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What I’m Reading: April 2021

It’s been a few months since my I last wrote a “What I’m Reading” post, mainly because engagement is low. Nonetheless, I realized that I miss writing them, because I enjoy the process of reflecting on and synthesizing my recent reading. So here goes!

A Religion of One’s Own: A Guide to Creating a Personal Spirituality in a Secular World by Thomas Moore

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I think I first heard about this book through a Facebook group associated with The Liturgists Podcast, which was my most valuable resource while I was deconstructing. The title caught my eye because although I am no longer religious, I remain deeply spiritual and still find religion fascinating. Perhaps my most passionate interest right now is to how to find spiritual fulfillment and community without religious belief.

Thomas Moore knows a thing or two about this, because he spent 13 years as a Catholic monk but left his order on the eve of ordination. He pursued an academic career but was denied tenure, so began a third career as a psychotherapist and writer. I was surprised I had never heard of such a prolific writer, who pens titles like Care of the Soul, Dark Night of the Soul, and A Life at Work—themes close to my heart.

This book calls for the deliberate cultivation of a religious sense in one’s life, even if one does not ascribe to any religion. Moore writes, “personal religion is both an awareness of the sacred and concrete action arising out of that awareness.” He says “it’s important to cultivate an eye for the numinous, a sacred light within things or an aura around them, the feeling that there is more to the world than what meets the eye” (4). This is a lifelong project, in which we each build—and help others build—our own personal cathedrals. Moore believes that hardcore secularists who deny our religious impulses live impoverished lives.

As a Christian, I was constantly taught the dangers of “cafeteria-style religion”, in which we remake God in our image by picking and choosing those aspects of religious experience that resonate with our souls. Moore has a higher view of human intuition, and enthusiastically embraces the project of constructing a personal religion; drawing heavily on Jungian concepts, he urges his readers to listen to those intuitions, explore widely among the world’s religions, and find authentic and personal ways of embracing the sacred. Chapters cover various related topics like mysticism, dreams, therapy, the erotic, art, and even magic. That last chapter was the most challenging for me, but makes sense within a Jungian framework in which tools like dreams or rituals can help us access our own unconscious. Speaking of Jung, I found the chapter on eroticism incredibly helpful, because Moore looks past superficial sexual desire to a deeper, less conscious thirst for life and connection.

The book is not perfect. For such a profound topic, from such a passionate writer, the prose often felt flat to me. The author’s personal embrace of different aspects of so many different religious simply sounds exhausting to me—but then, that is his personal religion, not mine. Those critiques aside, this was an inspiring book and one of the most helpful I’ve read about secular spirituality.

The Sand Sea by Michael McClellan

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I mentioned this novel in my April Newsletter. Michael McClellan‘s debut is a masterpiece, and the world thankfully seems to have recognized it. Boosted by strong support from Steven Pressfield, the book appears to be selling well.

This is an unconventional fantasy novel, set in a world loosely based on the late 19th century. It has rightfully been described as “Lord of the Rings meets Indiana Jones.” I’d add that it’s seasoned with a bit of “Dune.” The heroes fight with scimitars and pistols. They ride intercontinental trains and venture deep into the desert on camel expeditions. Imperial armies tote their cannons into war against primitive desert tribes. I loved almost everything about this book. The world is richly imagined, the characters are three-dimensional and diverse, the action gripping, and the prose perfect. This novel is truly a labor of love; McClellan’s master craftsmanship, applied over more than a decade, shines.

If I can critique anything—and I’m nitpicking here—it’s expectation management. The book is huge, so I expected a full dramatic arc brought to a conclusion. I was surprised and a little disappointed to find that the book ends short of a full resolution, as it sets up for a sequel. A couple key characters developed early in the book almost completely disappear in the latter third, although I expect they will play a more central role in the next book. Readers should also be aware that the book contains multiple torture scenes, which are gruesome. They serve the story but made me queasy, and I’m left wondering if they were necessary.

