lifeshifting #1 - meaning mountain

We go to meaning mountain to find out the most meaningful work for us to do. I think of it like a mountain peak sticking out of the mist somewhere ahead of me. You can’t see the base, just the summit glittering in the sun.

How do we get there? How do you find Meaning Mountain?

Viktor Frankl, the author of Man's Search for Meaning and survivor of five years in nazi concentration camps, wrote: “Life asks us a question. Every moment you are alive you could say you are being asked a question- how you live is the answer.”

In any situation there are choices. Some have more meaning than others. By making these microdecisions you will be lead towards Meaning Mountain.

Paths of Purpose

Sometimes we are burdened by the idea that if only we could find the one true purpose of our lives then we would be a torrent of energy and efficiency and ensuing satisfaction. People spend their lives searching for “their real purpose”. Others deride them and say there is no such thing.

Actually there are many Paths of Purpose up Meaning Mountain- if you can forgive the alliteration.

Imagine you were born in very different circumstances- say in a tribe of headhunters on the Amazon river- your path of purpose would include activities very different though meaning mountain would be the same. You would get meaning from experiencing loving others, from experiencing wonder, from creativity and from taking a choice in your attitude to adversity. Meaning Mountain is UNIVERSAL. Paths of purpose are LOCAL, relative to you and your current situation.

There are various methods touted for finding “your one true purpose”. Some involve listing activities until you find one that makes you cry. Try it if you like- but the best result you will get will be only one of several potential paths of purpose.

Often it is best to take the one nearest, the one you have been trained for, the one that suits your talents and then run with it.

A path of purpose is simply there to get us up meaning mountain. Frankl was an academic and a writer- so his path of purpose was to write a book. A filmmaker might make a film.

Getting up the Mountain

Progress along a Path of Purpose leads to choices. Each choice has either a higher or lower meaning content. For example I may be studying to get a new trade. I can either coast along consuming the energy of the teacher and my classmates until I am qualified, or do my level best to produce energy and enthusiasm and be the best in the class. Life asks you a question- are you a parasite or a provider? It is more meaningful to be a provider since the ultimate destination of parasitism is doing nothing, non-existence, death.

Meaningful means exactly what it says: not useless, justifiable. We may be unconventional or conventional in how we justify what is meaningful to us.

Making things is more meaningful than breaking things.

Creation is better than destruction.

Celebration is better than condemnation.

Flow activities are better than activities that make you watch the clock

Humour is better than sourness.

Follow your Path of Purpose. Go to meaning mountain and find your meanings. Find what you like doing, what you think is worth doing- trust yourself, trust your dreams.

Introduction to lifeshifting

In a career we pursue, or pursued, something that is a close enough match to what we really want to do. The reward is a salary and benefits and a decent pension. And spare time. And the freedom to act conscientiously. Unfortunately none of these things really apply now. Jobs are no longer for life. Benefits are often nugatory. Average salaries, relative to inflation have gone down over the last ten years.   Increasingly we are asked by large institutions to do things that are amoral if not immoral.  We suspect every corporation of being a potential Enron.

But let’s say you bite the bullet and decide to tough it out. Someone has to be the CEO so why not you? But as you get higher up the career ladder you begin to notice something worrying. There are costs involved in being promoted. The institution feels it can make greater and greater demands. They make you travel, they ask you to move. Every two years your children get to know a new set of friends. Or not, as the case may be. You see that the only people really enjoying themselves in this kind of work culture are the robotic and the truly obsessive. The robotic cleave to ultra-conformity in everything. They make no waves but then they have no fun either. Besides you’re not a robot. The obsessive can be great people. Often they make things work, are inspiring, the very backbone of a successful enterprise. But you know they go home at nine and crash out on front of the TV with a double vodka, that they long ago gave up trying to manage children or marriage, that their idea of a holiday is a period of uninterrupted time to catch up on work.

The sane often end up compromising. To save their marriage, soul, sense of dignity they cease being as ambitious as they once were. They stop seeking promotion. And start looking forward to early retirement.

