Alexandersmap

    Category: Career

    • The Value of Work

      “Understand the superior value of getting what you want through hard work.” — @robertgreene

      Want a bit of perspective on work? Spend a weekend digging holes for fence posts, raking the yard, hauling bags of cement or other manual labor. That was my weekend, and I’m grateful for the reminder of what can be done with applied effort. But you sure feel it the next day. Thinking on your feet and or tapping on a keyboard can be pretty stressful, but usually your whole body doesn’t ache the next morning.

      The thing is, I enjoyed the manual labor as much as I enjoy writing or helping people solve problems in their business. Paying a little sweat equity now and then is good for the soul. Our bodies weren’t designed to sit on a chair in front of a monitor all day. Getting out and doing what needs to be done offers a chance to transform a small piece of our world.

      Work is closing the gap between current state and desired state with deliberate action. It’s not office politics or how much money you make or dress code or how long your commute is, these are job-related nuances that attract or detract from the real purpose. To make a meaningful contribution for the collective good. That might be digging holes for fence posts, or it might be building a presentation for a meeting, but we ought to add value to it through our effort.

      Unhappy with the gap between here and a desired state? We don’t always want to hear it, but the answer is often simple. Get to work.

    • The “What’s Our Fire” Exam

      “Proper examination should ruin the life that you’re currently living. It should cause you to leave relationships. It should cause you to reestablish boundaries with family members and with colleagues. It should cause you to quit your job.” — @naval

      We march through our day-to-day life without serious thought about the big picture. What really matters to us, and are we moving towards that? Sometimes examination tells us we’re on the right track, sometimes we find more smoke than fire. But we ought to sort out what’s going on either way.

      Examination doesn’t invite trouble, it offers a lifeline. We get in the habit of saying things that won’t rock the boat. I’d suggest that the boat ought to be rocked now and then. There’s nothing wrong with a spring cleaning for the soul. Purge all those pent-up resentments and simmering anger and give them air to breath. They’ll either ignite into a bonfire or smother for lack of fuel. But we can’t just live every day ignoring the growing inferno without being burned alive from the inside-out.

      Socrates famously said that “The unexamined life is not worth living”. Are we meant to be a torch or merely kindling for someone else’s dreams? Think of the things that we accept in our life that are frivolous and inconsequential on the surface, and worse, distract us from the things that might be life-changing given the chance. The thing that makes Naval’s statement incendiary is that we may find we’ve just been kindling all along. Isn’t it fair to ask, what is our fire, anyway?

    • Feed the Spark

      “Again, we are daily forced to choose between depression and anxiety. Depression results from the wounding of the individuation imperative; anxiety results from moving forward into the unknown. That path of anxiety is necessary because therein lies the hope of the person to more nearly become an individual. My analyst once said to me, “You must make your fears your agenda.” When we do take on that agenda, for all the anxiety engendered, we feel better because we know we are living in ‘bonne foi’ [good faith] with ourselves. Courage is not the absence of fear. It is the perception that some things are more important to us than what we fear.” ― James Hollis, Swamplands of the Soul: New Life in Dismal Places

      James Hollis challenges the stories we tell ourselves to stay on course. We tell ourselves to stick with the plan, to not deviate into dalliances of adventure and irresponsibility, to do what must be done… but is that living in good faith—bonne foi—with our hopes and dreams? What matters most to us anyway?

      The thing is, we each have the promises we make to ourselves about what we’ll do when we get past whatever responsibility has a hold of us at the present moment. Pretty stories about career path and mortgages and obligations. Les mensonges que nous nous disons de continuer.

      We do a disservice to ourselves by limiting ourselves to what feels comfortable. We know we ought to do more and yet hold ourselves back for reasons that feel just real enough in the moment to justify the safe route. We slowly extinguish our life force for the mundane and routine. What a depressing agenda that is.

      Alternatively, we might choose to feed the spark:

      You, sent out beyond your recall,
      go to the limits of your longing.
      Embody me.
      Flare up like a flame
      and make big shadows I can move in.
      — Rainer Maria Rilke, Go to the Limits of Your Longing

      There’s no time to waste, we must be the arsonist with the deadwood in our soul. We must feel the fear of the unknown and do it anyway. We must embrace the imperative to reach our potential while there’s still time. Some things are more important than what we fear.

