Quickies: The Joys Of Retirement

     When you’ve worked three-quarters of your life, you can find it difficult to adapt to retirement. But today, which is the third anniversary of my retirement date, I find myself appreciating it more than ever. In honor of Saint Joseph the Workman, whose feast day it is, let me count the reasons...well, a few of them, anyway:

• I write my own schedule.
• The coffee is plentiful and potable.
• No one gives me static about eating at my desk.
• I only need to get dressed if I choose to leave the house.
• And what I choose to wear is no one’s business but mine.
• If the phone rings, I’m allowed to ignore it...and I often do.
• I can answer the phone “Suicide prevention. Will you please hold?”
• (Granted, that’s not a good idea if the call is from my beloved wife.)
• All my reference books are at home with me, and are easily accessed.
• And I am never told that I must attend some pointless meeting.

     After pondering the above, I think Item #10 alone justifies retirement.

Finding Equilibrium

I've been a focused person most of my life. I finished college with 3 kids and a husband, while working part-time. I worked full-time as a teacher, while building a business with my husband, and with 3 kids at home.

When I decided to work on my Master's, I threw myself into it whole-heartedly, while continuing to blog almost every day.

In SC, I worked as a teacher, often taking on new classes with unfamiliar content, and simultaneously attending and providing professional development, earning an amateur radio license, mentoring other science teachers, and writing a book.

Oh, and still blogging - for about 14 years now.

How did I do that? I'm a relatively single-minded person, who puts all her energy into the most important task at the moment. I'm good at breaking things down into bite-sized chunks. I'm also capable of ignoring other issues/tasks until I have the time.

Like cleaning the house. Or shopping for groceries. I'd be lying to say that it hasn't led to a few arguments with my spouse. However, I always kept the main task at the top of my mind, and attention.

When I retired, I anticipated finally having time to complete an in-process novel; I'm still working on the revisions, although I've made notes on what needs to change. My goal is to have it ready for copyediting by the end of the year.

So, I've begun looking at other possible choices for part-time money. I don't need a lot, just a few hundred a month to fill the gap between income and expenses. Whatever I do, it will have to fit into my household organization, novel revision/next novel planning, and volunteer work.

In short, I will make - at last - efforts to bring balance to my life.

The Journey Of A Lifetime

I’m in a somewhat philosophical mood this morning, partly because of some reflections over events of the weekend just behind us, and partly because anything too political will push my blood pressure past four figures. (I can’t write unceasingly about political subjects. It’s been slowly but steadily boiling all the happy bits right out of my brain.) So forgive me, Gentle Reader, if you find the following disconnected from your mundane concerns. I assure you, it connects quite well to mine.

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A question I’ve recently tried to keep continuously in mind, which I commend to all of you, is:

“Why are you doing this particular thing at this particular moment?”

Much of what any individual does is habit-based. The habit in question might be an important one, perhaps even a survival imperative. Nevertheless, habitual actions are undertaken automatically, nearly always without thought. It refreshes one to remember the whys of such actions; it makes them seem less mechanical and more purposeful.

Many of one’s remaining decisions and consequent actions arise from an aversion of some sort. To be more precise, we think of something to do – something that might get us nearer to some goal – and immediately find ourselves thinking of the negative aspects. In many cases, we turn aside from the action we’d thought to take – and in many of those cases, the deep reason is time preference.

In the simplest terms, we value a near-term reward over a long-term reward when the two are nominally equal. A dollar put in one’s today beats a dollar to be delivered tomorrow. Indeed, we value a dollar in hand today above a dollar and some cents tomorrow. There are several reasons:

• Gratification of desire is difficult to defer;
• Promised rewards sometimes fail to materialize;
• An asset currently in hand can often be used to generate a greater reward than what one was promised in return for one’s patience;
• If further investment, whether of time, money, or effort, is required to win the promised reward, those things have their own costs, both materially and in opportunities forgone.

The struggle to overcome our time preferences is summarized by a lapel button I once saw:

Hard work pays off tomorrow;
Laziness pays off today.

It also explains Americans’ willingness to finance current consumption with long-term indebtedness.

