Soul Shelter

More than a century ago, President Teddy Roosevelt raved about a new English-language work by a Japanese author, and bought five dozen copies of the book to distribute to family and friends.

The extraordinary text was entitled Bushido: The Soul of Japan. In this slim volume of less than 35,000 words, author Nitobe Inazo interprets Bushido, the samurai code of behavior, which explains how ethical people (samurai in particular) should act in personal and professional life. This was the first time that these millenniums-old, unspoken precepts of Japanese chivalry had been codified and published in a comprehensive work.

Bushido turned into the most important modern philosophical preachment ever published by a Japanese writer and became a global bestseller. It was translated into ten languages, and Nitobe went on to become the world’s most famous Japanese citizen of the early twentieth century. He later became an influential bureaucrat and an undersecretary of the League of Nations. His likeness was featured on the 5,000 yen note from 1984 through 2004.

Some scholars have criticized Nitobe’s work as romanticized yearning for a non-existent age of samurai chivalry. I believe Bushido contains extraordinary thousand-year-old precepts that did, in fact, originate in chivalrous behavior on the part of some—certainly not all—samurai. But more important, I believe Nitobe’s book captures the Japanese ethic of life—as the author himself put it, “an exposition of Japanese thought.” Ten years living in Japan convinced me that Bushido’s Eight Virtues are not only real practices, but a potent way to understand Japanese society. One thing is certain: None of Nitobe’s critics ever published an international bestseller translated into ten languages.

Here are brief overviews of Bushido’s Eight Virtues.

I. Rectitude or Justice
Here Nitobe refers to martial rectitude, but later and often he refers to personal rectitude: of behaving in accordance with an absolute moral standard, one transcending logic.

Rectitude or Justice, is the strongest virtue of Bushido. A well-known samurai defines it this way: ‘Rectitude is one’s power to decide upon a course of conduct in accordance with reason, without wavering; to die when to die is right, to strike when to strike is right.’ Another speaks of it in the following terms: ‘Rectitude is the bone that gives firmness and stature. Without bones the head cannot rest on top of the spine, nor hands move nor feet stand. So without Rectitude neither talent nor learning can make the human frame into a samurai.’

II. Courage
The influence of Confucius is conspicuous here and elsewhere throughout the text:

Courage is worthy of being counted among virtues only if it’s exercised in the cause of Righteousness and Rectitude. In his Analects, Confucius says: ‘Perceiving what is right and doing it not reveals a lack of Courage.’ In short, ‘Courage is doing what is right.’

III. Benevolence or Mercy
Again we see the strong influence of ancient Chinese philosophers (one wonders when China will again become as successful a wisdom-exporter as it was thousands of years ago):

Love, magnanimity, affection for others, sympathy and pity, are traits of Benevolence, the highest attribute of the human soul. Both Confucius and Mencius often said the highest requirement of a ruler of men is Benevolence.

IV. Politeness
Discerning the difference between obsequiousness and politeness can be difficult for the casual visitor to Japan:

Courtesy and good manners have been noticed by every foreign tourist as distinctive Japanese traits. But Politeness should be the expression of a benevolent regard for the feelings of others; it’s a poor virtue if it’s motivated only by a fear of offending good taste. In its highest form Politeness approaches love.

V. Honesty and Sincerity
True samurai, according to Nitobe, disdained money, believing that “men must grudge money, for riches hinder wisdom.” Thus children of high-ranking samurai were raised to believe that talking about money showed poor taste, and that ignorance of the value of different coins showed good breeding. He wrote that:

Bushido encouraged thrift, not for economical reasons so much as for the exercise of abstinence. Luxury was thought the greatest menace to manhood, and severe simplicity was required of the warrior class. The samurai earned his income from land and could even indulge in amateur farming if he had a mind to; but the counting machine and abacus were abhorred. This social arrangement kept the distribution of wealth more equitable, preventing riches from accumulating solely in the hands of the powerful.

VI. Honor
Though Bushido deals with the profession of soldiering, Nitobe’s explication is equally concerned with personal, non-martial behavior:

The sense of Honor, a vivid consciousness of personal dignity and worth, characterized the samurai. He was born and bred to value the duties and privileges of his profession. Fear of disgrace hung like a sword over the head of every samurai … To take offense at slight provocation was ridiculed as ‘short-tempered.’ As the popular adage put it: ‘True patience means bearing the unbearable.’ The great Ieyasu left to posterity a few maxims, among which are the following: ‘Reproach none, but be forever watchful of thine own shortcomings … Forbearance is the basis of length of days.’

VII. Loyalty
Among Japan’s salaried workers, the hard economic realities of the past two decades have dealt a body blow to corporate loyalty. Nevertheless, compared to the U.S.’s free-roaming, free agent business culture, loyalty remains important in Japanese society:

Loyalty to a superior was the most distinctive virtue of the feudal era. Personal fidelity exists among all sorts of men: a gang of pickpockets swears allegiance to its leader. But only in the code of chivalrous Honor does Loyalty assume paramount importance.

VIII. Character and Self-Control
What accounts for Japan’s prosperity as a nation? In my view, the virtues of Character and Self-Control explain much:

The first objective of samurai education was to build up Character. The subtler faculties of prudence, intelligence, and dialectics were less important. Intellectual superiority was esteemed, but a samurai was essentially a man of action.

So there you have them: Eight difficult, outdated ways to achieve excellence and success—from a foreign country, no less! (a future post will share thoughts on why I believe Japan is earth’s most prosperous nation).

I find Nitobe’s preachments inspiring, and wanted to share them with new generations of readers. So Mark and I decided to include an abridgment of the entire text of Bushido in The Prosperous Peasant.

To accomplish this, we trimmed the text to 5,000 words, modifying archaic punctuation and spelling in the process (Nitobe’s century-old language is dated and flowery, and he cites dozens of philosophers and writers unfamiliar to today’s readers).

