In my last post, I talked about my life long passion for learning new things. What happens if you decide not to live that kind of life?
Note
All of this is pure conjecture on my part. I do not really know how to live this kind of non-learning life, and I intend to keep it that way.
Meetings
In your working life, you will get to sit through meetings with your co-workers. There is an old joke about this:
We need to have a meeting to discuss why we have all these meetings!
In these meetings, you will encounter a variety of approaches to life, and a variety of "passion levels" towards the work you and your co-workers do. You need to experience this. (That is why I encourage working in teams in my classes!)
You might think the younger folks would be eager to learn how to make contributions in their new jobs. You might think the older folks are looking forward to getting out of their jobs, and retiring. Truth is, you will run into folks with exactly these feelings regardless of their age. You have to learn how to be the kind of person you want to be, in the face of working with others who feel very differently!
In my career, I have been in meetings where it was obvious that some in the room had no interest in examining how we were doing our work. Sadly, those folks seemed to be blissfully unaware that some of their co-workers were struggling to get their jobs done. They also seemed not to know that, in part, their behaviours contributed to that struggle. Those meetings were never pleasant!
To me, that said that those folks were probably more interested in doing the one job they knew well. They did not feel that worrying about how, or even if, their job was moving our clients (customers?) or co-workers forward. That issue was not their concern. All they seemed to want to do was the work required for their paycheck, and then they were off to live that really important personal life away from the job. That is probably not fair, but it sure seemed that way in some of the meetings I attended.
Some would say there is nothing wrong with this. You are paid to do exactly the job you were hired to do. Your personal life is not part of that, and you deserve that personal life.
True! But, you can manage to do your job well, and still have a fine personal life. Balancing those two aspects of your life is critical to being a happy, productive, person! It is all in how you approach your life!
Approaches to Your Working Life
Unless you were born into wealth and do not need to work, you will be getting a job at some point. You need to prepare for that working life early. That is why we go to school, to learn the skills we will need to do the work we will do.
While I was growing up, I saw two kinds of approaches to a working life. (I am sure there are others!)
One involved deep learning. You pick something and learn all there is to know about that one thing. You become an expert in that one thing, and you excel at doing that one thing. Cool! We need experts, right?
The other involved shallower learning about multiple things. You learned each thing one well enough to be a wise user of that thing, but you could not claim to know everything about that thing. What you could do, though, is stand back and see how that one thing connects to some other thing. Your skills were broad, not necessarily deep.
Which is better?
I am in that second group. My interests do not stop with one thing. I am curious, and I want to know about a bunch of things. As I explore those things, I am looking for connections.
Note
There was a really cool TV show in the late 1970s with just that title: "Connections". In that show, James Burke took a modern scientific invention and walked through the history of science to show how it came about. Some of the paths to that invention were amazing, and very unexpected. It took a lot of curious folks in history to see the possibilities of one thing, which led to another thing, and so on! I have always wanted to be that kind of person!
So, while sitting in those meetings, I am probably paying attention to all of the discussions, not just the ones involving my work. I am learning about my organization, and looking for ways to improve the whole organization, and not just the small part of it that my job covers. Surprisingly, I have managed to make an impact on most of my organizations by doing this! I also became someone my bosses would come to when they had questions about a variety of topics. That was pretty cool!
Some organizations encourage that kind of thinking, some do not. Some even actively discourage that kind of thinking from their employees. It might cause change, and change scares the pants off of some folks! My feeling is that the narrower your life view is, the more you are going to fear (or ignore) change!
History Lesson
As an example of what can happen if you only focus on one skill, here is a story.
You probably drive a car, right? (Or at least you ride in one often enough). How important are the brakes on that thing?
When I was a kid, my family never had much money, and for much of my growing up we had no family car. We rode the bus. I had no idea when, or even if, I would own a car, so my best bet was to share in my friend's car dreams.
I remember my classmate's car discussions. They could not wait to get their first car. They were dreaming about the huge engine their car would have, and how fast it could go. Brakes? They were for sissies.
Going fast was what it was all about, and they could see nothing else. They were going to have fast cars, and be the coolest kids around!
Sure, I liked going fast, but Mario Andretti taught me a lesson I never forgot:
Going fast is just one part of racing, stopping fast is just as important!
What?
Back around 1978, I was standing along the fence at the Mid-Ohio race track, watching an open-wheel car race. Mario was there, and I wanted to see him drive! Mario was a well known driver, competing in all kinds of races. I followed his career a bit, but this was the first (and only) time I got to see him race in person.
My friends and I took up a position at the end of a two-mile long straight section, where the cars got up to full speed, around 200 miles per hour! The evil track designers put a 180 degree hairpin turn at the end of that straight section! All those speeding cars had to slow down to get through that turn!
