Soul Shelter

(This post is an installment of CommonSensical, a periodic feature here at Soul Shelter in which we offer timeless words from thinkers and artists new and old on the subject of earning one’s living while protecting one’s soul.)

The British writer Charles Lamb (1775-1834) was a contemporary and acquaintance of the most significant Romantic poets Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats and Shelley. At age 17, Lamb had entered employment in a London office of the East India Company, where he continued to work as a clerk and accountant for 36 years. The “confinement of an office” was Lamb’s livelihood for all but ten years of his adult existence. The avocation of literature, however, always remained his primary passion.

Lamb’s essay “The Superannuated Man” was penned in 1825, immediately following his unexpected retirement from the office. It’s a bittersweet reflection on the pricelessness of personal freedom — and Lamb’s surprisingly mixed feelings upon his “deliverance” from a life of drudgery.

Reading it today, one can’t help but note how little has changed in nearly 200 years. Back then, just as now, being retired was a condition you craved and feared in equal measure. Also, we see that what we call “office life” is nothing new. Lamb speaks of his long-frustrated desire to escape his daily tedium — something many modern readers, caught between earning a living and having a life, can surely can relate to. “The Superannuated Man” begins:

If peradventure, Reader, it has been thy lot to waste the golden years of thy life — thy shining youth — in the irksome confinement of an office; to have thy prison days prolonged through middle age down to decrepitude and silver hairs, without hope of release or respite; to have lived to forget that there are such things as holidays, or to remember them but as the prerogatives of childhood; then, and then only, will you be able to appreciate my deliverance…

Lamb had been delivered, at age 50, from his dreary, desk-bound career — and dreary it was indeed, he assures us. Even Sunday, his one day of freedom per week, had tormented him because it always proved so short-lived. Vacations were hard on him for the same reason. He got a week per year. Most Americans today, as we all know too well, are lucky to get two.

…Besides Sundays I had a day at Easter, and a day at Christmas, with a full week in the summer to go and air myself in my native fields of Hertfordshire. This last was a great indulgence; and the prospect of its recurrence, I believe, alone kept me up through the year, and made my durance tolerable. But when the week came round … was it not a series of seven uneasy days, spent in restless pursuit of pleasure, and a wearisome anxiety to find out how to make the most of them? Where was the quiet, where the promised rest? Before I had a taste of it, it was vanished. I was at the desk again, counting upon the fifty-one tedious weeks that must intervene before such another snatch would come. Still the prospect of its coming threw something of an illumination upon the darker side of my captivity. Without it, as I have said, I could scarcely have sustained my thraldom…

I was fifty years of age, and no prospect of emancipation presented itself. I had grown to my desk, as it were; and the wood had entered into my soul…

This seemingly endless condition of drudgery had begun to depress Mr. Lamb. One of his colleagues happened to take note of his low spirits. Next thing Lamb knew, he found himself summoned to the boss’s office.

The eldest partner began a formal harangue to me on the length of my services, my very meritorious conduct during the whole of the time…[he] ended with a proposal, to which his three partners have a grave assent, that I should accept from the house, which I had served so well, a pension for life to the amount of two-thirds of my accustomed salary — a magnificent offer!

But once his initial jubilation had passed, the newfound freedom of retirement bewildered Lamb. He hardly knew what to do with himself. Possessing such an overabundance of time, he was also surprised to find himself feeling depressed again:

…For the first day or two I felt stunned, overwhelmed. I could only apprehend my felicity; I was too confused to taste it sincerely. I wandered about, thinking I was happy, and knowing that I was not. I was in the condition of a prisoner in the Old Bastile, suddenly let loose after a forty-years’ confinement. I could scarce trust myself with myself. It was like passing out of Time into Eternity — for it is a sort of Eternity for a man to have his Time all to himself. It seemed to me that I had more time on my hands than I could ever manage. From a poor man, poor in Time, I was suddenly lifted up into a vast revenue; I could see no end of my possessions; I wanted some steward, or judicious bailiff, to manage my estates in Time for me.

Suddenly given the opportunity to live however he should choose to, Lamb can’t help brooding upon the subject of how much life he has already resigned to employment in an office.

…I have indeed lived nominally fifty years, but deduct out of them the hours which I have lived to other people, and not to myself, and you will find me still a young fellow. For that is the only true Time, which a man can properly call his own, that which he has all to himself; the rest, though in some sense he may be said to live it, is other people’s time, not his…

But he can’t deny, either, that all his time spent in the office was also life, and surely counted for something — maybe even counted for more than he’d thought. After all, he’d had friendships at work, and he’d derived a certain pride and self-worth from doing his job well. In fact, a part of him began to wish he hadn’t retired (had desk-life really been as miserable as he’d sometimes believed?)

…My old desk; the peg where I hung my hat, were appropriated to another. I knew it must be, but I could not take it kindly. Devil take me if I did not feel some remorse — beast, if I had not– at quitting my old compeers, the faithful partners of my toils for six and thirty years, that smoothed for me with their jokes and conundrums the ruggedness of my professional road. Had it been so rugged then after all? or was I a coward simply? Well, it is too late to repent, and I also know that these suggestions are a common fallacy of the mind on such occasions. But my heart smote me. I had violently broken the bands betwixt us. It was at least not courteous. It shall be some time before I get quite reconciled to the separation. Farewell, old cronies….