If you prefer to read Bushido in the original text, you can download it free of charge at the Gutenberg Project and other locations.

By the way, full-color PDF posters of the Eight Virtues, designed by Keiko Onodera with the original kanji characters, can be downloaded from the “Gifts of Wisdom” section of The Prosperous Peasant Web site.

So enjoy! And please take refuge at Soul Shelter again on Monday, when Mark writes about American Prosperity.

You may also enjoy:

“Life Without Principle (or Interest)”

“Simplify, simplify!”

The latest Pulitzer Prize in fiction was awarded to Cormac McCarthy for his newest novel, The Road. This 75-year-old author is a fascinating example of one to whom worldly success and renown have come very late, yet whose career has been marked by consistent excellence, and–apparently–consistent personal fulfillment. Never once in the course of his life as an author has McCarthy sought public attention. The work itself–of writing and publishing–seems to have remained reward enough for him.

McCarthy has been publishing books since 1965 (The Road is his tenth). For nearly thirty years he labored in obscurity, publishing five magnificent novels, none of which sold more than 2,500 copies, though all were critically acclaimed, and one, Blood Meridian (1985), would eventually be named by Time Magazine in a list of the ‘Top 100 Books of All Time.’

It was McCarthy’s sixth book, All the Pretty Horses (1992), that finally brought him a deservedly wide audience (though still McCarthy avoided the limelight, remaining his quiet, hardworking self). Late last year, his ninth novel, No Country for Old Men, was brought to the screen by filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen. The film recently netted a heap of Oscar nominations.

A famously private person, McCarthy granted his first television interview last June to Oprah Winfrey, who had selected The Road for her TV book club. During the discussion, the author made a number of fascinating statements on the subjects of following one’s passion, pursuing excellence, avoiding employment, enduring poverty, living and working with dedication, and having the faith to let go of material concerns.

In my own experience as an author, I’ve never faced the kind of material squalor that McCarthy did in his earlier years (and I’m sure I wouldn’t want to), but though his lifestyle offers a rather extreme example of sacrifice, I find a great deal of wisdom in his words. As I see it, something beautiful comes through in his account of a life lived in total, humble dedication to his artistic pursuit–and the mysterious blessings that came of that dedication. Call it ‘the beauty of letting go.’

-McCarthy: …You know, you always have this image of the perfect thing which you can never achieve, but which you never stop trying to achieve … this interior image that is something that’s absolutely perfect, and that’s your signpost and your guide. You’ll never get there, but without it, you’ll never get anywhere …. You always have that hope that today I’m going to do something better than I’ve ever done [laughs] … How’s that for hubris?

-Oprah: …You were so poor at times, there was absolutely no money. And people would call and say, ‘Come and speak to us, we’ll pay you two thousand dollars’ or whatever, and you’d say, ‘No, everything I know is already on the page.’

-McCarthy: Well, I was busy. I had other things to do.

-Oprah: Are you just not interested in material [things]?

-McCarthy: I’m really not. I mean, it’s not that I don’t like things. Some things are really nice, but they certainly take a distant second place to being able to live your life and do what you want to do. And I always knew that I didn’t want to work.

-Oprah: How did you manage that? Most people want to know how to do that.

-McCarthy: Well, you have to be dedicated. But it was my Number One priority.

-Oprah: That you didn’t want to have a nine-to-five job?

-McCarthy: Yeah. I thought, ‘You’re just here once, life is brief, and to have to spend every day of it doing what somebody else wants you to do is not the way to live it.’ And I don’t have any advice for anybody on how to go about that, except that if you’re really dedicated you can probably do it.

-Oprah: So you worked at not working.

-McCarthy: Absolutely. Yeah, it was the Number One priority.

-Oprah: Was it true you were so poor you got put out of a $40 a month hotel or someplace?

-McCarthy: I did.

-Oprah: [Laughs] That is poor.

-McCarthy: It was in New Orleans, it was a little room … I was very naive….

-Oprah: And wasn’t there another time that you were so poor you didn’t even have toothpaste?

-McCarthy: Yeah, I was living in a shack in Tennessee, and I ran out of toothpaste, and I went down to the mailbox one morning to see if there might be anything there, and in the mailbox there was a tube of toothpaste.

-Oprah: A free sample?

-McCarthy: Yeah, a free sample. But my life, you know, there’s hundreds of anecdotes like that. That’s the way my life has been. Just when things were really, really bleak, something would happen.

I love this notion. McCarthy’s personal story seems to suggest that once he’d devoted himself wholly to the enterprise of writing, and made the material sacrifices necessary to allow him to do excellent work, he created circumstances in which other concerns took care of themselves–not because he was favored by some quasi-supernatural agency, but because he stuck resolutely to his vision, and apparently did so even in bleak circumstances. This same idea is explored at length in our book The Prosperous Peasant, though we chose to phrase the principle this way: “Gratitude Attracts Luck.”

-Oprah: So money has never really interested you?

-McCarthy: No, not really. It’s just … I have friends that are wealthy and have spent their lives making money and they seem to be reasonably happy, but I suspect that they became rich because they were doing what they wanted to do. I think it’s hard to just set out in the world and say ‘I’m going to become rich.’ I think you have, as you said, a passion. And if you do it well then you get rich in spite of yourself.

On this subject of involuntary wealth, McCarthy speaks from first-hand experience. His magnificent work has brought him great material rewards (albeit only recently), which he never clamored for. In addition to the tremendous book sales generated by the Pulitzer and Oprah’s Book Club, last month McCarthy reportedly sold his literary papers to a Texas university for a sum of around $2 million.

-Oprah: … Was it a concern at all, not having money? You know, a lot of people … You’re a different kind of man, because a lot of people would be … would have a lot of angst, a lot of anxiety, would feel a lot of lack of self worth, because they couldn’t earn the money.

