Archive for the ‘The Human Condition’ Category
“Writer without permission.”
Write On Your Own Dime
A new LinkedIn friend in the Minneapolis/Saint Paul area has a job title “Writer without permission.” The genius of her title is to say out loud what most every writer is thinking—nobody asked for this, nobody gave me permission, and frankly, no one is waiting for me to finish it. The whole thing is entirely self-motivated.
Let there be more of her tribe.
Writers without permission may encamp here as needed–not that you need permission.
Writers often stop mid-sentence and think,
I am entirely unqualified to write this. When will someone knock on my door and say, ‘Hey—Stop it: You got no business writing that.’?
When those Philip Glass moments occur, whether real or imagined, the writer without permission pauses and then continues the sentence. And the next sentence. And so on—breezing past the “No Trespassing” signs posted around the perimeter of the topic.
If you are waiting for someone to say, “You should write about X.” You have a long wait. If you are waiting for a fat check to cover expenses while you draft your manuscript, well that isn’t likely. Although I did chat with someone two weeks ago who received a sabbatical from her job to write a book. So, miracles do happen… and all that.
New stuff happens when we start writing without permission. But the alternative is also true: maybe nothing will happen. Maybe it will fail. Given all the books and writing and words floating around today, failure is likely. Then again, what is success or failure? If just getting your story out is success (I happen to think it is), then start writing. If success is getting famous, well…miracles do happen (and all that).
But there is something more to the kudos and the paycheck—it is a kind of validation that you are doing a good thing, a worthwhile thing, an important thing. It’s as if we need someone else’s validation to gather gumption and move forward. But what if someone won’t even understand what you are doing until you are done—because you yourself are working out the details? And you don’t fully understand it. Not yet.
We celebrate the creative genius of long-dead writers. But how many knew they were writing some landmark story until much later—or ever? Most had to battle the “No Trespassing” signs and the missing fat paychecks. And they created anyway.
Do you need permission to create the thing you cannot stop thinking about? You have my permission, for whatever it is worth.
Don’t put off creating.
Start today.
###
Image credit: Kirk Livingston
Zumba: Create Your Own [Alternative Dance] World
Learning from “Let it move you”
Advertising’s great advantage is making images that dismiss the real baggage real people carry into the real world. And that’s why we buy the product: we want to be that person so in the zone we don’t realize we’ve been dancing on the conference table in the middle of a budget meeting.
[Click to play at Creativity]
But is “dismissing real baggage real people carry into the real world” really so far-fetched? I’m starting to think not. We’re all marching toward some image of life that we’ve created or someone has created for us.
What are you marching toward?
What could you be dancing toward?
###
Via Creativity
How LinkedIn Helps Before You Are Between Jobs
Generate The Thing Between
LinkedIn is a powerful tool for connection. But lots of people, once they land the job, put connection on the back burner. Some take it off the stove entirely—and that is a mistake, especially in this economy. I know this because many friends and colleagues are on radio silence most of the time. Until rumors of layoff float by. Then it’s connections galore.
Don’t let connections go dormant.
Connection is something that happens long before you have a need or want to generate a sale. In fact, connection is not about the need or the sale, it is something entirely different. And we make LinkedIn frenemies when we mistake connection for a sale.
For those who understand the importance of connections outside immediate work and building relationships widely, there is a great joy in getting to know people and simply seeing what might happen. It’s not even an introvert/extrovert thing. It is a possibility thing. Maybe it is a thing for dreamers, but I think not. It is for anyone who starts to wonder what is possible outside the structure that encases their days.
This openness to others—this beckoning to others, this waving them close—is the early move toward collaboration. It is the ordinary conversation that starts to generate new things between you, seemingly by magic. It is the beginning of finding common ground that eventually leads to “Wait—what could we do together?”
Curiously, openness to others has a way of working backward into our present job so that we start to see new ways of working, collaborating and connecting.
When teaching college students about professional writing, I try to help them understand that the best jobs are the ones not advertised. The best jobs open and shut before ever posted on a web page or printed as a classified ad. Those jobs are available only to connections. Those jobs are almost incidental to the connection: friends see what you do, how fun you are to work with. Their synapses fire and they say to themselves, “She might be perfect for this need we have.”