---

Before the weekend, I had promised myself that I’d get some work done on Statesman, the sequel to Polymath. (Regarding which, I could still use reviews. Hint! Hint!) Well, to cut straight to the chase, I didn’t. What stopped me wasn’t an overload of more urgent tasks; it was time preference. It takes me about a year to turn out a novel. I can’t confront that extensive an effort without being beset by reluctance to begin, no matter how ardently I want to see the book finished. This past weekend I simply needed more get-up-and-go than I possessed to set to work on a project whose completion is so far away.

You’d think a writer with nine novels already out would have conquered that hill by now, wouldn’t you? Yet that “potential well” of reluctance has grown deeper with each completed book, because I know how much effort and suffering another one will cost me. This past weekend, a little immediate gratification from a quick short story seemed far more appealing. In case you haven’t already noticed, here’s what resulted.

My case is surely not unique. Only a writer of absolute and unfailing discipline is unaffected by this problem. And of course, it’s not confined to writers. The dissuasive power of time preference afflicts us all.

---

In Freedom’s Scion, at a critical juncture for Althea’s emotional development, she has the following exchange with her “dead” grandfather Armand:

     Grandpere! It’s been—
     —Nearly two years. I know, I know. You needed the time to yourself. Never fear, I’d have been there if you ever really needed me.
     (grimly) I had plenty of needs!
     —Nothing you were unable to handle by yourself, dear.
     And you knew that...how?
     —I know you.
     It halted her in mid-flight.
     My self-imposed exile wasn’t for any particular purpose. Maybe it served one even so.
     —No maybes about it, Al. You are not who or what you were. You’re far more. Some of it is invisible to you yet, though it won’t be forever. Just one of the unacknowledged laws of human nature at work.
     Which is?
     —At every moment of your life, you are everything you have ever been. It’s all there, from the instant of your birth onward to this very moment. And it all plays a part.
     Even the pain?
     —Especially the pain.

That “unacknowledged law of human nature” is more frequently overlooked than observed and respected. (Why, we might even call it “obvious!”) It has a clear application to our relations with others, but what I have in mind this morning is how it affects our preconceptions and decisions about our own lives.

What we “know” is really more often than not what we “have known:” i.e., what we have experienced in times past. We did this and then that happened. Sometimes we infer causal relations from those sequences of events. Sometimes our inferences are correct, and sometimes we’re merely being superstitious. Nevertheless, it’s the way the mind works: we associate our undertakings both with the rewards we got for them and with their costs in time, effort, and suffering.

However, there’s an important component that’s often left on memory’s “cutting room floor:” the pleasure of the moment.

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I’ve told my Gentle Readers on several occasions that I mostly write these pieces for myself, as a way of reasoning out my intuitions. It happens to be true; I did it before there was a World Wide Web, and I’m certain I’d continue to do it if the Web were to be shut down forever (shudder). This is just one more example of the practice.

What I’m going to try to do, when next I have time to work on Statesman or any other extended project, is to focus on the pleasure inherent in the instantaneous act of writing: the specific and immediate reward of getting the next scene, paragraph, sentence, or word exactly right. Narrowing my focus down to the very instant in which my fingers touch the keys might just be enough, not to “overcome” my awareness of the pain and struggle that lies before me, but to forget about it entirely for as long as I write.

After all, I can hardly argue with Armand; he’s a planetary Overmind. According to him, at every moment of my life I’m everything I’ve ever been. If so, then each moment is the culmination of my life’s journey up to that moment. In some sense, it’s why I’ve lived – why I’ve done everything I’ve ever done.

Note how this perspective differs from the typical “life is a journey” platitude: you don’t have a finish line to reach before it can be significant. You’re standing at a “finish line” at every instant of your life. That you can’t always hear the roar of millions of adoring fans is of infinitely less importance.

That makes it a pretty important moment, one that deserves my full attention...and my full powers of enjoyment. I’ll try hard not to waste it.

Encroachment: Five Years Or Five Yards?

Yet another demonstration of why Charles Hill is a long-time favorite of mine:

[M]any people well and truly hate their daily commutes, and that mass-transit options would appeal greatly to them if the logistics worked out. In my case, the logistics don't work out: bus stops are more conveniently placed for me than you might think, but two hours in and two hours back is 3:20 longer than it takes me to drive the 10.6-mile loop. And what bothers me, I think, is that people will look at that and think, "Oh, wow, three hours I can use to get stuff done."

