Month: August 2012

At one point or another, most of us have to work.  Some volunteer their labor, but most of us are working for our wages.  I might have blogged about this in the past, but when I was in kindergarten, I rode the school bus to and from school like most kids.  I remember sitting on the bus one morning going to school thinking, “wow, this is incredibly monotonous.”  OK, I might not have known the word monotonous at six, but I remember thinking another twelve years of school seemed like forever.  I’ve never really liked monotony, I don’t think many people do, but for some reason I seem to be particularly sensitive to it.  Once I have done something, I don’t tend to want to do it too many other times. I seem to be pretty good at looking at patterns and making connections based on what I observe, more so than most, I think. Maybe that is why at six I already saw the road ahead of me. My son Tyler is the same way from what I’ve been able to see so far. We were working on a Batman activity book one time which had a bunch of batman characters every few pages and the goal was to spot which picture of six didn’t match the others. He could spot the picture that didn’t match the others incredibly fast. I think it is how we are wired or something, it is odd but cool.

When Routines Are Bad

IMDB summarizes the movie Groundhog Day by stating the main character played by Bill Murray goes through life as a weatherman who is “reluctantly sent to cover a story about a weather forecasting “rat” (as he calls it). This is his fourth year on the story, and he makes no effort to hide his frustration. On awaking the ‘following’ day he discovers that it’s Groundhog Day again, and again, and again. First he uses this to his advantage, then comes the realization that he is doomed to spend the rest of eternity in the same place, seeing the same people do the same thing EVERY day.”

In life a lot of us are living like Bill Murray, we’re living each day like the previous, and we’ve become masters of our environments, so we can almost predict what will happen before it happens.  This is when life starts getting monotonous, and to some demotivating.

When Routines Are Good

Routine can be a good thing and I think Flannery O’Connor said it best in The Habit of Being, letter to “A” by saying “If you do the same thing every day at the same time for the same length of time, you’ll save yourself from many a sink. Routine is a condition of survival.”  We’ve become adapt at minimizing risk and the unknown to make us more successful, or so it would seem. I have all sorts of habits like putting things in the same place, parking my car in the same place, learning what makes people happy and repeating it, avoiding repeatedly what makes people angry. We all do this, many times without even thinking about it.

The Future

Here is where the topic is going to get even more interesting.  In the future of work, I am seeing incredibly efficient processes as compared to what we have today.

Robots

I’ve become obsessed with robotics recently. Everywhere I look, I see human jobs being replaced by robots. I won’t weigh in on whether it is a good thing or a bad thing that robots are “taking” human jobs, my only thought on it is “like it or not…it is inevitable…and often times fascinating.” Kiosks, phones, robots, manufacturing, 3D printing, and more are all of the ways humans are getting squeezed out by more efficient, less costly, and non-unionized robotic work forces. Each generation seems to face new innovations and with change comes the need to evolve or get passed over. In the future of work, creative people willing to adjust quickly will rule.

I’ve started noticing people are trying to get creative work over the “grunt work.” Here’s the odd thing though, thanks to all of our more “efficient” processes, the grunt work is going away as well. Work as we know it is quickly changing.  It is at times more difficult to be creative when templates, systems, standards or processes limit creative freedoms.

Globalization

I find the global economy fascinating, and I think we are only seeing the beginning of a distributed economy. Technology is changing nearly everything.  In the future, and arguably to some extent today, if you want a job done you can outsource that task to the masses on the Internet. Instead of competing with people in your geographic area for that project, we are now all competing with one another in the future. Reputation and keeping your skills up will be even more critical than they are today.

Your Turn

What do you think?  How will we be working, or not working, in the future?  Let me know in the comments.

A Geek in Ceramics Class

When I was in high school, I took two semesters of ceramics.  Yeah, you read that correctly, ceramics!  I really enjoyed it.  I made figurines, pots, mugs, faces, and monsters.  Not only that, but I made some great stuff that probably got thrown away before it ever made it home.  One of my best friends was in the class, which made it all the more fun.  The pottery teacher was an artsy type (go figure) and used to talk about the old house she was fixing up as we sculpted our bowls.  She got to wear the best outfit of all the teachers, a t-shirt, and jeans and because she basically got paid to teach us to mold mud, her clothes were almost always dirty.

