Finding the Energy to be You (or, Stop Wasting Energy Trying Not to be You)

I wonder how much energy people waste trying not to be who they are? It is true that everyone has some things about themselves that it would be best for everyone if they did not. Everyone has a tendency towards something like sloth or being just a little too curt or too flirtatious or … well the myriad ways of being that we don’t like in others or ourselves.

The sad thing about this is that the energy we spend trying to rid ourselves of the bad is diverted from trying to build on the good. The charismatic or creative self gets distracted, if not repressed, by our project to squelch the undisciplined or reckless self. There is only so much energy and if we waste it on not being us we have so little energy left with which to actually be us.

Peter Drucker once wrote that most problems cannot be solved and most problems are rendered irrelevant by success. Picasso made a mess of relationships but what if he’d worked successfully at getting relationships right but didn’t leave us his incredible body of work? Would the world really have been a better place if that had happened?

I wonder how much energy we’d have to do great things if we accepted that we, ourselves, were not that great but nonetheless accepted ourselves and then tried to find our way in the world with what it was about ourselves we wanted more of?

That might be one way to end a personal energy crisis, to find the energy for life that might otherwise be missing. You're only alive once - you may as well be fully alive.

After writing the above, I read an excerpt that Thomas gave from from Franzen's "Liking is for Cowards. Go for What Hurts." Franzen seems concerned with something similar.

If you dedicate your existence to being likable, however, and if you adopt whatever cool persona is necessary to make it happen, it suggests that you’ve despaired of being loved for who you really are. And if you succeed in manipulating other people into liking you, it will be hard not to feel, at some level, contempt for those people, because they’ve fallen for your shtick. You may find yourself becoming depressed, or alcoholic, or, if you’re Donald Trump, running for president (and then quitting).

...

The simple fact of the matter is that trying to be perfectly likable is incompatible with loving relationships. Sooner or later, for example, you’re going to find yourself in a hideous, screaming fight, and you’ll hear coming out of your mouth things that you yourself don’t like at all, things that shatter your self-image as a fair, kind, cool, attractive, in-control, funny, likable person. Something realer than likability has come out in you, and suddenly you’re having an actual life.

....

I was forced to confront a self that I had to either straight-up accept or flat-out reject.

Which is what love will do to a person. Because the fundamental fact about all of us is that we’re alive for a while but will die before long. This fact is the real root cause of all our anger and pain and despair. And you can either run from this fact or, by way of love, you can embrace it.

Obama Finally Gets His Experience Just as His Support Dries Up

Leadership does not just begin with vision. It begins with getting people to confront the brutal facts and to act on the implications.
- Jim Collins, Good to Great

Again, I feel like a Martian. I’m not sure whether to feel comforted by that or not.
When Bush invaded Iraq, I was aghast twice. Once that he’d do it in response to 9-11 and then that so many people – from media to everyday citizens – would so blithely cheer him on.

A year ago, when Obama was sworn in, I was, like so many Americans, so relieved that Bush was gone and happy to have a new president who seemed so intelligent, thoughtful, and carefully optimistic. The one big concern I expressed at the time was that Obama had no real experience. A year ago, I felt like a part of the majority. It was a little heady.

After peaking in the summer, Obama’s approval ratings have steadily dropped. They are now below 50%. And this is the part that I don’t get.

Obama’s one big weakness last year was a lack of experience. He now has it. And he’s done pretty well. I’ve got criticisms of the man, but he’s largely the cautiously progressive, boldly moderate candidate we elected. He’s kept his calm. He’s put money into infrastructure and education, showing his commitment to making long-term improvements in this country. And he’s shown genuine respect for other countries and won back our standing in the world community. He’s changed tactics, strategy, and even specifics about his goal on health care but has yet to sacrifice direction (moving towards more coverage for more Americans).

I’m still hopeful about this man who writes about the audacity of hope, but now I feel a little less uneasy about him. In my book, he’s proven that he can translate his potential into results. He has experience and the experience is not that bad, in spite of the bad economy and wars he’s inherited.

Bush had a great imagination. I’ll give him that. He wanted to transform a dictatorship in the Middle East into a beacon of democracy within a couple of years. Given such a thing has never happened in the history of humanity, such a goal showed great imagination. But he showed little acceptance of the world as it is.

By contrast, Obama has yet to show much imagination but he has seemed to show a real acceptance of the world as it is. He seems very realistic.

And to me, this explains why Obama’s approval ratings have steadily slipped. He hasn’t promised that anything will be easy. He has not claimed that in reality we’re well positioned. There is nothing exciting about confronting a reality that is full of issues as difficult as climate change, two wars (well, occupations really), the worst recession in a century, and health care costs that are steadily eroding salaries and competitiveness.

Yet the potential that comes from honestly addressing reality as it is, well that’s a potential for great achievement.

For me, Obama is addressing the real issues with real solutions. There is nothing easy, exciting, or quick about this. Drucker once said something to the effect of, “even the grandest strategies eventually devolve into real work.” And yet it is work that, finally, works.

I actually feel better about Obama now than I did a year ago. I guess this puts me back into the minority. But you know, after 8 years of watching Bush, I get some comfort from that.

What About Work?

Freud said that work and love is all there is. And yet work, like air, is nearly invisible to us.

