Posts from — June 2009

Your Boss Is a Monkey by Dan & Chip Heath. Fast Company, 2008 March 20.

Just a quick link for you. Dan & Chip Heath talk about how to use animal training techniques to “train” your boss. Unfortunately, it’s more than a bit simple minded. There are better techniques for manipulating your boss, all that take advantage of deep human patterns.

But you’d do worse than to follow some of the advice therein, and in the book the mention.

Alicia recommended this NPR show in a comment on “Unhappy? Stop Trying to be Happier!“. It wasn’t podcasted yet, but is now.

If you missed it, like I did, here it is, with no added commentary from me. (Maybe later: I need to get through it.) But feel free to comment if you learn something important.

The Manasclerk Company welcomes our summer intern, Calandra. Calandra is a student at Hope College, and has already added value. She’ll be working a bit on the Secret Rules of Career Success website but will mostly focus on helping me corral the 28 MB of HTML text in 750 posts I have from the original weblog and the 550 some posts from Requisite Writing. (There’s also the issue of the 300 unpublished posts from these sites to go through.) There’s more than enough for two or three books, as long as I don’t listen to how it should be done.

Photo licensed through 123rf.com

Did you know that feeling that you have a calling, and feeling that you are living it out, is a strong indicator that you will be a “happy” person? This has to do with feeling that your life has purpose, and it’s more important than you think.

Most of us, when we think of “living out your calling” (if at all) think about something big, like feeding the American homeless, taking care of Africa AIDS orphans, fighting for fair elections in our country, working to liberalize the politics of our land. But it doesn’t have to be anything so huge.

You can be living out your calling by leading a youth baseball or football team. By keeping the hospital rooms clean. By growing corn. By soldiering. By running a factory floor. Callings, as an invitation, as an internal urge that demands response — even though you don’t know what that might mean — can be lived out in a variety of ways.

Living out your calling, participating in your sense of what you are here to do, gives your life purpose because by following your calling you are “living out your purpose”. This is different from a feeling that your life has no meaning, or that it isn’t important. Many people confuse the calling to something with a desire for greatness. Callings are pursued in the light of no one looking, and fame doesn’t matter. (Unless fame is your calling, which is probably not seeing calling right.)

Most often, callings take you farther away from the respect of people who matter in your life. It is their nature.

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Chicagobusiness, a Crain’s thing online, asked the question Is LinkedIn more accurate than a resume? Employers can get better information from checking a prospective employee’s LinkedIn profile because of the extended network of people.

This means two things:

You had better have your resume/CV match your LinkedIn profile.
You may have better luck using LinkedIn to find a job than the traditional resume interview.

Although I have to ask: who uses paper resumes any more?

It’s hard to believe, but if I set you up to find a dime and then ask you how happy your life was over the last year, you’re quite likely to report being happier than you would have if you hadn’t found the dime.

Odd, isn’t it?

I read about this little finding, which comes from the 1980s, while going through Dan Ariely’s research articles that make up the basis for this Predictably Irrational book. Schooler, Ariely and Loewenstein describe other findings that are related:

Although individuals may have some global sense of their overall degree of well-being, there is also considerable evidence that reports of global happiness can be powerfully influenced by the situational context in which individuals are queried. A famous example of the difficulty of judging one’s global happiness comes from the research of Strack, Martin, and Stepper (1998), who asked some college students how many times they had gone out on a date in the last month, then how happy they had been overall. Other students were asked the same questions but in the reverse order. For those asked about dates first, the correlation between the two items was 0.66; for those asked about happiness first, the correlation was close to zero. These results suggest that instead of recalling their hedonic state over the last month, the students seemed to be looking more for objective cues about whether their last month had been good or bad and attempted to judge their happiness based on those cues. When the information about dates was activated, it played a more prominent role int these evaluations. Additional studies have demonstrated that individuals’ general assessment of their happiness can be similarly biased by a number of other situational factors including, the current weather (Schwarz and Clore, 1983), finding a dime (Schwarz, 1987), and the outcome of soccer games (Schwarz et al., 1987).