-McCarthy: … I was very naive. I always assumed that I would be taken care of in some way or other. And I was, I was always very lucky. Something always happened. Just when things were truly, truly bleak some totally unforeseen thing would occur.

-Oprah: Like …

-McCarthy: Like, I was living in Lexington, Kentucky once … A friend of mine had gotten me this job housesitting, so I had a place to live. But I didn’t have any money. I don’t mean that I didn’t have much money. I didn’t have any money. But there were still some groceries left in the house, so I ate those. And then one day someone knocked at the door, and I went to the door and there was a guy standing there and he said, ‘Are you Cormac McCarthy?’ And I thought, ‘I don’t think there are any warrants out for me.’ And I said, ‘Yes, I am.’ He said, ‘Sign this, please.’ I said, ‘What is it?’ He said, ‘I’m a courier.’ And he said thank you and got in his car and drove away, and I opened up the letter and there was a check in it for $20,000. … I was the first fellow of a new foundation that they had started, some people in Chattanooga, the Lyndhurst Foundation. They had some Coca-Cola money … and they were going to give these fellowships to people….

-Oprah: Wow.

-McCarthy: … And you got a [big] check every year for 3 or 4 years.

-Oprah: Do you think you were lucky? Or was there something else going on?

-McCarthy: I wouldn’t get superstitious, but you know, the laws of probability operate everywhere … You know, if you look at Barron’s and see these gurus that have done so well in the market … you’ll notice that next year it’ll be a different group of gurus. This should tell us something. … Some people, at some time in their life, are bound to be in one group [i.e. the lucky group] and not in another group [i.e. the unlucky group]. It’s simply the laws of probability. You don’t have to be superstitious about it. Anyway, it’s a long way of saying that I just think I’ve been very lucky. It could stop, certainly. I don’t think I’m blessed.

-Oprah: You don’t?

-McCarthy: Well, I am blessed because I’m one of the luckiest people I’ve ever known, so that’s certainly a blessing. But I’ve done nothing to be picked out for special … Quite the opposite. If there were justice in the world, they wouldn’t have picked me out to be particularly lucky, because I haven’t done anything to deserve it.

-Oprah: But you made a choice that you were not going to be working in your life. That you were going to do what you really loved.

-McCarthy: That’s right, and that obviously has some influence on it.

Indeed, it seems McCarthy attracted his own luck, through sacrifice, devotion to excellence, and enduring commitment. Most valuably, this enabled him to channel his energy entirely into his core passion of writing–and later earned him secondary material rewards.

To be sure, the circumstances of McCarthy’s life are extreme. Such circumstances, for instance, would likely prohibit a happy marriage and family life. But I believe the substance of his discussion here holds true. He had a vision, and then built a vocation of it by submitting himself to a path that he believed suited and sustained the vision, and now his work is destined to endure as some of the finest produced by an American author of his era.

This life path, like all, no doubt has had its share of complications, but within it there’s a main principle at work that is simple and universal: One’s pursuit of a vision demands the active qualities of dedication, sacrifice, bravery and hard work–but also a quality more mysterious, and more daunting: Faith.

In our upcoming Thursday post, Tim will explore some more formally postulated principles of excellence and success, as found in the age-old Code of Bushido.

Every Monday morning at Soul Shelter headquarters in Portland’s Hawthorne District, Mark and I hold a directors meeting (I’m Director of Fortune, Mark is Director of Fulfillment).

The first order of business is to power up Soul Shelter’s advanced server device—the Jura E50 automated espresso machine—after which we ponder solemn questions concerning fortune and fulfillment.

Last week Mark opened the discussion. “Why do you think fun jobs pay so little, and boring ones pay so much?”

The most longstanding of Clark’s Rules quickly came to mind, but for a moment my thoughts flashed back to the events of past months.

I’d met Mark by seeking editing help through Craig’s List, and we’d worked so well together that we decided to co-write a book. This collaboration was such fun that we decided to launch a blog that would build on the parables we’d written about two peasants seeking fortune and fulfillment.

Mark and I had taken very different paths in life. Disregarding the financial risks, he’d committed early and completely to a career as a novelist, while after struggling for a few years as a musician I’d moved on to a career in business. I’d found fortune, Mark had found fulfillment. Eager to share what we’d each gained, our discussions kept returning to the challenges of finding work that is personally fulfilling, yet pays decently.

So now, mustering the gravity that seemed appropriate to my considerably greater, er, chronological endowment, I offered Clark’s Law of Work:

Appeal is inversely proportional to compensation. The more boring the job, the higher the pay.

Mark pressed for details, so I elaborated, first noting that Clark’s Law of Work has been formally restated as Clark’s Construct Concerning Corporate Compensation (CCCCC).

“It’s a simple question of supply and demand. There’s an endless, overwhelming supply of people who want exciting careers as writers, painters, explorers, professional athletes, musicians, movie producers, television personalities, artists, models, singers, comedians, actors, and rock stars. But actual demand for people in those professions is limited. Huge supply and limited demand drives wages down.”

My novelist friend nodded slowly and took another sip of coffee. Mark looked amused as I continued fleshing out my construct. I drew a fresh cup for myself from the Jura E50. Coffee and Socratic dialogue are a beautiful match.

“If five kids on the same block all start selling lemonade at the same time, what happens? They drop prices to compete with each other. That’s exactly what happens in the “glamour” professions. Aspirants are so eager to break into the business that they’ll work for free—or even pay someone—to get started.”

“That’s why we see predatory fee-for-service ‘agencies’ for modeling wannabes,” Mark interjected, “and vanity presses for would-be writers.” I agreed: The law of supply and demand—the most fundamental principle of economics—is useful for understanding many things in life.

“What you say goes a long way toward explaining the low pay in creative/exciting occupations,” Mark admitted. “But what about high pay in boring professions?”