Get stuff done? What can they do on the bus that they can't do at home? And this is where I part ways with these folks. One of my desiderata is a distinct line of demarcation between Work Hours and Non-Work Hours, and that line is paved with asphalt. I'm not taking my work home with me, and the stuff I'm not taking home, I'm not bringing back the next day....

This is not to say that my position is unimportant, or that I'm easily replaced; however, damn little I do has to be done Right This Instant Or Else, and since it is tacitly acknowledged that I manage time superbly well, they're generally loath to play the Emergency card.

My word, how I've longed to hear others voice such sentiments!

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"Emergency! Everybody to get from street!" -- "The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!"

There's an inevitable tension between work and those activities (including total inactivity) that are not work. It's difficult to define the boundary between them with exactitude, especially since many of us find the activities in the former category pleasurable, while the latter category -- for those among us insufficiently rich to hire a household staff, at least -- includes many things that, given an acceptable alternative, we'd rather not do. For the purposes of this screed, let's use a wage paid by an employer as the line of demarcation.

Accepting a wage for your labor creates both an unwritten contract and a set of expectations. It's in the nature of the conventional employment-at-will arrangement that both these things are incompletely defined. For example:

• The "contract" doesn't specify standards of quality, nor does it encompass everything you'll be asked to do.
• The expectations might include "emergency" provisions your employer can invoke, which he will deem you ethically bound to respect.

The consequences for ignoring the force of those considerations can be dramatic, ranging from your supervisor's spoken chastisement to an expensive lawsuit.

An unscrupulous supervisor will ruthlessly exploit such invisible-ink provisions in your "contract" to his and his company's benefit. Again in the usual case, you'll have little recourse beyond submitting your resignation and finding a better gig. White-collar workers are, of course, the cohort most exposed to such hazards.

In particular, the cost of compliance with invocations of emergency can be significant. The upper bound is higher than you might think. If we take a standard "work year" as 2000 hours of labor (50 weeks per year, 40 hours per week) and a standard "career" as forty-five such years (90,000 hours), your supervisor can add five years to that career by extracting slightly less than one extra hour of labor per working day from you. As the typical white-collar worker isn't paid overtime, that would equate to fifty years' labor for forty-five years' compensation.

That doesn't strike me as a bargain I'd care to make. Yet millions of other Americans have done so.

---

There's some truth in the old maxim that If you need something done in a hurry, take it to a busy man. As it happens, the busiest man in a typical shop is also the most skilled and productive man there. As skill and productivity are difficult to conceal, extra work "finds him" almost automatically. He usually can't decline the honor without some sort of penalty.

A brief personal vignette is illustrative. As a software engineer of long and broad experience, I am sometimes called into situations the like of which my younger colleagues have never seen. Some years ago, I was asked to assist in resolving a deadlock condition in a superannuated system that shared random-access memory among a DEC PDP 11/34, a Motorola MVME-147, and a custom-designed vector processor. My assistance was deemed necessary because no one else in the shop had ever worked with any of the processors involved, whereas I had had prior exposure to two of the three. I swiftly found the exact place where the deadlock was occurring, pointed out the reason for it, handed it off to my electrical-engineering colleagues, and returned to my previous labors, deeming my involvement properly at an end.

But my E.E. colleagues procrastinated and dawdled. They didn't want to work on that old dinosaur of a system. The project manager was unhappy -- with good reason; there was a million-dollar payment hinging on the delivery of that old system -- but he preferred not to vent his unhappiness upon those most responsible for it. So without first speaking to me, he issued a memo to my direct supervisor, to the effect that I was on a mandatory 60-hour week until the problem had been solved.

My response to that memo was to submit my resignation, effective immediately. Yes, it had the desired effect. But many a senior engineer, mindful of the difficulty of securing a new position in one's fifties, would have submitted to the demand, as pointless and abusive as it was, thereby adding fifty percent to his work week for no compensation.

Mind you, I enjoyed the process of finding and diagnosing the problem -- indeed, I reveled in the use of expertises and skills no one else possessed -- but that's hardly the point.

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"You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

The tension between work and not-work can be sharpened to microtome levels by making work pleasurable. For those of us fortunate enough to enjoy our trades, this is often a contributor to intense domestic anguish. It's sundered many a marriage.

The great Robert C. Townsend has argued for making work so much fun that "[the employee] comes in on Saturday instead of playing golf or cutting the grass." However, the equally insightful Scott Adams has pointed out that the Law of Diminishing Returns guarantees that at some point, one's "return" of profit and pleasure from an increment of work will dip below that available from other activities. There is justice in both approaches. It's up to each individual, employee or employer, to find the break-off point.