I saw "Working" at the Old Globe last night. It reminded me of why I found Studs Terkel's book so fascinating decades ago. Hearing people talk about their jobs is sort of like listening to them talk about incomes or private sex lives. There is, oddly enough, a kind of intimacy when Terkel's characters confess to their ambivalence or resignation or dreams that makes us realize how little we really know about the daily work of people all around us.

All of business and economics stems from work and yet it seems as though business management and economic theory ignores work, or takes it for granted. This is a huge mistake and could easily undermine the bright and noble aspirations of Obama's bright and noble economic team.

Work gets defined by the economy and the economy by work. In an agricultural economy, work is subordinated to seasons and the demands of the animals and livestock. In an industrial economy, work is subordinated to the rhythms of machines and factories. In an information economy, work comes from applying algorithms or knowledge to tasks. In every economy, productivity is largely determined by big economic trends like industrialization and these trends, in turn, are defined by changes in work. Work matters and its demands are always larger than the individual.

Which brings us to today's economy and theories about how to move out of the recession AND again increase stagnating wages.

Obama's economic team believes that the Great Depression was ended by Keynesian policies. A sizable portion of their conservative opponents believe that the recovery was simply a natural consequence of the dynamics of capitalism and if anything, Keynesian policies just slowed things down. The players in this debate both seem to ignore work.

Peter Drucker thought differently. He attributes the massive increase in productivity in the 20th century (the average worker produced about 50X more per hour by 2000) to Frederick Taylor's application of knowledge to work. If he is right - and his is a credible claim - than the efforts of capital markets and Keynesian policy makers alike would have been for naught without this. We would still be working 3,000 hours a year (about 50% more than we do now), living a mere 47 years (rather than 77), and would have about 1/50th of the goods and services we now have. (And if you are past the age of 47 and say that this does not sound so bad, just consider the fact that in such a world your opinion would count for little: you'd be dead already.)

All that to ask, What is the theory of Obama's team about the source of progress for this next century? Now that the portion of our work force making and moving things has dropped to about 10%, Taylor's application of knowledge to work offers less promise. Now we have to transform knowledge work, and - just as we offered the children of manufacturing workers knowledge work as an alternative, a means of progress - we have to offer the children of knowledge workers the next stage of work.

It is not enough to pump more capital into the same markets. We've done that to create a series of bubbles. Capital - like labor - needs broader movements to harness onto in order to generate greater and greater returns. And it is not enough to stimulate an economy that isn't steadily improving the foundation - the work - upon which everything else builds.

Until we start talking seriously about work and how we expect it to change and improve in this next century, it seems as though any stimulus packages by governments and investments by Wall Street will simply translate into more drag and bubbles.

Economists, business managers and investors like to think of themselves as the keys to progress. They matter. But without changes in work, the machine breaks down. And work continues to be the most ignored of these vital elements. Maybe it is time to change that. Perhaps it is time to turn our attention from Treasury Secretary Geithner to Labor Secretary Solis. Money just change the score: work changes the game.

Most Problems Cannot Be Solved

Perhaps my favorite Peter Drucker quote is, "Most problems cannot be solved. And most problems are made irrelevant by success."

The point is, we can waste a great deal of effort in our lives trying to solve things. For instance, a business may spend a huge amount of effort to stem the erosion in market share of a product that is becoming obsolete instead of focusing that effort on creating a new product line. A person may work on correcting an annoying habit of someone they love or even to lose ten pounds rather than focus on living an extraordinary life and simply sweeping along whoever wants to come.

It's possible to put false predecessors before joy, before living life fully, before success. It might be that losing ten pounds helps you to feel happier or even to find the perfect person. It might be. It might also be that you can simply become the happier person and make the weight loss irrelevant (and perhaps even easier to attain once you are happy).

Which brings us to politics. We're facing record deficits. A huge wave of entitlement payments looms over us as baby boomers begin to retire. Wages have stagnated. It would be easy to look at the landscape spoiled by George W. and conclude that we have a great many problems to solve. But if we were to focus instead on creating new industries - industries like alternative energies, nanotechnology, teleporting, neuron manipulation for enhancing cognition, and the reinvention of education - these issues could be made irrelevant.

A commitment to become a happy adult probably doesn't involve solving all the problems of childhood.

I'm going to attempt devoting more attention at R World to painting what I see as possible, what I see as exciting. I think that our future is both more potentially exciting and positive and more potentially risky and catastrophic than most anyone seems to admit or realize. It is the possible future - a place on the far side of a great many social and technical innovations - that could be so extraordinary as to render moot the problems that so capture the attention of commentators and columnists today.

Imagine a world where our corporations have been transformed into vehicles for creating meaning and engagement at work, where abundance is a natural consequence of the design of systems that align with natural laws and personal convictions, organizations that don't dictate who we should be but, instead, facilitate the process of us defining and realizing who we could be. Imagine a world with technology that make transportation and energy issues sustainable, makes our economy less about consumption that destroys our habitat (a focus on quantity of goods) and more about engagement that defines our individuality (a focus on quality of life).

It would be unseemly for a 47 year old man to spend all his time trying to get "it" right, where "it" was being 13 and in middle school. It's best just to let some things go.

As we shake off the bad memory of the Bush years, or even many of the bad habits and issues of capitalism or even the information economy, it is best not to become too obsessed with solving the many problems that have been left to us. There is too much potential to realize, too many possibilities to explore, to let that be our focus.