dream someone will hire you to help build theirs.” – Tony Gaskins

      “You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.” – David Foster Wallace, Infinit Jest

      “If you must play, decide on three things at the start: the rules of the game, the stakes, and the quitting time.” – Chinese Proverb

      “Too many people believe that everything must be pleasurable in life, which makes them constantly search for distractions and short-circuits the learning process.  The pain is a kind of challenge your mind presents – will you learn how to focus and move past the boredom, or like a child will you succumb to to the need for immediate pleasure and distraction?” – Robert Greene, Mastery

      As I write, a crow lands atop a nearby tree, mocking me with its caw. The world owes us nothing, it lectured me, and it’s up to us to make something of ourselves. Pause, reflect, shift if you must, and move ahead. There’s only today after all.

    • An Infinite Sea

      When I was 17 I was sure I’d found my vocation. I’d become a draftsman, and the drafting table was a place where time flew by in a blur. But even then the ripples of change were in the air, and CAD (Computer-Aided Design) was taking over. Pencils couldn’t keep up with programming, and I opted for college to find a wider channel.

      Each man has his own vocation.  The talent is the call.  There is one direction in which all space is open to him.  He has faculties silently inviting him thither to endless exertion.  He is like a ship in a river: he runs against obstructions on every side but one, on that side all obstruction is taken away and he sweeps serenely over a deepening channel into an infinite sea.  This talent and this call depend on his organization, or the mode in which the general soul incarcerates itself to him.  He inclines to do something which is easy to him and good when it is done, but which no other man can do.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

      Emerson witnessed the American Industrial Revolution happening all around him in Waltham, Lowell, Lawrence, Fitchburg and other mill towns. The pace of change was extraordinary for the time, and still inspires awe. Cities bursting upwards from ancient land, transformed forever from ancient forests to quiet farmland to bustling brick and steel blocks as far as the eye could see. Timeless rivers dammed and diverted into canals that fed in turn the turbines and the looms and the mill workers and most of all the mill owners and investors. Railways and highways built and expanded to move goods efficiently from place-to-place. Neighborhoods creeping ever outwards to house the workers. The transformation is ongoing in an ebb and flow of maddening hunger for more and more.

      Mixed into this crush of transformation was the pressure to keep up, leading to consumer debt and then student debt. Shackled to interest payments, how does a young person navigate the obstructions on all sides and find the channel that brings them to the endless sea? The system is set up to feed the beast, not the soul of the worker. The futility of this leads to anxiety, blame and rage. Look around in America today and you see it everywhere. The dream lives on, but obstacles clog the channel. That channel is there, if only we break free of the obstacles. Too many never do.

      “Just as a well-filled day brings blessed sleep, so a well-employed life brings a blessed death.” – Leonardo da Vinci

      I’m further down the river, but haven’t reached that infinite sea. The writing feels like a better channel, though it’s currently a hobby not a vocation. I’ve sprinkled long form writing into many career stops down the river, but one man’s channel is another’s obstacle. In business long form writing gets swept aside for quick sound bites of absolutely necessary information and then on to the next thing.

      Better to find a better audience, and technology allows for that to a degree, even as it eliminates other opportunities. The proverbial river has changed since Emerson’s America, narrower channel in some places, wider in spots, but dammed up in others. Opportunities to find your way to that infinite sea have never been more available, just stop bouncing from shore to shore trying to find the channel and the journey will be a lot easier. There’s no serenity out of the channel (where too many find themselves), and the sea awaits.