I Still Don’t Know What To Do

The last 3 posts have been part of a series aimed towards developing a modern vision quest: a way to figure out what your talents and mission are, so you can become an active, productive adult member of society.

I’ve told you why I think it’s necessary, how to start identifying your talents, and how to start establishing a mission. But odds are pretty good that you still feel lost and confused.

The problem is, we’re not describing something that is quantifiable. I can’t tell you how to measure your mathematical capability, or your spacial reckoning, or your athleticism. And even if each skill were measurable, I couldn’t tell you which skills to measure, for there are an infinite number of possible skills and talents. So even though I’ve asked you to write them down, they aren’t actually the kind of thing you can really write down.

So unlike the annual planning series, you won’t leave this one feeling like you really know what you’re doing. But at least you’ll be thinking about the right things, and moving in the right direction.

Let’s start a conversation about what else needs to be included. What have you found helpful in your search for a mission?

What Do You Want From Life?

This post is part of a series aimed towards creating a modern vision quest: how to develop your unique talents, circumstances, and personality into a role for yourself as an adult in society.

Two days after I started writing this series, a friend gifted to me a book called The Rhythm of Life: Living Every Day With Passion & Purpose. The book begins by pointing out the quiet desperation with which most of us live our lives, and argues that the way to avoid that lifestyle is to become the best possible version of yourself.

Early on, the author tells the story of speaking to a class of high school seniors before they graduated. He looked out at the class, full of eager, hopeful faces, ready to go out into the great big world and become part of it, and asked them, “What do you want from life?” He got in response:

• Uncertainty as to whether the question was rhetorical,

• Vague answers probably instilled by society rather than from actual desire, like “I want a million dollars” or “I want a beautiful wife.”
• Some pretty good answers like, “I want to be a doctor so I can help people, reduce suffering, and make money.”
• One really good, fully-thought-out answer, from a young man who hoped to be president, and had a plan laid out for college, law school, military service, local campaign involvement, and internships on Capitol Hill.

Most of us have no clear answer to that question. And so you end up living a Jimmy Buffet song:

“It seems I have a problem in my present-day career:
My ship she has a rudder, but I don’t know where to steer.”

Of course we feel lost and confused; we are lost.

What does that have to do with my work?

During her year-long happiness project, Gretchen Rubin discovered a principle she labeled the first splendid truth: To be happy, you have to think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right, in an atmosphere of growth.” People like to make progress; we don’t like to do things that don’t accomplish anything. But one of the most common reasons for feeling like you’re not making progress is that you haven’t defined what constitutes “progress”.

And it’s not a quick and easy answer; success is different for each person.

Example 1
I recently spoke to a software engineer describing a conflict within his company: marketing wants them to build on successful past projects, developing new material for programs that they know sell. Operations wants to build brand-new stuff with inspiration and elegance. Marketing says, “I just want to make you guys rich.” And it’s a compelling argument, because following that advice would make all the programmers rich.

But for most of the programmers, being rich doesn’t count as success. Oh, they’d all like to be rich, and they’re certainly hoping to find a middle road that will allow them to be rich. But almost none of them, if they’d gotten rich by re-hashing old material, would feel successful. They know they can do better work than that, and they would be ashamed to sell anything less than their best.

Example 2
I’m about as introverted as you can get, and am fully satisfied with the circle of friends that I have. I’ve no objection to meeting new people, but I don’t feel any particular urge to seek it out. But I just spent the weekend with some friends who love people. They love to meet people, to learn about people, to spend time with people. And I believe that if, on their deathbeds, they could look back at their lives and say, “I made as many friends as possible” they would count themselves as successful.

There’s nothing wrong with being rich, or having a beautiful wife, or being a CEO. But please don’t believe that those things will automatically make you successful. Only you can define what will make you successful.

OK…So Now What?

Chapter 2 of The Rhythm of Life ends thusly:

Put this book aside now — and before you read on, spend five minutes or five hours answering the question for yourself. What do you want from life?
Maybe you have already thought long and hard about this question but have never written it down. On the other hand, if you have never taken the time to seriously address the question, don’t pretend that you have. Take the time. Think it over. Write it down.
There are no right or wrong answers. Write quickly. Don’t think too much. Don’t analyze or edit yourself as you make your list. Write everything down, even the ones you feel are foolish. Your answers don’t have to be definitive. They will change over time. That’s okay. In fact, some of them will probably change by the time you finish this book. But it is still important to write them down now. It will help you as you read through the rest of this book, and as you venture through the rest of your life. So write your list, and when you are done, date it.
….
Stop reading. Put the book down. What you are about to write on that paper is infinitely more important than anything else I have to say in this book.