I missed my old chains, forsooth, as if they had been some necessary part of my apparel…

Here Lamb beautifully observes an ironic truth that many a retiree can understand. Having “grown to his desk,” and having come to loathe his “prison” condition, he nevertheless sees that all passing time is precious. Whenever we cross a threshold and find ourselves forced to recognize an era’s conclusion, we distinctly feel this preciousness of time and wish we’d made more of what we were given (no matter how passionately we’d cursed the daily routines before). Maybe, given more time, we might have found more to appreciate. We might have learned something more about ourselves and our colleagues.

Now, Lamb finds himself adrift in a strange, unburdened existence.

…Time stands still in a manner to me. I have lost all distinction of season. I do not know the day of the week, or of the month. Each day used to be individually felt by me in its reference to the foreign post days; in it distance from, or propinquity to the next Sunday. I had my Wednesday feelings, my Saturday nights’ sensations. The genius of each day was upon me distinctly during the whole of it, affecting my appetite, spirits, etc. The phantom of the next day, with the dreary five to follow, sat as a load upon my poor Sabbath recreations… What is gone of black Monday? All days are the same. Sunday itself — that unfortunate failure of a holiday as it too often proved, what with my sense of its fugitiveness, and over-care to get the greatest quantity of pleasure out of it — is melted down into a week day. I can spare to go to church now, without grudging the huge cantle which it used to seem to cut out of the holiday.

In the end, of course, he not only accepts his new condition but learns to cherish it. And his newfound freedom teaches him that slowness, inactivity, and thoughtfulness should not be undervalued.

I have Time for everything…. It is Lucretian pleasure to behold the poor drudges, whom I have left behind in the world, carking and caring; like horses in a mill, drudging on in the same eternal round — and what is it all for? A man can never have too much Time to himself, nor too little to do. Had I a little son, I would christen him ‘Nothing-To-Do;’ he should do nothing. Man, I verily believe, is out of his element as long as he is operative. I am altogether for the life contemplative. Will no kindly earthquake come and swallow up those cotton mills? Take me that lumber of a desk there, and bowl it down… I am no longer clerk to the firm of _______, etc. I am Retired Leisure. I am to be met with in trim gardens…

Lamb’s freedom also brings him to reflect that he’d played his part well and offered society his service. Surely there was honor in that. But still, between the lines here, don’t we glimpse a man haunted by regrets? A man, perhaps, who wishes he’d done something different with his life.

…I have done all that I came into this world to do. I have worked taskwork, and have the rest of the day to myself.

Time is precious indeed, and we do well to spend ours wisely.

(Read “The Superannuated Man” in its entirety here)

You may also enjoy:

“You’ve Got to Jump”

“Understanding the World Through the Thomas Theorum”

“Recognizing the Opportunity Within“

That it’s possible to change oneself is the core premise—and the key promise—of the self-help movement. It’s something I’ve always believed. But is it really true? Well, as with most things, yes … and no.

Certainly it’s possible for us to change many things about ourselves. We can acquire wealth-building habits. We can lose weight. We can boost our energy level by exercising regularly. And we can upgrade our professional and technical skills through training, practice, and study.

I’m a firm believer, too, in the magic of sheer willpower. I believe we can think ourselves into different ways of behaving, though it’s usually easier to behave ourselves into different ways of thinking (I love the way Mark describes his routine for getting dressed in the morning, even though he could easily work in his pajamas all day). So in this sense, yes, we can change ourselves.

But one popular author has built a best-selling book and seminar business based on exactly the opposite assertion: We cannot change who we are.

Marcus Buckingham says that our basic personalities and predilections are unchangeable, and that rather than trying to fix or compensate for our weaknesses, we should instead focus on our strengths.

No less an authority than my mother has told me exactly the same thing for years, to my unending annoyance. It’s time to admit she’s right. After years of believing otherwise, I’m forced to agree with Buckingham (and Mom) that at a very fundamental level, we simply cannot change who we are.

So where does that leave those of us who still feel like so much unfinished work, like promise unfulfilled?

Well, first we’ve got to accept that we’re okay as-is, and that in terms of our basic personalities, we will never change. A tough call, but we’ve got to make it.

Next, while admitting we’re stuck with what we’ve got, we can still seek to better ourselves. Toward this end Buckingham offers a sound basic premise: Focus on your strengths (not your weaknesses).

I read through his latest book, Go Put Your Strengths to Work, and it’s good. The basic message is this: Identify your strengths, then steer your career toward a place where you can exploit them fully. Don’t waste time in a job where you’re forced to spend most of your time exercising weaker skills.

That’s good advice.

But the key challenge, in my view, is not accepting Buckingham’s premise, but rather the specifics of how to go about defining one’s own strengths. Reading through Go Put Your Strengths to Work, I felt continuous uncomfortable pressure to go to an online “strengths-finders” tool or to buy one of Buckingham’s previous books, which I haven’t read and which may be more helpful (I learned about Buckingham through an excellent article about leadership in Fast Company magazine, not through his Strengths books).

So here’s my action takeaway from Buckingham’s work: To prepare for my upcoming job interview, I’m going to sit down with a couple of colleagues who know me well, and ask them to describe my strengths. Their feedback may not enable me to change myself, but I’m confident it’ll be invaluable in helping me change my scene.

And in the meantime, I’ll strive to be happy with who I am—and who I’ll continue to be.

At age 19 I made the decision to become a writer. I hadn’t finished college yet (and wouldn’t) and did not formally study creative writing (though I delved deeply into good literature both contemporary and classic). And because from the start I possessed precisely zero affiliations in the publishing or academic worlds, I’m living proof that one needs no golden key or inside connections to pursue the work one most desires.