Many people figured this out in about 1960. Hence Downshifting. Living simply. Back to nature. Dropping out.

Downshifting seems like the perfect solution. You just absent yourself from all the nasty stuff in life and accept you have to take a pay cut. But you’re moving away from something, not towards something. Meaning is discovered by moving towards things, activities, people. Moving away may be the start. But it is not sustainable. Look at how many people who dropped out in the 60s and 70s and actually stayed out.

Actually, dropping out is a form of greed. You want better than the community you were born into can provide so you isolate yourself and hoard for yourself. Human beings are sociable animals. They live in communities- whether those communities are physically close or not. To drop out and isolate yourself from all others is a little like dropping out from being human.

Besides, it never really works. Downshifting puts the cart before the horse. The horse is work, the cart is a satisfying life. If you create a picture of what a satisfying life should be and then work to maintain that picture things are the wrong way round. Your work has to have meaning in itself.

Downshifting is trying to solve a problem by simply doing the opposite of what appears to be the problem. It’s a kneejerk reaction not a considered solution.

Now there is Lifeshifting.  Lifeshifting means making a quantum leap of a career change to put the work that means most to you at the center of your life.

The work.

Humans love work, they need work, but not boring work and certainly not meaningless work. Humans are workers. But their work. Not someone else’s.

What is work? It is making something. It is making something happen. It is making the world a better place. It is making yourself a better person. It is solving problems. To argue that humans don’t need work is profoundly unnatural. Without meaningful work the human spirit perishes. To argue that all work is a kind of play is false. Play stops when you cease being amused. Being amused is not the reward of work. You can work with a playful attitude and enjoy your work more, but the playfulness is a tool to make your work better. Work is its own reward. The fruits of work (money, satisfaction, respect from others) are secondary. If we don’t do meaningful work we feel bad.

The work that means most to you.

Humans are meaning centred beings. Our motivation is a complex dynamic thing, more complex than Maslow’s ladder of selves would have us believe[…].  Underpinning all motivation is meaning. The woman who lifts a saloon car off her infant cannot do the same thing when the car is parked on her own foot. She means less to herself than her child does. That’s how complicated it gets. Meaning is tricky, but it is meaning that motivates us not money, sex, food, big houses, fast cars. In the absence of meaning we may pursue these things, but they cannot supply meaning.

Meaning is tricky. One person may find raising racing pigeons the most meaningful thing in life. For someone else racing pigeons are about as meaningless as it gets. Meaning is diverse. There’s no one great meaning that fits all. We have to find our own. Or build it up by amalgamating things, which by experience we know we like doing.

What do you want to have said about you at the end of your life? That you had a fast car and a big house? Or that you left this world a better place? That people were grateful to have known you? Our own small world is a better place when we do work we find meaningful. The big world is just a lot of little worlds joined together. We leave this world a better place by finding and doing work that we ourselves find meaningful.

This has to emphasized. Just because our culture depicts certain jobs as more meaningful than others (doctor beats poker player, policeman beats builder, teacher beats just about everyone) it doesn’t mean that they are more meaningful to you. In fact I have met and interviewed at length a physiotherapist who only found meaningful work when he lifeshifted to become a diving instructor. One of the con-tricks of received opinion is that some work is a priori more meaningful than other work. NOT TRUE. It is we who give meaning to our work, not the other way around. You have to find your own meaning in this world- otherwise life would be just too damn easy.

Paradoxically, by doing work that is meaningful to ourselves we imbue it with passion, love and sincerity- all of which may bring substantial financial and material rewards. Success, huge success, very often follows meaningful work. But success is like the shadow- move towards it and it moves away. The sun is work that is meaningful. Move towards that and the shadow follows.

Work that means most to you at the center of your life.