Some persons adopt a strategy of rigidity: 40 hours labor per week, no more under any circumstances. Others attempt to be flexible, hoping that their employer will be reasonable in acknowledgement of their willingness to accommodate. There are situations fitted to each of those approaches, but there are never any guarantees.

What's to be avoided is the automatic acceptance of a cry of "emergency." Of course, if the problem is your fault, that would be ethically unacceptable. But how often is that the case? How much more often is the genesis of the problem a bad job by management, whether in estimating, scheduling, resource allocation, or personnel deployment?

Your employer's innate incentive for extracting more work from you for the same money is powerfully compelling. Such demands could easily become habitual, and they're the worst enemy your personal life and ongoing enjoyment of your job could ever have. Don't automatically bend to his "emergency" encroachments on your non-work time. Even if you agree with him on the importance of the "emergency" and your indispensability to its solution, inflict "five yards and loss of down:" pleasantly, to be sure, but firmly and without embarrassment. That's the only counter-incentive at your disposal...assuming you can't get away with what I did, of course.

Work And Love: A Kinda-Sorta Rumination

First, to all my Christian readers: Happy Easter! In these times of widespread suspicion and distrust, isn't it good to know that some promises really are kept (i.e., "He is risen, just as he said.")? Though as Pope Benedict XVI has told us, faith is inseparable from doubt, the Resurrection allows us to wait in hope, if not (damn it all) in Hope.

Second, to all my Eastern European readers: Happy Dyngus Day! Enjoy yourselves thoroughly. But do be careful with the pussy willow branches. Those things can smart.

And third, to all you constipated anti-capitalist types slavering over your annual opportunity to go all sanctimonious on the rest of us tomorrow, you can stuff that where the moon don't shine. I'll be celebrating "Earth Day" by enjoying the fruits of my labors, including a spacious single-family home, a Mercedes-Benz S550, a 65" HDTV and matching home theater system, a magnificent hot tub, my five-computer network, my Kindle HD Fire 8.9", and my B&N NOOK -- all of which you jackasses would deny me in the name of your rocks-and-moss-worshipping gospel of "environmentalism." I hope my more sensible fellow citizens will do the same, or close to it.

Ah, that feels better. Now, where was I?

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An emotionally healthy person is one with the capacity for work and love. -- Origin unknown

If memory serves, I first encountered that statement in Joyce Rebeta-Burditt's marvelous novel Triplets. It immediately struck me as a breakthrough in the understanding of mental health: a cutting-through-the-underbrush insight that, if generally understood, would put the entire psychiatry industry out of business. The core perception is one of the existential basics. It provides a simple and satisfying answer to a question that our plague of pseudo-intellectuals asks as if it were the bane of human existence: "Why are we here?"

Why are we here? Why are we here? Why are we here?? Glory be to God, people! Where else could we be?

Living men live in Time. Time is inseparable from matter and energy. Without matter and energy, there would be no causes and effects to take place in time. Without time, the fundamental characteristics of matter and energy could not exist.

Time is the locus of dynamism. It makes change possible, whether for good or for ill. Thus, it's indispensable to learning and growth.

If we accept ourselves for what we are -- temporal creatures that must exercise reason and conscience to survive and flourish -- then we must accept where we are: the spatiotemporal universe into which we're born and from which we must ultimately depart.

Of course, the combination of "what we are" with "where we are" carries some implications, too.

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Metaphysical absolutes give a lot of people emotional indigestion. The notions of "social construction of reality," the "Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis," and the like have penetrated a lot of minds to their detriment. The postulate that reality is independent of our perceptions and opinions trumps a lot of relativist and deconstructionist nonsense that, if accepted, could raise its promoters to total power.

The realities of human nature, our needs and desires, and the choices that flow from them are as absolute as any other metaphysical fact. Two above all confine us beyond all hope of escape:

• We must work to live and flourish;
• We need to love and be loved.

He who rejects either or both of those facts is insane in the most fundamental sense: he denies the reality in which he must live. He who exhorts you to doubt or deny them is emphatically not your friend.

