Ponidealnichki

That is the word here for Monday in the adjectival form. When someone asks you how you are doing, you can answer Mondayish. Sometimes, Macedonian can be more descriptive than English. Today is one of those days.

A late start, and slow start, and work piling up, delays and decisions, important events happening in other countries and you have responsibilities there too, quick travel plans made to get there, while putting out a fire in another country in the other direction, part not yet here for the car repair, banking issues, money in the wrong account in the wrong country, people in need but limited resources available to apply, world cup in full swing but the game you really want to watch doesn't come on until midnight!, fishy requests for help, children of a church member in the hospital, worship practice has to be in our small apartment, a dinner long planned gets changed, the neighbors are playing music really really loud, the internet won't work properly when you are trying to talk to someone on the other side of the planet, the scales are not smiling today, and then someone else dumps a big problem in your lap, and one of your clients is facing a mutiny in church leadership, and the nationals you work with are shooting one of their own, but a really nice lunch with my wife. Yes its Mondayish.

Learning to love what you do? How about doing what you do?

I think it fascinating and providential that exactly one day after I wrote my last blog about loving what you do, rather than doing what you love, in the Harvard Business Review, there was this blaring headline, "Don't do what you love, do what you do." Charlotte Lieberman wrote a serious piece of real life, and very much along the lines of what I reported the day before. 

She found herself one year out of undergrad at Harvard, with lots and lots ideas and potential plans about what she loved doing, but instead working at a job/jobs she had never considered really. She quotes Miya Tokumitsu who remarked that DWYL (Do what you love) is the "the unofficial work mantra of our times." And that it is completely elitist and that only those in the upper echelons of society have the possibility of doing this as a general rule. They are the only ones in society that have the economic freedom to choose employment based on criteria other than opportunity and money.

As I read Lieberman's article, I have to admit that there was a part of me (a bigger part than I am comfortable admitting!) that wanted to reject her premise as wrong, that she was too young to make such assertions and that she was simply too inexperienced in life to make such bold statements of reality. But I was wanting the fantasy . . . she had already made the jump to most people's reality and real life. She argues convincingly and with a great deal of maturity that belies her years, that you can make most jobs meaningful if you are mindful of what you are about.

She nails the underlying issues with this statement, "But instead of trying to find complete congruence between our passions and our livelihoods, it is perhaps more productive simply to believe in the possibility of finding opportunities for growth and satisfaction at work, even in the midst of difficulties – a controlling boss, demanding clients, competition with your colleagues, insufficient boundaries between your work life and personal life." This is a person who is facing the real real, not a pampered debutante who expects financial compensation for that which she would likely do for free given the right circumstances. 

Honestly I cringe at my unwillingness to let the fantasy go, that I should both automatically get paid for doing what I love the most, that these two should ALWAYS go together. Part of what has fostered this in me, is reading. It seems that every single book I have read in the last 15 years has assumed that this is not only the ideal, but the destiny of every single person who can count to 100. My own very real experience and that of my clients should have clarified this much more for me, before now. You can read the article that Lieberman wrote here "http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/06/dont-do-what-you-love-do-what-you-do/"

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Learning to love what you do

Sebastian Klein over at Lifehacker/Fast Company had an interesting blog and a great point recently. He pointed out that for many people, changing careers and following your passions is not nearly as good of strategy as refining the skills you already have. 

As I have come to be in the Leadership business, many of my clients find themselves in changing jobs or their industry being downsized or their job being eliminated or themselves not being an ideal fit with their current organization. I resonate with this situation, having faced it myself some six years ago.

I learned the hard way how difficult it is to follow your passions while placing a roof over you head and putting food on the table. It is not that I cannot see ways to monetize my passions, it is much more that my experience and education limits the boundaries of how far I can stretch this particular bankability. It is a difficult wall to climb, a pulverizing realization that although much is written about doing what you love, the older you are when facing these types of situations, the more pinned in you may find yourself. The time and freedom and opportunities to change fields of work dwindle with age. 

My life (and yours) is a mosaic of jobs held and done (experience) and educational choices and history. That defines most of the possibilities on the horizon. I wanted to get out of the clergy/cross-cultural worker field and I wanted out badly. Burned out toast to the crispy max, I wanted something completely other. So I resigned the post that I held and left the parent group I had worked with for 23 years. My wife asked me what I REALLY wanted to do now? Don't laugh, but I told her that I wanted to repair motorcycles (that is the subject of a future blog perhaps!). So I resigned, and started researching motorcycle repairing.

I know, the smart way to have done it (if it can indeed be done) would have been to line up all the necessary parts and pieces of this change in vocational industry BEFORE I left my paying job. But that only seems to happen to hard core planners or gypsies who can foresee the future. Mind you, I had been thinking about changing industries for years, but the urgency of the now, pretty much kept my hands full all the time, and there was not enough urgency to send me to motorcycle repair school, Yes you heard me correctly, motorcycle repairman have to go through at least a full year residential program (move the family and feed them while going through school kind of residency program) in order to be certified to qualify for a job. And that in and of itself is no guarantee of job at the end of the year of learning. With three teenagers (two in college) at the time, no savings, and no margin, changing industries/changing career fields in my mid-late 40's was a practical impossibility.

Don't get me wrong, the opportunities are the very much the same in my opinion, for everyone regardless of age, but what is not the same is the freedom of choice. So Klein is very much on to something when he advocates refining your current skills and refocusing your current experience. This is what I have done. This is what I am suggesting to most of my clients. Although I am a huge Seth Godin fan, he suggests regularly that only desire and bravery (= passion) and the willingness to risk are required to change your career, what you do, how you provide value, and to what you accomplish.