I refueled with a long drag on my quadruple Americano. Mmm! “Think about which businesses occupy the ground floors of the world’s largest office buildings? Financial institutions and insurance companies. These companies make money consistently because customers pay for their services ‘rain or shine’—in good times and bad. Money flows heavily and relatively predictably through these ‘infrastructure’ businesses and others like them: oil, steel, commodities refining, transportation, government and legal services, and so forth. Many would consider these boring organizations to work for.”

As a former legal clerk and temporary office worker, I acknowledged that ‘boring’ is a relative term, and Mark, who’s done his share of temporary gigs, agreed.

“But then there are the clerks,” he said, “and other administrative assistants for these companies. They don’t get high salaries.”

“Right,” I agreed, “because they’re doing low-skill work. A huge supply of people with low skill levels compete for a comparatively limited pool of clerical and other jobs, so wages remain low. But someone with high-level skills in a boring sector can command a high salary.

“The unfortunate truth is this: The greater the predictable cash flow, the less exciting the business—and the better the pay.” I encouraged Mark to ignore this as career advice, not that there was any danger he would abandon writing (see Fulfillment: A Work in Progress).

Looking skeptical, Mark proposed, “But there have got to be some exciting jobs that pay well?”

Sure, I replied. Here are some examples:

• Crime Let’s face it, illegal acts can be extremely lucrative. But the severe moral and practical downsides make this a non-starter for almost everybody.

• Dangerous work Miners, offshore oil rig workers, lumberjacks, professional underwater divers, and similar occupations offer good money. There’s a reason: You can get killed. (Mark was quick to concur, as his first novel explores the lives of coal miners)

• Dirty work Same idea; see “Dangerous Work” above.

• Hardship posts Fifteen years ago, a business school acquaintance of mine boasted to his classmates about the $150,000 annual salary offer he’d won—for a position based in a remote island nation. ‘Nuff said.

• Whatever turns your crank The most important category of all: Some lucky people are passionate about law, accounting, insurance, and other professions that many consider unexciting. More power to them! “Exciting” and “interesting” are in the mind of the beholder.

We repaired to the Soul Shelter Blogatorium for notemaking, whereupon Mark postulated his first corollary to Clark’s Rules:

There are many exceptions to CCCCC, and like all of Clark’s Rules, CCCCC should be enjoyed or ignored at one’s own discretion.

The Director of Fulfillment is wise beyond his years. In recognition of his sagacity, this corollary is now known as CCCCCCC: Cunningham’s Corollary to Clark’s Construct Concerning Corporate Compensation.

Our pondering of fortune and fulfillment continues next Monday, when Mark writes about The Beauty of Letting Go.

Related posts:

“Life Without Principle (or Interest)”

“Clark’s Rule About Priorities” (CRAP™)

With this post we inaugurate CommonSensical, a periodic feature here at Soul Shelter, in which we’ll offer commentary from thinkers and artists old and new on the timeless subject of balancing fortune and fulfillment, or maintaining a livelihood while having a life.

In previous posts, I’ve mentioned a guru of mine, Henry David Thoreau (see “Simplify, Simplify!”). Old Henry will inevitably pop up on this blog from time to time, for he had no shortage of things to say about earning a living in America, most particularly how to do so without allowing one’s soul to be crushed.

I recently revisited Thoreau’s “Life Without Principle.” It’s one of his most cogent, funny, tell-it-like-it-is pieces of writing. In fact, it’s impossible to read “Life Without Principle” today without noting its relevance to our office-bound, overworked, under-vacationed, gridlocked, media-saturated culture.

Thoreau talks about the importance of doing work one can be personally invested in (“getting a living by loving”). He encourages us to avoid the empty, draining pursuit of earning wages for wages’ sake. He talks about the fallacies of relying upon circumstantial “luck,” and the importance of locating the “gold” within the mine of one’s own talents. Ultimately, he urges us to make the most of every day we’re given.

Hard to believe Thoreau’s essay was published (posthumously) way back in 1863, but so it is. The industrial revolution had sent its waves through our national culture by then. Clearly its impact is with us still, felt on a daily basis in the workplace. Here follow extracts from “Life Without Principle,” with a few remarks sprinkled in.

Thoreau begins with a bang, tackling the problem of what we would call “the rat race” today:

Let us consider the way in which we spend our lives.

This world is a place of business. What an infinite bustle! I am awaked almost every night by the panting of the locomotive. It interrupts my dreams. There is no sabbath. It would be glorious to see mankind at leisure for once. It is nothing but work, work, work….

If a man was tossed out of a window when an infant, and so made a cripple for life, or scared out of his wits by the Indians, it is regretted chiefly because he was thus incapacitated for—business! I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself, than this incessant business….

Most men would feel insulted if it were proposed to employ them in throwing stones over a wall, and then in throwing them back, merely that they might earn their wages. But many are no more worthily employed now….

The ways by which you may get money almost without exception lead downward. To have done anything by which you earned money merely is to have been truly idle or worse. If the laborer gets no more than the wages which his employer pays him, he is cheated, he cheats himself…. Those services which the community will most readily pay for, it is most disagreeable to render. You are paid for being something less than a man…. The aim of the laborer should be, not to get his living, to get “a good job,” but to perform well a certain work…. Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.

Thoreau goes on to further address the value of working at something you love. He speaks from experience, for he solved the problem his own way early on. Because he loved being out in the fresh Concord air, he made a living of roaming the local countryside, working as a surveyor.

… Those slight labors which afford me a livelihood, and by which it is allowed that I am to some extent serviceable to my contemporaries, are as yet commonly a pleasure to me, and I am not often reminded that they are a necessity. So far I am successful. But I foresee that if my wants should be much increased, the labor required to supply them would become a drudgery….

If I should sell both my forenoons and afternoons to society, as most appear to do, I am sure that for me there would be nothing left worth living for. I trust that I shall never thus sell my birthright for a mess of pottage. I wish to suggest that a man may be very industrious, and yet not spend his time well. There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living…. You must get your living by loving.