Maintaining and growing connection is not for a someday need or someday sale. It is a piece of being human and carries a glory all its own.
###
Image credit: Kirk Livingston
What Did You Forget Today?
Welcome to Monday—what brings you here?
On your way to work—whether by train, plane or automobile (or stairs)—your mind raced ahead to anticipate the tasks needing attention. You passed by and through spaces not dedicated to the work you do: the incidental scenery along the way. Liminal spaces. Preoccupied with your onerous task (the meeting to conduct, the performance review, the estimate/report/files due by 11am), you may not have noticed those places. Anyway: aren’t they just the ugly, industrial infrastructure or detritus required to make the big commerce machine run?
Not really worth attention.
But those spaces have a way of releasing you and possibly preparing you for the very work you are doing just now. Those spaces—so regularly ignored as to become invisible—help your mind and body make the leap to the world of productivity. Moving forward through those spaces you shed thoughts and instincts from the weekend so you can adhere to hierarchy and care again about what your company cares about. Maybe those quickly-passing-spaces even erase the resolve and wonder built up over the weekend.
And welcome to Monday.
But it’s not good to forget lessons learned from the quiet of the weekend. Even hard-partying readers—I hope—found margin for reflection. Don’t leave those reflections and fresh understandings at home on the kitchen table. Bring them with you.
For me, a long conversation with this poet/psalmist has created a specific resolve that I hope will flow through this week. A boat-ride in the September sun and a story about a daughter in a far-away land cooking a Minnesota meal for the nationals—all these have a sort of sustaining power.
I’m eager to bring these with me into the week, right through the liminal spaces of my transit. In fact, now I wonder if the liminal spaces of experience are the very stuff of a full life.
###
Image credit: Kirk Livingston
Italian Telecom Wind: Engage + Remind – Shill
Still selling, of course. But they pulled me in.
Lots of great “dad” moments in here.
What about those decades-long conversations we have with the people in our lives?
###
Getting Things Done: Better Call Agent 007-0827
Or should we call a prayer meeting?
“Agency” is a word for getting something done. In a philosophical sense, it is the capacity to act in the world. It has to do with choice-making and accomplishment and focus—especially focus. We hire an advertising agency when we need to offload some critical marketing element and make sure it happens. That agency accepts the mission and acts. And so we pay their fee.
Why hire agency? Because we don’t have the capacity to do it ourselves, whether that means talent or headcount or time or interest or focus or all of the above. But the critical thing needs to be done and must be done. So we get someone we can trust to do it. There is an entire industry set up around the notion of getting things done. Time management is always a hot topic for any gender in business or academia and in the rest of life.
But agency has a tricky theological side. Even non-theists debate determinism versus free will. And Christians, well—we’ll kill each other over our views of how the world works. Just find an Anabaptist and ask how their minority voice was received by their determinist rulers, way back when.
Why bring in theology when talking about getting things done in real life? Isn’t theology the useless opposite of getting things done here on earth?
Yes.
And, No.
Because while we can accomplish much with our time-management techniques, there is much outside our ability. Like changing someone’s mind. Or opening long-closed doors. Or protecting oppressed people from their brutal dictator. Or helping a nation care about all its citizens (versus just the privileged ones).
What the time-management industry does not answer and cannot answer is how to work with these very large questions that deal with agency in the larger world. So we back off and shut down and feel guilty.
Can we pursue agency that sees and acts on larger things? Some of my heroes are doing this and their agency consists of some combination of prayer and action and faith and presence.
###
Image credit: Kirk Livingston
When Walking To The Podium, Remember This.
Resolved: “You are gonna dig this.”
No one will argue that public speaking is petrifying. On this we all agree. Even seasoned performers routinely get the nerves before they walk on stage. In my limited experience, the one thought that calms nerves and spurs me forward is that something I’m about to say will help someone.
Next?
This occurred to me recently in working out the details for launching ListenTalk. Someone suggested a party and my first reaction was, “Ugh—I hate being the center of attention. No thanks.” But on reflection I found myself at a decision point: do I want to give my best effort toward helping this book succeed or will I follow natural impulses and just drop the published book off on Amazon’s front steps, ring the doorbell and run. Because if I do the latter, I am guaranteeing a narrow audience.
