So before earning an MBA, consider a do-it-yourself “MPA” — a Master of Personal Administration. Unlike an MBA, which purports to train you to manage organizations, an MPA encourages you to understand yourself and manage your own career. Here are some differences between the two:

1. Organizational business plans versus personal business models

Even though the dotcom meltdown demonstrated more than a decade ago that “business plans” are a lousy basis for entrepreneurial action, MBA programs remain wedded to “business plan” thinking. The MPA, on the other hand, calls for individuals to seek meaningful work by designing and testing personal business models.

2. Big/stable/predictable versus small/chaotic/ever-changing

The “A” in “MBA” assumes a need for administration — people to manage large, stable, predictable organizations. In contrast, the MPA approach acknowledges that work today is messy, unpredictable, and constantly changing — and that small businesses employ half of all private sector workers.

3. Greed versus contribution

The U.S. financial meltdown has exposed greed at its worst — and the dangers of the kinds of financial engineering taught in MBA programs. The MPA calls for learners to do good things for others while helping themselves — the essence of ethical business.

4. Commoditization versus differentiation

MBA degrees are increasingly common and therefore an ever-weaker differentiator in a tight job market. But the candidate with a sound personal business model linked to a clear purpose stands out. As Josh Kaufman writes in The Personal MBA, “Skip business school. Educate yourself.”

So, are you tempted to start studying for your MPA? Where should you start?

Well, there’s no formal curriculum, and no diploma at the end. The first step is to develop a personal business model — a concise definition of your Customers and the Value you provide them, all driven by a Purpose that binds work and personal life. You do this with a Business Model Canvas, which looks like this:

You can find the Canvas and more at Business Model You, where 276 work life wizards from 37 countries are developing the personal business model methodology (thanks to personal branding expert Andres Perez Ortega for his inspiration on the MPA acronym, which I’ve rendered in English).

At Business Model You you’ll also find other resources and experts to help you make the MPA honor roll. Now, that doesn’t mean working on an MPA is easy: One member who uses our methodology in business courses says that “students think making up strategic plans for business is easy, but creating a strategy for yourself is hard — because the personal strategy matters more.”

In fact, I’ll be the first to admit that none of us has actually earned the MPA credential yet. We may never graduate! But maybe that’s the biggest advantage of all. While an MBA costs tens of thousands of dollars for two years of classes, an MPA is free — and the learning continues for a lifetime.

Why not enroll today?

I was Tokyo for a couple of weeks, working on my doctoral research and seeing family and friends between interviews and writing sessions. One night I enjoyed dinner with Brad, a longtime buddy who’s been in mobile communications for some ten years. He’d lost his job a few months back, and wanted to talk about life, work — and going solo.

“I went to see a recruiter about a month before I got canned,” he said over a Club sandwich at a basement café in Omotesando. “I told him, ‘I know I’m going to get the ax, and want to see if I can find something preemptively.’

“The guy looked at me like I’d sprouted green dreadlocks. ‘Don’t quit your job now,’ he urged. ‘Nokia just let 60 people go, and a bunch of them are showing up here. Stay put as long as you can!’

“Two months later, that recruiter’s company closed down, and he himself was out of a job.”

As I listened, I tucked into my maguro tuna garlic steak. Outrageously good. Brad continued.

“That mindset — that your well-being and success depends on an organization — just blows me away. Now that I’m older, I see how I’m the one creating value, I’m the one who makes things happen.”

He went on to detail the events leading up to losing his job, his anxiety over continuing to provide effectively for his wife and children, his unforeseen excitement about being forced to pursue career and personal goals closer to his true self.

Reflective, Brad returned to his sandwich. I told him I got his drift about the “dependency mindset,” and that it often results in too much work time spent resolving conflicts unrelated to operations. Turf battles, personality clashes, political struggles. Those things are a huge part of salaried employment.

“In fact,” I said,  “most office jobs can be done in three or four concentrated, uninterrupted hours of real work or day. It’s the attendant nonsense — plus meetings, administrivia, and commuting — that claims the rest of employee time. The key challenge of blowing all that off and going solo is securing the steady income of a conventional job: the relentless salary that rolls in month after month.”

