Two Cents

On the heels of my last post, some additional observations about finding a job that will make a difference. . . .

What’s Right for You

Finding fulfillment in our lives and in our work requires deliberate choices.  It includes looking critically at the easy choices that often present themselves so we are reasonably confident that the choices we make are determined by our priorities, not someone else’s.

We often pursue the path somebody else lays out for us after convincing ourselves that it will improve our options, make it more likely that right doors will open for us down the road.  But too often this is just putting off a hard decision in the misguided hope that somehow we will manage to find the right door on the wrong road.  Figure out what you need and what your world needs today, and then pursue whatever lifetime of work lies ahead of you because of who you are and the factors that make your life worth living.  

         In her Yale Daily News article, Marina Keegan correctly notes that finding your vocation is “not exactly a field with an application form”—and certainly not one that someone else will be handing you.  It is an opportunity that you have to give yourself.  Deciding to pursue the job of your life includes being level-headed about the choices you do have—even when those choices are limited—and learning how to say “no” to work that can never provide you with the right kinds of returns.

Some thoughtful students at Stanford felt strongly enough about resisting the “siren call” of certain kinds of high-paying work that they started Stop the Brain Drain, a national organization with the following mission statement:  

Three years after the Great Recession, we are still experiencing a jobless recovery and need our most innovative and creative minds to build new companies, technologies, and industries. 

Every year, however, up to 25% of graduates from top universities are hired to work for financial institutions – reducing our nation’s supply of job-creating entrepreneurs, scientists, and public servants, and weakening America’s economic dynamism.

Enough is enough: it’s time for America to stop the Wall Street brain drain.

Of course, it is not just about financial institutions recruiting on elite campuses.  It is about the work that needs to be done today, and that you need to be doing—whatever it is.

Envisioning What Your Work Will Look Like

         In my last post, when Philadelphia’s newest Rhodes scholars talked about realizing their ideals through politics, what both wanted to learn was how to make a difference through public service. To do so, they will (among other things) be studying the lives of individuals who have broken through the political log-jams of their own times in an effort to give their principles staying power.

Politics isn’t for everybody. But there is wisdom we can all gain from the lives of extraordinary public servants whose values were in creative tension with the decisions and compromises they were called upon to make every working day.

Whether you are trying to find the right job after years of work or are just starting out, other’s life stories can often provide “both shape and form” to what your own working life might look like. Two such working-life stories, involving principled engagement in political worlds very much like our own, are told by Marcus Tullius Cicero and Edmund Burke.

         Cicero and Burke each wrote extensively about how their ideals served as both catalysts for change and constant reminders of how little they had actually achieved after the political dust had settled. What this kind of “push and pull” might look like as a career is suggested in Mary Ann Glendon’s “Cicero and Burke on Politics as Vocation.”

         In her essay, Glendon’s most telling observation is that while Cicero and Burke both saw themselves primarily as political actors, neither of them could have achieved nearly as much if they had not also been men of ideas.  In fact, their ideas were like a compass that kept them on track. Her quote from one of Burke’s biographers applies with equal force to both of them:

No one has ever come so close to the details of practical politics, and at the same time remembered that these can only be understood and only dealt with by the aid of the broad conceptions of political philosophy.

        

We learn from the lives of Cicero and Burke that while the public person must be engaged today, the private person needs to be thoughtful about his actions tomorrow.

None of us has to be either a politician or a philosopher, but if you want to make a genuine difference in your world, it is probably not enough to simply be engaged.  Those committed to changing the world also bring their ideas to their engagement.  

Best wishes for the New Year.

Yale Student Blues

It was like ice-water-in-the-face when I recently read a hundred, mostly negative responses to Yale student Marina Keegan’s thoughtful New York Times piece called “Another View:  the Science and Strategy of College Recruiting.”

Ostensibly, her article was about how sad she felt that her classmates had come to New Haven with dreams about changing the world but, 3 ½ years later, had found themselves with something far less than that, like jobs in “consulting” or the banking sector. 

What her article was really about was how difficult it is for Keegan and many of her peers to find their way to work with meaning and purpose.

It was the ostensible part of the article that garnered Keegan most of her negative responses. Comments ran the gamut from how spoiled and naïve she is after prep school and now Yale (so take off your rosy glasses), how many students have no job prospects, let alone high-paying ones (so quit your whining), and what great “real world” skills you can build by working in jobs like banking (so seize the day you’ve been given and stop finding fault with it).