It is remarkable that there is little or nothing to be remembered written on the subject of getting a living; how to make getting a living not merely honest and honorable, but altogether inviting and glorious; for if getting a living is not so, then living is not. …

We’re all familiar with the more modern refrain, “Love your job and you’ll never work a day in your life.”

Our book, The Prosperous Peasant, explicitly explores this very subject through the parable of Jiro and Gonsuke, two peasants in sixteenth-century Japan who set out to change their destinies. All their lives they’ve known only servitude and monotony, but at the start of the book they undertake a quest to fulfill their personal dreams. Jiro implores his friend, “Why not admit your deep longing to become a merchant and act upon it? Why pretend we’re content to slave in the fields? If we fail to grasp our purpose today, where will we be ten or twenty years from now?”

Thoreau continues with an exploration of luck, and the fallacy (from both the moral and the financial standpoints) of relying on easy ventures and chance fortune.

The rush to California, for instance, and the attitude, not merely of merchants, but of philosophers and prophets, so called, in relation to it, reflect the greatest disgrace on mankind. That so many are ready to live by luck, and so get the means of commanding the labor of others less lucky, without contributing any value to society! And that is called enterprise! I know of no more startling development of the immorality of trade, and all the common modes of getting a living. The philosophy and poetry and religion of such a mankind are not worth the dust of a puffball. The hog that gets his living by rooting, stirring up the soil so, would be ashamed of such company. …Did God direct us so to get our living, digging where we never planted,—and He would, perchance, reward us with lumps of gold?

(Note: Though Thoreau invokes the religious tone here, it should not be mistaken for conventional piety. He was no churchgoer. His religious views were nonconformist and deeply subversive of the religious establishment.)

… The gold-digger in the ravines of the mountains is as much a gambler as his fellow in the saloons of San Francisco. What difference does it make whether you shake dirt or shake dice? If you win, society is the loser. The gold-digger is the enemy of the honest laborer….

With that vision of the diggings still before me, I asked myself why I might not be washing some gold daily, though it were only the finest particles,— why I might not sink a shaft down to the gold within me, and work that mine…. I might pursue some path, however solitary and narrow and crooked, in which I could walk with love and reverence….

Men rush to California and Australia as if the true gold were to be found in that direction; but that is to go to the very opposite extreme to where it lies. They go prospecting farther and farther away from the true lead, and are most unfortunate when they think themselves most successful. Is not our native soil auriferous? Does not a stream from the golden mountains flow through our native valley? and has not this for more than geologic ages been bringing down the shining particles and forming the nuggets for us? …

That’s my favorite part of the essay. We must ask ourselves: What riches (worldly or otherwise) do our own talents, passions, and interests already supply–or promise to supply–us and the world around us? How can we harness the inspiration to access that wealth (or continue accessing it) and possibly inspire others by doing so?

…A man had better starve at once than lose his innocence in the getting of his bread…

You cannot serve two masters. It requires more than a day’s devotion to know and to possess the wealth of a day…. It is for want of a man that there are so many men…

I believe that the mind can be permanently profaned by the habit of attending to trivial things, so that all our thoughts shall be tinged with triviality…We should treat our minds, that is, ourselves, as innocent and ingenuous children, whose guardians we are, and be careful what objects and subjects we thrust on their attention. Read not the Times. Read the Eternities….

Today, it’s not hard to imagine Thoreau exhorting us to smash our televisions.

America is said to be the arena on which the battle of freedom is to be fought; but surely it cannot be freedom in a merely political sense that is meant. Even if we grant that the American has freed himself from a political tyrant, he is still the slave of an economical and moral tyrant…What is it to be born free and not to live free? What is the value of any political freedom, but as a means to moral freedom?…

We are warped and narrowed by an exclusive devotion to trade and commerce and manufactures and agriculture and the like, which are but means, and not the end.

And on that salutary note, we’ll leave off with old Henry.

In preparing this post, I told Tim that I found the following observation by Thoreau particularly striking, and dismayingly true, even today:

Those services which the community will most readily pay for, it is most disagreeable to render.

Many of us notice this in our day: often it’s the sterile, soul-draining work that seems to bring the greatest material rewards, while more gratifying, fulfilling, or creative labor pays but pennies (not to mention socially important labor, such as teaching, nursing, etc).

So I asked Tim, “Why do you think the fun or important jobs pay so comparatively little, and the boring or less essential ones pay so much?” He had an interesting take on this subject, which he will offer here in his Thursday 1/24 post. See you then!

(In the meantime, visit the full text of “Life Without Principle” here).

See also: “Simplify, Simplify!”

My career is deeply intertwined with Japan, and a stay in Tokyo late last year reminded me how powerfully face-to-face communication helps us achieve our goals.I’d been communicating with partners and colleagues by Skype and e-mail for weeks before my visit, but things really happened after we sat down and talked in person. The experience was so powerful that I decided to formalize another Clark’s Rule that’s been simmering in the background. So without further delay, here—for the first time on any page—is Clark’s Communication Potency Theorum™ (CCPT):

The power of communications improve exponentially with proximity, either physical or psychological.

CCPT postulates that the weakest form of communication is e-mail: the easiest, least-invested way to get in touch. On a scale of one to 100, CCPT assigns it a value of one.Talking by phone is ten times (one order of magnitude) more powerful than e-mail. I don’t even put my e-mail address on my day job Web site; long experience has shown that e-mail-only inquiries are invariably time-wasters in my business (people unable to spend a nickel or muster the gumption to call on the telephone are poor prospective customers or partners).