If you find doors closed against you, set your shoulder to them. Push.

I had no MFA degree, no roster of famous acquaintances, nor even any friends whose friends knew somebody’s friend who worked with Editor A at one of the big Manhattan publishers. Still, at age 22, in blind defiance of practicality and lacking all credentials save perhaps a singular passion for fiction and poetry, I began composing a novel set in my own backyard in the nineteenth century — that is, in the Black Diamond Coal Fields about 30 miles east of San Francisco, a place once inhabited mostly by miners from Wales.

Before starting this book, I knew nothing about coal mining, Welsh culture, or geology, though all were essential elements of the story. Neither did I know much about life in nineteenth-century California.

Furthermore, I hadn’t a single publication credit to my name, and hence not the slightest rational basis to believe that this historical novel would ever be published. I had, however, acquired a bit of writing experience, having fumbled my way through a learning process of intensive reading, compositional experimentation (i.e. bad writing), and minor personal successes in my chosen art. Some of my short stories had their virtues, but I’d also dashed off, already, the full manuscript of an entirely different novel, which I’d judged a failure and consigned to a drawer.

While working on my coal-mining novel’s first draft, which took me a year, I was employed fulltime as a bookstore clerk, earning $8.25 per hour. Later I temped in a commercial mortgage office for slightly higher pay.

Beyond these day jobs, my time was spent in long, solitary hours at my desk; or reading in a chair; or walking in the pastoral hills that surrounded my apartment-home; or watching movies with my wife; or receiving rejection slips in response to my endless outflow of short story submissions (to date I’ve collected enough to stuff two shoe boxes — size ten; see “Redefining Rejection“); or dreamily forecasting the future date when I’d have a full-length book published under my name.

A year after completing my novel’s initial draft, I received my first letter of acceptance from a literary magazine in Alaska. The following autumn, they printed a 30-page short story of mine. And the following year (2003), after 60-odd query letters to publishers and agents, a New York agent said she wanted to represent me and my coal-mining novel (which was then in its tenth or eleventh draft).

In autumn of 2004 that peculiar novel, The Green Age of Asher Witherow, appeared for sale in bookstores throughout North America. In the month of its release I traveled to Minneapolis, 2,000 miles from home, to give the first public reading of my career, and had the pleasure of meeting folks who had read and enjoyed my words. It was strange and wonderful, I remember, to be so far away from my home and the novel’s setting, and yet to talk with people about my local history and the landmarks relating to it — to find that these provincial details, because I’d featured them in a narrative, had become things of interest to these distant readers.

As it turned out, my profound experience at that first bookstore appearance was just the beginning, and the year ahead would become the most social one of my life, consumed with the fun and frenzy of first-novel promotion. More than 30 reviews of my book appeared, all of them (save one) complimentary and several of them glowing (I’d had hopes, but no explicit expectations). Booksellers across the nation selected the novel as a No. 1 Book Sense Pick, and it was nominated for the Book Sense Book of the Year Award.

Thanks largely to this avid bookseller support, the novel began to accrue a readership. It went into a second printing within a month of publication, was listed as a “Best Book of the West” by the Salt Lake Tribune, and enabled me to travel through 13 cities in seven different states. It was all much, much more than I could have hoped for.

Obviously, I am by no means famous. Nor am I what the publishing industry adoringly dubs a “bestselling author.” I did not rake in heaps of royalty payments. And the arduous, mystery-shrouded process of writing has grown no easier or more streamlined in the past four years. I still spend most of my time alone in a room with pieces of paper, and usually while writing I feel I’m fumbling in the dark. My vocation is by no means financially profitable, either. Figured on an hourly rate, my income amounts to barely a fraction of what it was when I clerked in that bookstore (this past year my earnings were well below poverty level). What’s more, I still receive a few rejections a week.

But…I’ve forever checked off “dreamily forecasting” from that list of pastimes I mentioned above — and this fact causes me wonder every day.

How could so much good stuff happen to a rather naïve, unassuming guy — an anonymous dreamer — in what cynics would call a celebrity-driven era of sales-obsessed publishing and corporate gluttony?

There I was: an upstart, undistinguished by privileged association, lacking formal education and hard life experience, unable to boast of past achievements. With qualifications no stronger than a high school diploma, some hard-won literary magazine publications, and a manuscript that people liked, I found myself embarking upon the literary life I’d dreamt about.

A charmed existence? In some ways, certainly. But with the passing of time, I’ve continued to think there’s more to it than that — and my experiences so far have taught me one thing conclusively:

You don’t have to be an insider. The golden key is yours already. The closed door can be opened.

As the samurai and teacher Hideyoshi states in our book, The Prosperous Peasant, “Conceivable Means Achievable”:

For every stage of a journey, one must keep a clear end in mind. If you can conceive of the steps along the way to your destination, isn’t it a straightforward matter to plot those steps and reach them one by one? Men fail less for lack of ability than for lack of clear intermediate goals…What can be accomplished that the mind has not first conceived?”

[Hideyoshi’s] two listeners shook their heads. “Nothing,” they agreed.

“Precisely. But once the goal of your journey is fixed, it is simple to plot the course.”

My breakthroughs, such as they are, have all required a great deal of work and persistence, as much on my wife’s part as on my own — including (don’t forget) the writing and scrapping of that first novel I referred to above (a two-year process) before I could confidently write a book like The Green Age of Asher Witherow.