But most of the venting missed the truly provocative question Keegan was asking:  for those in her generation who want to make a difference in the world, how can you get a job that will enable you to start doing so?

Keegan had done an informal survey of her fellow students before putting her ideas out there, findings she had reported earlier in the Yale Daily News.  Later in the Times piece, she said:

Maybe I’m overly optimistic, but I think most young, ambitious people want to have a positive impact on the world. Whether it’s through art or activism or advances in science, almost every student I spoke to had some kind of larger, altruistic goal in life. But what I heard again and again was that working at J P Morgan or Bain or Morgan Stanley was the best way to prepare oneself for a future doing public good.

Keegan also was effective at describing the basic challenge (how to go about finding a job, any job) and how easy it is to get diverted from finding the right one.

What I found was somewhat surprising: the clichéd pull of high salaries is only part of the problem. Few college seniors have any idea how to “get a job,” let alone what that job would be. Representatives from the consulting and finance industries come to schools early and often – providing us with application timelines and inviting us to information sessions in individualized e-mails. We’re made to feel special and desired and important.

I know what she means because it was much the same when I was finishing law school, and only the big corporate law firms came to recruit. Both the professional success they seemed to embody and the attention they were paying to me triggered a range of reactions:  I was flattered, relieved at how simplified my job search had suddenly become, and how approving “the world” would be if I took the high-paying road that was opening up before me. I was attracted, and then hooked.  

In 1981, it required deliberation, first to counter the lure of easy choices, and then to find alternative roads, particularly meaningful ones. It is much the same for new workers 30 years later.

Keegan’s hopes for meaningful work belong to many, if not most in her generation. Unlike mine, squarely confronting the challenge may produce more positive results.

This past week, there was an article about two local kids who had been awarded Rhodes scholarships, a high honor conferred on only 32 American college graduates each year.  In talking about what he hoped to make of this opportunity, Zachary Crippen, who is in his last year at the Air Force Academy, said he hoped to study the place in our society where ethics, politics and the law come together and use that information to build a career.  Nina Cohen, at Bryn Mawr College, said almost the same thing.  Her plans are to study political theory, in particular, how ethical beliefs can be reconciled within a liberal democratic framework  

After spending a couple of years in England thinking about these issues, will Crippen and Cohen gain for themselves more information than Keegan seems to have now about how to find the work of their lives?

Others at Yale have thought about the quality of the information we need when making the most important choices in our lives. One is Anthony Kronman, who makes a persuasive argument about developments in higher education that contribute to the deep-seated uncertainty graduates feel today, and what needs to be done about it.  He presents that argument in Education’s End:  Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life (2007).

In the past 50 years, Kronman argues that our institutions of higher learning have largely abandoned their role providing students with “the accumulated wisdom of our civilization.”  College students no longer study the West’s great minds who, throughout the centuries, have thought long and hard about lots of things that all educated people should know something about, including how to live a meaningful life. I whole-heartedly agree with his case for the return of a core “humanistic” curriculum, and will talk some more about why in a later post. I also think that our newest Rhodes scholars are on to something by deciding to take a closer look at both their ideals and how they can play themselves out in the rough and tumble of a political culture.

What I’m afraid of is that they may be the lucky few.  For the rest:  A weak economy.  A need to pay the bills and gain some personal independence. An unfocused, scattershot education. Unhelpful college career services.  And will more education and better information to base decisions upon be enough, even for them?

How does a generation that wants to make a difference find itself the right kind of work?

Inaugural post

The most important thing that I have in this world is my life.

One reason my life is important has to do with what I can do with it—the wonderful things I can accomplish when I make the most of it—both for myself and for others. We all have an opportunity to make something truly extraordinary out of our lives. But at the same time, this opportunity is constrained by the limited time that we have been given to realize it.

We spend a lot of our limited time working. We work because we have to, to make money, to give ourselves and those who need us a place to live and a measure of material comfort. But there are more life-changing opportunities to be realized through our work than what it can buy for us.

Work can be an opportunity to learn how to use our talents to become more productive. It can be an opportunity to test our capabilities and, by doing so, gain an increasing sense of personal power: to discover the difference we can make when we’re firing on all cylinders. It can be an opportunity to fill the shoes we were born with.

Work is also an opportunity to join our productivity with that of our co-workers to make something of value. What our work produces can have value in the marketplace, namely, the goods and services we have come to either need or want in our consumer-driven society. But our work can also produce value at a deeper level. Our work can help to make the world the kind of better place that we want it to be.