Brad began describing possibilities for his new, non-employee career. He’d already secured a temporary gig with a mobile content consultancy, enough to carry him through the following month, and now he was looking at combining three part-time opportunities that might equal or even surpass his previous income — all the while letting him focus on areas of greater personal interest, minus the commute, conflicts, and constricted hours of conventional employment.

“I’m starting to see how losing my job has pushed me to a new level of awareness about the nature of work,” he said, bright-eyed. “When you put yourself out there, things start to happen. If you make ten tries, one or two might work out. Make 20, four or five might work out. It’s not like you make ten tries and nothing happens.”

I nodded, recalling my favorite takeaway from Rich Dad Poor Dad: The amount of revenue coming in is directly proportional to the number of communications going out.

Brad paused. “I don’t know why any of this should come as a surprise, but somehow my thinking has changed.”

Time for an epigram, I decided, and quoted from a new book by Kanye West: “Life is five percent what happens and 95% how you react.”

Brad kept talking, and I kept listening. As we parted, he thanked me profusely for the “energizing discussion.” I nodded with a smile. He had energized himself. He’d lost a job, and now was reclaiming his life.

(This post is from the Soul Shelter archives)

You may also enjoy:

“How to Go Solo without a ‘Big Idea’”

“Entrepreneurship: A Primer”

“Know Your Gift“

Working on a doctoral thesis has sent me on a book learnin’ kick, and the other day I stumbled across something that, to my mind, reveals much about how the world works.

It’ s a genuine sociology precept called the Thomas Theorem. Formulated in 1928 by the sociologist William Isaac Thomas, it’s been described by one eminent scholar as “probably the single most consequential sentence ever put in print by an American sociologist.” Sometimes called the Thomas Dictum, it is accepted by many researchers as scientific fact—or at least as a powerful way of comprehending the human condition. Here it is:

If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.

The Thomas Theorum is no armchair theory. Law enforcement agencies use it to train officers in the handling of the mentally ill, and it’s been used effectively to explain everything from beauty contest outcomes to panic runs on bank deposits.

To me, the Thomas Theorem explains a lot: The healing power of religion, crowd behavior, a leader’ s ability to galvanize, the staying power of superstitions, Henry Ford’ s famous line that “whether you believe you can do a thing or not, you’ re right.”

Closer to my heart, the Thomas Theorem suggests that self-help books advocating the power of belief are basically right.

In fact, Thomas may have gleaned inspiration from one of the Granddaddies of the self-help movement, a man who intuitively understood the Thomas Theorum decades before Thomas himself: James Allen.

A soft-spoken, retired Englishman who lived quietly in the southwest coastal town of Ilfracombe, Allen wrote a short book about positive thinking called As a Man Thinketh. The key theme of Allen’ s ground-breaking book is that one’ s thoughts determine one’ s circumstances. As Allen put it:

A man is literally what he thinks, his character being the complete sum of all his thoughts … As the plant springs from, and could not be without, the seed, so every act of a man springs from the hidden seeds of thought, and could not have appeared without them.

And more to the point:

Most of us are anxious to improve our circumstances, but are unwilling to improve ourselves.

Oddly, Allen contradicted his own thesis when he decided that As a Man Thinketh was unworthy of publication. Fortunately, his wife disagreed, and the book spawned an industry now worth several hundred billion dollars each year.

You can view the complete text of As a Man Thinketh at sites such as the Project Gutenberg.

Allen died in 1912, long before witnessing the seminal effect his work had on today’ s gargantuan “wellness” industry. Allen wrote 19 books, many with undeniably broad appeal (it seems another becomes a bestseller in Japanese translation every year).

In my view, James Allen was to the self-help industry what Chuck Berry was to rock n’ roll music. Berry was influenced by many musicians, but he was the first to combine numerous traditional elements into an original, enduring new form.

Similarly, writers preceding Allen by decades—even centuries—covered comparable topics, but Allen crystallized the “power of positive thinking” concept in humble, poetic language utterly devoid of hucksterism (I haven’t read most of The Secret’s source texts, many of which preceded Allen and seem more focused on money-making—if you’ve read any, please share your thoughts).

Later self-help gurus—Dale Carnegie, Napoleon Hill, Tony Robbins, Wayne Dyer and many others—owe a huge debt to Allen. And the industry is poised for even more explosive growth, analysts say. Economist Paul Pilzer, in a book entitled The Next Trillion, predicted the U.S. wellness industry will be worth a trillion dollars by 2010. So there’ s plenty of opportunity to do good by helping others be well.