But though I’m still in an early and modest chapter of my career, I’ve learned that impractical hopes can become sustainable reality. To paraphrase Henry David Thoreau:

Endeavor to live the life you’ve imagined and you will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

Later this month I’m going to do something I haven’t done for twenty years: apply for a job. This qualifies as a reasonably daunting task, one that I’m very much looking forward to.

No, I’m not giving up self-employment. The position I seek is half-time, one that suits me perfectly and offers an outstanding fit with my other work. Plus, I was invited to apply, so my chances should be good (wish me luck!).

But it’s been a long time since I sat on the applicant side of the interviewing desk, so I’m taking my preparation seriously. Especially so because my prospective employer is a large institution with a formidable bureaucracy.

Bureaucracy intrigues me. Every large organization has one, and all bureaucracies—none moreso than those involved in the business world—struggle to cope with ever faster-changing environments.

So while pondering the issue every job seeker must squarely address—how to best help one’s prospective employer—I realized that my background in entrepreneurship is the most valuable asset I offer. To deal with increasingly effective competitors, this organization needs someone with a fresh perspective and a different skill set. In other words, it needs to introduce some variety into its system.

Variety. The word stuck in my mind, and while mulling initial steps in my application strategy, I stumbled across an intriguing concept, The Law of Requisite Variety. It’s from the discipline of cybernetics, the interdisciplinary study of complex systems originally defined as “the science of control and communication, in the animal and the machine” (not to be confused with Dianetics, the controversial self-help movement founded by L. Ron Hubbard).

The Law of Requisite Variety applies to organisms, machines, institutions, and any other system trying to survive. “Survival” can be described as “maintaining essential variables within a proper range of values.” That’s something all systems try to do, typically with the help of some sort of control mechanism, or regulator.

Here’s the science behind it: W. Ross Ashby, the law’s formulator, said that disturbances (D) start in the world outside the organism—often far from it—and threaten the organism’s survival (drive the essential variables (E) outside their proper range of values) if the organism’s regulator (R) does nothing to block them. To maintain E within proper values, R must counteract each disturbance D. But to completely block the effects of disturbances, the regulator must be able to produce at least as many counteractions as there are disturbances. To completely eliminate disturbances, therefore, the regulator must embody as much variety as the disturbances.

In plain language, what does this mean? Ashby himself wrote that “in its elementary forms the law is intuitively obvious and hardly deserving statement.” He offered the example that a camera must be capable of at least twenty distinct settings to successfully take in-focus pictures of twenty different subjects lying at varying distances from the photographer.

But applications of the Law of Requisite Variety to business and other disciplines are clear. Only adaptable organizations can survive, and the way to become adaptable is to incorporate more internal variety. Here’s what the Panarchy Web site says about broader implications of the Law of Requisite Variety:

This is a central law for the proper functioning of every mechanical and biological entity. It has been totally ignored by the social scientists and by their patrons, the state elite, because it represents a refutation of the need for the concentration of power in a central apparatus (the state) as the only way to solve problems (or generally to deal with reality) in a complex society.

In fact, the law supports the exact opposite view, declaring, with the support of logical reasoning and empirical evidence, that only variety can master variety, reducing disturbances and promoting harmonious order … This principle then disposes of the myth (still cherished by journalists and sociologists in search of easy popularity) that extraordinarily complex situations demand the concentration of extraordinary powers in a central entity.

Putting it in business terms, when markets are changing and competition is stiff, corporate rigidity and centralized decision-making threatens survival (I love it when pundit-spouted aphorisms turn out to be backed by hard-core science).

So there you have it: Proof that variety is not only desirable, but necessary to survival (give me some credit here, I’m exerting myself not to use a dreadful cliché involving the word “spice”).

How does this relate to my job search? Well, I hope to help change the scene at an institution I love, and equally important, I hope that this institution will help me change my scene. Together—and by providing each other with requisite variety—we’ll not only survive, but thrive.

You might also enjoy:

“Recognizing the Opportunity Within”

“You’ve Got to Jump”

“Understanding the World Through the Thomas Theorem“

“We proceeded on.”

These three words pervade the justly famous journals of Lewis & Clark. They hold a metaphorical significance that I find endlessly inspiring, and capture the essential spiritual achievement of the expedition of 1804-1806.

Legendary trailblazers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark have long been a subject of fascination to American history buffs while being remembered primarily as a subject of … well, homework, by most of the rest of us.

I suppose it was a long-lasting residual effect of my own school-day boredom, but I’d always thought that the Lewis & Clark story was overrated. In my college years, this assumption took the form of arrogant “enlightenment.” Okay, these guys journeyed into the unknown and all that—but weren’t they merely functionaries of Manifest Destiny?—you know, that dubious enterprise by which an imperialist American government laid claim to territories already inhabited for millennia by indigenous peoples?

Well, being a newcomer to the Pacific Northwest, and given that I’m working on a new book partly set in the region, I concluded recently that this Lewis & Clark business deserved some looking-into. What was all this about the Native American woman Sacagawea? About Clark adopting her half-Shoshone, half-French children? About Clark’s slave, York, coming along and being the first person of African descent ever seen by the Native Americans along the way? What was this about Lewis believing the expedition had proved a failure? Lewis being a manic depressive? Lewis killing himself!?

Perhaps there was a compelling human drama there after all, a story as rich and complicated and epic in scope as many another iconic moment in our national history.