Many of us expect little more from our work than a paycheck, some pleasant interaction with our co-workers, and a vague sense of accomplishment at the end of the day. We don’t expect our work to give us a higher sense of self-regard because of how capable we are becoming by doing it. We don’t expect our work to further objectives we care about or to help change things for the better.

Given the limited time we are given to realize the opportunity in our lives—and the huge amount of our time that we spend working—we should all be expecting more from our work. And when our work isn’t meeting our expectations, we should start thinking about creating the right kind of work for ourselves.

This blog is committed to thinking about what we should expect from our work, what we need to do to clarify those expectations in our lives, and how to create for ourselves the kind of work that meets those expectations when we can’t find it elsewhere.

Work Today
On September 22, the U.S. Census Bureau released figures showing that one in three young people, ages 20 to 29, were unemployed. With a national unemployment rate hovering around 9%, the actual number of Americans who want to work but can’t find jobs may be closer to 20% of the workforce (or roughly 60 million Americans!). The lost opportunity is simply staggering.  


I am writing this from Philadelphia, which now enjoys the unfortunate distinction of being the Poorest Big City in the United States.  According to the same Census figures, 27 percent of Philadelphia’s residents, and more than one third of its children, are living below the federal poverty level. In some of our neighborhoods, the unemployment rate approaches 50 percent.  Philadelphia also has the lowest percentage of college graduates.  With only one in ten of those students who entered our public high schools in 1999 completing college, there are far too few low level jobs available for the rest.  It is like waters building behind a dam.

A discussion I had a few years back made these statistics more personal. I wanted to write to City gas utility customers about a plan I had for lowering their gas costs for things like cooking and heating. As the discussion went on, my thinking changed rapidly from what to say to how. 

While I knew that a third of Philadelphia’s residents cannot read at all, I learned that even more have such minimal skills that they can read little more than the labels on products in the grocery or drug store:  Heinz ketchup, Tide detergent.  In other words, as many as two thirds of our residents may be unable to comprehend two straightforward paragraphs. So much for sending the utility’s 500,000+ customers my carefully reasoned attempt at communication.  

At this point, my mind wandered to political campaigns in India, where the principal communication with millions of its poor and illiterate voters involves little more than the display of recognizable symbols, like a clock (the National Congress Party), a hand (the Indian National Party), or a lotus flower (the Baharatiya Janata Party).  I realized that if India’s economy is “emerging” from this primitive state, our’s may be “slipping back.” In what would have been a first for Philadelphia’s natural gas utility, it occurred to me that I could have used a stove with dollar bills jumping out of it to get our customers’ attention, but where I would have gone from there with them remains a mystery.

Shockingly widespread poverty and low literacy disable Americans from becoming productive.  For a nation preoccupied with worker productivity and gross national “product,” the lost opportunity this represents (and its associated costs) are unacceptable to me and likely to many others who are reading this.  But poverty and illiteracy, that is, particular social problems, are not the aim of this conversation. The aim here is to care about, and then do something about whatever realities you find unacceptable in the world today as an integral part of your work.

Many seeking jobs here in Philadelphia (and elsewhere) are not in the pool of permanent unemployment occupied by people who are unlikely to find or keep a job in America’s economy today.  These are unemployed Americans who read and hold high school diplomas and college degrees, and already have valuable skills and job experience.


This waste of our working potential is a further crime, but unfortunately we are far from being out of the woods. Lawrence Katz, an economist at Harvard, recently said: “The labor market has shown absolutely no recovery. There’s no scenario in which the labor market doesn’t continue to need help three to four years from now.” 

Beyond what I have already said about the priority of realizing the promise in our lives through our work, today’s employment market may provide an additional argument for those of you who still need convincing. Its harsh realities may provide the final catalyst for you to start thinking about the nature and quality of your work in a whole new way.

If you cannot find any work with established employers—let alone fulfilling work—then it may be time to start thinking seriously about creating the right kind of job for yourself. (Necessity is the mother of invention. And we are, after all, a nation of entrepreneurs.)

Once you start looking to yourself for a job, why not give yourself a job that is both productive and fulfilling. There is lots of work that needs to be done to improve the world as you see it, and much of it will make you a happier and more fully realized person while doing it.

From this vantage point, the current employment challenges will involve some different mechanics than the usual job search: how to bring your energy, talent and imagination to the work that you create for yourself, and how to “make a living” while doing it.

Work That Makes You Feel Good About Doing It
Philosophers since Aristotle have committed a lot of words to describing the kinds of experiences that make us feel fulfilled in our lives and in our engagement with the world around us. They have generally concluded that we gain a sense of wellbeing when the way we live has both meaning and purpose.