Klein's blog was/is so much more practical at most levels in my opinion. Instead of "doing what you love" he suggests that you "learn to love what you do." He references Cal Newport's book, "So Good They Can't Ignore You" as a basis for this. When these ideas are considered together with Godin's ideas, the result is a powerful possibility that can change your circumstances significantly. Become a craftsman of what you do. Practice hard and get out of your comfort zone. Acquire rare and valuable skills in your vocational area. Become so good that they can't ignore you indeed!

I would add one more suggestion to these fine one's here. Acquire some objectivity about your vocation. Involve others so that you can  see it through fresh eyes so that you can discover new areas within your area of expertise. So I still work in the clergy/cross-cultural worker fields, but I am doing something few others do within those areas of vocation. I provide a service where few others do, and with people who can't access the resources that I can provide them.

Still it was and is unnervingly risky, and I am constantly navigating new waters and my learning curve is terrifying. But I am doing far more learning to love what I do than I am spinning my wheels (pun intended) on motorcycle repair. While I still may get to the bikes eventually (doesn't that sound like a a great second career after retirement?!), for the moment, I am refining 35 years of education and experience into something more valuable and meaningful. (You can read Klein's post by Googling "Focus on the Skills you have instead of following your passion.")

The importance of habits and processes

Here I am 10 days after arriving home, with two new computers, all the hardware anyone could need, and I STILL haven't gotten back to full productivity. As I wrote in the previous post, I am indeed mentally ready for full productivity, but my habits and processes have been so totally disrupted that I have not yet succeeded in returning to my former glory or effectiveness.

Good hardware is not enough. I already knew that, and honestly I produced much of my work on an iPad or iPhone, the computers were/are primarily key to finding and organizing my daily research. The computer crash I had (and while I was at it, I decided to replace my limping-along-three-year-old-desktop)​ led to me losing the software functionality I had with several key programs. It was a combination of things, developers not supporting the software any longer, my not protecting and organizing the application serial numbers, developers not answering my inquiries to regain those, not being able to restore the now-crashed-computer on the new one, etc, etc. Trust me, I am now paying attention to said details much more. Backups of data are NOT enough!

Having said that, the loss of these software programs exposes the weakness of my processes in my workflow. I am now in the middle of replacing/recreating said process​es and it is very slow going. For a week I thought I was back in business, but then I discovered I was using bata software, and this discovery happened when the beta expired! Unfortunately I had been rebuilding the key RSS feeds for a whole week and now once again I lost them! 

I could go on about the weaknesses of my process-rebuilding, but what I REALLY discovered throughout all of this, is that my daily habits are too dependent on external applications. This is not bad or evil in and of itself, but I need more redundancy.​ I need to have the same processes and same software on at least two machines at all times. I need to have a much higher level of continuity between devices. I need good habits that insure high levels of productivity even if I lose a peice of hardware (or two!) What changes do you need to make right now to protect your productivity?  Trust me, data back up alone is not sufficient!

The biggie decisions

There are hard decisions that come along in life. Decisions few are prepared for and no one is ever eager to engage. Aging parents are the biggie of the biggie and no two situations are the same . . . and yet they are all the same. Your parents (and certainly mine) need new bodies and new minds and that is why they (and us) need Jesus, because that is the only way that any of us are ever going to experience that wonderful necessary thing. Unfortunately, from a humanistic point of view, you have die in order to get these wonderful gifts.

In the West we don't have a strong tradition any longer of caring for our parents and grandparents in their last years. The trend is to place them in homes, assisted living facilities, nursing homes and whatevers, so that all the unpleasantness of diminished capacity, declining minds and bodies, the lost of normal adult functions, are handled by others. It is sold to us as being better for THEM. Marketing has been very successful. Here in the East though, there are different expectations, and different economic realities and relational realities. Few can or would consider such solutions. Yes we have old folks homes, but most of those there are truly alone in the world and they have no one alive to care for them and they cannot care for themselves.

The problem is that my wife and I are caught between the two cultures. We WANT to care for our parents, and they NEED us to do so, but yet we struggle to find a way to continue working while doing so. I mean we have 15 years to go before we qualify for retirement and have the freedom (in the Western mindset) to care for them. This is not a theoretical dilemma. This is real and current and the pressure builds for action to take place and soon. So what honors them and God most? We are probably too close to the situation to have any objectivity at all. What do you plan to do and how do you plan to accomplish it? 

Me? I see that I have waited far too long to do anything other than react. All the initiative has been taken away by delay and denial. Learn from my misstep.

Back to uber productivity

Sometimes, perhaps regularly, we all need to disconnect from the pace of our daily lives. The planned interruption is so healthy, that to ignore it is dangerous. That includes digital interruptions. I just returned from one such an interruption and can say that it was an unqualified success in delivering a sweet refreshment to my mind. Its like the whole cache was dumped and the memory cleared out, so that clarity and productivity can once again be something I have each day.

As productivity guru Chris Bailey writes, the three ingredients of productivity are Time, Energy and Attention.​ As he states so well, "Productivity is very much a holistic concept, characterized by the understanding of its interconnected parts." You need all three of these to really be productive. But you shatter your productivity by working too hard or too much, Bailey continues. He did an experiment where he worked 90 hours a week, and then 20 hours a week, back and forth for a month, to measure productivity. What he discovered was that he roughly got just as much work done in the 20 hour weeks, as he did in the 90 hour weeks! Why? Because when you work too hard or too long, you rob yourself of two of your most valuable resources; your time and your energy.

I am back to uber productivity, because I listened to Chris and took some down time. How about you?​