I decided Lewis & Clark should finally get the attention I’d refused them for my entire public-school education. So I started by touring a Smithsonian exhibition marking the expedition’s bicentennial. Then I plunged into Brian Hall’s magnificent fictional recreation of the Lewis & Clark story, the unfortunately titled novel, I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company. Some time later, I read a second novel on the theme. And finally, just this month, I turned to that blessedly dependable interpreter of great past events, filmmaker Ken Burns.

Burns’s four-hour documentary, Lewis & Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery, illuminates the two-and-a-half-year Jefferson-commissioned expedition in its suspenseful essence. Yes, suspenseful! Granted, we all know what happened: With immense confidence and acumen a Dynamic Duo spearheaded a party of thirty-odd able-bodied men (and one woman), pushing through that uncharted expanse between the Mississippi to the Pacific coast, braving roaring rivers, Indian warriors, grizzly bears, and winter starvation, even while mapping the country, documenting new species of plants and animals, and recording scenic impressions along the way.

But somehow, in defiance of our staid assumptions regarding Lewis & Clark, Ken Burns returns us to the real-time experience of the journey itself. In his hands, the spirit of the historic undertaking (read: “We proceeded on”) begins to mesmerize. Watching Burns’s beautiful film, I couldn’t help pondering all the implications of what it really means to commit oneself wholeheartedly to an adventure—be it physical or spiritual—to “proceed on” and push through to the accomplishment of a goal.

It’s not incidental that Burns’s film should affect me so personally. The lauded documentarian articulates his main philosophy as a filmmaker in one pungent phrase that speaks perfectly to the power of his style:

Meaning accrues in duration.

The longer we let ourselves consider a history-changing moment, a great life, a work of art, a face, a landscape, then the more deeply and directly the viewed object will speak to us–and the more we’ll learn about ourselves and our world.

Of course, in this hyperlinked, high-speed culture of ours, we are confronted daily by super-ephemeral stimuli. PhotoShopped images, flashing pop-ups, and pixilated text assault the eye and speed the rate of our looking till our most customary state is one of quick glances, passive reception, a kind of waking REM. The long-term effect of this is a cultural, personal, I daresay spiritual numbing and dumbing, what literary critic Sven Birkerts has forbiddingly dubbed,

… the leaching away of mass and consequence from our personal and historical experience.

But Ken Burns is right. Meaning accrues in duration. So he pins his camera to an image and leaves it there till the image starts to work on you at some powerful and mysterious level.

Likewise, after fifteen years of letting my eyes glaze over at the names “Lewis” and “Clark,” I’ve finally taken a good solid look and—what do you know?—have discovered that this tiresome old tale in fact speaks to me deeply.

Now, leafing through my condensed edition of the Lewis & Clark journals, I spot the singular weighty phrase in Clark’s entry of July 30, 1804, early in the journey:

Set out this morning early, proceeded on to a clear open prairie.

Turning through the pages, I find him using the same words on September 26th, 29th, 30th–and yet again on October 5th, 18th and 26th. I begin skimming at random, and there he is, still employing the phrase on July 19th of the following year, 1805, as the expedition nears the Great Falls on the Missouri River. And there again, on the 23rd and 25th of that month.

I skip ahead and catch up with the expedition in late 1805. They’ve reached the rapids of the Columbia River, less than a hundred miles from the Pacific coast. On November 10, 1805 Clark writes,

We loaded our canoes and proceeded on.

The more closely I read it, the more it means to me. I, too, am on a journey. I too proceed onward. And the longer I gaze at the visions along my way, the more meaning each moment of my journey shall accrue. I feel awake, alive, alert at every step—and every step teaches me something new.

You might also enjoy:

“Art Awakens Us: The Diving Bell & the Butterfly”

“You’ve Got to Jump”

“The Value of Travel”

“Eight Difficult, Outdated Ways to Excel“

One of my favorite tunes from decades past is Whip It, by the technopop unit Devo. I used to play Whip It in a cover band (along with Uncontrollable Urge), and it always made partygoers jump to their feet. Back then, I could hardly have known that I would later run into Devo founder Mark Mothersbaugh at a Tokyo art show, or that years after that, I’d be referring to Devo in a blog.

But here I am, facing a daunting task (designing and executing doctoral research) and I find my mind casting back to days of playing music, and drawing on the wisdom so neatly described by Devo’s lyrics.

Some listeners thought Whip It is about kinky sex; it’s actually about problem-solving:

When a problem comes along, you must whip it.
Before the cream sits out too long, you must whip it.
When something’s going wrong, you must whip it.

Now whip it! Into shape. Shape it up! Get straight!
Go forward! Move ahead! Try to detect it. It’s not too late! To whip it! Whip it good!

When a good time turns around, you must whip it.
You will never live it down, unless you whip it.
No one gets their way, until they whip it.

Maybe because I played Whip It so many times, and maybe because I happened to meet Mothersbaugh in person, something about the song struck me deeply and stayed with me over the years. While pondering my approach to daunting tasks recently undertaken, I came up with seven steps that have worked for me. Take a look, and see if they might work for you, too.

1. Abandon Either the Task or the Result
Read The Underachiever’s Manifesto and know that it’s okay to give up before you start. You don’t have to set the world on fire. Undertake the task only if it’s truly meaningful, and you have the time, energy, skills, and psychic bandwidth to handle it. Sure you want to proceed? Then abandon attachment to the result and immerse yourself in the process. The value of completing Daunting Tasks lies in the journey theretoward, not in the end state of accomplishment. Still on board? Then on to Step 2!

