Category: Career

I just read an interesting article about the Working Dead – people who get paid to do nothing.  (Or who are getting paid and do nothing, mostly by choice.)  I think the working dead are caused by two things:

• People haven’t found their passion.  (If you are willing to take a nap for two hours during the work day, either you really don’t get enough sleep or you aren’t too excited about what you are doing.)
• Corporations aren’t managing them effectively.  (I know somebody who doesn’t always have stuff do do and yet he’s not allowed to do anything but sit there when he doesn’t have work.)

For a while in college I had a job where I would occasionally spend a couple of hours babysitting the copy machine.   (I got so good that I could tell where it was jammed just by the sound it made.)  I got a lot of homework and reading done and I’ve often wondered if I would enjoy a job where I could work on something else (programming, reading, etc) while I occupied space at work.  I don’t think I’d turn it down if it paid enough but I don’t think it would be very satisfying.

Did you know that the 40 hour work week is totally made up.  From Groovy Green – The 4 Day Work Week:

The notion of our standard work week here in America has remained largely the same since 1938.   That was the year the Fair Labor Standards Act was passed, standardizing the eight hour work day and the 40 hour work week.

So when you consider alternate work schedules and hours, keep in mind that there’s no real reason you are supposed to work 5 days a week, 8 hours a day.

It’s nice to hear from someone (famous) that they are happy with their job and not looking to climb any corporate ladder or start a company. Finding something you love to do and then realizing that you love doing it makes for the perfect career and a much happier life. There aren’t too many people that realize that society’s call to climb the management ladder or start a company might not be their dream.  This is Linus Torvalds:

First off, I’m actually perfectly well off. I live in a good-sized
house, with a nice yard, with deer occasionally showing up and eating
the roses (my wife likes the roses more, I like the deer more, so we
don’t really mind). I’ve got three kids, and I know I can pay for their
education. What more do I need? 

The thing is,
being a good programmer actually pays pretty well; being acknowledged
as being world-class pays even better. I simply didn’t need to start a
commercial company. And it’s just about the least interesting thing I
can even imagine. I absolutely hate paperwork. I couldn’t take care of
employees if I tried. A company that I started would never have
succeeded — it’s simply not what I’m interested in! So instead, I have
a very good life, doing something that I think is really interesting,
and something that I think actually matters for people, not just me.
And that makes me feel good.

For those that haven’t heard of Linus – he’s the guy that originally wrote Linux.

scottberkun.com #54 – Writing Hacks, Part 1: Starting:

It’s not the fear of writing that blocks people, it’s its fear of not writing well; something quite different.

My parents have found a really neat coffee shop in Brookings, South Dakota.  They not only serve good coffee and food but they’ve created a welcoming and fun ambiance with local art on the walls, live music and interesting books.  (I stumbled across D.I.Y.: Design It Yourself there and any place that introduces me to an interesting book is a good place!)

The owner Jacob Limmer is featured in this video explaining why he didn’t like businesses – because he thought they exploited people – and how he’s gone about creating his own fun, very successful, not exploitative business.

CurrentTV has a great video of Ira Glass on story telling.  (Ira Glass is the creator and producer of This American Life.)  In the video Ira talks about telling stories, finding good stories and "good taste."  It was the good taste section that I found really interesting.  You get into something because you enjoy it and appreciate it – you have good taste and you can tell what’s good and what’s bad.  Unfortunately, your taste is good enough for you to realize that what you are producing is not great.  Ira says you have to work through that – keep producing – and eventually you’ll get better.  He says most people quit at that point because their taste is good enough to realize that their product is terrible.  He then shared a radio segment he made eight years after he got into radio and he explained how terrible it was.  And yet he stuck with it and now he’s one of the most famous radio story tellers of our time.

I’ve always been fascinated by the difference in generations. Generations at Work held so true to me that I recommended it to many friends.  This blog article talks about how the American Dream varies over the generations.  According to the article, Generation X and Generation Y value time, family and personal development way above money.  It rang really true to me! 

The article is about how those changes in values are changing the work place.  People are getting new jobs every two years, dropping lucrative careers to spend time with the family and much less willing to work 60 hour work weeks.  All of this is helping family and personal development:

We are
spending more time with our kids, and we are keeping our marriages
together more than twice as effectively
as our parents did. And Generation Y is doing better than their
parents, too: They refuse to waste their time on meaningless entry
level work because they value their time and their ability to grow more
than that.

Generation X values family more than money (and distrusts large corporations to take care of them) – Generation Y has taken it one step further and they are developing themselves.  Building a personal brand.  Every Generation Y’er I’ve ever interviewed has impressed me to
no end about all the things they’ve done – on their own.   And the rest of us are learning from them – just check out all those blogs!