If you allocate only your spare time to doing work you find meaningful it may never flourish. When I worked as a teacher (a job I found meaningless by the way) and did aikido, the Japanese martial art, in my spare time I knew deep down I would never be any good, I would never reach my goal of a blackbelt and my desire to do martial arts was always compromised by having to give it so little time. I should also add that a lot of the time I didn’t particularly enjoy aikido but at the time it was the most meaningful thing for me. I was disgusted by my lack of physical fitness, my inability to fight, to be tough as I perceived former generations as having been. But it wasn’t at the center of my life.

The single most important change I have ever made was putting work that had meaning for me at the center, not the edge, of my life. In this case it was doing a full time course for a year with the Tokyo Riot Police and becoming not just a blackbelt but also gaining an instructor's license at Yoshinkan aikido. After that writing books did not seem such a big thing after all.

The Power of Less

A short catalogue of non-starters:

Aged 23 I wrote a proposal for a book called ‘how to be a real intellectual’ with writer Lloyd Evans. We got to see, and interest, a top agent but for some reason failed to write any more of the book.

Aged 25 I wrote a book about walking the Pyrenees- the friend who read it left off half way through I could tell by the absence of pencil marks from there on. No publisher was sought.

Aged 26 I wrote a kid’s book called Marcus Mayhem and his magic trainers. I had one conversation with a publisher but it was never submitted.

Aged 30 I co-wrote a language book that was commissioned for no upfront money called ‘Sexpertise in Japanese in 7 days’. The publisher read the manuscript and cannned the project.

And finally a starter:

Aged 31 I wrote Angry White Pyjamas about a year doing martial arts: it went on to win two major awards including William Hill sports book of the year, was turned into a movie script by Miramax, and sold over 80,000 copies.

What happened? Less happened.

With all the projects in my 20s I was doing too much too much of the time. I was so distracted by earning my rent, living a great social life, embarking on side projects and business ventures of all kinds, saying yes to everything.

Finally I said no to a few things. I went for less not more.

I learnt to do one thing at a time. I learnt to accept doing less means making sacrifices. You have to kill your little sidelines and diversions. That might be painful. You have to accept that pain to avoid the greater pain of not doing what you want to do.

I moved back to live with my parents while I wrote my book. I told myself if it took ten years and 100 rewrites this book would get published. I wouldn’t drop it after a single toe in the water. And I didn’t do anything else until it did get published (which took about a year of fishing around for a publisher). I did less and got a lot more.

Of course I’d learned a fair bit about writing along the way. But by doing less I opened up a whole new experience of a power that I never knew existed. By doing less I felt I was twisting some focus grip and concentrating my existing skills a 100 fold. The other day I was showing my kids how to use a magnifying glass to light a fire. I’d forgotten how you have to learn how to twist the lens in several planes and back and forth to get that diamond bright spot of pure heat and light. It’s quite a fiddle. By analogy, by doing less gave me the space to get control over that lens, I finally was able to bring that spot into focus, make it diamond bright.

I learnt about doing less by making expeditions. I was always amazed at how comparatively easy it was to succeed at what I set out to do when I went on a long hike carrying all my gear. In everyday life in my 20s my projects failed but my expeditions succeeded. There were so few distractions- get up. walk. make camp. sleep. But without distractions you achieved your goal of making the miles. I was a slow learner but finally I made the connection. Do less. When I approached doing martial arts I applied the same method- cut everything else out, do it full time, during the day, and worry about getting money in my downtime. That way I earned a black belt in a year. 

You might think being a polymath, someone who aims to master many different skills and types of knowledge, requires more not less. Not at all- just do one thing at a time- then change and do another thing. You acquire polymathy sequentially- because that way you can really focus- which you can't by attempting to do it all at once.

I was in a friend’s house today and went into one room which was empty like a hotel room. I felt the power of less immediately- which you forget so easily, surrounded by all your things- I remembered it from all those empty hotel rooms I have stayed in where you feel completely free and how a new beginning can start right there, right out of that small suitcase. With less you feel anything can happen.

More clogs the mind. As soon as you start focussing on less, on cutting away all you do not need, you start to build momentum. As soon as you decide to keep it completely simple, the simplest form it can take, you begin to move forward. It’s as if all the weight of more was stopping you moving.