That's not to say that work and love are unmixed blessings. Work is tiring, can be frustrating, and all too often goes unappreciated. We often come to appreciate its pleasures only when we renounce it -- or, as prison inmates sometimes discover, when we're deprived of it. As for love, it lacks guarantees, is frequently unrequited, and can cause the lover to sacrifice his preferences to the needs and desires of his beloved. The proposition that "'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all" is rather painful to swallow, though it's no less true for that.

Yet this is the nature of life under the veil of Time. We only escape it at our deaths, and few of us, regardless of our respective faiths, are eager to confront that eventuality.

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The weariness and frustrations of work, and the sorrows and sacrifices that attend love, can blind us to our need for them. Think of all the stories you've heard about retirees who, deprived of any meaningful effort with which to occupy themselves, have wasted away in astonishingly short periods of time. Think of all the tales of love unappreciated and unreturned, and the horrific crimes that have been committed by persons abused by those they love. Yet few of us get all the way through our lives without personally experiencing some pain from our work and our lives. That, too, is part of our natures.

The Gospels tell us of a life lived for work that could return no benefit to the Worker, powered by an all-encompassing love that never faltered. What greater work could there possibly be than the redemption of the entire race of Man? What greater love could exist than a love that accepts unmerited death by torture to prove the sincerity of the Lover's message? And what simpler message could He possibly have brought us:

"You shall love the Lord your God with your whole heart, and your whole soul, and your whole mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets." [The Gospel According To Matthew, 22:37-40]

The Resurrection has more than one meaning. In Jesus's time as a man among men, He illustrated the heights to which work and love can raise us. These things were not necessary to Him -- God has no needs, after all -- yet He embraced them unhesitatingly, sacrificing all the satisfactions available to ordinary men to fulfill them and the New Covenant founded upon them.

It is not for us to do all that He did, but in this as in so many other things, we can learn from His example.

May God bless and keep you all.

Work And Pleasure

Three pointed articles:

• Do We Care If The Poor Don't Work?
• Obama Democrats’ troubling view on work
• Is Peak Orwell Sustainable?

...suggest that the Democrats' attempts to celebrate the disincentives-to-work created by ObamaCare might be as potent a poison to their electoral hopes this coming November as the law itself. The columnists above, and this squib from Ann Althouse:

"Why Do Republicans Want Us to Work All the Time?"

Asks a professor of leisure studies in The New Republic.

When you sort the comments by "best," this comes up on top:

To answer the writer's question, we don't want you to work all the time, we don't give a flying shit what you do.. We just don't want to have to pay for your life of leisure. Do what you want, leave me alone.

...are indicative of the mood among normal Americans who both work and understand the several values of work.

Work is denigrated by being reduced to its economic significance. In Twenty-First Century America:

• Work builds character and self-respect.
• Work engenders a spirit of independence.
• Work establishes oneself in one's community.
• Work fulfills of our nature as "project pursuers."
• Work rationally selected and pursued is pleasurable.

That last facet of work in modern America is the one most frequently overlooked.

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Because of the extraordinary variety of occupations available in our society, virtually any able-bodied American can find and pursue work that will support him and that he enjoys. I have friends and acquaintances who have voluntarily renounced the possibility of much more lavish standards of living specifically to work at trades they love. No doubt any Gentle Reader could say the same.

It all depends on one's priorities. He who values money above all else will work at whatever he can do that offers the highest financial return. He who values certain conditions of life, such as the enjoyment he derives from his labors, higher than money will do otherwise. The modern Informational / Industrial Economy allows for both. We are not subsistence-level hunter-gatherers that must follow the bison herds sixteen hours per day, seven days per week, to keep life in our bodies. (To be fair, there might have been Neanderthals who enjoyed it, though I'd bet they kept that fact to themselves.)

In contrast, the denial of the privilege of working, even if cushioned with a comfortable degree of external financial support, is soul-crushing. One's dependence upon others cannot be concealed, especially from oneself. Worse, one's irrelevance to others' well-being is all too plain. Note that prison inmates denied work are prone to acting out far more than inmates to whom the privilege of work is available.

There's been much discussion of the downside of the now-dominant two-income family, but little of the non-financial reasons it's become commonplace. One of them is that many women have found work they enjoy, and are willing to pursue it at the cost of forty or fifty hours of leisure time per week. If it costs them time with the kids, or a reduction in their neighborhood involvements, or the dubious fulfillments of daytime television, they endure those sacrifices willingly, and in the usual case with good humor.

