Creating havoc since 2006. Fair use is claimed for images on this site, but they will be removed (if owned) on request out of politeness. movingnorth@gmail.com
My heart attack didn’t kill me, so why act like it did? See, Tim, it was the Roman philosopher Seneca who said “if we let things terrify us, then life is not worth living.” – Home Improvement
There is nothing that says “I’m never giving up” like a stop sign duct taped to a lamp post.
Back in 2011, I was reading Italian chemistry professor Ugo Bardi’s blog (LINK) and was struck by his quoting of the dead Roman, Seneca, who wrote that “increases are of sluggish growth, but the way to ruin is rapid.” I know it sounds like he’s writing about Adam Sandler’s acting career, but in reality, Seneca’s talking about everything, and it struck me as a universally applicable truth:
Everything that can be built, is built relatively slowly fighting entropy all the way.
And when it’s built?
The greater the effort, the higher it has risen, the faster it falls.
This is especially true when it comes to organizations – large companies that have been in business for decades close up in an afternoon. Sears was founded in 1893, 114 years ago. It became larger and larger over time until in the 1980’s it encompassed not only its department store business (the last remaining bits today) but also the Discover Card, Allstate Insurance, Land’s End, among other brands.
Today? It’s (possibly) worth less than a handful of magic beans. Nearly certainly by 2020 Sears will be just an answer to a trivia question.
And if you look at life, you see the same pattern again and again, that progress in your own life is built up only slowly, mainly over the course of years. And losing it? It’s a precarious balance, and (sadly) in the end all of our Jenga™ blocks fall down.
That was one of Seneca’s other lessons – you absolutely know that your blocks are going to fall over, and, most importantly, the blocks don’t care. There will be a time when you will lose. A business venture might fail, a book might not end well, or a blog post might be much shorter than you’d usually expect (this is foreshadowing).
In my personal life, I’ve seen this happen again and again – when I was first out of college and working for a big company, I put in 80 hour weeks for nine months to build a project – the biggest that company had ever built up to that time. They bulldozed it fifteen years later – and I assure you it was done in a month and a half – it came down a lot quicker than it went up.
After I got my Master’s I put all the notes, all the disks, and everything associated with my thesis in the fireplace. It was May, but I still put a match to it, willing to pay for the air conditioning just to give my academic career a Viking funeral. It was over. The months of research, the months of writing, all up in a matter of 20 minutes.
But, perhaps, Seneca might have been a bit wrong. He spent his life building his ideas. And we’re still talking about them today. Perhaps there is a force that defies entropy – that can withstand ages.
“Since when did AI Stand for artificial insanity?” – Andromeda
A machine for making Pez! Â Or the back side of an Airline Departure board. Â I forget.
The Middle Class Apocalypse is Coming! The Middle Class Apocalypse is Coming!
Today is Wealthy Wednesday, so this post is about Wealth, and the future patterns associated with wealth and work based on the trends we can all see today. On Monday, the Weekly Wisdom post talked about significance and the importance of work, and that post is here.
I’ll give you the TL;DR version – Work is important for health and well-being. A great job has certain attributes that tie to the significance of the work, which lead directly to health and well-being. Humans were made to work. We actually like working when it makes a difference, when we make a difference to the world.
But what about that Apocalypse thing you mentioned up above? It seems like that just might be important?
The economy is changing now at the most rapid pace, well, ever. What we’ve seen over the past few years has been an economic recovery that’s been rough, especially for the middle class. Most jobs that have been created appear to not be as good, not pay as much as the ones that have disappeared.
This trend is not over. It’s actually just starting.
And, like Star Wars: The Force Awakens®, it has all happened before, though Han Solo didn’t die the first time they blew up the Death Star. Or the second time. Third time was the charm.
Four hundred years ago on the planet Earth, workers who felt their livelihood threatened by automation flung their wooden shoes called sabots into the machines to stop them.
Hence the word sabotage. – Star Trek, The Undiscovered Country
Not the last use of Sabotage in Star Trek
The Last Time We Were Here
The industrial revolution was an extraordinary dislocation among the working class in the Western world. Extraordinary advances in power (steam engines) and mechanical devices (looms, tools) made standardized manufacturing of a consistent product on a grand scale possible. Spoiler alert! In the long run, this led to much greater prosperity and a constantly rising standard of living that created the greatest wealth machine in the history of mankind – Europe and the USA.