We were standing at exactly the spot where most driver's came off the throttle and hit the brakes. We started measuring the driver's skills by where they were when we heard the power end and the braking start. It was fun, and amazing.
Most of the drivers started braking right where we were, and they struggled to get through that turn without running off the track into the grass.
Then came Mario.
He was on the throttle right up to our position. We expected him to start braking. He did not. He kept on the throttle until we were sure we had seen the last of him! Then he braked, and breezed through the turn with no problems. He did this lap after lap, and we were stunned. He made it look so easy, and he won the race.
Mario realized that brakes were just as important as the engine, and he had learned how to work both to maximum effect. He knew how to combine those two aspects of his car to do the best job he could! He also understood how his tires worked, and how to "stick" to the track! He could do everything needed to succeed in racing, not just go fast! He went on the become the World Champion Formula-1 Driver that same year! He was one of those rare learners who went pretty deep into many things. He certainly did not focus on just one skill!
Deep Thinking and Drum Brakes
Early brakes were called drum brakes. They were constructed using a cast iron shell in the form of a shallow drum attached to each wheel. Inside that drum brake pads were forced onto the drum side surface when the driver hit the brakes. The friction between the pads and the drum was what slowed the car down.
Most of the time.
When those pads got wet, they did not work so well. Folks would hit the brakes, but the car would keep on sailing along. Not good.
Then technology came up with a better brake. This one had a metal disk sandwiched between two sets of brake pads. The system put pressure on both sides of the brake disk and greatly improved the efficiency of the brake.
Great advance, and much better. We should all have disk brakes, right?
Wrong.
More Meetings
I would have loved to sit through some of these meetings. The car companies of the day had invested a lot of money in building drum brake systems for the millions of cars they built. Those brake plants were humming along nicely, and they were profitable. The deep-thinkers knew drum brakes systems very well, and they were definitely not interested in changing things! It does not make "economic sense", was their battle cry.
Time for my favorite saying:
We never have time to do things right, but we always have time to do the same things over!
In the end, it took an act of Congress (in the name of public safety) to force the car manufacturers to move to disk brakes.
Sometimes, getting something to change in your organization will feel like it takes an act of congress to achieve! I am pretty sure that part of the reason why has to do with the differences in how we live our lives. For some, change threatens their lives, and they resist change unless forced to make it happen. Others see change as an opportunity to do things better, to move our society forward. These change-embracing folks may actually fear a lack of change, seeing it as stagnation!
There has to be a balance between these two groups.
Back to non-learning
Mario wanted to be a great driver, and he succeeded! His skills as a driver covered so many aspects of automotive technology, it is astounding! He was not a one-skill, deep learning person. He was a driver with broad interests, who learned a lot about many aspects of his field, and learned how they worked together. What made Mario even more impressive, was he managed to keep his skills as a driver relevant through several decades of advances in racing technology! He definitely did not fear change. He met the challenge of a changing world, and did quite well at it. I suspect he taught his kids that lesson well, since we are in the third generation of Andretti racers!
If your skills are limited to one special thing, you will end up fearing change, especially change that means your skill is no longer needed!
Change
Change will happen, whether you want it to or not. You need to keep one eye (Hmmm, I only have one eye these days!) on the world around you, if you intend to get a nice career going. I am afraid some of those I have worked with were not looking around them, and they sure did not seem to be looking toward the future. I simply choose not to join in with them, especially when they refuse to support change. Those folks do not seem interested in advancing the organization's goals, just maintaining their own lifestyle. I am definitely not going to do that!
I have never feared that change would invalidate my skills. I keep updating my skills. I spend a lot of time reading, studying, exploring ideas, just to make sure my skill set stays sound. I also make sure I can speak to the changes that are going to happen around my organization. By doing this, I have been able to become an advisor to many (most) of my bosses, something I am pretty proud of! I even got to serve on advisory committees at the Congressional Level, something that amazed me at the time. (That is until I had to work closely with some of those political critters that surround Congressmen! But that is another story!)
Balancing Personal Life and the Job
But what about that personal life? How to these two very different kinds of people balance personal and professional lives?
The deep-learner may well spend a lot of time learning that one thing they do so well. But eventually, they will reach a point where they have mastered that thing. Unless it changes (which they will resist) they are done with learning. Their books on the thing will start to get old, and basically, they do not need to spend much time learning any more. What they need to do is protect that one thing!.
Great! That leaves more time for the personal stuff. That must be nice, especially if you love to go fishing, or play a lot of golf. You have plenty of time for all that.
So maybe this is a good thing.
Unfortunately, I do not like fishing or golf. So I am stuck!
The shallow learner has a lot of ground to explore. A lot of that "personal" time is going to go into that exploration, so their ability to separate work from personal things may well suffer. That is certainly a risk, but I think there is a solution.