Pity the man who has been denied the privilege of work, or successfully discouraged by external disincentives from seeking it. Don't bother to pity the politician who created those disincentives; he'll get his just deserts in November.

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The above might sound a bit strange coming from me, as it's fairly well known that I'm near to retiring and anticipating it eagerly. But that's not the whole picture, as I have more than one vocation. I look forward to retirement as a way to liberate time and energy for other productive pursuits, especially the writing of fiction.

Many retirees who attempt total leisure find it unpleasant: boring and pointless. That also applies to persons who think to fill their days with pastimes such as golf. The great difference between such activities and work is seldom appreciated until it's been personally experienced.

Conservatives should hope the Democrats persist in their attempt to portray ObamaCare-induced idleness as a positive good. Americans are still sensible enough, in the main, to react to such nonsense properly. It's my guess that those of us currently unable to find work who'll provide the strongest reaction. And what poetic justice it will be to have Democrats ejected from office pounding the pavement, looking for work in this sluggish economy along with the rest!

The Beauty of Excellence and Voluntarism

Drawing by the author, done in art school from a live model, c.1979

Greetings rebels to King George and curious others...

 

What is it that brings tears of Joy to your eyes? Is it finding out you bought a winning lottery ticket? Hearing a favorite piece of movie music? Reading about a pivotal moment in history?

It happened to me once again last night, while watching an ad on YouTube - for a Volvo truck, of all things - and today I decided to figure out why.

Not surprisingly I’d searched for that particular Volvo original short after watching something else: the so-called Chuck Norris parody of Jean Claude Van Damme’s truck stunt. The computer created Chuck-short featured a retro Ken-doll Norris, of course in a cowboy hat. His beard looked sprayed-on and his face was as smooth as a 15-year-old’s. Yes, it was laugh out loud clever.

Then I tracked down the Van Damme ad (linked above). And was mesmerized. And teared up, like I said.

And now, a day later, I’m absolutely convinced that it hasn’t been seen by 62 million people. Nope, I’m betting it’s more like 6.2 - 12.4 million and like me, they’ve watched it five-to-ten times each.

Mesmerized - from the opening seconds onwards - by the haunting music of Enya…

Held by the still appealing though undeniably weathered face and poignant voice-over from Van Damme…

Amazed by this one man’s steely calm and still-unflagging athleticism…and lastly…

Wowed by the sheer beauty of the rising sun gleaming off the twin Volvo machines which so ably co-star with a real-life action hero. For what courage it must take to attempt such a stunt!

So…to the more subtle difference between the Chuck Norris parody and this original, and what I believe makes the former a video that elicits a chuckle and a grin and Van Damme’s one that earns a joyful tearing up and a lasting inward glow.

Aside from the fact the Norris video is fake, it is dependent on a show of State Force, albeit force wrapped not in the proverbial velvet-glove, rather wrapped in Christmas lights and pretty signal flares. Sure “Norris” also straddles two mighty machines, which for all I know could be held aloft by Volvo engines. But these machines are war birds of some sort, painted grey or grey-blue (and is it just me or does the one whose nose we see look to be smiling?). The planes and the soldier-heroes this video’s splitting stunt man singlehandedly holds aloft are State-trained, then retained, and finally, dispatched by the State for one purpose only: to do harm to someone or something it has deemed its enemy. In other words, They Live to Destroy. Not only that, but they do all this by means of stolen property, tax-dollars taken at gunpoint, albeit implied-gunpoint, by your friends and mine, the I.R.S.

Now consider the real ad.

Think of how that one-minute and seventeen-seconds came to be and think of what it embodies.

It’s actually very simple. There were no threats, no real or implied force; just a boat load of FREE CHOICES. Men freely choosing to develop excellent skills…and then businesses bringing those skilled men together with the raw-materials upon which they could apply their skills.

Together voluntarily, cooperatively, Volvo and Van Damme worked to create an excellent synergistic Physical-plus-Performance “product.” Volvo engineers voluntarily traded their time to design and refine the machines Van Damme was then carried atop; Van Damme himself voluntarily used his physical being; traded his time to train hard - not merely for this stunt, but to maintain his fitness over all these years - and then he voluntarily got up and stood on those magnificent truck’s mirrors, and was driven flawlessly - backwards and timed to perfection - into the sunrise.