Like defining your talents, this is not a one-shot, no-problem exercise. In fact, like every other part of the vision quest, this is an ongoing, never-ending exercise. Start now. You’ll never be done, but you still need to start.

Resources for Further Reading
The Power of Clarity
A refinement of my happiness formula
The Rhythm of Life

A Modern Vision Quest

I had a conversation with a friend last year about the life stages of a human being. Although every person is obviously different, most people, we observed, will go through these stages at approximately these ages:

• Childhood (0 – 7 or 8 ) In this stage, a person is new to this whole gig, and is just trying to learn about everything that’s going on. They’re overwhelmed by the amount of information out there, and don’t have the time, experience, or spare processing power to do much analysis of what is happening.

  My friend says that in jungle cultures, children are first allowed to wield a machete at age 7 or 8. In the Catholic church, children are considered mature enough to understand and take communion around 7 or 8. In US culture, although we have no formal rituals, 7 or 8 is about the time most kids are assigned chores of their own, and the earliest most parents would consider letting their kids have a pet.

• Adolescence (7 or 8 – 30 or 33) In this stage, people continue to learn about the world, but their focus is now more on figuring out how they fit into it. Exploration of skills and talents, pushing your limits to see where they are, and trying out new things are the primary activities. Towards the later years, skills and talents should hopefully be clear, and focus is on how best to use those skills and talents to do something useful in the community.

  I realize that my age range here is controversial, because most places define “adult” now at age 18 or 21. But if you look at people who have changed the world, from Jesus & Buddha to Ghandi and Martin Luther King Jr, the turning point in their lives, when they began to affect others and to devote themselves to their lives’ work, came closer to age 30 than age 20.

• Adult (30 or 33 – ?60 or 65?) This is the period when most of your life’s work will be done, whether it’s ending racial injustice or raising great kids.

  Please note that this is unrelated to success in other areas; it is obviously possible for an adolescent to release a hit album, become a basketball start, or start a multi-million-dollar business in their dorm room. And all of those successes are awesome, and worthwhile. But they’re usually not the sort of thing that a person would count as their “life’s work”; most people who achieve all that will start looking for something more.

  What it means to you

  Here’s the main problem with our culture (and if you live in a place that hasn’t fully imported US culture, watch out for this pitfall): we don’t teach people how to be adults.

  The mechanisms of our culture do a very poor job of helping us figure out what our strengths are and how to use them, what our weaknesses are and how to compensate for them, and what unique value we can offer to the world.

  In the industrial age, this wasn’t such a big deal. The world had pre-defined slots, and you were going to be hammered into one whether you liked it or not. So if you never found your unique set of talents, it didn’t matter much.

  But now we’re in the information age, and you’re going to be self-employed one way or another. You need to offer something unique if you’re going to get ahead, and knowing your individual talents, skills, knowledges, and capability is critical for success.

  I don’t have an easy answer for you. But I have struggled with this for the last 10 years, and I have come across some things that can help. So the next few posts will cover ideas on how to find your niche in the world.

Forget the Lexus – Buy an Olive Tree

Book Review of Thomas Friedman’s The Lexus and the Olive Tree

The Lexus and the Olive Tree was perhaps the first book to look at the phenomenon of Globalization from a cultural, economic, and political perspective. Friedman argues that you can no longer examine cultures, economics and politics separately: they are all inter-related, and examining one without the others will give you an incomplete (and confusing) picture.

The book covers a wide range of examples of what globalization is, how it compares to the Cold War system of the previous generation, and what it means to Americans and to the rest of the world. As a net-gen born in 1981, I found the contrasts to the Cold War system particularly enlightening, not for their explanation of Globalization, but for their explanation of why my parents’ generation thought the world would behave differently.

The Lexus
Friedman uses “The Lexus” to represent everything a Lexus represents to Americans — status, affluence, freedom of choice, access to material benefits. For the first time in history, these things are available to almost anyone in the world, if they and their government do what is necessary to plug into the globalization system. And, he points out, people are amazingly willing to forego luxury, buckle down, work hard, and sacrifice in order to get access to the Lexus. A government can ask their populace to do almost anything if it means they’ll have a chance of getting to Disney World in the next few decades.