But along the way? Lots of people were displaced. If you were a knitter, you now no longer need knit knickers neatly, because a machine was massively manufacturing many muumuus. To put it gently, you no longer had a knitting job. Take your needles and shove off. And the machine is better at knitting than you. And you suck at running knitting machines because you have ADHD.
Being faced with this type of situation, the average person in at the time reacted calmly and happily watched as the trade or craft that they had engaged in their entire lives was extinguished like M&Ms® at a Weight Watcher® relapse? No. Inspired by (potentially fictional) leader Ned Ludd (the origin of the term “Ludditeâ€) they rioted. They raided the countryside, molested the cattle, and inspired really bad art:
Via Wikipedia – This image is in the public domain in the United States.Â
Oh, my! When I go down in history, I’d like to have a much better picture of me, not one where I’m wearing a polka-dotted Muumuu while my gigantic form looms over my tiny minions as the Alamo burns in the background. And what AM I wearing on my head. Is that a beaver??
I guess it’s an understatement to say that the change was difficult, but it did lead to mass producing important things, like nails, sewing machines, scarves, and, eventually, Pez®.
And it led, finally, to the creation of the middle class. The factories had to have managers. Engineers. Equipment manufacturers. HR. Accountants. Payroll clerks . . . and these factories finally allowed the concentrated application of experience and knowledge to the problems of industry. Some owners of factories became extraordinarily wealthy. Some geniuses, like Lord Kelvin? He basically invented thermodynamics and spent his summers on his massive yacht wandering around the Mediterranean with the Kardashians. Not the ancestors of the Kardashians, but the same ones we see on magazines all of the time. I am convinced that the Kardashians are:
Evil, and
Immortal.
But I digress. The middle class is stunningly important to economic and governmental stability. It’s a place for middling to high IQ people to go and strive, to go and find meaning in their work and in creating civic organizations and clubs and golf. All that brainpower tends to go toward helping people in all of society get wealthier over time, and makes society better as they get wealthier – a truly virtuous cycle.
If they weren’t doing this?
Well, if smart, capable people aren’t doing great stuff to make society better? They get all Emo and Occupy.
Imagine if Rage Against The Machine actually had a job down at Dad’s hardware store? Would they be singing barbershop quartet instead?
Michael Lewis has written several books, like Liar’s Poker and Moneyball. He’s talented. But his first degree was in Art History. Admittedly it was from Princeton, but it was . . . ART . . . HISTORY. He ended up being a bond trader after getting a degree in economics from the London School of Economics before landing the bond trading gig, but, really, these sorts of opportunities don’t exist for current liberal arts grads. And, like Ned Ludd, current liberal arts majors all dress up in polka-dotted muumuus and put a beaver in their dreadlocks and protest.
They’re protesting against a global labor market. They might have the best degree that you can get, but legal aides are now competing against actual lawyers (and smart ones, too) in India who’ll do 250 hours of legal and case research for some pita bread and half of a Coke®. The first part of this wave of globalization was the outsourcing of labor that went into manufacturing. For the last 15-20 years mid-level engineering and legal research has joined the globalization push. It’s had the effect of making the world more average, and if you’re talking pay, I assure you that you don’t want to work for the world’s average wage, which for some types of work is a cot and a promise not to play any music by Bob Segar®. If you’re bad? You have to listen to “Turn the Page.†Again and again.
And that’s the big kahuna. The large enchilada. The massive Pez®. Global low wages, procedural jobs that kill the soul? Those are nothing compared to Artificialish Intelligence.
(According to Google, I, John Wilder, am the one who has coined this term! Huzzah, me!)
If you count the sheer number of accountants and tax preparers that have lost work due to TurboTax®? Yeah, lots, and TurboTax™ probably does a better job than many tax preparers, with a lower error rate. This trend of Artificialish Intelligence destroying jobs is not new.
Ever feel like your job is to pass the butter? And it’s actually not at all required to add too much intelligence to most of our devices. Who needs an automatic vacuum or smart cell phone that has a mood?
I’m not sure of the new jobs that will be created due to the changes I’ve noted above, but I do have suggestions if you’re starting out in your career that might help . . .
