Premeditated Thought

Passion and Money

Much has been written about following your passion to the money. Chris Guillebeau's The Art of Conformity blog recently summarized views from several leading bloggers on whether they truly believe you can follow the path from passion to wealth.  The consensus is that passion is a necessary, but not sufficient, factor in working your way to wealth.  Mignon Fogart, Grammar Girl, summarizes it nicely: "I think it is much harder to be successful if you aren’t doing something you love because success takes time and commitment, and those are easier to give if you’re happy and engaged in your job."

Many of the experts simply state the obvious: that some fields simply don't offer the opportunity for wealth.  Passion (and talent) will help you reach the pinnacle of your field, but won't guarantee you wealth. 

Or at least not without some creative thinking.  For example, you won't get rich from teaching; but if you take an expanded entrepreneurial   view of teaching, you can create your own learning annex and get rich.  Once the money is driving you, though, and not the passion, other research shows that you will have less career satisfaction.

The best way to get rich?  Be passionate about making money.  But then you've got other problems.

Existential Crisis

This blog is not confessional, but if I am going to write about meaning and identity, occasional personal bits will slip through my filter.  Here's one I'm holding the door for:

Tonight I am sitting at home for the second straight day, having slept too much from a flu.  I am facing an existential crisis.  The cause, or so I tell myself, is that I am looking toward the end of my MBA, and looking back at what it has meant to me as a person.  I am sure I will be writing more about this as May graduation gets closer.

What brought this on was a short story a woman in my class sent me late last night.  The gesture touched me; I do not know this woman, but my posting on identity reminded her of a story she had written.  The one-page fable is about a little hexagonal iron nut that was no longer holding together a computer system.  The nut had suddenly lost its purpose in life.

Prior to applying for Stern's MBA program, I had been writing fairly regularly for several years.   At weak moments, I had dreams of cashing out on my NYC apartment, enrolling in an MFA program, and writing in some shack in Mississippi.  Or the Rhode Island coast. 

I always read voraciously.  My bookshelves are stocked with magic realists, nineteenth century Russians, Kundera, collections of short stories, Robert Stone, the great twentieth century Jewish American writers, James Joyce, and oodles of eighteenth century romantic literature.

I haven't read a novel since September 2004, when I started my MBA program.  Aside from New Yorker stories, I've read little fiction in the interim.  I feel the void.

To return my new friend's (well, I've yet to meet her) gesture, I sent her a story I had written in December 2003.  The plot tracks a man's rebellion against his hell-bent pursuit of money at the risk of any deeper emotional life.  His guide out of the abyss is an Isis-like character.

The MBA has not cost me my soul.  Many of the courses, especially on the leadership track, emphasize our humanity.  Yet the program as a whole is of course focused around the pursuit of career, whatever that may mean.   And at the end of winter, with the last of my sixty credits fast being awarded, that single-minded pursuit finds me searching for deeper meaning again.

And, with that in mind, I am about to crack open Durrell's brilliant opening to the Alexandria Quartet, Justine. 

Self-Identity and Adaptability

Rick Miller, in a case I read for my change management class at NYU this week, is forced by external circumstances to make major career choices.  Having been CFO at RCA, he opted to take a line management position to gain operations experience, where he was on the fast track toward CEO.  Miller was caught unaware when his division was sold to GE (wounding his pride in the process, since he was not involved in the negotiation).  Despite realizing he had little chance to become CEO of GE, he took the challenge of rebuilding GE's consumer electronics division.  After just nine months on the job, Jack Welch surprised him by announcing that Thomson, a French company, had made an offer for GE's consumer electronics division.  "I don't even know the French national anthem," Miller said to himself while contemplating whether to follow his division to Thomson.

In class, we discussed Miller's dilemma mostly in terms of entitlement and complacency.  To me, it was about self-identity.  Miller defined his career in certain terms: he was going to be CEO of a major American brand and help American competitiveness in the process.   Taking a position at Thomson would mean rejecting that self-identity.

It is often said that Americans, more than other nationalities, define themselves through their career, their work, and their ambitions.  "What do you do?" is a frequent conversation starter.   Yet we are often faced with changes we cannot control.  In my career, my company has been sold (twice), my division has been spun-off (twice) and I've been laid-off.   Each change forced me to consider how I define my career.  Of course, the lay-off forced me to confront much more about my self-identity as a successful professional.

Rick Miller had specific career goal, but many people I know have an even narrower self-identity.  They may be malpractice attorneys or Unix kernel hackers, but what they have in common is a vulnerability to external forces.  Too narrow a self-identity is a straitjacket.  In this view, Resistance to change can be the result of a slim self-identity.