Two years ago I moved all my ‘important papers’ into another room. I haven’t looked at them since. I have my notebooks of years back. I used to look at them but I don’t anymore. I have shirts I never wear. Indeed, when I go on an ultralight hike I carry no spare clothes at all, only a warm set that can be removed as the weather heats up. This could get ridiculous you might think, and of course it might. But I’m willing to go there. Or at least get a lot closer.

Less is the power of the hermit, the monk, the desert nomad. Amongst Bedouin the one who is most respected is not, as in the settled world, the one with the most tools, the largest kit bag, rather it is the one with the least, who can make do and mend with almost nothing. A third world polymath.

Travelling light is not only easier and more fun, it frees the mind. With less to hang on to you have more to look forward to.

That we need to get used to less is becoming all too apparent. Anything unsustainable will seem, to our children, not only foolish but morally reprehensible. Those silly old buffers who prate about their absolute need for clean water to crap in and endless cheap power and food generated by a system that wastes almost as much as it produces- they will be seen in the same light as the last rulers of ancient Rome.

That the ‘problems of the developed world’ can be solved by doing more of what has already not worked will have to change. We’re running out of money for more, less will be the only option.

But it is in the personal realm that the power of less can really be felt, can really be used right now. It completely inverts the happiness game that most of us get caught up in a lot of the time. “If only I had X I THINK I would be happier.” Instead, with less, you say: “What can I get rid of? Because I KNOW that will make me happier.” Just keep looking for ways to strip your life down. Reduce your wardrobe. Have fewer toys. Less tools. If you don’t use it everyday think of getting rid of it.

By using less, by giving yourself less choice of distraction, you’ll find it easier to see what you should do. That empty room again. If you can, spend time in an empty room, no pencil and notebook even. Spend several hours in your ‘cell’. You’ll be amazed at your productivity, how your thoughts will be sorted and made clear.

Or take a walk. Not walking somewhere, not stopping to drink coffee, but a circular walk of about an hour, thoughts move at walking pace- you’ll do more than three hours of pacing your crowded office stopping every half hour to check your emails.

The email thing. Unless you have an ongoing project check them twice a week- Tuesday and Thursday. Send them from a phone so that you can be excused their necessary brevity.

Facebook. Ditch it.

Carrying a phone- why?

Anyone who has been backpacking knows the power of less. When I started ultralight backpacking I was shocked at how, for so many years, I had carried so much weight I didn’t need. Extra clothes, heavy cooker, pots, double skinned tent- all gone.

I carried so much I didn’t need and exhausted myself. Now I can hardly believe at how much more fun it is to carry a light pack and go further.

The Time thing. Surely ALL of us need more time? What we need is to do one thing at a time, do less, have far fewer distractions, have far more time ‘doing nothing’ (really nothing and not TV and Internet nothing) and then, strangely, what you have to do will take less time. In WW2 they extended factory hours to make more bombs- but they found people made less in 11 hours than in 8- because when you work 11 hours you have to get all your other demands met during work- social mainly- and you work with far less intensity. We need to also accept that if we live a life that revolves around a car, then we will always have too little time.

Less means accepting sacrifice. Might even be a little painful.

I recently read about a multi-millionaire giving away his wealth. Most of it. But he could probably have given away all of it and it wouldn’t matter that much. The contacts, the reputation, the skills he had already developed would probably keep him from needing his millions. In fact it would probably hold him back in the sense of learning new things, since nothing insulates you from experience better than wealth.