On further reflection, and perhaps with a bit of divine intervention, I realized the message of ListenTalk is much more about this hope I’m starting to entertain: that readers will begin to happily engage in and explore their own daily conversations with something of a treasure-hunter’s gusto. That’s the good thing I want readers to understand. That’s the thing people are gonna dig—once they get it.
So, for those about to engage in public speaking, or for those looking for motivation to move forward with some public task, ask yourself: How am I helping the person I’m about to engage?
It’s always good to refocus on the other person.
###
Image credit: Kirk Livingston
Citizens: Neither Audience nor Consumers but Makers
Reuters image
In a viable self-governing nation… citizens can only know themselves by way of the civic agency. True citizens are not the audience of their government, nor its consumers; they are its makers.
–Hyde, Lewis. Common as Air (NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010) 27
###
Mind-reading and the Perfectionist’s Dilemma
“Come here, you big, beautiful rough draft.”
You know what needs to be done.
You know how to do it.
But—given your schedule—you simply cannot attend the details. What you want is to jump to editing the rough draft—but who’s got time to create that rough draft?
This is what I’m thinking….
We could be talking about drafting an email, an article or a chapter. We could be talking about a curriculum for a class or a seminar. We could be talking about writing a memo to employees or a letter to partners or a speech to stakeholders—anything that requires focused attention for a time so you can spin out and organize the details. We’re talking about anything you need to create from scratch to deliver to others. Any communication that solves a problem you’ve noticed.
Now is when you need an assistant who can move forward without hand-holding. Now is when you need someone who knows what you know without you telling them. Now is when you need a mind-reader.
But there are no mind-readers.
Are there no mind-readers?
I won’t say copywriters are mind-readers. I will say I find myself in situations every week where my client has provided 15-25% of the details but expects our project to organize 100% of the content in a coherent, compelling fashion.
Sometimes I wonder if our close friends, colleagues and collaborators serve as near-mind-readers. With them we feel free to spit out the raw bits of what we know. And as we say it, we realize what we need to do next. To tell someone what is on our mind is the first step to accomplishing a task. Those conversations are a kind of verbal rough draft.
Don’t be intimidated by the blank page. Embrace the notion of doing something mostly wrong and partly right, which is to say, embrace the rough draft.
It is much easier to change words on a page than it is to put words on a page.
###
Image credit: Kirk Livingston
Could Your Organization Grow Your Spirit?
LEED-like certification for human-spirit-sustainable workplaces
LEED certification is a rating system that recognizes a building’s sustainability. LEED or Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, rates a new building project using five different categories:
- Site location
- Water conservation
- Energy efficiency
- Materials
- Indoor air quality
Businesses and organizations with the highest ratings display them as a sort of badge of honor for the public to see.
What if there were some system to measure and rate the culture within a company or organization? Since we worry about bullying at school and we’re starting to recognize bullies in the office and toxic corporate cultures, does it make sense to start thinking about organizations that sustain people rather than beat them?
For instance, what if any organization was judged by these four categories:
- Bias toward collaboration
- Employee engagement indicators
- Mix of top-down messaging with true conversation
- Ratio of CEO-pay to rank-and-file pay
Seem ridiculous?
It would be difficult to measure many of these, especially since most of the categories seem so subjective. And yet, would it be impossible to measure? Would it be worthwhile to measure? Are we already moving in that direction?
In Minneapolis/St. Paul—like any set of cities—insider talk has long identified those cut-throat corporate and institutional cultures that routinely toss human capital to the side. Insider talk also identifies those bosses, managers and C-suite people without empathy and/or ethical moorings. New employees are generally forewarned when they sign up.
Of course, business is still about earning a living for the people involved even as the organization serves some human need. So don’t think I’m championing some communistic collective. Profits will and must be made to help society move forward.
But as we move toward fuller employment, workers will become more choosy about where they spend their days. And those cultures that have a less sustainable ethos will not be the winners.
I’m not convinced I’ve identified the right categories to measure. What categories would you include?
###
Image credit: Kirk Livingston
conversation is an engine 