Open the Door

Discovery results—as often as not—from our ability to combine the familiar with the unexpected into a new way of doing things.  It’s as true about the challenges we face at work, as it is about figuring out what kind of work we should be doing in the first place.

If you want to start seeing your work differently, there is no better way than to break down your preconceptions about yourself as a “worker,” and put everything back together with the leavening agent of new information.

Shake it up.  See new possibilities in familiar territory. Recognize how ideas that seem to have nothing in common (like “producing social benefits” and “profit-making”) can be brought together in an exercise of the imagination to provide you with work that is as productive for you as it is for others.

But what if we’re so ensconced in our little worlds that unexpected combinations—the raw materials for insight—can rarely, if ever happen?

         That many of us choose to live in a limited world when we have an unlimited world at our fingertips, at first seems to make little sense. Our smart phones give us near-instant access to almost everything. But instead of using that outlet as an opportunity to learn new things and to grow, too often we use the most powerful tool we have ever held in our hands to do little more than validate what we already know.

         Much of it is fear—a key by-product of what Alvin Toffler called “future shock.”

Barraged by more-information-than-ever that risks confusing our most cherished beliefs, there is a strong pull to retreat into our comfort zones in order to (as we see it) feel more in control and function more effectively.  

But how effective are we (either for ourselves or for others) when everything we think about and do is dictated by our preconceptions about what is “real” and “true,” and what is not?  

Making the glut of available information manageable doesn’t require closing ourselves off from conflicting information.  To do so confines us in a too-small world, because it’s precisely this kind of information that contributes the most to insight and change, to personal growth and tolerance.

        Jonathan Swift, the great English author of Gulliver’s Travels, famously said: “He was a bold man that first ate an oyster.”

It’s not easy to be bold and try something new. It certainly required an altered state for me to dive into that first sushi platter 30 years ago with my friend Mitch, eager to give me a taste of what he was learning from his Japanese clients. But once you start opening doors, your days huddling around “the old and settled” seem limiting and lifeless. It’s about stepping out and being fully human.

        You can get a powerful glimpse of the thrust to evolve and fling open the doors to possibility in schools committed to innovation, like the Institute of Design (or “d-school”) at Stanford and the MIT Media Lab. These learning centers get students out of their silos of specialization by making all courses interdisciplinary, so that unexpected combinations start taking form. The goal at such places isn’t getting good grades or parroting the “right” answers, but risking the “stupid” question, learning from your mistakes, and sometimes entering a new frontier.

        Of course, reaching boldly through reluctance or fear and towards possibility can have benefits everywhere.

If you think of your work in the same old ways, you will have the same old work. When you believe only what you’re accustomed to believe and tune out the rest, how could it be otherwise? You’re living in an echo chamber.     

        You don’t have to be like everyone else, stuck in conventional ways of thinking about your work.

It’s not just about finding “a job,” but finding “the right job for who you are.”

It’s not just about making money, but getting a better mix of rewards from your work—including a sense of purpose.

It’s not just about products and services the market already demands, but also about creating new markets.

It’s not just about someone else giving you a job; sometimes it’s about creating the right job for yourself.  

If you’re not open to new (and better) ways of thinking about your work, you will never be able—step by step—to breathe life into them.  

Open that door.

I Am a Work in Progress

          How you introduce yourself has everything to do with how you see yourself.

        I am a writer. A speaker. A company starter and a dispute resolver.  But that’s not all that I am. How others see me, and even more importantly, how I see myself, is contained in the words I use to describe myself.  These words should include all the things that you are, including what you’re working to become: the dynamic as well as the static parts of you.

        All of us are works in progress, tadpoles becoming frogs. 

Fold to Assemble

That’s probably why it’s so limiting when people are summed up with adjectives that speak only to their former glories.  Academy award nominated actress.  Nobel prize-winning economist. President Clinton. What we hear is that you’ve already come and gone.  Summed up, and no longer becoming.

        Over-simplified packaging (even to honor) probably derives from our survival instincts.  A stranger approaches:  is she friend or foe?  As we start learning more about her, we put her in one category or the other. Where is she in my pecking order, and where am I in hers?  Today it’s no longer safety we’re most concerned about, but meeting the expectations we have for ourselves, and that others are busy imposing upon us.

        What I’m talking about is scrambling those expectations in the ways that are best for you as soon as you start talking about yourself.

        Doing so changes everything: the way you see your work, the way you think about your life. Because these are the words you are choosing to define yourself.

        Social media has made tagging ourselves the very springboard for conversation. This wasn’t the case “in the olden days” where self-description was limited to more specific occasions  (Resumes. A few lines in a yearbook. A short bio when someone was introducing you someplace).