On the whole, though, this is a fantastic novel that I’d recommend to anyone who loves sweeping fantasy, 19th century history, or just a great story in a richly imagined world.

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

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I bought this Audible book based on an algorithm recommendation and its glowing reviews. I wanted to love this book, because so much about it is excellent, but a couple structural flaws rankled the entire way.

The easiest way to characterize this book is as a 21st-century update to It’s a Wonderful Life, right down to the near-identically-named hometowns. That film has often been criticized for being too sentimental, but its unapologetic sentimentality has always been part of its enduring appeal for me. The Midnight Library also has a sentimental streak, but there are no childlike angels here; it’s a grittier book with antidepressants, alcoholism, a sexual encounter or two (not graphic), and the occasional f-bomb.

The premise is that protagonist Nora Seed, upon hitting rock bottom in life, finds herself in a library where she can try out alternative lives in which she makes different choices at key moments. It is hard to say more than that without giving away the story, but your initial intuitions about the book’s plot arc and themes are probably correct.

I loved a lot about this book. The characters are fantastic, especially given the multiple roles that each has to play across many different realities. Audible narrator Carey Mulligan brings Nora to life. I devoured the book quickly because, at every step of the way, I wanted to know what happened to Nora next. That is the most essential element of storytelling, which says something about Haig’s talent as a writer. The prose is wonderful. Everything about the book is well-executed, from the rich cast of characters and crisp dialog to the vividly imagined alternative lives.

Unfortunately, two structural challenges consistently undermined the book for me. The entire premise is that Nora can try out any possible version of her life and choose the one that suits her best. However, each life she tries is marred by some fatal flaw that undercuts its appeal. This pattern drives both the plot and the theme, but if Nora can really enter any possible world, why can’t she simply enter an improved version of life without that flaw? Every step of the way, I imagined better alternatives, and felt increasingly aggravated by the smoke-and-mirrors necessary to drive the story forward.

Nora also enters each life with no memory to that point, no sense of her identity, and no knowledge of the people around her. She is essentially a stranger playing a part, forced to improvise and avoid detection as an impostor. This left me with a constant sense of dread, and many interactions made me cringe—not a feeling I enjoy when reading. The author relies on constant sleights of hand to make this work, and it repeatedly violated my suspension of disbelief. One character after another asks, “Are you okay, Nora?” when she doesn’t know the most basic facts about her life, and she waves them off with vague comments about alcohol or exhaustion. I can’t even imagine how hard these scenes were to write. Apart from the awkwardness, this setup undermines the book’s core plot and theme, because I can’t imagine any possible way Nora would choose a life in which she was a complete stranger to herself.

One might argue that I am overthinking things, but given that the entire book is premised on this notion of alternative lives, these two flaws felt like cracks in the foundation. The book captivated me the entire way through, but I was relieved to reach the end.

Pure: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Shamed a Generation of Young Women and How I Broke Free

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Throughout my Christian deconstruction, I had to process through so many domains of my life. What did I really believe? Why? What are the grounds for morality and ethics? How should I live? Without Christian teaching and practice to lean on, I had to tear my beliefs down to the foundations and rebuild. Far from becoming a spiral into nihilism and immorality (as many Christian leaders warned me it would), this has been a rich, meaningful process that forced me to engage with moral and ethical issues in a far deeper way than I had before.

One of the hardest areas of life for any person to work through—Christian or not—is sexuality. Religion and sexuality are deeply interwoven; both are rooted in our deepest sense of identity, and both involve our relationship with extraordinary, transcendent power that can be highly empowering or deeply destructive. I continue to study and reflect on sexuality with the same curiosity that I bring to religion or psychology. That study has implications for how I live my own life, but also for how my wife and I raise our children—a topic that feels increasingly urgent as they approach adolescence.