The money thing. My old aim was, like so many people, to make as much money as I could as fast as I could. Of course it always takes a little bit longer than you anticipate. And pretty soon half your life has gone by. Then you start thinking about how much you’ll need for a comfy retirement and…stop right there. Less. You need very little. Friends, adventure, challenge- none of this costs that much money. All you need is normal money, not silly money. Success is a process not an end result. Identify processes that you want to continue, be a part of, are meaningful, give something to others- that is success. Not the bestseller, the sold company- I mean these are nice things, lucky things, and maybe the result of identifying a ‘success process’. But they are not success. Ever achieved your wildest dream? I have- to win major literary awards with my first published book. What did it feel like- kind of flat. I dreamt of walking the full length of the Pyrenees mountains- what did it feel like when I did and plunged into the sea at the end- not that great. What does it feel like when you are in the middle of a great process- be it writing, walking the high hills, making something happen, creating something, helping folk- it feels great.

You don’t need the success others crave, you need less. You need to identify a success process that’s all.

The world is what it is because people thought they needed more. It’s time for less.

energy is liberated when something happens

I was down, musing on the downside of life in Egypt when my wife and kids came back from a basketball game my daughter had been playing in, a game they had slunk off silently at an early a.m. leaving me musing over a mug of tea…but now they were back and instantly I was  brimming with energy, fun upbeat energy all derived form this game they had watched and played in. Something had happened that they had been a part of. I thought if they had all stayed home, and watched TV or whatever, none of this energy would have happened. It would have never existed. So humans Not Doing Stuff deprives the world of energy. Watching TV and playing computer games drains the world, deprives it of life.

Think about machines allowing one man to do the job of several. Again very little energy is generated compared to a group effort. The pinnacle of this idea is the Amish way of barn raising- do it in one day with the whole town participating and then have a party. I used to have an allotment but trudging down there alone to dig a few silent trenches on a cold morning was a drag. I now know I should have had a dig for victory party where everyone brings a spade and digs for half an hour or so all together. There are few things more fun than reasonably easy manual labour going on for not long with a bunch of people you really like. I keep being amazed it’s that simple.

multi-dimensional living

Why live in one dimension when you can flip between many, choosing the right dimension at any particular time for what you want to do? 

I don't mean a spatial dimension, I mean something like a sci-fi 'other dimension'. Something experiential, where, because of altering your sense of time or priority, all your experiences are altered. With multi-dimensional living you actively seek to alter the way you experience things.

Multi-dimensional living is a new way to think about things you have probably intuited right at the edge of existence, in the shadows so to speak. It’s time to bring them out into the full glare of the spotlight.

Multidimensional living starts by attacking the prevailing accepted myth that we live in one dimension, that time passes at an even rate, that human energy, coincidence, alignment are all pretty irrelevant. When in fact they are key.

In a subjective sense time passes slowly when we are bored and quickly when we are interested. But it’s more complicated than that. When we are LEARNING time slows down-when we are consuming pleasurable experiences we may not really notice time passing- but probably sense it as going past rather quickly. The first two days of a holiday seem to last forever. The last two rush by. Everything is new on the first two and we are keen to enjoy ourselves to the full. We’re in another dimension.

One dimension is the ‘flow state’ you are in when doing something you enjoy, well. Cooking, climbing, playing bridge- you are carried along and ‘outside time’.

Another dimension is when you are learning something demanding. It takes all your attention- and though it is satisfying it is ‘like fun only different’. Time can pass very slowly in this dimension.

A third dimension is when you lying in bed and letting everything fall away. You are content just to lie there almost thinking nothing. Maybe you are observing yourself, the contents of your mind.

Is a dimension just another name for a mental state?

No. I think a life dimension is a combination of doing something, some activity, and the mental state that is generated by that activity or required by it.

Is there a ‘worry dimension’? A shallow dimension? What about talking about the past, remembering good times? That’s a kind of dimension.

Then there is making plans- the future dimension. Can be a blast.

Then there is the creative dimension. Making something new, maybe with others. A surge of energy as you set free the creative spirit.

The play dimension, when it just isn’t serious, when you can say anything, nothing is stiff, nothing cannot be bent to accommodate a different shape.

People at work inhabit the ‘professional dimension’. Is there are ‘friends dimension’? One for old friends?

We shift between dimensions accidentally. Some of us, of course, contrive to stay in one dimension all the time. The alcoholic uses booze to maintain the play dimension long after he should have quit trying so hard. The workaholic seeks to extend the sense of flow into every crevice of his life. Or hers of course.