Freedom to create Excellence. What could be more beautiful or more joyful?

Until next time, Keep Rebelling and keep creating, in whatever medium YOUR talents and skills are most excellently utilized!

Work And Motivation

Yes, this is a primarily political op-ed site. And yes, knowing that that's what most Gentle Readers of Liberty's Torch come here expecting to find, I prefer to remain within that domain most of the time. But every now and then I run across something elsewhere on the Web that reminds me of topics I once addressed more often than I have these past few years. Today I found one such:

Give me the task to be done, let me do it to the best of my ability, and then let me scram. I don't need to be cajoled into it, I don't need dancing ducks and explosions on a PowerPoint presentation to tell me how it's important. I just need the guidelines of how to do it and to be turned loose to do it.

It resonates with me for several reasons, not the least of which I expressed in this swatch of a piece from Eternity Road:

The duties of any manager are twofold:

1. Know what your subordinates need to do their jobs, and get it for them;
2. Hold them to their promises.

To these, the front-line manager must add a third: keeping middle managers from fouling up the works. Middle managers have many ways to do this, and the front-line manager has only one defense against it: being tougher than the British Army Of The Rhine.

• Middle managers must be prevented from directing subordinates a level or more removed from them. Either the company's authority structure means something or it doesn't -- and if it doesn't, why should a front-line manager have to face the music when things turn south?
• Middle managers must be prevented from injecting their own preferences into technological undertakings. Requirements, though they must often remain open to revision, should be the articulated requests of a recognized customer group, not the idiosyncrasies of an uninvolved person with too much time on his hands.
• Middle managers must be reminded, publicly if necessary, that technical authority is not theirs to wield. That authority lies with those whose responsibility it is to meet the requirements of the job at hand: the engineers doing the actual development work.

....In short: Don't be a pusillanimous marshmallow.

The folks who most often promote the "dancing ducks / exploding PowerPoint" crap are, of course, middle managers hoping to "move up." Yes, some front-line managers, more focused on their personal advancement than on their responsibilities, will attempt to emulate them. However, the middle manager who detects such an attempt usually reacts badly -- vindictively.

Not coincidentally, the folks who promote "team building" and "morale building" crap are almost always middle managers as well. Have another swatch from the recent past:

Your Curmudgeon had a strange experience this morning. His group is part of a larger, project-oriented software department which meets every Friday for general status review. Now and then, the department head will use that meeting to introduce some question or topic for general consideration and input from the troops. Today was such a day. The question was: "Do employee appreciation events (e.g., company parties and comparable special events) have a positive effect on employee morale?"

As you might expect, most of the other engineers there mumbled something ambiguous and noncommittal. Your Curmudgeon did not. Almost without intending to, he lit off on a grand and passionate tirade about how "employee appreciation events" missed the whole point of employee morale, that morale is not about time-delimited events intended to compensate for the travails of one's job, but rather about the time one spends actually doing it, and whether the holistic experience is interesting, exciting, and comfortable -- in short, whether the employee can be induced to love his work.

The reactions were mind-expanding. The department head was stunned -- wide-eyed, open-mouthed, speechless, and unable to continue. The other engineers and group leaders were distributed across a spectrum that ranged from baffled to resentful....

In some ways, this seems consistent with what your Curmudgeon knows of himself and of most other working people. As a rule, engineers are embarrassed to admit their enthusiasm for their work. Most employees of any sort would be unwilling to tell their supervisors that they love their jobs and have committed to them voluntarily; it would seem a stick to beat them with at some unspecified future time. But there's more, apparently stemming from the societal worship of "cool."

Passion of any sort is widely regarded as embarrassing. A raised voice is an unacceptable disordering of the social norm. A Juggernaut-like charge into difficulty, with the intent of smashing obstacles flat by sheer power of will, is considered disrespectful toward one's more restrained colleagues. It's "uncool."

The "cool" phenomenon is a promotion of disengagement over enthusiasm. "Be cool, man." Don't commit yourself. Don't invest your emotions. Don't let anyone know that there's something that lights your boilers, charges your condensers, or gets you greased and ready to kick ass.

If there's anything I'm not, it's "cool." I've been characterized as a hothead, a wild man, and many less complimentary things...but I'm also the top group leader in the company and have been for many years. I'm also the company's top-rated software engineer, and have been for even longer. The reasons are quite simple:

• I love my work;
• I maintain an environment for my subordinates in which they can love their work.