But most important, the Thomas Theorum suggests that our own fortune and fulfillment are, indeed, largely the result of our beliefs. In fact, I feel a new Clark Rule coming on … wait a minute … yes, here it is! And with an easy-to-remember acronym: TTTTT™ (Tim’s Take on The Thomas Theorum):

Make it real in your mind first, then real in fact.

Or as Mark and I put it in The Prosperous Peasant, our book of success parables: Conceivable Means Achievable.

(This post comes to you from the Soul Shelter archives)

You may also enjoy:

What We Really Need to be Happy

Life Without Principle (or Interest)

Opting Out of The Deferred Life Plan

In the Absence of ‘Yes’

Once upon a time, a young Apple Computer attorney named Randy Komisar negotiated a deal that might have turned the personal computing industry upside down—and changed the world.

Komisar struck an agreement with Apollo Computer to license the Macintosh operating system. The move was the very embodiment of “Computing for the Rest of Us,” Apple’s Big Idea, the grand and good mission that inspired Apple employees and fans alike. Later Komisar would write:

Along with many others inside Apple, I was a strong proponent of licensing the Macintosh operating system in order to preempt Microsoft in setting the standard for user-friendly computing. After all, it was Apple’s birthright, its overriding mission. It would mean cannibalizing our own model, sacrificing margins for volume and market share, but it seemed better than circling the wagons and defending an ever-declining piece of the PC business.

But at the last minute, John Sculley, the brilliant Pepsi-Cola executive who at Steve Job’s behest famously gave up “selling sugar water” to lead Apple, scuttled the deal. Sculley undercut the company’s greater mission in order to preserve Apple’s high-margin end-to-end hardware/software business model.

Apple’s share of the worldwide personal computer market subsequently plummeted, and today it stands at just under three percent (3%). Would Sculley have made the same decision if he could have known that, years later, the reality of Apple’s vision would be Computing for Three Percent of Us?

No one knows, of course, what might have happened had Apple stuck to its ideals and licensed its operating system. But in The Monk and the Riddle, the best-seller detailing the episode, Komisar illuminates the point by distinguishing between passion and drive. Passion and drive are not the same at all, he writes:

Passion pulls you toward something you cannot resist. Drive pushes you toward something you feel compelled or obligated to do.

Passion pulled Apple Computer toward its mission of making computing available to everyman, but drive forced management to choose predictable profitability and lower risk. Here’s my takeaway: Drive arises from will, passion from the soul.

The distinction is useful. Komisar goes on to make the key point of his book, a rejection of what he calls the “Deferred Life Plan.”

The Deferred Life Plan consists of two steps:

1. Do what you have to do, then

2. Do what you want to do

To achieve the “promise of full coverage under the plan,” writes Komisar, you should divide life into two distinct parts. In Part One you do whatever it takes to become financially secure. In Part Two, you retire and do exactly what you want (it may hardly be necessary to note that the Deferred Life Plan is fueled by drive rather than passion).

The problem, of course, is that those who achieve financial security through drive rather than passion often discover the hollowness of victory. To use a self-help cliché, the success ladder they struggled so hard to climb was leaning against the wrong building.

I experienced this for myself when I sold my company in 2000. I’d started my firm in 1994 based on a passion: exploiting the Internet’s ability to convert high variable communications costs into low fixed costs on behalf of Japanese consumers, who’d long suffered from expensive metered-rate telecommunications services. The Internet also promised a curiously powerful mix of intimacy and anonymity, something perfectly matching the Japanese communication style.

That passion sustained me through the tough early years. Later, as our services were sought by higher and higher profile customers, the exigencies of business—and my drive to succeed—steadily overtook passion. Soon my business became one of helping online retailers sell more, more, more into Japan, Taiwan, and Korea. By the time we sold out, I, too, had “sold out” my Big Idea—my original vision—while fatigue and world-weary “success” blurred my recognition of that very truth. Maybe that’s why Komisar’s story struck me with such force.

Received Western wisdom continues to enthusiastically endorse the Deferred Life Plan, as it has for more than 200 years (see Mark’s post about Charles Lamb’s surprisingly mixed feelings upon his “deliverance” from a life of office drudgery in the early nineteenth century).