    • These Next Five

      “Excellence is not a ‘hill to climb;’ excellence is the next five minutes.” — Tom Peters

      Tom Peters tweeted a one page summary of accumulated wisdom yesterday. I’ve quoted Peters’ “next five minutes” statement before, because it lays it all out there for us so succinctly. I’m using it again with fresh perspective after attending a trade show these last few days and reconnecting with so many people who have been integral in my career. It’s always been about now, not next quarter or even tomorrow. What we do with the rest of our life is nothing more than these next five minutes, stacked incrementally one after the other to form its substance.

      We can’t sustain high levels of urgency, but we can celebrate the ripe potential of each moment and remind ourselves to do something with it. Life is now, we all sense that. The concept of time is very human. Five minute increments are but a basis of measurement, conveniently contained in one hand. Imagine what we can do with these next five.

    • The Thing About Busy

      “Being busy is most often used as a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions.” — Tim Ferriss

      We have a love/hate relationship with busy. We all want for more quiet time, but when we get it we quickly yearn for the energy of hustle and bustle. This is compounded by the story we tell ourselves that those who get ahead are the busiest and hardest-working among us. That might help make you a Partner at one of the “Big Three” consulting firms or the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. But how often do we stop and ask ourselves why in the world we’d ever want that title? It’s a Faustian bargain—a deal with the Devil to have it all now in exchange for your soul.

      Screw that.

      Status doesn’t mean you’re successful at living. It just means you ground out more miles. Do we ever stop to ask what really gets ground in the process? Think about the last conversation you had with a “really busy” person. Was it meaningful or a transaction? Frazzled is a posture that doesn’t highlight one’s positive traits. To be calmly efficient is a choice; just as much of a choice as frazzled. But with better hair.

      We can be successful in life without sacrificing 300,000 heartbeats a week for the profitability of whatever stock symbol we happen to align ourselves with. The thing about busy is it’s a story we tell ourselves as an excuse for not doing what we really want to do. It takes courage to stop hiding behind busy.

      Instead we might choose contemplation and conversation and the deliberation of taking meaningful steps. We might seek experience accumulation and relationship building. We could delight in pregnant pauses. We can give ourselves permission to celebrate deep thinking and active listening and finding the right word without Googling it. We can rejoice in finishing what we once so boldly started but put aside because we’ve been so damned… busy.

    • Can’t See the Open Road

      Mellow is the man who knows what he’s been missing
      Many, many men can’t see the open road
      — Led Zeppelin, Over the Hills and Far Away

      Huddled in a group at an Irish pub, four men scheming for the future: one free of obligations and ready to roam, one surfing the peak of his career and working to cash in before it crashes, one just riding the swell and hoping this time—this time— he’d caught the right wave, and me, a would-be writer and wanderer observing the human condition. I’m surfing my own wave, of course, but don’t we all dream of coming about, hoisting the main and sailing away instead?

      “We labour at our daily work more ardently and thoughtlessly than is necessary to sustain our life because it is even more necessary not to have leisure to stop and think. Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations

      Nowadays we can all see what we’ve been missing in YouTube videos, Instagram and Facebook posts, or wherever you choose to live vicariously through the lens of others. My own favorite footage often involves drones flying above stunning landscapes, as if I were flying myself. And don’t we all wish to fly?

      But the question is, do we wish to fly away from something or towards something? For life is short and we can’t waste our precious time running away from ourselves. Yet so many do, in distraction and debauchery and debate. It’s easy to run away, but impossible to really get away from that nagging discontent.

      Old friend Henry David Thoreau pointed out that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” He would also say that, “So thoroughly and sincerely are we compelled to live, reverencing our life, and denying the possibility of change. This is the only way, we say; but there are as many ways as there can be drawn radii from one centre. All change is a miracle to contemplate; but it is a miracle which is taking place every instant.”

      In other words, life is change, everything is changing around us even as we debate what we ought to do with ourselves. Which brings me back to a constant refrain: We must decide what to be and go be it. And be content with that which we leave behind.