One morning the teacher walked into the class a little late while we all sat on our stools perfecting our muddy creations remarking “weren’t the trees simply amazing this morning?”  Now I don’t know if there was a little extra something in her coffee mug to make her extra inquisitive but the statement was so odd to a bunch of 17 and 18-year-olds that it made most of us all stop what we were doing and look at her to see what she would say next.  She then quickly went on to list a few other things she had seen on her drive to school.  “I mean wow…not just the trees, but the birds, the clouds, the sun, the sky” she remarked.  I think one of the students made a smart remark back to her like “uhhh nooooo I didn’t see the stupid trees today.”  She seemed perturbed by our lack of interest.  She went on to further explain herself: “you guys have lived almost a quarter of a century, and you don’t notice the things that matter…the beautiful things…the things all around us that go by quickly and if you don’t stop and pay attention to them, you won’t ever notice them” she said.  For some reason, unlike most of the other students, what she was saying made perfect sense to me.  It was a great two-minute rant from a teacher.  It wasn’t great because it was an abstract concept I hadn’t thought about, but because I hadn’t really thought about slowing down and enjoying my surroundings until that point.  Don’t get me wrong, everyone stops and “smells the roses” every now and then, but I took her rant a step further.  Almost literally from that moment on I didn’t take too many things for granted, which sounds silly, but it is true.  You know that scene in Office Space where Peter is hypnotized and is in a state of complete relaxation?  It was almost like that.  I started to see life differently.

Why Enjoying Life Matters

If enjoying life isn’t important, I have to ask…what is the point of life?  No, really…what is the point of life if you don’t enjoy it?  Everyone has bad days, weeks, months.  Heck, I’ve even had a few bad years, but at the end of it all I have really enjoyed life.  I don’t know what the road ahead has in store for me, but I’m finding the older I get, the less focused I am on the destination and the more focused I am on the journey.  There are lots of people who have midlife crises where they suddenly realize they are halfway through life, and they haven’t really gotten out of life what they anticipated.  There are probably even more who on their death beds that have regrets.  They haven’t lived the life they wanted to live.  Even worse, there are some who spend their entire lives living someone else’s life, or a life they didn’t enjoy.  The biggest regret I think I would have in life is regretting living life to its fullest.

I have written about it in the past, but I see loads of zombies.  I see people who live their lives with their heads down.  They don’t notice the sky, the birds, the clouds, or the trees.  They don’t notice the things that matter.  I read this poem a few years ago and kept it around because it said things that made a lot of sense to me.

“Have you ever watched kids on a merry-go-round?  Or listened to the rain slapping on the ground?  Ever followed a butterfly’s erratic flight?  Or gazed at the sun into the fading night?  You better slow down.  Don’t dance so fast.  Time is short.  The music won’t last.  Do you run through each day on the fly?  When you ask: “how are you?” do you hear the reply?  When the day is done, do you lie in your bed with the next hundred chores running through your head?  You’d better slow down.  Don’t dance so fast.  Time is short.  The music won’t last. Ever told your child, we’ll do it tomorrow?  And in your haste not see his sorrow?  Ever lost touch, let a good friendship die because you never had time to call and say “hi”?  You’d better slow down, don’t dance so fast.  Time is short.  The music won’t last.  When you run so fast to get somewhere, you miss half the fun of getting there.  When you worry and hurry through your day, it is like an unopened gift thrown away.  Life is not a race.  Do take it slower.  Hear the music before the song is over.” – Chain email

10 Things Ceramics Class Taught Me About Life

1. As my High School teacher recommended, you can enjoy your surroundings while driving into school, but you can’t take your eyes off the road for long before you crash and lose track of where you are going.
2. You can learn something from any situation you choose, or life chooses for you.  I took ceramics thinking I would create some pots and other useless things…OK I did…but I took away a really important life lesson.  My ceramics teacher probably has no idea the impact she had from a rant she made one day in class.
3. Making things in life, like ceramics, are better when done with friends.
4. You can have lots of ideas, but few people will buy your art until it is fully baked from the kiln.
5. That scene in Ghost where you are Patrick Swayze who comes back from the dead to meet a young Demi Moore at a pottery wheel.  Yeah, no…that won’t happen to you…no…it won’t…ever.  Sorry.  The good news is, a true love will love you when you are there and when you aren’t…like in Ghost.  True loves love forever.
6. Step outside your comfort zone every now and then.  I’m not usually the artsy type, but when I give new things a chance, I usually tend to enjoy it.
7. Some of the best things in life take time.  Slow down and don’t be afraid to create something slowly.  Everyone knows the saying that good things come to those who wait.  Often it is true.
8. My teacher was crazy and probably did have something in her coffee, but man was she cool.
9. You can make whatever you want in life.
10. Look around you.  Enjoy life.  Enjoy every bit of it.  Wake up!  Don’t be a zombie.  Do what you want.  If life isn’t giving you what you want…go get it.