Opting out of the Deferred Life Plan is no easy task. It’s a struggle demanding discipline, not just of the will, but of the soul.

(This post appears from the Soul Shelter archives)

You may also enjoy:

Time for Everything

You’ve Gotta Jump

Recognizing the Opportunity Within

Soul School

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. Here are a few others you can check out:

“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)”

(This post has bubbled up from the deep blue Soul Shelter archives)

While reviewing thousands of psychology studies performed over the past six decades, Martin Seligman discovered a disturbing pattern: the overwhelming majority dealt with mental illness. Only a tiny portion addressed the issue of greatest concern to most people: How to be happy.

Dr. Seligman, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, was thunderstruck by the implications of his discovery. During World War II, Seligman realized, psychologists had focused on helping traumatized soldiers regain their lives. In the process they became preoccupied with studying, classifying, and treating mental illnesses. Inquiries into happiness and well-being were crowded out of the research ring. For the past 60 years psychology had been devoted almost exclusively to rehabilitation, remaining largely unconcerned with understanding how people become happier and more satisfied.

Seligman has since spearheaded a “positive psychology” movement dedicated to scientifically defining, identifying, classifying, and engendering behavior causally linked to happiness and well-being.

In short, he and others have undertaken rigorous research into Soul Shelter territory: Fortune and fulfillment. What did they learn?

Most important, work satisfaction is crucial. Seligman discovered that people become happier when they can use their “signature strengths”—another word for skills or core competencies—in an enterprise linked to a greater good. That jibes with Marcus Buckingham’s work (and my personal theory that business ventures are scalable and successful to the extent that they address significant social problems).

A growing number of scholars agree. Psychologists and couples therapist Aline Zoldbrod says recent research demonstrates that materialism is bad for one’s emotional well-being. Psychology professor Tim Kasser, the author of one such study, was quoted in an International Herald Tribune article:

Consumer culture is continually bombarding us with the message that materialism will make us happy. What this research shows is that that’s not true.

Such findings trace back to the Easterlin paradox, first proposed in 1974 by the economist Richard Easterlin. Easterlin conducted a global study showing that wealth does not improve national happiness levels once basic needs are fulfilled. Since then the Easterlin paradox has become one touchstone of the positive psychology movement as it relates to happiness.

Recently, though, the Easterlin paradox has been challenged. An article entitled “Maybe Money Can Buy Happiness” quoted two economists who found measurement problems with the data underlying the Easterlin paradox. “The central message,” one said, “is that income does matter.” Other economists agree.

Easterlin himself admits that people in richer countries are more satisfied, but cautions that correlation does not equal causality. In other words, wealth doesn’t necessarily cause satisfaction.

What are we non-economist, non-psychologist types to make of all this?

Well, it seems the experts agree on at least one thing: increased wealth clearly increases happiness for people living paycheck-to-paycheck. Yet unbridled materialism is a recipe for dissatisfaction. The problem seems to be our ability to effectively predict what will make us happy. Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert put it this way in (yet) another IHT article:

If it were the case that money made us totally miserable, we’d figure out we were wrong … it’s wrong in a more nuanced way. We think money will bring lots of happiness for a long time, and actually it brings a little happiness for a short time.

P.S. On May 2nd, 2008, after completing the rewrite of this post, I discovered that Justin Wolfers, the author of Economic Growth and Subjective Well-Being: Reassessing the Easterlin Paradox, wrote an extensive, six-part series on happiness. I really need to start reading more posts than I write …

(This essay first appeared in a different form in the October 2004 issue of Japan Entrepreneur Report. It comes to you today from the Soul Shelter archives.)

You may also enjoy:

“What We Really Need to be Happy”

“The State of American Happiness”

“A Moment of Fulfillment”

“Jack London on Upward Mobility”

“Simplify, Simplify!”

“Recognizing the Opportunity Within“

“I can’t. I’m scared.”

Skyler Dunn, three years older and infinitely wiser, looked at me with a kind smile as I stared nervously toward the water nearly thirty feet below. The surface of Lake Washington had never appeared so green and ominously dark.

It was a brilliant Seattle today in the summer of my twelfth year. I’d long before completed my rite of passage by leaping from “Top,” the white steel diving platform at the end of the Laurelhurst Beach Club dock. But budding hormones now goaded me to plunge headfirst — to dive, like the teenagers.