SOURCE: Schooler, Jonathan W.; Ariely, Dan; and Loewenstein, George. 2003. “The Pursuit and Assessment of Happiness can be Self-Defeating.” In The Psychology of Economic Decisions, I. Brocas and J. Carrillo, eds. (Oxford, Great Britain: Oxford University Press) [image-based PDF]

There’s a lot for hidden high potentials to consider with this, and with the material in the rest of the article. Here’s a couple of starting points.
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Not that type of callings.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/yourdon/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

We religious types talk about callings a lot. Christians of the Calvinist mindset even call all work, “your calling”. Other Americans have caught on, and many spiritual people of various types talk about callings. It’s not a term restricted to people of a particular faith, or even of any faith. Saying that you have a calling seems to encapsulate something important, something big.

I think that Calling is an important topic for most hidden high potentials. We use the term when we talk, seeing many of your frustrations through of the lens of frustrated calling. It’s an important topic, one that I’m now convinced I have to deal with openly. There’s just one small problem.

What in the world do we mean?

The obvious answer is “a verbal or internally verbalized command by a god to perform some task”. Hercules had a “calling” to clean out the stables. Jonah had a “calling” to preach to the city of Nineveh.

Of course, once we get into a more modern time we hear that God told someone to do something and think, “Crank”. That shows a good deal of prejudice on our part, for there are many thoughtful people who claim to hear a divine voice in visions, dreams and even waking hours.

For most of us, however, that doesn’t happen. Yet we still feel this thing that seems to fit with the term “calling”. You may even be one of them. If I press you, you may find it very hard to really say what a calling is, or even to describe your calling in any detail. Having to defend that you have one challenges it, and you begin to doubt what you still feel as real.

I think that we can do a little better than that.

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We’ve talked about how you can level-shift a job down — making it so that it only requires a lower level of work — can change the playing field and let you compete in what seems like a closed market. The Register, online source of all that is geeky news goodness, recently wrote about the US Air Force’s problems in handling how the Predator has changed the face of military reconnaissance flying but the Air Force can’t make the transition.

The Predator, a pilotless drone flown by the US military, is “piloted” remotely, often from places on a different continent than the plane itself. Many of the drones used in Afghanistan are piloted from a facility outside Las Vegas, Nevada, for example. This makes it easier to keep staff since they don’t have to be rotated out of the theater, and it’s cheaper to have someone at home than it is sent into a foreign country.

The problem is that the US Air Force has insisted that the drones not be equipped with an auto-land ability. The Air Force drones must be piloted by an experienced and qualified pilot of real planes, someone who has stick-time up in the air. Their argument is that a human being is better able to adjust for the situation as it is occurring and can do a better job. Note that pilots are officers in the USAF. Class plays a part.

The Army also flies Predator drones. Since they don’t have a lot of pilots, they looked at this and said, “hey, we can train people to fly these, and make them land themselves.” So they do.

The interesting things is that the Air Force apparently crashes more of their Predators than the Army does. The auto-land function works better than the “real” pilot.

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http://www.flickr.com/photos/yourdon/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

You hear it all the time. Sometimes even from me.

“I just wish I were happier.”

Or even,

“I just wish I was happy.”

Perhaps because I say it, I find people who constantly whine about how they need to be happier like sand in open wound. Not necessarily painful but still something you’d like to avoid.

Since last time I took a look at how the experience immediately before will change how happy you evaluate the previous year, I figured that today I’ll take on something related:

Why wanting to be happier is probably not what you want, besides being stupid anyway.

Offended yet?

If you’re still with me, let’s take a look at why.

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Did you know that society’s where men are more unable to marry, whether because polygamy or social forces against female survival, have greater rates of violence? You really don’t want a couple of nations with nuclear arms sitting right next to each other where there are massive numbers of men who cannot get mates, itching to go beat someone up.

What do you know? — we do!

In China, traditional biases against women could end up making it impossible for many men ever to find wives. Because of China’s strict policy limiting family size to one child, many parents abort female fetuses, with the result that there are now 117 boys born in China for every 100 girls. By 2020, China could have between 30 million and 60 million men who cannot find wives.

[Coontz, Stephanie. 2005. Marriage: A History. pp. 3-4]

By contrast, estimates for the United States at the same time (c. 2000) were 105 males per 100 females. The European Union sits at 106/100, and South Africa is at 101/100.

Interesting, India has a similar problem with having too many boys. It seems that there parents have also been aborting females. The national average is 108 boys to girls, a number that is rising. But in some districts, the ratio is as high as 125 boy births to 100 girl births!