All you have to do is pick a career field you really enjoy, so the work you do is fun.
Simple, right!
Not so simple for a lot of young people, it seems. They have a hard time finding something to focus their lives on. I was very lucky. I picked my career in Aerospace Engineering when I was eight years old! It was a fine choice, but my shallow-learning tendencies made my choice morph into computer science. Still it was fun!
As happens with most professionals, as my career moved on, I was moved into management. I have always hated that term. To me is is a deep-thinking term. Managing implies maintaining things, stagnation. I prefer leadership, I want to help lead the way to the future!
As a "manager" I was the boss over a lot of people. In my last assignment in the Air Force, I was the boss of over 125 people. I had a staff of lower level managers to help with all of that!
I used to tell my folks that if they were not having fun doing what they were doing, they were probably in the wrong job! I tried to make sure they had the resources they needed to do their jobs, and I fought to make sure the pressures on them were reasonable. I was the interface between my bosses and them!
What? Another Meeting?
I held a lot of meetings as the boss. Meetings are about checking on how things are going, and planning for the future of the organization. To be a productive member of the group, you have to be prepared for a meeting. You have to know what is going on, and have a vision of the future. As is usual in many organizations, I had a mix of deep and shallow thinkers. Their ways of dealing with change showed up when things got tough. Some would fight to protect the status-quo. Others could see what was happening, and worked to do the best they could with the changes that were coming.
Unfortunately, in some of my meetings people only saw the future in terms of where they would be in that future. Others saw the future in terms of where the organization was going. To me, the best employees were the ones who focused on what change would mean for our customers. Those were the folks who produced the best results for the organization. Their reward usually came in the form of promotions, or more responsibilities (which some see as a bad thing. Wait, that is those deep thinkers again!)
The Next Generations
It seems that focusing on your career is not very popular with today's students. Their vision of the future is measured in the things they want to do, places they want to go, toys they want to acquire. (Or worse, in terms of how may friends they have on Facebook!) Their happiness seems to be measured by these things.
It is sad to see young folks who have no vision at all of what they want to do in this world. I was very fortunate to have role models who valued serving others above serving themselves. Those who lack a sound vision of the future need to be guided by someone, or they will end up living much less of this life we have than they could.
I was taught that if you did your job well, all those things you might like to get out of life will be your reward! You are not "entitled" to them outright! You have to earn those things by making a contribution! Now, it seems that the job is just a means to an end. It is a way to earn the money needed for those really "important" things. I have made my career working for organizations whose mission was to help people in real ways. My vision of success was that my organizations succeeded really well, and I played a significant role in that success!
The problem with this new generation of employees seems to be that they center their attention on themselves, not on their contributions to this world they live in. I believe that living the non-learning life leads to a limited view of the world, and your ability to make a significant contribution to that world will be limited as well.
If you disagree with this, that is surely your right. But be careful! Your single, deep learned skill, the one you depend on to fund your "real" life, may cease to be of interest to anyone. If you are lucky, you will reach retirement before that happens. If not, well, good luck with that.
What Now?
My problem for now is simple. I am old enough to retire, but I have so much of this world left to explore and learn about, I cannot see retirement. I love the idea that I get to teach a new generation about this world, and, hopefully, show them the cool connections out there waiting to be explored. I still want to turn them into the kind of people who will make a real difference in this world.
Every once in a while I get an email from a former student telling me I am on track. That makes for a great day!
Family Life
We were not meant to live this life alone, no matter which path your life takes. If you are fortunate, as I have been, you will find someone to accompany on your journey through life. That companion deserves a chunk of your time, so be sure you carve off enough of whatever you do for them. Sometimes that is tough to do. It is essential, and do not forget that.
My companion in this life is much like me, she is a professional who struggles to find time for things other than the job. We both enjoy being together, and doing hobby things, and traveling. Some would say we are both workaholics, and they may be right. But I think we both feel that what awe re doing is helping others, and that is why we keep at it!
Your Challenge
Don't let your approach to life keep you focused on the wrong things. I believe we are here to make a contribution to the world we will leave behind. It ain't about the toys you gain during your life, it is about the people you leave behind who will remember you as someone who made a difference in their lives. That is something cool, and worth working hard to accomplish!
A Final Note
In spite of my belief that the goals of these two kinds of people are very different, there is no rule that you must be one or the other. Neither is it clear that one lifestyle is better than another. You get to choose! That is what freedom is really about.
I chose my path. I will never view my job as something to do until it is time to do those other things in life. I know a lot of people who live their lives just that way, though. They seem happy enough. But then I look to see who they have inspired, and what they will leave behind. I do not like what I see. I strive for more than that.
But that is just me!
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