For an hour, Skyler had been egging me on, in a supportive, sympathetic way — my first one-on-one coaching session. I was thrilled that the bigger boy had taken such an interest in my dilemma.

“You can do it,” he insisted. “Once you’ve dove, you’ll wonder why you were ever scared.”

Again and again he pleaded my own case for me, persistent but positive. After what seemed like hours of agonizing, I edged to the brink of the platform, then flung myself headlong toward the water, moments later bursting with joy to the surface, to return triumphantly to Top for another dive. As Skyler had said, now it was easy.

It’s easy for me to know this now, because I’m a lot older, and when you get older it becomes easier to understand that risk is what makes life fun, what pushes you ahead. I love the Van Halen tune:

Might as well jump. Jump! Might as well jump.

Go ahead, jump. Jump! Go ahead, jump!

My father died a couple of years ago, and your father dying is the universe telling you, “you’re next.” And when you’re next, you start to realize that — given the new big picture you’ve just been handed — few things in life are truly risky.

During my first six-year stint in Tokyo, I talked to a guy who told me how he got started on an impressive business career. It was like talking to Skyler Dunn twenty years later:

“An acquaintance’s father, an electronics company executive, asked me if I could go to the U.S. and research the battery market. ‘Sure,’ I said.”

Ever cautious, I asked if he’d had any market research experience when he made that bold reply. He snorted. “Hell, if I always had to have experience before trying something new, I wouldn’t be able to get out of bed in the morning!”

His confidence bowled me over — and I winced at my own timid thinking. Of course! Just dive, like Skyler said! It’s the thought of trying the unknown, the fear of it that holds us back. It’s not that we’re incapable. We’re all capable of doing what we can reasonably imagine ourselves doing.

What Skyler taught me at the Beach Club so many years ago, and what I keep struggling to apply, now has the clarity of age. So I say: Dive, young man! Dive, old man! Dive!

The secret of reaping the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment from life is to live dangerously.

Frederich Nietzsche

(Tim’s currently on sabbatical; this post appears courtesy of the Soul Shelter archives)

You may also enjoy:

“Recognizing the Opportunity Within”

“Eight Difficult, Outdated Ways to Excel”

“The Merit of Mistakes”

“How To Achieve Even While Losing”

“Why We Should Contradict Ourselves“

— Here’s a good summer read that affirms the worth of obscurity, naïveté, and so-called “delusions.”—

I find myself at a semi-nascent period of my career as an earning writer—that is, earnings are no longer merely nascent. Each year, just enough wages come through to contribute a decent supplementary income to my household. That is something to be extremely grateful for—and grateful I am, everyday.

But keeping even the little checks coming continues to be a struggle week by week. And an optimistic outlook, rugged perseverance, and a brave belief in the worth of the work at hand all become more important as time goes by. For despite my many plans, ambitions, works-in-progress, and continuing commitment to my art, the future remains uncertain.

This is the story of many a working writer—and has been so for ages, as anyone can see by reading the correspondence or journals of any number of even our greatest authors. Henry James’ notebooks contain a fair share of biographical evidence to this point. In 1889 James anxiously writes:

I simply must try, and try seriously, to produce half a dozen—a dozen, five dozen—plays for the sake of my pocket, my material future. Of how little money the novel makes for me I needn’t discourse here.

(Perhaps a need to remind myself of this plight of penury—and affirm it as universal to most all writing lives—was in part what compelled me to publish a novel about the impoverished poet Rilke.)

Ultimately, most writers can only bend their heads, keep working, and strive to be their best. “Success” as the world knows it is wholly beyond our control, and anyway mostly irrelevant to the substance of our daily labors. “For us, there is only the trying,” said T.S. Eliot in his Four Quartets.

But struggling as I am to keep the small checks coming, the mystery of success remains a natural subject for pondering, so I was primed recently to delight in the new book, Born Standing Up, by comedian Steve Martin. It’s an eloquent narrative of awkward beginnings, perseverance, and accidental fame.

Martin devotes his attention to the long struggles, the necessary obsession, the small and ill-paying—sometimes non-paying—triumphs that marked his journey to comedy dominance in the late 70s, and this sets his book apart from the standard celebrity memoir. There’s no gratuitous namedropping in Born Standing Up, not a bit of juicy insider gossip. Martin’s subject is his apprenticeship in—and his ultimate abandonment of—stand-up comedy. He begins:

I did stand-up comedy for eighteen years. Ten of those years were spent learning, four years were spent refining, and four were spent in wild success.