Conversely, people who call first rather than e-mail immediately stand out. I see this all the time at school: Outstanding students prefer telephone or in-person conversations, while the less capable prefer to “converse” by e-mail. So phone calls score ten on a scale of one to 100. You might be physically far away on the phone, but you’re very much more present.Meeting in person, though, is ten times again as powerful as a telephone call. This is the gold standard for potent, meaningful communication—it rates 100 on the CCPT scale. Below is a highly scientific graphical representation of Clark’s Communication Potency Continuum™:

Here’s an example of CCPT in action: While working on my first book, I arranged a telephone interview with a Tokyo-based real estate professional.

The conversation was, frankly, disappointing: where I expected explosive revelations he offered only mild commentary. I almost decided against asking for an in-person meeting, but did, and on my next Tokyo trip, I was glad—because once we’d met face-to-face, he offered some of the hardest-hitting insights of any interviewee. His initial reticence on the phone wasn’t cultural (he’s from the U.S.). It was simply that meeting in person created an unbeatable depth of rapport and trust.

My latest meetings drove the point home. What a difference! Think about e-mail “conversations.” Typing out questions or responses, transmitting them, then waiting for answers is dreadfully inefficient. A seven-minute telephone discussion can easily replace hours—even days—of piecemeal, back and forth, typed question-and-answer “conversations.” But it’s more than a matter of efficiency. The human voice’s rich contextual cues—tone, pitch, pauses, silence—communicate far more than mere words. And in person, facial expressions, body language, bearing, and posture add more layers of rich context. Forget the message itself; talking by telephone or in person will take you far beyond the “message”—maybe into an entirely new relationship.

Sure, you can’t beat e-mail for transmitting a PDF file or spreadsheet. And for ongoing working relationships, especially for people in different time zones, e-mail can be extremely effective. But for accomplishing powerful, satisfying communications, especially in the initial stages of a relationship, give me telephone or in-person interactions every time. Why do so many people these days insist on typing rather than talking? I can’t help but think they do so not only to prevent confrontation, but to avoid encounter.

Time and again I’ve seen people give up on something because “I e-mailed him and he never got back to me.” Giving up after a single attempt, using the least potent form of communication, is no way to go about achieving a goal—or building social capital. Every personal and professional breakthrough I’ve ever made originated in a face-to-face encounter, and I find it hard to believe things are otherwise for most people.

Am I a hopelessly outdated, living-in-the-past Luddite? Maybe so. Like all of Clark’s Rules, CCPT is empirically unproven and based solely on the experiences of Clark. So be forewarned: Clark’s Rules may be false! E-mail may indeed be the new gold standard of communication …But I don’t think so. So if you’re with me, get hip to CCPT and pick up the phone, or better yet, set a coffee date. You’ll create a better connection—and go farther toward achieving your goals.P.S. Stay tuned for our Monday 1/21 post, when Mark will ponder career issues in Life Without Principle.

Related posts:

“Happiness is Turning Off the Computer”

A major job hazard in my line of work as a novelist is an occasional looming sense of futility. Futility because, well, how does a writer know whether he’s a success or not?

This quandary is on my mind these days because I’ve just come through a holiday season replete with innumerable parties. You know what I’m talking about. Every year, inevitably, these seasonal engagements require you to give multiple updates on the status of your career.

Oh, what does a midlist author say? How summarize one’s attainments? Come to think of it, how does anyone know how successful they’ve become? Let’s admit that American culture refers to some rather limited criteria to define “success.”

For a novelist or other artist, credits in the elite media seem to be regarded as the main measures. If you can say you’ve made a movie with DreamWorks, been featured on network TV, performed at Carnegie Hall, or been listed as a New York Times Bestseller, you’re in good shape. Your work is out there, it’s being recognized by the trendsetters.

This can be hard on a toiling novelist whose books are not featured on Oprah, who can boast no lofty advance or runaway bestseller, and who spends most days in solitude struggling to make a page or a paragraph as good as it can be. You can’t just come out and say, “I wrote several hundred really excellent paragraphs this year,” or, “my novel is selling like hotcakes at Betsy’s Books in Duluth,” and expect to elicit an impressed smile. (God bless our independent booksellers, though!)

Did I become a writer in order to win money, fame, social acceptance? Of course not. Still, the culture of money and fame is everywhere — and yes, it’s frequently a shortcut to social acceptance. Its influence is felt most painfully, of course, when making a new acquaintance. How wearying it can be, let me tell you, to have to engage in a conversation like the following:

-Stranger: And what do you do?

-Me: I’m a writer.

-Stranger: Oh really? What do you write?

-Me: Novels mostly. I’ve published some.

-Stranger: What are the titles?

(I say the titles)

-Stranger: Sorry, what?

(I say the titles again)

-Stranger: Are they for sale at Barnes & Noble?

-Me: Yes. Well, sometimes. I mean, they’re not always right there on the shelf. I guess it depends which Barnes & Noble….

-Stranger: Hey, wouldn’t you love to be on Oprah? Wouldn’t that be great?

-Me: Enough about me. What do you do?

Ah, the awkwardness…

Naturally, narrow American measures of success are not only hard on artists. Your success as a parent, for instance, isn’t likely to wow folks at a holiday party—unless maybe you happen to be rich or famous as well. And what about success as a spouse? Success as a religious leader? As a math tutor or camp counselor or dog trainer?

Perhaps it’s for the sake of social expediency, perhaps it’s a function of the evolutionary mating-impulse, or perhaps it’s due to plain shallowness, but in our culture, if you can demonstrate wealth, fame, or political eminence you’ve made it. Whereas if you pursue success that’s less demonstrable, or less “impressive,” you may find yourself lacking social traction.

Of course, on a conscious level most of us know it’s not the end of the world to feel awkward and outranked at a party. But such experiences still have subtle and insidious effects, and in the long term they can wear down a person’s confidence and self-worth.

So how do we avoid becoming infected with our culture’s measures of success?

For starters, we ought to try to recognize and value the achievements of others. But most importantly, if we want to be happy and self-confident and continue wholeheartedly doing the work we love—however underpaid or undervalued—we must learn to rely on the measures of success that mean the most to us personally, and strive not to lose sight of them.