Recent data is confirming their traditional wisdom. Industrial psychologists have begun to prove empirically that workers need to feel that their work has purpose and meaning for them to also find it satisfying. At the same time, professionals in a range of health-related fields are demonstrating the measurable benefits to both body and mind that result when the way that we work and live has these two components, making us feel productive and fulfilled. (We’ll be looking at several of these studies in a later post.) The first element that must be present for us to gain a sense of well-being from our work is dynamic in nature.

As suggested earlier, work has meaning and purpose when it involves your becoming someone who is smarter, more efficient or more energized, and as a result, more capable than you were before you started doing it. This kind of work likely produces something of value for the business you are in (and you get paid either a little or a lot for doing it), but it also adds to your self-confidence and skill. Accordingly, this kind of work tends to increase productivity in two directions: yielding not only higher returns for your workplace but also for you in terms of personal empowerment.

Work that has purpose and meaning also brings you closer to meeting important personal goals. While this includes financial independence and being able to provide for those who depend on you, it also involves accomplishing broader objectives that you care about. They can be internal to the workplace, like collaboration. Or they can extend beyond it, to external objectives: Protecting the environment. Maintaining a level playing field for all when it comes to opportunity. Providing access to safe housing, to adequate healthcare or nutrition. Mandating transparency in the political process or in the financial markets. Believing that everyone deserves a basic quality of life. These are the kinds of commitments that reflect your values: the principles that influence important decisions in your own life and in your engagement with the wider world.

Your work can vindicate your values, and make the world into what you believe will be a better place, in several ways. The nature of the work itself is one. What you’re making, or the service you’re providing, can have this sort of upside. In other words, those who buy your products or use your services may become smarter, healthier, able to communicate faster or travel more comfortably, have warmer houses or produce less pollution than they did before because of your product or service—and you may feel good about that.

Another way your work can further your values is how it’s being done. Does the place where you work improve the community where it’s based? Does it treat its employees, customers and suppliers fairly? Does it play a socially responsible role in its industry?

The value-charged goals we have as individuals are either met or disappointed in our workplaces today. We are either becoming more capable and more powerful as individuals when we do our jobs or we’re not. When you come to the realization that your work is making you feel neither productive nor fulfilled, it is time to think about creating the kind of work that will brings you returns in terms of job satisfaction and personal wellbeing. This kind of work is an opportunity that each of us has to make a living while living a life that is worth living.

Taking Everything Too Seriously (or Not)
Because our discussion here will often be about serious things like work and values, becoming happier and more productive, and even finding the so-called “meaning of life,” there will always be a risk that I will start taking myself too seriously (or one of you might find yourself unintentionally doing the same) while we’re in the middle of this conversation. After all, the stakes are high and time’s a-wasting.

While these are all things that matter and need to be talked about, I would also like for us to have this conversation without breast-beating, pontificating, I’m right/you’re wrong, I’m smarter than you are (or all of those people are over there)—that is, without the edge in the voice that tends to creep in whenever we leave the realm of small consequences for the realm of big ones.

How exactly can we do this?
There are several possible ways. You could leave this conversation to get a dose of balance, sanity and humor by taking your search engine to another page entirely. (I’ll recommend some interesting destinations from time to time.) You could also just close your screen and find some domestic source to restore both balance and perspective. But I’d rather that you take a moment to get a grip right here and quickly rejoin our conversation.  For this purpose, I will always try to provide at least one place on this page (and eventually more) where you can go to get “Back in the Moment” and balance the seriousness and passion of our quest with a smile. 

The animated Introduction "Connecting Your Values to Your Work" provides a slightly different angle for looking at what we’ll be discussing in these posts—as well as some basic information about why I wanted to have this conversation in the first place. It’s the same water, I think, but with some bubbles added to give it a lighter finish when it’s needed.

The words of Francois VI, the Duc de La Rochefoucauld and Prince de Marcillac—or just “La Rochefoucauld” as we have come to know him today—are also helpful in this regard. Among his Collected Maxims and Other Reflections (1678), La Rochefoucauld included the following:   

                             Virtue would not go far if vanity did not keep her company.


When we are in touch with them, our principles do require some arrogance, along with more-than-a-little vain posturing and righteous indignation if they are to help us prevail and make a difference in the world. It is a way that you speak truth to power. But at least for purposes of our strategizing together in this discussion, there is a more productive balance to be struck. Thanks in advance for helping with that.