Not a lot of people love their work these days. Few persons would describe their feelings about their work as passionate, even enthusiastic. Granted that there are jobs about which it seems hard to muster love or enthusiasm. All the same, most of us in "white collar" trades chose to enter them out of preference -- and not a "this is the best of a set of bad choices" sort of preference, either. So why do so few of us love our work and attack it with passion?

If it ain't middle management and "cool," I can't imagine what it might be.

---

Whenever I've been in a hiring position, which is most of my forty-five years in my trade, I've looked for two things: raw intelligence and a kind of joyful aggression. You can't manufacture the former, but you can elicit the latter and embed it in conditions that will bring it to fullest flower. Those conditions require mainly that management at all levels stay the hell out of the employee's way. So I do -- and I guarantee to my people that anyone above my level who tries to interfere with them will face my wrath, which I've demonstrated several times to be a fearsome thing indeed.

In consequence, most middle managers purely hate me and wish I were dead. I'm okay with that, as I have no desire to enter middle management. (Frankly, I'd rather drive needles into my eyes than spend my time doing what they seem to do all day, every day. Meetings. Conference trips. Reports. PowerPoint presentations. Ick!) A lot of other front-line managers resent me as well, both for running a group that consistently outperforms their groups and for preventing them from stealing or meddling with my subordinates. But as they're normally the internal customers for what my group produces and maintains, they know better than to conspire at my downfall.

For those reasons among others, and despite the recognition that my years in my trade must soon come to an end, I'm a happy man. Exuberantly happy even when pressed so hard that my eyes are bulging out. The furthest thing from "cool," and utterly indifferent to the multifarious vermiculations of middle management. They can tell me what they need. They can demand that I keep my promises -- once I've made them, of course. But I forbid them to do anything beyond that; it would spoil the pleasure I take in my work, and the pleasure my people take in theirs.

---

One of the forgotten open secrets of the American psyche is how our pride in our freedom and independence has historically translated into creative energy and industry. That's been on the wane for a lot of years now, and I think I know why: the transition from a land of predominantly small, highly personal enterprises to a Fortune-5000-dominated realm in which the great majority of Americans draw their livings from employment in a large corporate hierarchy.

Being a small cog in a big machine doesn't go with a spirit of joyful enterprise.

There are still some great stories of individual achievement and success being written. I can't think of one that starts with employment in General Motors or Exxon-Mobil. Yet when Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber wrote The American Challenge, the tract that warned all of Europe of what it would face in its competition for a return to the tables of world power, he focused his readers' attention on what he called "the genius of the American corporate manager."

Back in the Eighties, there was a certain cachet in expressing such sentiments. Peters and Waterman turned them into a best-selling book. That was one of the poorer characteristics of an otherwise wonderful decade.

We have a lot to unlearn.

---

There are other threads running through all of this, each of them worthy of an exhaustive treatment, but it's early Saturday morning, I'm already tired from a long work week, and the chores beckon. So I'll end this tirade in my usual quirky fashion: with a lyric by the late, great Ellis McDaniel, better known to the musical world as Bo Diddley:

I walk forty-seven miles of barbed wire,
I got a cobra snake for a necktie
Got a brand new house by the road side,
Made out of rattlesnake hide
Got a brand new chimney up on top,
Made from a human skull
Come on take a little walk with me baby,
And tell me who do you love?
Who do you love?
Who do you love?

Around the town I use a rattlesnake whip,
Take it easy baby don't you give me no lip
Who do you love?
Who do you love?

I've got a tombstone hand and a graveyard mind,
I'm just twenty-two and I don't mind dying
Who do you love?
Who do you love?
Who do you love?

Now Arlene took me by my hand,
She said "Lonesome George you don't understand,
Who do you love?"
The night were dark and the sky were blue,
Down the alley an ice wagon flew
The door flew open, and somebody screamed,
You should've heard just what I seen
Who do you love?

I walk forty-seven miles of barbed wire,
I got a cobra snake for a necktie
Got a brand new house by the road side,
And it's a-made out of rattlesnake hide
Got a brand new chimney up on top,
Made from a human skull
Come on take a little walk with me baby,
And tell me who do you love?
Who do you love?
Who do you love?

Best listened to here:

That's the spirit to which Americans must return -- and for more reasons than just their emotional health while at work.