This eighteen year period took him from youthful gigs at Kiwanis Clubs in his native Southern California, through employment at Disneyland during his teenage years and a repertory act at Knott’s Berry Farm during college, to eventual fame and fortune as a stand-up comedian who regularly sold-out giant stadiums.

Most fascinating about the book is Martin’s central confession: his complete lack of natural talent.

I had absolutely no gifts…Thankfully, perseverance is a great substitute for talent.

That aphorism becomes Martin’s pervasive theme as he recounts his experience pursuing a lifelong passion—and finding himself subject to the incidental whims of fortune and success.

I was seeking comic originality, and fame fell on me as a by-product. The course was more plodding than heroic: I did not strive valiantly against doubters but took incremental steps studded with a few intuitive leaps. I was not naturally talented—I did not sing, dance, or act—though working around that minor detail made me inventive.

Martin has always had a serious streak. All comedians do, of course—their craft demands a rigorous personality infused with perfectionism (see the film Comedian, which follows Jerry Seinfeld through the grueling process of developing new stand-up material). But few comedians have incorporated their serious side into their public career as has Martin, who’s long expressed an interesting blend of zany and heartfelt. His play Picasso at the Lapin Agile is a perfect example of his rounded style, as are the films L.A. Story and Roxanne, both wonderful comedy/melodramas that originated as Martin authored screenplays.

Like his best movie moments, Martin’s book is a refreshing blend of the breezy and the thoughtful. His motive here is not to produce a work of chuckle-inducing comic writing (see his earlier book, Pure Drivel, for that). In Born Standing Up, Martin provides a longer-lasting service to his reader. The memoir engages, entertains, and instructs. It will resonate emotionally with anyone who longs to bring their passion and a pursuit of excellence to convergence in hopes of earning a living.

Martin has a knack for quotable insights. Born Standing Up is jeweled with them. He writes:

I did have the one element necessary to all early creativity: naïveté, that fabulous quality that keeps you from knowing just how unsuited you are for what you’re about to do.

And later on:

Through the years, I have learned there is no harm in charging oneself up with delusions between moments of valid inspiration.

The book repeatedly affirms the worth of obscurity, naïveté, and these so-called “delusions.” And that’s a marvelously unique perspective to take as a basis for what, as we all know, becomes a tale of staggering worldly success.

What comes through in Martin’s story perhaps most palpably, most movingly, is the precious fleetingness of his apprenticeship period, before the arrival of mastery, before the glories of success or the rewards of fame, when the sole significant payoff of performing was the pure and resonant joy it brought. Here Born Standing Up, which at first appears to be a chronicle of a much-coveted pinnacle gained and abandoned, becomes an allegory of the importance of living life and cherishing one’s work each and every instant. Whatever our circumstances may be, however far from the ideal our careers may seem to run, there is always the work at hand to be nurtured with passion and delight. Recognizing and cherishing that reward—that we are doing exactly the thing we most wish to be doing, that we are learning daily—is the essential task of a fulfilled life.

In 1981, the year Steve Martin quit stand-up comedy forever, he was 36 years old, and he had become far more famous than he really wanted to be.

Though the audiences continued to grow, I experienced a concomitant depression caused by exhaustion, isolation, and creative ennui… This was, as the cliché goes, the loneliest period of my life.

I was caught and I could not quit, because this multizeroed income might last only a moment. I couldn’t imagine abandoning something I had worked so hard to craft. I knew about the flash in the pan, I had seen it happen to others, and I worried about it happening to me.

But it’s in freedom that the passing of time is sweetest—the freedom to learn, experiment, and make useful mistakes. And Martin had grown to understand that he was no longer free to do the thing he most wanted to do. He had striven to become a performer, but now he found himself merely rehashing prior achievements in hopes of staying rich. He was no longer growing, and the joy was disappearing.

Toward the close of Born Standing Up, he tells of an impulsive visit he paid to the Bird Cage Theater at Knott’s Berry Farm some twenty-odd years after his early employment there. The theater is no longer in use. Martin lets himself in and stands alone in the musty dimness. In this space, which is still unchanged, he had learned some of his most enduring lessons about performance. Daily, with a troupe of performers, he entertained small audiences, experimented, played around onstage, and now and then failed freely—with no ill consequences, but immense lessons learned.