    • Strategic, Interested Experiencing

      “When people stop believing in an afterlife, everything depends on making the most of this life. And when people start believing in progress—in the idea that history is headed toward an ever more perfect future—they feel far more acutely the pain of their own little lifespan, which condemns them to missing out on almost all of that future. And so they try to quell their anxieties by cramming their lives with experience.” — Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

      Burkeman’s statement isn’t something you just fly by without contemplation. I have people in my life who would be indignant about the very idea of there being no afterlife. You might say I’m more open to the concept. But no matter what your belief about what happens next, most would agree in the concept of the infinite unknown. It was here before we were conceived and began our march through borrowed time, and it will envelope us again sooner than we’re comfortable with thinking about. Really, it’s all around us, we’re just stubbornly alive beings bumping up against infinity every day until we rejoin it. Giddy-Up.

      We get busy in life, marching through our days and obligations. I was just thinking to myself that I’m a bit short on micro-adventures lately. Blame it on my day job running parallel to this blog. I have a few friends that question my sanity for trading so many of my four thousand weeks for a career. But life is more than chasing waterfalls and sunsets. You’ve got to make something of your time, don’t you? Or do you need to do something in your time? Can you do both? Can we really have it all?

      Burkeman recommends “strategic underachievement”, which is simply “nominating in advance whole areas of life in which you won’t expect excellence of yourself” to mitigate the underlying stress of living for both commitments and experience. Focus on what you want to excel in, and gently put the rest aside on the priority list—placing the not-so-important stuff into tomorrow is a gentle way of punting what doesn’t really matter in this brash act of living life on our own terms.

      “Tomorrow is for the lazy mind, the sluggish mind, the mind that is not interested” — Jiddu Krishnamurti

      The answer, I believe, is to focus on the things that make you feel most alive, things that put you right in the mix of a fulfilling, satisfying life. That might be a sunset in the tropics or washing the dishes with your favorite song playing louder than it should. Embracing the mundane and the remarkable as it comes, but prioritizing that which places you squarely where you might maximize these experiences. We ought to decide what we want to savor most, and what to let fall away.

      Let’s face it, passively waiting for life experiences to come your way leads to a whole lot of waiting. Strategic underachievement in one area of your life means you’ve got to proactively work to strategically overachieve in other areas. Be interested in this business of living! Get up off your passive expectations about living and go out and meet the things you most want to achieve, be and do in this short life. Not so much “cramming experience”, but rather, strategic, and interested, experiencing. Wherever we might be.

    • Catching Up & Bridging Gaps

      The idea of catching up is tantalizing. I use this phrase often in two contexts; catching up with someone I haven’t spoken with in some time, and catching up on work that’s piled up in my work or personal ambition buckets. This week I did a fair amount of catching up in both contexts. But we never really catch up, do we? We mostly just shrink the gap between people, workload or expectations before we inevitably see the gap widen again. We’re all just so… busy.

      The act of getting reacquainted, of meeting to see how someone’s been, what’s up with the family, how so-and-so’s doing, is a lovely form of catching up. There’s so much loneliness and division in the world today, fueled by the pandemic and political inclination, and the general categorization of people into one camp or another. It should be so easy to just put it all aside and listen to each other. Many people just don’t want to deal with conflict or focus on differences of opinion, and so we just don’t communicate at all.

      But there’s joy in bridging the gap. Finding common ground and dancing in the light of understanding and acceptance. When we close that gap we draw closer together, and feel the humanity of another. When we ghost each other, block people on social media, and gossip about what the other is doing the gap widens. I’ve shrunk from a few people over the last several years, finding their opinions repulsive. Yet I know there’s still common ground should we ever sit down to catch up. We go on with our lives without those people in it, but feel the void where the relationship calved. Stack up enough of these and it’s death by a thousand cuts. No wonder people are lonely and stressed out.

      At least there’s work to take our minds off the world, right? But even here the gap between what needs to be done and what we can possibly accomplish feels impossibly large. We catch up on one thing and see the gap widen in another. Supply chain issues, labor shortages, trust issues… it’s enough to make you throw your hands up in the air and buy a boat or camper to get out of Dodge. We work until the wheels come off and then teeter trying to balance on what’s left.

      The reality is we’ll never quite catch up, and that’s okay. We decide where to close gaps and where to let things stay adrift. When the time is right–if the time is ever right–we’ll come back to that which we’ve neglected and, well, catch up once again.