What this really means is focusing on the profound, everyday moments that make us more human, whether they occur within the realm of our work or beyond. And maybe that means playing with our children, kissing our spouse, calling our parents to chat, listening to a friend, thanking a waiter or waitress with a smile, reaching a gratifying consensus with coworkers, or, perhaps, writing and re-writing a paragraph in a novel until a luminous human truth comes through (i.e. “I’m not writing this for The New York Times. I’m writing it because it makes me a more empathetic person and deepens my own humanity.”)

If we simply strive to be openhearted human beings, then our humanity is bound to permeate our work and improve it beyond measure. Surely, that’s success by any standard: to be fully human, all the time.

And should a more worldly success eventually arrive, we’ll always have this invaluable perspective to hold onto: we’ll know exactly what makes our work worth doing.

See also: “How Much is Enough,” “Fulfillment: A Work in Progress”

Some months ago I watched an intriguing special on NHK (Japan’s national television broadcaster, like BBC in the U.K.) about a Tokyo design firm struggling to regain its vitality. The president, a guy in his late 50s or early 60s, decided his employees were spending too much time staring into computer screens and not enough time interacting face-to-face. He instituted a new rule: No more individual desktop PCs. Henceforth employees wanting to create files would have to get up from their stations, walk over to a special area, and complete digital tasks on shared-use computers. While at their own desks, they would work only with pencil, paper, and other analog tools—or confer with colleagues.

What do you think happened?

Morale and productivity soared, as designers rediscovered the power and joy of collaborating in person rather than swapping computer files and “conversing” via electronic Post-it notes. Workers were jolted out of “computer complacency”—the false sense of accomplishment achieved by constantly exchanging e-mails and endlessly fiddling with digitized designs. Hot, live, dialogue replaced silent messaging and passive monitor-gazing. The firm’s workplace was transformed.

I wouldn’t suggest that computers always drag down productivity. But let’s face it: The moment we sit down at a PC, we face a smorgasbord of time-wasting activities. A constant stream of incoming e-mail, mostly trivialities, creates an illusion of urgency, while social networking invitations, games, opt-in solicitations, and countless other distractions fairly overflow our screens, beckoning, as if to say, “c’mon, let’s goof off!”

The computer, of course, is a terrific bundle of tools. But like a 27-blade jackknife or Microsoft Word, when you open it up, most of the content is unnecessary or unimportant (last week I wrote about distinguishing between urgency and importance).

Years ago, like that president in the NHK special, I discovered the dark side of excessive computer use—and paid a price in health and happiness. Thanks to early and deep attention to computing and the Internet, my ship came in, so to speak, during the dotcom days. But in the meantime, years of constant work hunched over a keyboard and 20,000 keystroke-per day typing sessions steadily chipped away at body and spirit. Eventually, putting my hands to the keys became physically painful, then almost impossible. I discovered I had cubital tunnel syndrome (not carpal tunnel syndrome) in both arms. For the first time, I feared for a professional life so utterly dependent on keyboard/computer usage.

Meanwhile, I grew alarmed by a growing spiritual exhaustion brought on by too much PC time. Finally, I’d had enough. I’d reached a turning—make that a breaking—point.

First, I decided to work on the physical stuff. I’m a firm believer—along with a self-help guru whose name I can’t remember and will probably misquote—that it’s easier to behave yourself into a different way of feeling than feel yourself into different way of behaving. So for starters, I studied up on ergonomics, repetitive stress disorders, cumulative trauma, and nerve compression, then had surgery on my right elbow. I hired a transcriptionist to take the physical strain off my hands, then began using Dragon NaturallySpeaking voice recognition software. This literally saved my work life. For years now I’ve dictated everything I write, sometimes after penning it longhand (as with this post).

Next, I switched to pointing and clicking with both hands instead of just one, using a Wacom pen and tablet (wonderful!) on the right side and a traditional mouse on the left. I got an “expensive” high-quality office chair and a Nada Chair for traveling and outside work. Now I couldn’t get by without either. To reduce nerve compression during sleep, I gritted my teeth and invested $2,000 in a Tempur-Pedic bed (indispensable—geez, I wish these guys had an Affiliates program!). I recovered to the point where I could physically deal with a CPU-driven work environment.

Now it was time to deal with the psychic fallout. Apart from the physical problems, I’d found constant computer use dehumanizing enough to want to change careers. So, with my usual blend of foresight and business acumen, I went into … writing and teaching! Of course, I promptly discovered (what a surprise) that computers have taken over those occupations, too. What was I thinking?

Time to face facts: there’s no getting away from CPUs, no matter what you do for a living. Nonetheless, I find teaching and writing far more rewarding than helping large companies try to make more money. I’ve managed to cut way back on computer usage—and reclaim my evenings and weekends in the bargain. I joined the International Institute for Not Doing Much. And to emphasize the analog even more, I’ve started a new policy: The PC stays off on Saturdays or Sundays. Like the Tokyo design firm, I find that working with pen, paper, and books jumpstarts productivity.

I realize my technology aversion was fueled by physical problems, and I don’t mean to imply that my way of dealing with it is for everyone (check a related post at Zen Habits). Heck, I really enjoyed computing in the pre-spam days, before the Internet was re-conceived as a marketing “platform” instead of a communications tool. Nevertheless, no one will be happier than me when this “digital” fad finally blows over and we can all go back to talking to each other with our voices and writing with pencils and paper like civilized people ;-).

Until that day, writing will be my soul shelter. Mark and I will post in our newly-renamed blog every Monday and Thursday, and these twice-weekly essays—and a PC that sleeps all weekend—will mean a bit of happiness to me. What pieces of life mean happiness to you?