2. Start Now
Start right away, “before the cream sits out too long.” Immediate action, even baby steps, generates momentum and confidence.

3. Enlarge Yourself
In your mind, make yourself bigger than the task. You are huge and powerful: you look down on this puny job like a towering giant who twiddles trees like matchsticks. Grab your Daunting Task by the, er, family jewels, and squeeze until he begs permission to shrink to a manageable size. Grant such permission. Now kiss and make up. You’re friends, but you had to show who’s in charge.

4. Brainstorm a Quick & Dirty Plan
Quickly write down a strategy for dealing with the Task. Don’t think hard about it, just jot down whatever thoughts come into your head. Write badly and don’t edit. Later, look over your notes and rearrange the order of your thoughts. Try to see how the job might be broken down into manageable sub-tasks.

5. Draft or Rehearse
Based on your notes, write a draft plan for accomplishing the Daunting Task. Alternatively, if it’s a job interview, presentation or the like, “rehearse” the task: shut yourself into a room (preferably with a video camera) and let ‘er rip. Who cares if you sound goofy or your draft plan reads terribly? By blurting out the words you need—whether on paper or by voice—you’ll start to understand what you want to say, and perceive the gaps in your plan. And by blundering through one “dress rehearsal”—sloppy as it may be—you’ll feel like you’re 50% of the way home. See how your confidence has jumped?

6. Be Confident and Be Friends
You can do it! View your task as a challenge, a job, a project—anything but a problem. Thinking of something as a problem from the get-go immediately positions you to fight the Daunting Task rather than collaborate in achieving the promise of its purpose. Remember, you bought into tackling the job during Step 1. So be friends with it. Let the challenge of your work create curiosity rather than despair. If you feel stuck, read a book on the subject, or seek out and approach an expert for advice.

7. Do First What You Want to Do Least
Clark’s Rule About Priorities (CRAP™), the first of Clark’s Rules, says Do First What You Want to Do Least. It’s based on the difference between urgency and importance. Even though you’re friends with your Daunting Task, somehow you may find it easier to start each day by responding to e-mail, browsing the Web, and accomplishing little, “urgent” errands. Resist the temptation. Stick with the important task: the Daunting Task.

Finally, celebrate the process as much as the end result by treating yourself as you pass through major milestones. You’ve earned it!

The foregoing is hereby formalized as Clark’s Axiom Regarding Daunting Tasks (CARD TASKS): Abandon either the task or attachment to the result. Earlier this week, Mark put it beautifully as “Think Progress, Not Completion.”

As always, read the disclaimer, and be advised that Clark’s Rules may apply only to Clark, who can barely follow them himself.
You may enjoy some related posts:

“Clark’s Law of Work” (Attractiveness is inversely proportional to compensation)

“Clark’s Communication Potency Theorum” (The power of communications improve exponentially with proximity, either physical or psychological)

“Clark’s Option on Opportunities Theory (COOT^TM)”

I work entirely from home, and unless I make a concerted effort, I can go weeks without seeing other human beings face-to-face, save my wife (and soon my child). But because this weird lifestyle helps me remain prolific, I thought I’d share a few small habits that keep me keeping on.

I believe each of the following points may be applicable to the lifestyle and/or profession of anybody seeking to increase and maintain productivity, whether in the workplace or in some as-yet uncultivated personal or creative aspect of life. So even if you don’t stay at home alone everyday dreaming up characters and writing novels and short stories, take a look.

1. Wake Up Early (Engage the Process)

I get up every weekday at 6:45am. I make my wife’s lunch and see her off to work, then settle into my daily rhythm at the desk, amidst my books and papers. Now, most people have to rise and shine and be at the workplace by 7:30, 8:00, 9:00am, so this may not seem like news. But I include it because for me, waking up early is about more than the literal act of rising from bed in order to arrive at my desk “on time.” It’s about consciously putting my day before me, giving myself the time to envision its many possibilities, then easing into all that possibility with a sense of purpose and an awareness of each day as an incremental accomplishment on the way to a larger goal. The process is more important than the result; without the former there can be no latter.

2. Get Dressed & Put On Your Shoes (Establish a Ritual Act)

I never sit down at the desk without first changing out of my pajamas and slippers. For me, this outer preparation facilitates an inner one. I guess you could call it a ritual act. It helps me feel more focused or centered. Somehow it also validates or elevates my sense of the work I’m going to do. I arrive at the desk feeling put-together, more equal to the challenge, the seriousness, of what’s before me. “Look the part,” they say in the business world, meaning if you seek a high-powered executive job, you’d better arrive at the interview dressed like a high-powered executive. That’s one element of my meaning here, sure. But more importantly, I’m talking about establishing some active personal ritual, however simple, by which you prepare yourself, body and mind, for immersion into your work.

3. Use an “Isolation Booth” (Nurture Concentration)

There is no greater danger to productivity than distraction. I suspect this is true in many professions. And silence (sometimes soft music) is to the writer what a steady hand is to the surgeon. Concentration and productivity are symbiotic. I believe that the buzzword “multitasking” is merely a benign-sounding synonym for distraction. I’m a big proponent of mono-tasking, and for that very purpose I’ve set up a detached writing studio in my backyard. This studio is unprofaned by the telephone or Internet. It’s my sacrosanct creative space. All one really needs is a designated area, preferably shut off from everything about, where one may focus exclusively on a particular task.