When we are exhausted our bodies flip dimension without warning. You get depressed which is another dimension.

People in one dimension may not even notice those in another. Students out enjoying themselves may not even SEE another person quietly walking along the street observing them with a cautious or even envious eye.

Multi-dimensional living, which remains a project, a fantasy of sorts, nevertheless has its roots in the achievable- which is- the ability to identify other dimensions and like Captain Kirk and Spock- zap right into them. Flip into a new dimension to GET THE MOST out of life AT THAT MOMENT.

No, that isn't quite right. What I really mean is: being able to inhabit a new dimension where the unexpected can occur. It's not about repetition of tried and tested experiences. It's not about setting up a consumption experience, its about creating a sense of travel in the very moment of living. 

I mean that feeling when you arrive at a party, maybe there are some strangers there and perhaps a few friends- probably the party is in a strange place maybe abroad and suddenly all kinds of things are happening and being said which DON’T USUALLY HAPPEN. Rimbaud wrote that he sought ‘the systematic disorganisation of the senses’ in order to write fresh poetry. Surely he was trying to broach another dimension.

It’s about the vibe you give out. Because we mostly live in the same dimension we feel we give out 'no vibe' when in fact we are giving out the 'same vibe all the time'. Sometimes we realise this in seemingly trivial ways. I came back from a week long trip around Europe and sat in a coffee shop and people just started talking to me. This never usually happens- in England at least. I had a different vibe. Multi-dimensional living is about being able to alter the vibe you give out in order to experience a different reality.

Multi-dimensional living hides from us because it's evidence seems to lie in the flippant and 'unimportant'. I have found that wearing a loud crazy shirt to a party ensures that people are happier talking to me and more laid back than when I wear a black shirt…and yet giving a public speech in a black shirt works better than wearing a loud shirt. Clothes are a significant way to change dimension. Hence the attraction of fancy dress and cross-dressing parties. Who could be more important to the sanity of the court than the jester?

The biggest obstacle is when we are in a rush. Then we focus on our objective and send out a vibe that signals ‘don’t try and make contact with me’.

A party can create another dimension- not just through drink- through the shared experience of being there, perhaps in a strange place.

I have recently been reading about people who go ‘skipping’- finding stuff at night in supermarket skips. The writer compared the excitement and fun of it with the tedium of forking over cash at the till for the same goods (often they are in the skip because of being a day past the sell by date or the packaging is damaged). I remember the thrill of ‘getting a book for free’ from a publisher- by offering to review it- compared to the boring ease of buying the same book.

Could it be that making something that is usually easy, into something hard, is a way of slipping into a different dimension? The thrill of making fire with a bow drill compared to using a match is extraordinary. But sometimes you’re in a rush…rushing again.

When we are in a different dimension we have the kind of experiences that only usually happen to ‘other people’. Often we have amazing luck- good and bad. Naturally we prefer the dimensions that seem to supply good luck.

To be a master of multi-dimensional living one must primarily NOT be in a hurry. This is increasingly hard in our high-speed world. I suspect that many of the best dimensions exist in the realm of ‘unexpected downtime’- finding yourself in a situation which is unusual, where no one has to rush off. I find that literary festivals- especially those far away, can be like that.

Going on a trip helps- a friend of mine, I discover, is going to make a week long dogsled journey- now that will be entering a new dimension for sure.

Aren’t I just saying travel is a way to get into new dimension? well, maybe. But when you travel and know someone in the place you are visiting it seems easier to enter the new dimension then if you know nobody and you are in that old familiar me-alone dimension.

Multi-dimensional living is about being able to leave the old luggage behind. It is about sending out a new vibe- maybe having the ability to shift any occasion into something NOT BORING.

Drugs are the obvious way to enter a new dimension- but I don't want to be beholden to drugs. For it to be real you have to be able to do it without power assistance, so to speak.