    • Serious, True Work… Foreseen

      The stamina of an old, long-noble race
      in the eyebrows’ heavy arches. In the mild
      blue eyes, the solemn anguish of a child
      and, here and there, humility—not a fool’s,
      but feminine: the look of one who serves.
      The mouth quite ordinary, large and straight,
      composed, yet not unwilling to speak out
      when necessary. The forehead still naive,
      most comfortable in shadows, looking down.

      This, as a whole, just hazily foreseen—
      never, in any joy or suffering,
      collected for a firm accomplishment;
      and yet, as though, from far off, with scattered
      Things,
      a serious, true work were being planned.
      – Rainer Maria Rilke, Self-Portrait, 1906

      Rilke wrote this after three decades on the planet, with an assessment of himself that doesn’t leap out for its enthusiasm, nor with overt criticism. Here was a man who was planning great things for himself but knew he had a long climb ahead. He apprenticed with Auguste Rodin around the time he wrote this, and got a sense of what the singular pursuit of mastery looks like. And he’d apply it to himself.

      Rilke’s future was hazy, but he could sense his own potential. He sought an apprenticeship to learn how to cross the chasm from average to master himself. The last line betrays his belief in bigger things. I don’t speak German, and thus rely on the translation. Here is his original:

      Das, als Zusammenhang, erst nur geahnt;
      noch nie im Leiden oder im Gelingen
      zusammgefaßt zu dauerndem Durchdringen,
      doch so, als wäre mit zerstreuten Dingen
      von fern ein Ernstes, Wirkliches geplant.

      So here we are, collectively emerging from the shadow of a couple of dark years and looking squarely in the face of a new year. New possibilities. What do we make of it? What do we sacrifice or say no to in pursuit of our plans? For in looking inward for the answer we must wrestle with the question of what we might leave behind. The comfort of the familiar pulls us backwards. The only choice is moving ahead. Should we dare act on what we’ve foreseen.

    • Crossing the Stream to Deeper

      “If you want to win the war for attention, don’t try to say ‘no’ to the trivial distractions you find on the information smorgasbord; try to say ‘yes’ to the subject that arouses a terrifying longing, and let the terrifying longing crowd out everything else….

      The way to discover a terrifying longing is to liberate yourself from the self-censoring labels you began to tell yourself over the course of your mis-education… Focus on the external objects of fascination, not on who you think you are. Find people with overlapping obsessions.

      The information universe tempts you with mildly pleasant but ultimately numbing diversions. The only way to stay fully alive is to dive down to your obsessions six fathoms deep. Down there it’s possible to make progress toward fulfilling your terrifying longing, which is the experience that produces the joy.”
      — David Brooks, “The Art of Focus”, The New York Times

      The tricky thing about discovering “primary source” material is that you’ll uncover that what you believed to be primary source references other primary sources, which infers they aren’t the primary source at all. Such is the Great Conversation, spinning through life one book, interview or article at a time. We leap from one to the other, like stones across a stream, until we reach our destination with delight (and a new stack of reading material).

      Something recently pointed me towards Cal Newport’s Deep Work, which is a how-to book on pushing the shallow work aside to get to the deep work, where we differentiate ourselves and find true meaning in our careers and lives. Newport, in turn, pointed me towards several articles and books that I hadn’t previously been aware of, and a couple that I hadn’t fully absorbed on the first go-around. I’ve pursued them all recently, all in an effort to get meaningful work done. For we all must go deeper if there’s any hope for us to contribute something meaningful. And that requires breaking the spell of distraction:

      “Efforts to deepen your focus will struggle if you don’t simultaneously wean your mind from a dependence on distraction. Much in the same way that athletes must take care of their bodies outside of their training sessions, you’ll struggle to achieve the deepest levels of concentration if you spend the rest of your time fleeing the slightest hint of boredom.” — Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

      Here’s the thing: In diving into all this material around deep work, I’ve questioned whether this blog is itself deep or shallow (It aims for deep, but sometimes skims a bit shallower than I’d like). But what is the purpose of the blog but to establish a daily habit of writing and finding things out—things that gradually pull me deeper? Put another way, those stones I’m hopping across in life are documented, one at a time, for anyone that wishes to follow along. But even here, we all choose our own path across that stream of life, we just happen to land on the same spot now and then.

      That terrifying longing? It’s on the other side, and the only way to reach it is to stop watching the debris float by in the stream of distraction and focus on the next landing spot, and the one after that. Our time is short, and we have so far to go. So go deeper.