Light filtered in from the canvas roof, giving the Bird Cage a dim, golden hue. There I was, standing in a memory frozen in amber, and I experienced an overwhelming rush of sadness… [I] looked out at the empty theater and was overcome by the feeling of today being pressed into yesterday. I didn’t realize how much this place had meant to me.

Driving home along the Santa Ana freeway, I was still unnerved. I asked myself what it was that had made this place capable of inducing in me such a powerful nostalgic shock. The answer floated clearly into my consciousness as though I had asked the question of a Magic-8 Ball: I wanted to be there again, if only for a day, indulging in high spirits and hi jinks, before I turned professional, before comedy became serious.

The journey itself, the learning itself, the apprenticeship, the obscurity and marvelous naïveté—the struggle itself—is the beautiful thing, a freedom to be cherished. Many long for such freedom from the heights of whatever professional pinnacles they have reached.

Here again is Henry James writing in that notebook:

To accept the circumstances, in their extreme humility, and do the best I can in them: this is the moral of my present situation. They are the reverse of ideal—but there is this great fact that for myself at least I may make them better. To take what there is, and use it, without waiting forever in vain for the preconceived—to dig deep into the actual and get something out of that—this doubtless is the right way to live.

You might also enjoy: “Measures of Success,” and “Fulfillment: A Work in Progress”

“When I do [my] first draft, I shut the lights off and pull a stocking cap over my head and eyes, and I’m typing blind. It’s the old paradox that you see by blinding yourself.” – Novelist Kent Haruf

I’ve heard lots of different writers tossing around a particular little quote. I’m not sure who first said it, but it’s been variously attributed to Joan Didion, W.H. Auden, and Saul Bellow. Here it is:

I don’t know what I think until I see what I say.

Writers cherish this epigram because it gets to the mysterious heart of the creative process. Often we sit down to our work at a loss for ideas. We find, at such moments, that we must relinquish control, step back, and welcome the surprise of whatever comes through.

Whether you’re a painter, songwriter, or creative thinker of any kind, your process of creation will be the same in one important respect: it will require surrender.

Surrender to what? Oh, to the uncontrollably slow, fabulous percolations of imagination, memory, mind, soul — or, in strictly psychological terms, surrender to the untraceable workings of the unconscious.

Because I’m chest-deep in labor on a new book now, I muse upon these matters daily. The unconscious is a rascal, but I’d be lost if I didn’t surrender and let it do it’s rascally thing.

I love this passage from Annie Dillard’s darkly whimsical volume, The Writing Life:

On plenty of days the writer can write three or four pages, and on plenty of other days he concludes he must throw them away. These truths comfort the anguished. …Most writers might well stop berating themselves for writing at a normal, slow pace. Octavio Paz cites the example of ‘Saint-Rol Roux, who used to hang the inscription, The Poet is Working, from his door while he slept.’

For all of us it’s true: we do much of our work while lying asleep — or while standing in the shower, or sitting behind the wheel en route to our day-jobs. Always, little cogs keep silently turning. Some rich mineral water seeps up through the strata to surface as a glimmering idea.

Ernest Hemingway famously described his working method as a revving-up of his subconscious. As soon as heard the engine’s purr he stopped working and let it run on its own. So, paradoxically, when he left his desk his real work got started.

I always worked until I had something done, and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day. …I learned not to think about anything I was writing from the time I stopped writing until I started again the next day. That way my subconscious would be working on it and at the same time I would be listening to other people and noticing everything, I hoped; learning, I hoped; and I would read so that I would not think about my work and make myself impotent to do it.

One must go to the desk, of course, and regularly; nothing will happen if one doesn’t. A regimen is important because it primes the pump. But just as important is surrendering one’s conscious efforts, letting the spout at the back of the mind burble free.

These words of Andre Dubus, one of the twentieth century’s greatest short story writers, remind me that not thinking about one’s work, like Hemingway, is a discipline as indispensable as going to the desk in the first place.

I gestate: for months, often for years. An idea comes to me from wherever they come, and I write it in a notebook. Sometimes I forget it’s there. I don’t think about it. By think I mean plan. I try never to think about where a story will go. This is as hard as writing, maybe harder; I spend most of my waking time doing it; it is hard work, because I want to know what the story will do and how it will end and whether or not I can write it; but I must not know, or I will kill the story by controlling it; I work to surrender.