I think the first task is to simply start observing yourself as you move through your daily life: ask yourself- what dimension am I in right now?

what form should school take?

When I think about the times in school when I ‘learned something’ I have to compare it to the other learning experiences since school- for example an intensive Arabic course I did and a year long intensive aikido course. I can safely argue that you really do learn during an intensive course. Whatever your age. And school is not intense. You whiffle along, a bit here and a bit there. No wonder I learnt more French in my first two years with a demonic French teacher than the subsequent three years with someone more relaxed. Making classes ‘relevant’ and interesting rather than intense just waters it down further. The model for learning a sport is simple- do it a hell of lot, do it with people who are better than you, watch videos of people better than you, read their biographies, emulate them. Why then is this simple model not applied to school or university?

The obvious answer is that school is not about learning it is about fitting in with a way of life which has evolved over centuries in our country, in most of the world. But at the heart of this answer is a lie. If school is not about learning why can’t we give it another name? Too many people are involved, implicated, paid for- it won’t happen.

So real learning happens elsewhere- on intensive courses, between self-appointed students and the mentors they seek out, at home using internet forums and resources supplemented by lots of individual effort.

The question is: when do you throw in the towel with the school and seek out real learning opportunities? Especially as school and of course university are, or can be, such fun things to do- even if, as I did, you use them for meeting people and not really ‘learning’.

Except you do learn- by being with so many people you learn something about being with so many people. It does all seem a drag and a waste of time though. I think its like this: being in prison will teach you many things, it may be a valuable experience, you may learn how to ‘get on’ with many different types – but it would be odd to argue that it was a good experience for all. Prison leaves you tarred with the brush of failure. The broad brush of being on the loser end of things. Not that an old crim can’t talk it up a storm, but most of them find, après prison, that they tend to get the shitty end of the stick.

School and university might be closer to a prison experience than we imagine. Unlike being offered crime opportunities when you leave, old classmates can at least help us get a decent job. So is school just an imperfect elevator into the over rated world of work?

It’s true, university serves a useful, though heavily criticised, role in sorting people. You went to Oxford- good- you can join our firm. Though, as an old Oxfordian will attest, the old boy network isn’t half as effective as its detractors imagine.

You go to a school and a university and you have a badge saying “I belong, I am normal”. Now do what you want to do?

Intensive well designed courses are the way forward for real learning- of anything- especially if supplemented with less intense encounters with mentor figures. If you have met several real life authors, writing a book seems a normal thing to do, even an easy thing. When Hoagy Carmichael, then an amateur pianist, saw Irving Berlin fumble while playing a song he was surprised that he could do just as well- and so he was inspired to become a professional.

I’ve been on several intensive well designed courses that taught me singing, battlefield first aid, language improvement. I’ve never regretted for a minute the time spent on such things. Memories of school ‘learning’ are far more mixed, my attitude to it ambivalent at best.

defeating perfection

Mostly we don’t do stuff because at the moment of ‘almost doing’, it seems to overwhelm us. Why? Because we fast-forward ahead and imagine the final product and we suspect strongly that it won’t be as good as what we had earlier imagined when we set out to do that thing. Imagine the insanity of this- comparing two imaginary things and then giving up something real as a result?

Yet I do it all the time. Not just with creative things. Also with routine matters such as invoices. I can’t face the task because it appears more work than it should. In my perfect world invoices should be sent telepathically. In fact they take very little time, just as cleaning up takes very little time when you do it straight after making the mess. As all parents know. But it isn’t perfect, so it doesn’t always get done.

Perfection, again, screwing things up.

We live in a world over attentive to presentation. Instead of looking for the grain of sustenance we ‘judge’ how ‘finished’ something is. That is, how well it is presented.

But our idea of ‘finished’ is just a bit of cultural baggage. Editing can go on forever. I sometimes think time is the only editor you really need to consider.

I’ve found the iterative approach of the internet, posting up improved versions, as I go on, as one way out of the perfection trap.

I wanted, in my perfect world, to make this longer but I’d rather post it now.