4. Write Longhand (Go Analog)

The advantages of an analog working method are nearly countless. I usually write my first drafts on paper (I filled nine notebooks while working on my last novel). Word processing programs are invaluable later in the writing process, but early on, the backspace key imperils productivity. I produce far more by opening a notebook than by switching on my laptop. Surrendering to the imperfection of the first draft, I escape writerly paralysis. On paper, there’s no “highlight and delete” function, hence no compulsive scrapping of text. Sentences, paragraphs, pages are allowed to accumulate in all their lovely inadequacy. A book takes shape this way, flawed at first, and later sculpted and refined. And I suspect that for all those insufficiencies of the early draft, I am a better writer on paper, because my thoughts move more slowly and each of my imaginings is allowed to deepen in that process. Nuances come to light that I might have missed altogether in the hurried tapping of a keyboard. As a bonus, paper productivity allows me to retain a visible record of all my deletions, in case I should later rethink my first impulses; i.e. ‘This sentence didn’t work in this particular place, but it will go nicely over there!’ Check out Tim’s preachments of the value of avoiding e-mail and turning off your computer.

5. Think Progress, Not Completion (Stay in the Rhythm)

Avoid overwhelming yourself with the magnitude of the task before you. Trust your process. Novelist E.L. Doctorow said:

Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

All one can do is orient oneself to the daily act. By putting one’s focus into each moment at hand rather than far out ahead at some hazy eventual destination, one does better and more meaningful work–or, to amend Doctorow’s analogy, one avoids crashing the car.

The Lonely Novelist’s Five Point Productivity Plan is simple, but it works for me. Allow me to cap it off with a favorite quote (which you may have seen in a previous post):

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

Here at Soul Shelter this Thursday, Tim will present a method for dealing with daunting tasks.

See also:

“The Four-Letter Question for 2008: WIRU”

“Understanding the World Through the Thomas Theorem”

“Redefining Rejection“

Books have always been important to me. Once I acted on a very specific piece of advice from How to Sell Your Business and Get What You Want and earned, in the space of six months, more money than I’d ever had in my entire life before then.

Rarely is the value a book delivers quantifiable in dollars; most often it’s an immeasurable dose of pleasure or inspiration. Think about it: how else can you acquire, for only fifteen or twenty dollars, the fruits of a thousand hours of someone’s thought and hard labor?

So today I’ll describe eight other books that have had a big impact on my life; that have shaped Soul Shelter’s twin themes of Fortune and Fulfillment.

First up, my favorite pick in the Fortune category: The Richest Man in Babylon by George Clason.

This is one of the rare books that addresses the nature and meaning of work, not simply ways to grow wealthy. Through parables set in ancient Babylon, it reveals timeless laws of wealth creation, the most important of which is summarized in three words: Pay yourself first. It was published in 1926, so the style and language may not resonate strongly with younger (let’s say pre-AARP) readers.

Next up is a generational stalwart: Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill.

Abundant with anecdotes, this classic is based on the idea that whatever thoughts predominate in one’s mind tend to manifest themselves in reality (a sound notion backed by the Thomas Theorum). Think and Grow Rich may be dated, but it still turns my crank. See if it turns yours.

Batting third is Rich Dad, Poor Dad, by Robert Kiyosaki, whose mention will undoubtedly make J.D., my blogging mentor, roll his eyes. But Rich Dad, Poor Dad strikes a chord with me because it advocates entrepreneurship, and it’s written in a folksy, easily understood style with plenty of stories (my favorite is Kiyosaki’s admission—to a Singapore journalist critical of the Hawaii-born author’s writing skills—that he’s a “best-selling, not a best-writing” author).

Rich Dad, Poor Dad teaches the difference between assets and liabilities, explains why your home is a liability, and offers powerful arguments for self-employment. Just because it’s sold 30 million copies doesn’t mean it’s a bad book.

In the cleanup position is The Millionaire Next Door, by Thomas Stanley and William Danko. The most recent of my three picks, Millionaire Next Door is like a follow-up to Rich Dad, Poor Dad because it empirically demonstrates that self-employment is the most practical road to wealth for most people (Stanley is an academic who studied millionaires and discovered that most are small business owners living normal lives in ordinary neighborhoods like you and me). A strong endorsement of the basic message of Rich Dad, Poor Dad.

OK, enough about fortune. On to the second half of the equation: Fulfillment!

Leading off is Be Here Now by Ram Dass. The key point of this extraordinary book is that now is all we have—there is no yesterday or today, at least not in any way that we can experience them. There is the “now” that we experienced yesterday, and there is the “now” that will come tomorrow, but since it is always “now,” we’ll do best to try to live, well, now, or “in the moment.” On car trips my young son Ray used to continually ask “are we here yet?” I kept answering “yes” until he got the point. A terrific introduction to eastern spiritual thinking.

Batting second is James Allen’s As a Man Thinketh, about which I posted the week before last. Napoleon Hill, Dale Carnegie, and a host of other self-help gurus copped key licks from Allen, who wrote:

A man is literally what he thinks, his character being the complete sum of all his thoughts … Most of us are anxious to improve our circumstances, but are unwilling to improve ourselves.

Priceless.

Third up and swinging the world’s heftiest bat is the Tao Teh King by Lao Tzu, my favorite philosophy book. Make sure you get the Archie J. Bahm translation: its crystalline poetic logic stands in stark contrast to those literal—not literary—translations featuring ponderous, baffling prose. Reading Bahm’s edition, your mind will be boggled that such astounding wisdom has been around for thousands of years—and what a difference good translation makes.