Be born rich.
Be a friend to billionaires.
Really, the jobs that are very hard to automate or turn global are things that have a barrier, like the following categories:
Government Jobs. The barrier is pretty obvious to this one – Congressmen don’t have to go home to their constituents and explain that they’ve outsourced the Department of Commerce to Uzbekistan.
Distance Barriers. Some things have to be done locally – most construction, plumbing, tree services, and these are jobs that will be a bit harder to automate, though they will change significantly.
Regulatory Barriers. Plumber, Electrician, Pharmacist, Doctor, Lawyer . . . each of these have barriers that are require credentials and licensing. I would add Teacher to this list, but distance learning won’t be kind to that profession after a decade or so.
Extreme Knowledge. It can be done, being a specialist in a very narrow field.
Be a Creator. You can’t outsource a Steve Jobs from Sebastopol, nor a Bill Gates from Bratislava. Nor a Scott Adams from Albania. These are unique talents due to their ability to create. Can everyone be a Creator?  But the good news is that there are still Government Jobs!
I have only a limited understanding of what the world of work will look like in twenty years, but the changes will be very drastic, and I’ll be posting more about this in the future. In the past, if you were making copper pots by hand, when the machine took your job and started pressing them out of sheet copper, you had no real way to see that a world of thermodynamics, engineering, and advanced wealthy complex society could form out that stupid job-stealing machine.
But you could see the beaver clearly. That’s why you kept it in your hair.
“We’re put on this earth to do a job. And each of us gets the time we get to do it. And when this life is over and you stand in front of the Lord . . . well, you try tellin’ him it was all some Frenchman’s joke.” – Fargo (Series)
The Boy on his day job, attacking dragons, lions, and the French. He’s pretty good with that, since we haven’t seen any of those around here recently.
Nothing has a greater influence on the well-being of a man than the work he does and how significant it is. Studies have shown that doing good, significant work increases testosterone levels, decreases anxiety, decreases depression, and increases the likelihood of developing super powers, like fingernails that grow on command, or advanced control of nostril hair. I’m just kidding – decreased anxiety, how ludicrous!
I know you’re thinking, “John Wilder, how can you make such an outrageous claim!” but I assure you, thousands of scientists have been working for decades just to prove me right. Oh, and Gallup, Incorporated® did an actual study that proved exactly what I’m saying.
Their study came out in the book, First Break All The Rules. You can buy it (and I do recommend this book) here . (Full disclosure, at some point I might get around to monetizing these links, but as of the date of this posting, not yet.)
The authors, Buckingham and Coffman (like many business book authors) manage to pack a decent five pages worth of material into the current edition’s 368 pages. Also, other folks (consultants) glom on to it with, I’m sure, tests, powerpoints, websites, charts, and four day training courses in Orlando in the off season, complete with a coffee bar and a buffet lunch with an added spousal event where the spouses go and tour Epcot, get to take a photo with Walt Disney’s frozen corpse, and drink mojitos all day long.
But back to the book . . .
The book is based on 1.5+ million hours of interviews with over 80,000 managers over the span of years. Gallup then looked at which of these businesses were highly productive and profitable, and, rather than come up with a theory, just looked at what the data said about these high-performing organizations. What came out of it were 12 questions that determined employee engagement. Crazy idea – if employees are engaged at work, the place gets profitable?
What sort of sorcery is this?
Here are the 12 questions, and it’s important to note that they are in order. The first question matters more than question 12. I know that there are those of you who say all questions should be equal, and they are. Some are just more equal than others.
Do I know what is expected of me at work? This one is top of the list.
I’ve had managers who give you a desk and say, go do it. What is “it”? Nope, the only thing you see is a contrail as they head away from your desk at nearly lightspeed. Then you’re left guessing at what “it” is. This turns work into an eternal game of “warmer”/”colder”, assuming that your boss even gives you that kind of feedback.
I’ve also had bosses who say – “go fix the thing – I don’t care what you do, just don’t break the law or spend more than $10,000,000.” Those are actually really clear expectations. I like bosses like that. And they like me.
Do I have the material and equipment to do my work right?