The article details that this is not a good thing, even though some women may see it as giving them a better bargaining position:

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He adopted the mobile habit and now can’t break it.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/yourdon/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

Paradoxically, habit is both the product of learning and the escape from learning. We learn in order not to learn. Habit is efficient; learning is messy and wasteful. Learning that doesn’t produce habit is a waste of time. Habit that does not resist learning is failing in its function of continuity and efficiency. Buildings keep being changed until they get to a point where they don’t have to be changed so much.

Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built, pp. 167.

Although Brand is talking about buildings, the lesson generalizes. We can even apply it to the working life. If you think about it, the problem of levels transitions is that the habits that you have formed to effectively work at one level have to be jettisoned and new ones learned, whenever you transition to a new level. Since most people only make one or two transitions over the their working life, these can be handled fairly

Most of what you learn about working, you try to encapsulate into habit. You need this so that you can stop worrying about certain things. Even “simple” elements of worklife like expense reports or timesheets need to be habitual, so that you can stop learning them and simply integrate them into the habit of the day, like getting a coffee in the morning.

Which is why changes to expense systems (or the office coffee machine) can be so jolting: you didn’t know what you already knew, nor remembered how long it took to learn how to use them effectively.

As a long-time external (I started while in college), I know the inefficiencies of having to learn a new system because I had to do it every couple of years. (I worked longer projects than most externals.) It takes a long time, you waste time trying to get something done right — it always come back a few times — and you wonder how much money got wasted paying you to fill out paperwork.

All of which made me wonder today: how often do Hidden High Potentials (HHPs) have to adopt new habits? Since this affects you more than it does normal people, it’s worth touching on.

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Twenty years ago, my friend Terry was an international affairs major at a major university in America’s west. A friend of his invited him to spend part of the summer with him back home, in Beijing. Terry read the tealeaves and thought that June would be a great time to visit China. What could possibly happen?

Terry’s friend was one of the young people camped out in Tiananmen Square. From what he saw, the demonstration was organic, taking advantage of a moment. Terry was there when the tanks rolled in. The Chinese helped him escape, but they decided to stay.

This wasn’t Terry’s fight, after all.

I’m told that the real reason that the Red Army moved in was that the Workers grew upset. Hard to believe now, but back in the 1980s the most powerful force in Communist China were the workers. They saw the students as a threat to the Great Strides made for workers, and the party officials knew who buttered their bread.

China has done some interesting things lately to indicate it is still very much a totalitarian state. I can’t say whether or not the students were right about how they did this, or what they did. China still gets protests and it scares them, which is why they have begun to even threaten Western news organizations. And maybe a protest that was that large, that shut down the Mall in Washington, D.C. would be met with armed force here, too.

Still, the anniversary makes me glad I live somewhere that, for all its faults and the decline in civil protections against the government, we enjoy a great deal of liberty.

I’ll also note something important: India had her elections last month. As Fareed Zakaria observed in the June 1 Newsweek (US edition), that the elections:

are also a fitting symbol — in this case of India’s strengths, which are defined no by state power [as is the case in China] but people power, with all the messiness and chaos that implies. With 420 million people voting, the recent polls were the biggest exercise of democracy in history.

Nice contrast to the Chinese shutting down possible dissident websites on the eve of the Tianamen Square anniversary.

Adam Savage, who is one of the special effects artists who routinely blows things up on Discovery Channel’s Mythbusters, did a talk at Makers Faire on Failure. What’s amazing is how good it was.

I’m busy researching Happiness — it turns out that I needed more research because what I had been writing turned out probably at least half wrong — so there’s more Happiness stuff coming. But failure is often looked at as something that will destroy your happiness: Adam shows how that’s not true.

He’s obviously winging it, but it’s Adam and he’s been doing TV for awhile now, and frankly it felt like he pulled it off.

Don’t let the first story slow you down. It’s the second failure story, the one about being an art director for a film school student, that hits home. At least for me. I can still taste the first time I blew it like that.

He follows it with the reasons why failure is important:

What is success? Success is moving forward. Success is being able to build on what you’ve done and continue to do it, to move forward. So if I think of success as the road, I think of failure as the car you’re driving…. It’s the vehicle by which I move forward. It’s those incremental steps.

And he’s right: there’s something that allows you to see patterns and taste the risk of something blowing up in your face. In his case, really blowing up.

“MythBuster Adam Savage’s Colossal Failures” on FORA.tv.

I just realized that I don’t have a category for “Success”. Odd.