The Olive Tree
But there’s another side to globalization: the lack of Olive Trees. Friedman uses the Olive Tree to represent everything an olive grove represents to residents of the Middle East: cultural ties, tradition, historical roots, a feeling of knowing where you come from, and where you belong. Globalization requires cutting down some Olive Trees, and (since the US has the best government for globalization, and globalization is therefore often confused with Americanization) many countries are losing their Olive Trees faster than they know or can control. The book explores the dynamic between people’s desire for Olive Trees and their desire for a Lexus.

The book is an excellent introduction to how the world works, and outlines some cautions for those considering entering into it. I recommend it highly for anyone who would like to get ahead any time in the next decade. But I’d like to discuss something that I think Friedman overlooks:

What Globalization Means To You

Ethnocide actually didn’t start with globalization… or rather, it started with the first globalization movement, back when Europeans set out to conquer the world for God, gold and glory; if you wanted to name a symbolic historic event, you could peg the beginning at 1492, when Columbus went out and got himself amazingly lost. The 1500s were when the world first saw a global-scale cultural export process, when Europeans went to the other continents and said to its residents (directly or indirectly) “We have guns, germs and steel; and you will live our way or you won’t live at all.”

Even now, when ethnocide is not a condoned practice, and we allegedly allow others to live the way they wish, the world is still ruled by a European viewpoint. The Hopi Indians of Arizona were lucky enough to get their reservation on their traditional tribal homelands, and within the bounds of the reservation they may run their tribe under their own laws. But still they struggle. They can’t grow corn as they used to – Peabody Coal is taking the water from their aquifer to slurry coal from its mine. They can’t hold their spiritual dances as they used to – too many of the participants work all week, and ceremonies can only be held on the weekend. They could cut themselves off entirely, but they want access to medical care for their children and supplementary food sources in case of drought. But… to tie into the European system at all means taking all of it: a 40-hour-a-week job, struggling to pay the bills, and living a life of quiet desperation.

This is the choice that many people have faced over the past 500 years, and are still facing today: give up your Olive Tree, become a white man, and your people won’t starve to death; keep your Olive Tree, hold to your traditions, and you have to face the infant mortality rate that you faced before modern medicine. And time after time, people have sacrificed their Olive Trees in order to protect themselves and their children. It’s the correct choice, but the results are tragic.

What To Do Instead
Globalization does require some Americanization. You must have a democracy (anything else is too slow to change). You must have a free-market economy (anything else is too likely to harbor inefficiencies). But you don’t have to import American materialism, American obesity, or American quiet desperation. Globalization allows — within its specified constraints — anyone from almost any culture to earn a decent living wage while living life the way they want to.

And that’s the real power of globalization: it can’t make your Olive Tree provide you a living, but it can make you rich enough that you can afford to keep an Olive Tree anyway. Buy a Lexus if that’s what you really want…. but what if you put some of your new-found wealth towards maintaining what matters to you?

Is It Evil To Make Money?

There’s a pervasive notion in our culture that being rich automatically means being sleazy, greedy, and uncaring (and admittedly Hollywood residents don’t help a lot with dispelling that stereotype). There’s also a pretty strong feeling among many people that not working for your money makes you bad or greedy or lazy.

If you strongly believe in not making money, I won’t try to change your mind; I strongly believe in letting people decide for themselves. But I’d like to other some alternative points of view that might help you in deciding where you stand.

Money Myths

Any time you argue with a belief that’s widely held in society, you have to call it a myth; that’s the rule. But in fact most of these ideas have a pretty sound basis. None of them are 100% wrong. But I think many of them are overgeneralizations, and I’d like to point out some distinctions that I think are important ones.

Money Is the Root Of All Evil
Actually — if you look in 1 Timothy 6:10 — you’ll find that what Saint Paul said is that love of money is the root of all evil. Money itself can do good things or bad things — the church collects money, after all — but to love money, to desire it for its own sake, and especially to love it more than God, more than people, more than goodness, more than virtue… that may not be the root of all evil, but it is the root of a whole lot of it.

On the other hand, loving most things is good. If you love your kids and want to send them to college — wanting money for that is not evil. If you love your partner and want to make sure they’d be safe even if you were hit by a truck — wanting money for that is not evil. If you love 3rd-world countries or inner city kids or spotted owls or cancer victims, and want money to help them get out of their bad situations — wanting money for that is the opposite of evil. So I think it’s an important distinction.