If you know that you’re in charge of the Canadian space program (Is it called CASA?) and they expect you to create a manned space expedition to Mars within ten years, eh, you certainly have clear expectations. But if they only give you two dog teams, some moosehides, and the retired Mounties from Saskatchewan, well, you’re going to be as frustrated and conflicted as a vegan poodle in a butcher shop.
Do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day?
I can recall finishing a project (it took 45 straight 12 to 16 hour days) and watching as the last piece went into place. What I did in those 45 days was what I do best – and it was wonderful, and I was in the zone. I saved my company tens of millions of dollars.
But I’ve also been in the job where I was tasked with correctly folding up manufacturing drawings. Yay! More folding! But, within two months I was doing research for the company (and, accidently recreated Soviet research into the perfect railroad tie). It got better.
However, there are places where you’ll never get to do what you do best. Imagine Seth Rogan teaching physics to high school students? Yeah, that probably isn’t where he’d be best used, unless the class was really titled: “The Physics of Marijuana, Dude.” At some point, if the company can’t use what you do best, you’ve gotta hit the rip cord and bail out of there (the preceding does not constitute parachuting advice nor parachute training).
These first three form a triad – they speak to having clear purpose, tools, talent and using them all to create value. This is food for the soul of the deepest level. If you have these three elements at work, you are happy at work, and generally also happy at home.
The other elements are also important, but decrease in importance as we go:
In the last seven days, have I received praise or recognition for good work?
Most of us are people (technically The Boy isn’t, since he is an android sent from the future to destroy the popularity of Justin Beiber by bombarding Beiber’s brain with dank Twitter memes) and people like to have their good points brought up. Funny, huh?
Does my supervisor or someone at work care about me as a person?
Ditto. I like to work with people that want me to keep breathing. It’s nice when you walk in and have a cup of coffee with a coworker and they genuinely pretend to being interested in my boring life. Your mileage may vary, but still not as important as doing important work well, though it can be a partial substitute if your employer is slowly eating your soul.
Is there someone at work who encourages my development?
I think that no matter our age, we all want to improve, do better, and want the advice of people we respect to help us grow, because those are people that can become our mentors. Not Mentos™. Mentors. They are different things, though both can be minty.
At work, do my opinions count?
I’m sorry – I wasn’t listening? Did you say something?
Does the mission or purpose of my company make me feel that my job is important?
Let’s pretend that all the questions above this are answered with YES! In that case, you’re probably happy, unless your job requires you to grind kittens into Kitten Chow™.
That’s how it’s made, right?
Are my coworkers committed to quality work?
If the people you work with do bad work, goof off, or are in some other way not contributing, I know you don’t like it, because if you’re reading this, you’re smarter and have great character and probably don’t need deodorant because your body gives off a faint scent of sandlewood whenever you sweat. But if your coworkers are trolls from the reject pile that do work like poo flinging monkeys? Yeah, takes a bit out of your pride of doing work.
On the plus side? You’d think you’d get a good performance review, unless your boss is threatened by you and your genius and natural sandlewood smell. Then you’ll get a review that says you don’t fling enough poo.
An aside at an appropriate place: Pugsley just told me, “For a writer, you’re a pretty good typist.” Thanks, pal.
Is it just me, or did anyone else ever assemble an Ikea bookcase and end up with a functional hovercraft?
Oops – big digression. Having a friend at work makes you want to stay there. Duh.
In the last six months, has someone talked to me about my progress?
Getting toward the end (keep in mind, less important as we go down) – this is a variation on point 6 – the concept that humans want to be more effective and to have someone they respect tell them how well they’re doing. Honestly, that’s what we want – someone to tell us how awesome we are. It is a rare person who wants actual truth.
And, as a manager, after a long time doing it? I gave ‘em both barrels in annual reviews. Full on truth. But HR was getting none of that truth – HR exists to justify why you fire employees and reduce their benefits to those of a typical Botswanan goatherd, so when you ding an employee on a review, they start circling like high school students around a dank meme.
Don’t give them that dank meme! (Also, would someone please tell me what a dank meme is?)
Urban Dictionary says:
“Dank Memes” is an ironic expression used to mock online viral media and in-jokes that have exhausted their comedic value to the point of being trite or cliché. In this context, the word “dank,” originally coined as a term for high quality marijuana, is satirically used as a synonym for “cool.”