Related posts:

“Simplify, simplify!”“A Moment of Fulfillment”“Fulfillment: A Work in Progress”

My vocation entails years of labor often resulting in maddeningly unquantifiable results. Because this is so, it has revealed to me a few things about the elusive nature of fulfillment, both personal and professional.

Rewind to ten years ago, when I had the clearest epiphany of my life. I was nineteen years old and spending a college semester in London, and the bolt of lightning struck during a ride on the London Underground one afternoon. The girl I loved was sitting beside me (I’d followed her from California to England, where she was studying for a year). I leaned and whispered my secret: “I’m going to be a writer.”

Since earliest boyhood I’d enjoyed dreaming up stories, I’d kept journals and written poems for years, and knew I had a natural gift of kinds, so I nurtured a passionate desire to devote myself to the work of the pen. This vocation, of the many I could imagine, seemed to promise the greatest personal fulfillment. Immediately after returning home from London, in a craze of determination, I started working on a nonfiction manifesto. I knew virtually nothing of how to produce a compelling book, but believed passion and truthfulness, when bolstered by small native talent, would yield literary brilliance.

Perhaps it’s needless to say that my manifesto never saw the light of day. Another four solid years of hard work and perseverance were required before I managed to create literary material that merited publication—a short story. During that four-year period I wrote and scrapped a second full-length manuscript, but the short story was published in a national literary magazine. Two years after that (six years since returning home from London) my first novel appeared in hardcover on bookstore shelves across the country. My second novel was published only recently.

That beautiful girl from the London tube has now been my wife for eight years, and all this time she’s been an unflagging supporter of my by-no-means lucrative pursuit. We both believed, early on, in the true value of art: a humanistic, even spiritual value transcending money. We still do. This conviction has helped us avoid delusions of wealth. Despite today’s countless stories of break-out novels and meteoric best-seller successes, literary art is one of the roughest, most overgrown and ill-maintained highways to financial security.

My wife and I have always worked hard to simplify our lives (see my post, “Simplify, Simplify!“), to reduce our material necessities, and have made some very difficult sacrifices in order to continue doing work that fulfills us (for six nervous years we had no health insurance). For my wife these days, fulfillment means teaching high school English. For me, as ever, it means writing books. You can see we’re a far cry from model capitalists.

In spite of some great successes (my first novel was glowingly reviewed, nominated for a prestigious award, and even earned me royalties) living by writing continues to be a struggle, requiring—as ever—extreme determination and ceaseless hard work. And naturally, this artistic existence would be completely impossible without my wife’s moral and financial support (she’s the breadwinner in our house). No doubt this will be the case for some time, for even now I receive a few rejections per week.

What does it feel like to strive for such a personal vision, and how does fulfillment manifest itself?

Well, I’ve slowly come to understand that I’ll never attain my vision of “becoming” a writer, because every time I sit down at my desk I find myself beginning over again: reminded, by the hard work I do every day, that the feeling of being a Writer (with a capital “w”) will never arrive. I imagine this kind of thing is true for anyone who wishes to attain excellence in their work. Ultimately, attainment matters less than commitment. That, to me, is strangely comforting.

But when does fulfillment arrive if one is always at a beginning?

It’s all too easy, sometimes to convince myself that “fulfillment” and “financial security” are one in the same. In my worst moments I fall into fantasies of a golden prize that lies somewhere just ahead—a definitively measurable accomplishment that will eradicate all financial concerns and deliver a conclusive feeling of Success (with a capital “s”). Sometimes the fantasy is seeing my book title on the New York Times Bestseller list. Sometimes it’s having one of my novels adapted for a major motion picture.

But in my clearest, most truthful moments, I know fulfillment is to be found by recognizing something simpler and more profound. I guess you could put it this way: My destiny is already unfolding around me. What I want to happen is happening now. I’m a published novelist and am living my life as a writer. My continuing struggles—rather than undermining my achievements—are reminders that it’s all for real. I’m working, actively working, at the thing that fulfills me most. I was lucky, early on, to find some wise words in the Bhagavad Gita. They’ve helped to guide me for years now:

Be intent on action, not on the fruits of action. Avoid attraction to the fruits and attachment to inaction.

For me, that’s what fulfillment means: sitting down at the desk and working, every day.

See also: “A Moment of Fulfillment”

Happy New Year!

In our final post of 2007 I postulated, in my Midwestern, self-denying, Protestant upbringing way, Clark’s Rule of Priorities: Do First What You Want to Do Least.

To kick off 2008, here’s a four-letter corollary I call WIRU (“Why Are You … ?”)

WIRU addresses the difference between urgency and importance—it stands for “What’s Important is Rarely Urgent.”

We all tend to confuse urgency and importance. I think Stephen Covey was the first self-help guru to popularize the notion that most people spend far too much time in the “urgent” zones of their lives—and not enough in the “important” zones. Here’s how I recall Covey’s conception of the four different “quadrants” in which we can spend time:

Now consider some common tasks and into which of the four quadrants they fall:

See a pattern? Most of us spend too much time in quadrants 1, 2, and 3. Our goal, of course, should be to spend as much time as possible in quadrant 4.

The WIRU acronym can be used to help prioritize daily activity. Before devoting a chunk of time to something, I try to step back and ask myself, ‘Why Are You choosing to do this now? Is this important—or just urgent?’

For example, it may not be “urgent” for me to exercise, but boy, is it important. It might not be “urgent” for me to work on my doctoral thesis, but from a long-term fortune and fulfillment perspective, few things are more important (hmm, ears burning …)

Here’s some powerful advice via my buddy Mark Fritz: “Procrastination means giving up what you want most for what you want now.” Constantly tending to so-called urgent tasks is one way of putting off truly important work.

So here’s my resolution for 2008: Every time I crack open my e-mail program or tackle some other “urgent” job, I’ll try to pause and pose the four-letter question to myself: “WIRU?”

See “How to Set Priorities” and “Risk of Happiness”