In fields driven by technological progress, maintaining a broad identity - being a generalist, perhaps - is increasing in importance.  In The Singularity Is Near, Ray Kurzweil says "the time to adapt new paradigms is going down by half each decade."  With the pace of change so rapid, what we started our career doing is almost certainly not what we will end up doing.  Most of us will change careers several times, sometimes within the same general field, but not always.  Even if we stay in the same field, we may be doing drastically different work than what we had anticipated - such as management instead of technical work.

To build a capacity for change, we must create a broad career self-identity.  Doing so lessens the impact of sudden unexpected shocks and provides leeway to find new positions that fit your self-image.

But to truly be flexible and less traumatized by uncontrollable career-changing events, I think we need to develop non-work identities.  Healthy relationships and hobbies - whatever floats your boat - all serve as stabilizers for unexpected turbulence.   

The Self-Actualized Manager

I first became a manager in 1996, and was immediately inspired by the challenges of leading a team to create and produce.  It is this context - during a 360-review - that I first ran across the term self-actualize.  The charge to produce results when you can no longer do the work yourself broadens how you think of yourself.  You become influencer, mentor, leader, and coach.  And so Richard Florida's narrow view of managers disappoints me in Creativity versus Control.

The way I see it is this battle between creativity and control is the defining issue of our age. It goes back several decades now. And it crystallized around the sixties when this thing first came to a head. Have a look again at Daniel Bell's classic, Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. He lays it all out there. Economic growth and development is leading to a culture clash. People no longer want to keep in line with the old Protestant work ethic - slave away at their jobs, conform to expectations, save money. They want to  self-actualize, have fun, and self-express. Or as Virginia's Republican Congressman Tom Davis has taken to saying: "economic development works."  When people get richer, they demand more out of life.

The rise of self-expression challenges lots of people - middle managers for one, old-school politicians, national leaders.  For them, solution is simply to reinstate control - to squelch self-expression and creativity. Even if it costs innovation and economic growth.  We see it everyday in companies, in countries and in cities and regions.  That's what squelchers do.

In other words, the Me Generation.

To me, management is a challenge to one's maturity.  Effective management and leadership requires sharing the spotlight and giving up control, not asserting control.  If maturity is part of self-actualization, then becoming a manager can be a step toward being all you can be.  Not all managers see things this way; the one's that don't become Florida's squelchers.  The best ones, though, realize that to get the most value from their team, they need to leave room for creativity and self-expression. 

The best managers learn to harness this self-expression via a loose-tight leadership model.  This model is identified in Tom Peter's In Search of Excellence as one of the eight attributes of management excellence.  Loose refers to a more participative management style, whereas tight is more directive, command-and-control leadership.

But is this reach for self-realization blunting my pursuit of self-expression and creativity?  The blunt answer to that can be found in the existence of this blog.  The blog serves as outlet.  In response to Florida, I would say that the real tension I feel is between a broad view of self-realization and a me-first focused desire for self-expression.

Be Here Now: Zen and Career Happiness

In the January 14 Financial Times, Lucy Kellaway wrote an article intringuingly titled "Why 'post-ambition' is the secret to career enlightment."  I read it with the hope that somehow I would find the off-ramp to the rat race.  Twenty-plus years into my career, I am at an age when one sees as much in the rear-view mirror as open road in front.  Kellaway's husband, in a similar stage in his career, recently came to the conclusion that he was no longer as ambitious as he had once been, leading to his self-congratulory (if true) statement that "Ambition is nothing but a displacement activity for unhappy people."  Kellaway writes

The trouble with ambition is that, however well you are doing, you could do better.  The further up you climb, the more your options shrink as the pyramid above you narrows.  Although you'll earn a fortune, you'll spend your life enviously grinding your teeth over those who earn an even bigger one.

The only sensible answer is to aim at a varied level of ambition over a lifetime.  Those starting out need a lot, but after a couple of decades, the trick is not to strive to keep ambition live, but to give it a good death.  Not everyone can be CEO.  Hardly anyone can live their "inspiring career dreams."  Instead we need to feel successful and fulfilled without advancing at all.

Wow.  Ambition sure doesn't sound like a lot of fun.

My problem with this passage is that is views ambition as the motor of career advancement.  Many people certainly become CEO through some combination raw ambition and talent (and judicious career planning).  Most people, however, that are driven by raw ambition end up unhappy with their career for exactly the reasons Kellaway state.

There is a better way.

Given that we all want to be both successful and happy, the key to career happiness is to choose what you do wisely.  At any moment of your career, you should find your work interesting, engaging, and challenging.  When you cease to be absorbed by work (at work, not 24 hours a day), it is time for a change.  If you have achieved a level of mastery, it is time to move either laterally, or upward.  To me, this is the secret to lifelong career serenity.

The irony of this is that by focusing on doing what you love, and doing it well, you will put yourself in a better position to succeed.

Since we are all human, ambition will rear its ugly head now and again.  It is only natural to compare your success with that of your neighbor's.  But if you honestly enjoy going to work every day, you'll have the last laugh.