So, now you know.
In the last year, have I had the opportunity to work and grow?
As a set of questions for leaders to gauge the environment they create? Priceless. These 12 questions are wonderful in that respect. Every leader should strive to create an environment where they get the most out of their employees, not only because it benefits the business, it also benefits the employee.
Whew.
I have at least two more topics that are directly related to this, and I’m over 1900 words on this post right now.
Okay. I give up.
This is my first unanticipated two or more part post. In the near future? IQ and the workplace of the future. Not that this will be an important topic to anyone. Or, really, everyone.
Okay, really, it is everyone who will be impacted by this, we’re on to a trend that will determine all of future life for humans in Western civilization for at least the next 80 years. But that’s too scary to think about right now.
So now? I’m just going to make my fingernails grow like crazy!
Yes, that’s a picture of a rainbow over an outhouse. And why not?
“How would you like to spend the next several nights wondering if your crazy, out-of-work, bum uncle will shave your head while you sleep? See you in the car.” – Uncle Buck, Uncle Buck
When I was a kid, I was a sneaky kid. A really awful four-year-old. There wasn’t a drawer in our house that I hadn’t explored – and I knew where my Mom kept odd bits of things, like quarters, or ballpoint pins.
I also went through the medicine cabinet, and, on one occasion found a clear plastic on one side/foil on the other side square set of pills. There were 28 of them. At least there were 28 of them prior to me eating a dozen or so and determining that they were really, really crappy candy. It turns out those were birth control pills, and although I got a fairly strong lecture from Mom about eating medicine on a lark, it turns out those pills were incredibly effective, as I have not gotten pregnant even once after ingesting them.
I imagine the doctor laughing after they called him and explained the situation . . . “Your four year old ate what?”
In one of my foraging trips I went through the sideboard . . .
True Fact: Okay, I had to look up the name for this piece of furniture. The Mrs. suggested “china cabinet” but there’s no glass door, and but the piece of furniture really is this:
That’s according to the website “houzz”, which I can only assume is housing advice from the members of ZZTop.
Anyhow, I was looking through the sideboard and pulled open the top drawer, and found, amongst the things that Dad emptied from his pockets on a daily basis, two little pamphlets. Although the topic of the second pamphlet escapes me, the topic of one of them was “Attitude.”
I’m pretty sure I’ll never forget the picture on the front. It was of a man who obviously had no money, given the threadbare condition of his suit and the shabby hat and the unshaven face. Imagine the word “bum” or “hipster” and you’ll get the idea.
I really tried to find a copy of the pamphlet picture, but gave up when these were the types of results I was getting
But on his face, as he’s smelling the aroma from a cup of coffee, is the face of the happiest person on earth. Beatific is the word that always comes to mind. The synonyms for beatific are: rapturous, joyful, ecstatic, seraphic, blissful, serene, happy, beaming. This is not an ordinary happy, this is happy squared. This is a state of being where one is entirely present, and every fiber of your being is experiencing joy. It’s probably how you feel when you think about a new post being up on this website.
Remember, it’s M-W-F now, people!
So, here is someone who even my four year old brain could calculate the net worth of from the drawing (some string?), and yet I could plainly see the bliss on his face. All due to that cup of coffee.
Now, coffee is awesome, but is it that awesome?
Even at four, I was no stranger to coffee. After the adults left, I’d finish what was in their coffee cups, even though Grandma McWilder told me that it would turn my knees brown. But to get that much enjoyment from coffee?
Yes. It’s possible.
Think of your first kiss, a cold beer on a hot day after hard work, and your first cup of hot coffee in two weeks on a cold day.
There are things that we experience in each and every day that are miracles that we wall ourselves off from. In most instances, our lives are nearly entirely empty of actual adversity, so we create it ourselves.
One thing I have found is almost all of my unhappiness derives from something that either:
Hasn’t happened yet, but might, or
Happened in the past, but that I can’t change
Some people may be unhappy about what other people have (fortunately for me, I seem to have avoided that curse, as I like it when good things happen to other people) or maybe the living room temperature is off just a bit and doesn’t meet their expectations.
Now, if you’ve just been attacked by a Tyrannosaurus Rex and are bleeding on a sidewalk in Jurassic Park®, sure, you’ve got some legitimate gripes.