        Today, we are constantly introducing and branding ourselves.  When there is truth in our marketing, these kinds of tags can move our expectations (and the expectations that others have about us) to the rich-with-promise places where they need to be.

        I have a friend who describes himself as “the home inspector lawyer, professional speaker, and raconteur.” His promise is that he’ll help you with your home inspection problems, and that you’ll have fun while he’s doing it. Joe is many things, but first and foremost he’s an entertainer: happiest when he’s making you happy.

         I am collaborating with a woman who describes herself as an “empire builder.” Whose empire, you might ask?  The stated goal is that it’s mine, but (in truth) some of the best energy in our collaboration also comes from being a part of what Amy’s building for herself.  And then there’s the software developer at a client’s company whose bio begins with “puzzle piecer.” When I read this, I see my fragmented jigsaw puzzle sprawling over a table and Jonathon’s getting a charge by helping me find that recalcitrant piece.

         People like this who involve other people in what they’re doing—and with who they are—are influential people.  There are even meters for tracking their influence (like Klout; PeerIndex; Appinions; and PeopleBrowsr, the creator of something called Kred). The endorsements of influential people are important precisely because there are all of us out here who want to be involved with them and learn from the choices they’re making.

         Mark Schaefer, a Rutgers marketing professor, has put his finger on the way that influencers are creating buzz with their followers in social media today.

This is an entirely new marketing channel, and when’s the last time we had one of those?  Done well, it can be enormously effective because you’re getting this advocacy [for whatever it is you’re offering] organically.

But organic marketing is really only part of it.  

It’s not the reflected glory from past accomplishments that influential people are providing, but future promises. In the words they use, each of them is involving our expectations with theirs.  Not by offering a static summary of who they are, but by opening a door that invites you into a shared experience you begin creating together:  truly, a springboard into the future.

Think about defining yourself this way.

It’s more than just words, of course. But the right ones invite others into your work-in-progress—while putting your best foot forward.

I am (not) my job

             We’ve all had the feeling in the pit of our stomachs.  Somebody asks you “What do you do?”  They seem to think they’ll learn a lot about you by asking, but you’d rather they never had.

 Maybe your job needs too much defending or explaining. Or you’d rather not have to think about “what you do” when you’re not doing it.  Maybe you don’t have a job to talk about. Maybe it’s just an inadequate measure of who you are. 

  It doesn’t have to be.

“What do you do?” is usually a stranger’s second question. (The first—“Where are you from?”—is just an icebreaker, before getting down to business.)  As he sums you up, he can already see your age, sex and race, and how well you present.  Your job provides all the remaining information he thinks he needs for his snapshot of you.

Because it’s a demonstration of your worth.  It gives him your rung on the social ladder. He thinks he’ll learn something about how hard you’ve worked and how smart you are when you tell him. You don’t have to let the question sum you up so easily.  

Never just say: “I work at ___,”  “I’m a ___,” or “I’m studying to be a ___.”

                                                            

Tag yourself differently. Take the opportunity this question presents to define yourself in the ways that you want to be defined.

            I was struck the other day by a column about work in my local paper entitled “It’s Not All That We Are.” The writer had been watching her co-workers, who had lost their newspaper jobs, leave for the last time. They got some final applause when they left the newsroom from the employees whose jobs—like hers—had been spared. Then she wrote:

         "When the applause ends, a dreadful silence sets in."

In this moment-after, when you could hear a pin drop, the importance of a job like writer or copy editor “takes on mythical proportions.”  Indeed, when it’s gone the void can seem so huge that it’s hard to find what’s left of the person who held it.

At times like this, a job can seem like all that we are.  The dread hangs in the air over those who have been left behind, silently wondering what the applause would sound like for what remains of them.

            It’s not just that our work is too important in our lives. It’s that the other things that are important about us are not more front and center—holding their own with our jobs as essential and obvious parts of who we are.

It’s those things about us that can’t be taken away when a job is.

While the question “what do you do” is looking for a quick summary of your utility in the world, your answer should always speak to your contributions and your value in broader ways.

Your answer should no longer be a label or a tag, but a very short story. 

It should speak to your present but also your future.  (I am this, working to be that.)  It should speak to your commitments.  (I write or draw or raise dogs, I travel, sing or climb, I help my elderly neighbors, I march in parades.)  It should speak to your spirit. (I live for the silence after a snow has fallen, or for the roar of twenty thousand baseball fans.)  You need to put this kind of information out there too.

A very short story in 3 parts that says:  my job is only part of “what I do.”