In the cleanup slot, we have The Prosperous Peasant, a book of parables built upon true historical events surrounding Japan’s most extraordinary leader, a sixteenth century peasant-turned-samurai who achieved mind-blowing wealth and success, only to precipitate his own downfall with ill-advised overseas invasions (sound familiar?). I love The Prosperous Peasant because it uses the classic storytelling method to reveal millenniums-old wisdom more fundamental than any “how to” advice (an opinion only slightly tinged by the fact that I wrote it together with novelist/Soul Shelter partner Mark Cunningham).

So there you have it: Eight outstanding books pointing ways toward fortune and fulfillment. What books have made the most impact on your life? Send a short note to “authors” at this domain, and we’ll post some responses—and reward the writer of the most intriguing submission with a free, signed copy of The Prosperous Peasant.

Here are some more Soul Shelter posts about books and writing:

“Simplify, simplify!”

“Fulfillment: A Work in Progress”

“Steve Martin Tells the Story Before the Glory”

“Being, in excess, wells up in my heart.”–Rainer Maria Rilke

The most powerful works of art connect us to ourselves and each other. They awaken us, un-distract us, and bring us home to the substance of life: a touch, a taste, a color. They affirm human existence in its romance and tragedy alike. Our time here is brief, they remind us; we are duty bound to savor the wonders around us while we may.

Like the poet Rilke wrote in his Ninth Duino Elegy:

…To be here means so much / …everything here, all this that’s disappearing, seems to need us, to concern us, in some strange way, / we who disappear / even faster!

Good art touches us at our own uniquely human core. I believe it resonates on a level profoundly more intimate than the “everybody’s reading it, seeing it, listening to it” craze often sparked by honors bestowed upon a book, a song, or a film from this or that committee of judges.

So maybe it’s fitting that our first Soul Shelter film review should concern a quiet little movie nominated for four 2008 Academy Awards, which remained conspicuously absent from the proceedings onstage at the Oscars last week, for while viewing this film I had one of the most astonishingly personal, emotional art-experiences of my life. Actually, I phrase it badly to say I viewed the movie at all; I inhabited it, would be more correct. It’s called The Diving Bell & the Butterfly.

Based on the true story of Jean Dominique-Bauby, an elite epicurean from the French fashion world, the movie explores Jean’s bodily and spiritual trauma in the aftermath of a devastating stroke that left him paralyzed at age 43. At the start of the film he awakens from a 20-day coma to find himself surrounded by doctors who inform him he’s “locked in,” that is, afflicted by a rare syndrome that leaves him fully conscious and capable of normal thought, but unable to move or speak. He can blink his eyes, nothing more.

From this place of bleakness and despair, an unthinkably expansive journey begins. In a mesmeric approach to the paralytic’s story, director Julian Schnabel puts the viewer directly into Bauby’s body. We see through the stricken man’s eyes and are privy to the murmurous narration of his thoughts. We are “locked in” as he is. A shutter closes on screen whenever we blink. It’s a startling out-of-body experience. With Bauby, we suffer one eye being sewn shut (to save it from infection); in a wheelchair we’re pushed down a hospital corridor and catch glimpses of our contorted face reflected in a window; our limp body is submerged in a tank, sponged and scrubbed by orderlies.

We are completely dependent upon the doctors and hospital therapists, and very soon we come to love these people. They are good-hearted and generous of spirit. They are beautiful.

Bauby’s real story culminated in the publication of a memoir about his experience, entitled The Diving Bell & the Butterfly. Amazingly, he “dictated” the book in the midst of his paralysis, blinking his single good eye as a means of selecting, one at a time, each letter of each word he wished to use. In the film, we participate in Bauby’s first slow attempts at this process.

Eventually Schnabel’s camera pulls back. We glimpse Bauby from the outside. And though we’re now looking at him, we remain inside him. Because the trance of the film’s empathic opening lingers, we’re attuned to his interior world as we watch him in his wheelchair, his hospital bed—and also in memories from before the stroke, when he was in his physical prime. Through it all, this interior world becomes a luminous, living place.

This man has lost everything: his body itself, the pleasures of movement, sensation, privacy, personal freedom—but his spirit is alive and well, perhaps even freer than ever. The “locked in” man transcends his condition. He imagines, loves, and creates, and we are swept along on this spiritual journey.

Bauby wrote in his memoir:

My diving bell becomes less oppressive, and my mind takes flight like a butterfly. There is so much to do. You can wander off in space or in time, set out for Tierra del Fuego or for King Midas’s court. You can visit the woman you love, slide down beside her and stroke her still-sleeping face. You can build castles in Spain, steal the Golden Fleece, discover Atlantis, realize your childhood dreams and adult ambitions.

Schnabel’s film positively resonates with the preciousness of life in all its sensual particulars. It explores how art and imagination liberated one human spirit; how, even in his “broken” state a man could celebrate the pulsing beauty of existence. And where Jean Dominique-Bauby is set free by his own art, thoughts, dreams, and memories, we too are set free through the art of the film that tells his story. We take flight into him, as he takes flight into the gifts of life.

It’s an experience equivalent to what Rilke describes later on in his Ninth Elegy:

Between the hammer strokes our hearts survive / like the tongue / that between the teeth / and in spite of everything / goes on praising.

I emerged from The Diving Bell & the Butterfly renewed, inspired, and alert to a fresh immersion into my own senses. This film is a gift.

[Note: Rilke translations here are by David Young.]

See also: “Steve Martin Tells the Story Before the Glory” ; “A Moment of Fulfillment” ; “The Risk of Happiness”