There are no events that are happening in the here and now that drive me to be upset. Let’s take this very moment – having a beer while the ribs are cooking in the smoker, going to be done in an hour. I’m typing and listening to “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow” by Fleetwood Mac, and I’m telling you that, while it’s okay to think about tomorrow, it’s certainly not okay to dwell on all the bad things that can happen tomorrow.
And we do that, and we’re taught to do that. The old phrase from the news? “If it bleeds, it leads.” News is meant to grab you right by the adrenal glands (is it just one gland or is it two?) and to make you upset. We are taught to get wound up about things that don’t impact us at all, and certain groups are great at getting people all riled up over nothing (I’m looking at you, Canada, trying to look all innocent and everything).
“Your mind will take the shape of what you frequently hold in thought, for the human spirit is colored by such impressions.” – Marcus Aurelis’ Facebook Feed
I went camping with a Boy Scout Troop (The Boy was a new Scout at that time, and parents are always invited). It rained all weekend long. It started Friday night, and rained pretty much every hour. Plus it was in the 40’s and 50’s (F, not C – no socialist units here!). It was cold and rainy.
As we stood under an awning, making breakfast on Sunday morning, one of the Scouts (11 or so) said, “What an awesome weekend this was,” while eating soupy oatmeal out of a mess kit in the drizzle.
And it was an awesome weekend. When you are 11, you don’t create the conception that each weekend should be sunny and 72F. Essentially, each of these boys allowed themselves to be cold, wet, hungry . . . and happy.
Coffee is important – I know I derive 90% of my personality from it. And, if I let myself, the aroma from a cup of coffee on a Monday morning when I’m at work but would rather be in bed can still make me the happiest person on Earth.
If I let it.
But I’ll skip the birth control. Those pills taste like chalk.
The photo above is what inter-dimensional real estate might look like
Today everything changed.
Actually, it was yesterday.
I have been thinking a lot, I mean, a LOT about what I want to do when I grow up, and finally came to the conclusion that it was to trod (tread?) my sandaled feet over the bones of dead kings as I took their thrones, watching them crushed, seeing them driven before me, and hearing the lamentations of their women!
No, wait. That’s Conan.
Me, I wanted to start blogging again. I came to that conclusion. I mean, if I talked, even AS LOUD AS I COULD, I could only influence a few hundred cult followers people. My booming basso profundo voice only carries so far.
As I discussed my evil plan for world domination helping people with a friend, a funny thing happened. This person, making a salary and bonus in the top 1% of people in America, decided to sign up to sell real estate, and follow their passion to see where it takes them.
Huh?
As I discussed my evil plan elsewhere, a different blogger decided to take up a keyboard again, and (maybe) a person to pick up a long-neglected novel.
Huh?
There are thousands of people that are literally sleepwalking through life.
You may be one of them.
I was.
Let me explain:
I was driving through a small town in the Midwest with my sons and saw a sign that said, “Jim McGill, Insurance and Real Estate.”
I spontaneously pulled out my best radio announcer voice and said,
“Jim McGill is here to help you with all of your insurance and real estate needs, AS HE HAS FOR A THOUSAND YEARS HERE IN CEDAR RIDGE.
“No one has more experience than McGill, who has brought the experience of his countless years of his nigh-immortal life and communion with the deep powers of the earth to find the best property for you. Since the dawn of time, there is no insurance agent who will ever get you a better deal.”
The Boy piped in: “Brought to you by the power of the Necronomicon™.”
We laughed. Life is like that around our house.
I reflected on it the following day at work. Why was it so very funny? (And, trust me, nothing makes a joke better than explaining it)
Simple: because you expect an immortal living on Earth to have a mountain redoubt, and an evil plan to take over Estonia, not sell insurance in a town of 2000 people.
Then it hit me. I don’t have a thousand years. I *might* have 30 or 40.
Why did I waste today?
And why did you waste today?
You don’t have many days. That’s why I’m writing this at 12:36AM instead of playing a game. Or sleeping.
I don’t have time to waste, since I’m not an immortal insurance agent.
The Boy on his day job, attacking dragons, lions, and the French. He’s pretty good with that, since we haven’t seen any of those around here recently.