Why do you want money? What would you do with it if you had it?

Making a business is less work than getting a job
Owning a business is less work than getting a job once the business has been built. But my experience so far suggests that actually building the business is as much work as 40 years’ worth of employment, rolled into one decade. Certainly it’s much harder work.

At my day job, all I have to do is show up, do what my boss tells me to, and be average enough not to get fired.

In my business I have to motivate myself, plan where the business is going, decide the most important thing to do today, and be good enough to compete with every other business in my industry, including some really big companies. I must have or learn self-discipline, organization and planning, and prioritization, as well learning enough in my field to excel at some aspect of it.

It’s a lot harder than my day job. But I love it. It’s work that challenges me. It’s work that makes me a better person. And I hope that it’s work that makes a difference, that by my writing this blog, making my time management website, I can make some people’s lives a little easier.

What kind of work do you want to do? How much are you willing to do?

Power Corrupts
This one is the most true of all. It’s very easy to take advantage of having power — any kind of power, and money is a great example — to do things that you wouldn’t if other people had the courage to scold you for it. And it is a risk of being rich; we see it all the time in our tabloids.

But you can also abuse power without being rich. Being promoted to manager was a test of power and character for me; would I use it to force my coworkers to do things my way, and to do the grunt work I didn’t want to do? I made a few bad decisions; but getting the promotion, and seeing the results of those bad decisions, has made me a stronger, better person. Losing my temper was no big deal when it only affected me; learning to keep it was much more critical when it had the power to affect half a dozen people who I liked and respected.

“Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.” — Abraham Lincoln

What challenges would face you if you were given power? What would you have to change about yourself to be able to handle it? Would you be a good leader? What would have to change for you to be able to say yes?

Other things to consider

Most Men Live Lives Of Quiet Desperation
Thoreau went to the woods to live deliberately, away from the prejudices and preconceptions of society. And one of the things he found there is that, when you take a look at it, most people are pretty unhappy with their lives, due in large part to money or lack thereof. Or, to sum up middle-class America succinctly: most people go to a job they hate so they can spend money they don’t yet have on things they don’t need to impress people they don’t like.

And living like that is crazy. Everyone knows that, at some level. Blogs like The Simple Dollar and Zen Habits help you with this problem by helping you recognize which expenses can be cut from your life without problems; blogs like Itty Biz and Personal Development for Smart People offer advice on making more money without going to work every day. But everyone agrees that you need to do something.

What would you do if you didn’t have to go to work, ever again? It’s all very well to say that you’d play golf all day, or lie on a Caribbean beach. But you know as well as I do that you’d get tired of that after… oh, say, a year or so. And you’ve probably got more than a year left to live. What would you do when you got tired of doing nothing?

Why not make your dreams come true? Live the life you always wanted… whether that’s helping kids learn baseball or making stained-glass windows or discussing holy books with learned men. A life that you want. A life that means something to you. Instead of quiet desperation.

What WOULD you do if you didn’t have to go to work?

You Could Make A Difference
Odds are good, actually, that you have a secret dream, so deep down that you may never have admitted it to yourself, where you make a difference in this world. The particulars will vary from me to you to Bob Gomez over there, but you dream of doing something that matters… maybe writing a history or philosophy book that clarifies everything, or working for your church, or volunteering at the soup kitchen 5 days a week, or traveling to poor countries and helping people get by, or making a difference in government, or….

If you didn’t have go to work every day in order to get money, you could do that.

What could you do to make a difference in this world if your job didn’t get in the way?

You Don’t Have To Keep It
If worst comes to worst, and you just cannot bear the thought of making that much money, but the idea of building a business still appeals to you….

give it away. There are plenty of people who will take it; you can give it to bums on the street, or worthy charities, or to me, if you’d like. (I’ll use it to build my business so that I’ll have time to help save the ethnosphere.) If it turns out that you’re not trustworthy with that kind of power, get a financial manager who will give most of your money to designated charities and dole out a small amount to you each month (it’s worked for British aristocrats for years).

So, is it evil or not?

I can’t answer that question for you.

I don’t think it is. I think that accepting a job that is less than I can do, to create less benefit than I am capable of creating, and in turn preventing both my selfish dreams and my dreams of helping others… I believe that’s evil. And the opposite of that: following my dreams, educating myself to do the best job I can, to build a business that will help others — in turn — follow their dreams… I believe that’s good. But you have to answer for yourself.

-Amanda