“Art is long,” wrote Henry James. “If we work for ourselves of course we must hurry. If we work for her we must often pause.”

Indeed, one must be patient. One must surrender to the slow fruition of thought, image, ideas. Rilke called this “being inactive with confidence.”

And if we reflect, we see that this practice applies to many aspects of life. Essentially, it’s the practice of faith. Surrender, stillness, and trust: all are religious disciplines. T.S. Eliot talks about this religious quality of creativity, and even equates one’s creative actions with one’s destiny:

Some men have had a deep conviction of their destiny, and in that conviction have prospered; but when they cease to act as an instrument, and think of themselves as the active source of what they do, their pride is punished by disaster. …The concept of destiny leaves us with a mystery, but it is a mystery not contrary to reason, for it implies that the world, and the course of human history, have meaning.

Stalled as it may seem at times, our work has a meaning and an order. If we care about what we do, if it is real to us, and if we approach it with discipline and surrender, it will germinate night and day — and cannot fail to blossom and surprise us.

(This post is reprised from Soul Shelter’s Year-One archives)

You may also enjoy:

“Unleashing Ideas: a Four-Fold Approach”

“What’s the Big Idea?”

“In Praise of Physical Spaces”

“Making Money: the Right and Wrong Questions to Ask”

“Hazards of Career, Rewards of Vocation”

“Know Your Gift“

– A celebrated literary reference turned fifty late last month. Today we consider that book’s embedded life wisdom. –

A slim sourcebook for writers, The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E.B. White is a veritable classic, thoroughly instructive and reliable for any writer young or old, novice or professional.

During one of my periodic perusals of the book recently, it struck me how much of Strunk and White’s writing advice can be viewed as advice about life and career. So, herewith, four nuggets from The Elements of (Life)Style.

(Note: Insertions of blue text represent my adaptations of Strunk & White.)

1. “Put statements in positive form.”

“Make definite assertions,” counsel Strunk & White. “Avoid tame, colorless, hesitating, noncommittal language.” Avoid using the word “not” as “a means of evasion.” This helps one see clearly and define one’s goals.

Thus: I do not very often work all that hard

becomes: I lack discipline.

And: I do not have a clear sense of how to reach my objective

becomes: I need clear intermediate goals.

2. “Use the active voice.”

Strunk & White assert: “The active voice is usually more direct and vigorous than the passive.” In undertaking challenges in life, too, the active voice helps harness one’s passion and belief.

I will pursue my destiny and embrace my happiness.

This is much better than

My destiny and happiness are there for my pursuing.

3. “Use definite, specific, concrete language.”

Strunk & White advise us to “Prefer the specific to the general, the definite to the vague, the concrete to the abstract.”

“If those who have studied the art of writing life are in accord on any one point, it is on this: the surest way to hold the attention of the reader get inspired and remain perseverant is by being specific, definite, and concrete” in one’s vision.

Thus:

I will work very hard to write well and try to get published

becomes:

I will write for two hours every day until I’ve produced a complete short story. Referring to The Elements of Style, I will revise the story. I will show the story to trusted readers, weigh their comments about it, and make appropriate changes and improvements. Finally, once the story is as perfect as I believe I can make it, I will send a copy of it to one magazine per week until it is accepted for publication.

4. “Choose a suitable design and hold to it.”

Strunk & White point out that every form of writing happy, healthy lifestyle and every fulfilling career is rooted in a structure or plan — though they acknowledge that “In some cases, the best design is no design.”

More often, however, planning precedes writing success. A primary rule of composition success “is to foresee or determine the shape of what is to come and pursue that shape.”

A sonnet is built on a fourteen-line frame, of five-foot lines. Hence, the sonneteer knows exactly where he is headed. …

The more clearly one perceives the shape a design for one’s desires, the better one’s chances of success. …”

What do you know, maybe writing well and living well aren’t all that different.

You may also enjoy:

-Tim’s Entrepreneurship Series-

“Eight Difficult, Outdated Ways to Excel”

“The Lonely Novelist’s Five-Point Productivity Plan”

“The Anchovy’s Rules of Goodwill and Good Work”

“Working Without Working”

“Secrets of Creative Longevity“