Pure is a damning indictment of the Purity movement that swept through American Evangelism in the 80s and 90s, when I happened to be coming age. This was the age of I Kissed Dating Goodbye, True Love Waits pledges, promise rings, dating Jesus, and sometimes even waiting for the wedding day for the first kiss. All of this will sound bizarre and alien to those who didn’t grow up in it—but for many of those who did, it shaped their lives in incredibly powerful ways. Author Linda Kay Klein is a former Evangelical, raised in the movement, who draws on over 80 interviews with other women raised in the Purity movement, and especially on her own group of teenage friends. They are grown now, with decades of life experience behind them. A pattern emerges from these interviews: the Purity movement scarred many of these women for life, and they want to tell their stories. Clearly, Klein has tapped into something.

I felt a little sheepish about reading a book about sexuality written for women, but it proved to be a powerful read. The stories these women share are devastating and sometimes excruciating. I alternated between empathy and righteous indignation. What I realized partway through—and what struck me harder than I expected—was that this is not a book about sexuality; it is a book about shame. At its best, religion shapes, upholds, and expands the human spirit; but at its worst, religion wields shame as a weapon to destroy a person’s sense of self and imprison them in abuse. Story after story reveals the appalling frequency of the latter.

Klein (still a Christian) takes great pains to emphasize that she is not attacking Christianity, and she acknowledges that some women view the Purity movement with ambivalence or as a positive force in their lives. However, her attack on shame is unsparing and well-deserved. As I man, I found the book helpful for understanding the extent of both explicit and implicit misogyny and shaming in the church and the world at large. The book also heightened my empathy for the stories that the women—and possibly men—in my life might be carrying.

Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times by Katherine May

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This literary memoir has been making waves lately. I picked it up because its themes of growth through fallow seasons seemed well-aligned with my own book. It’s a beautiful little gem of a book, from its magical cover to its gorgeous prose. The core metaphor of wintering works well, and speaks perfectly to our time.

This is a quiet, slow-moving river, so it will not appeal to everybody. Nothing much happens—just a lot of life—but that is exactly the point. May could be any of us, languishing a year into COVID-19, wondering why we are struggling when we don’t really have it that bad. What she brings to these experiences is a keen eye for observation, a rich capacity for a reflection, and a willingness to bring meaning to her experiences. Her memoir becomes a mirror in which we can see ourselves in a new light.

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When You Lose Your “Why”

Today I published a guest post on my friend Joe Byerly’s blog From the Green Notebook. Joe and his team write about leadership, Stoicism, books, writing, and other aspects of the well-lived life… generally within a military context.

In earlier episodes of the From the Green Notebook podcast, hosts Joe Byerly and Jacob Gawronski concluded each interview by asking their guests a question made famous by Simon Sinek: “What’s your why?”

It’s a great question because it reveals so much about an individual’s character, values, and motivations. If Sinek is correct, why is the most important question a leader can ask, because everything else builds on that foundation. A clear why motivates strong leaders, creates and sustains powerful visions, inspires teams, and compels followers. We often spin our wheels trying to answer what or how questions, but why takes us a level deeper, to the source from which all other questions flow.

Recently, after catching up on the podcast—on a solitary drive through rural Alabama after a glorious day reconnecting with nature—I switched off the stereo and contemplated how I would answer the question. After some consideration, I had to admit an uncomfortable truth: I don’t know my why. Not right now, anyway.

I suspect I’m not the only one, so I’d like to share a few thoughts on how I got here—and how we navigate these seasons when our why is no longer clear.

Read the rest at From The Green Notebook.

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The Challenge of Bad Days

Every sport, artistic endeavor, or daring enterprise offers days when you feel unstoppable. You are on fire. Invisible assistance from the universe or your deepest unconscious propels you onward. You act intuitively and with perfection. We associate such days with flow but for all of our scientific probing, nobody really knows when, how, or why the magic comes. All we can do is joyfully accept the gift when it arrives.

Then there are the Bad Days. Days that feel exactly the opposite.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about lead climbing Misty, my hardest and most intimidating outdoor climb to date. I fought and struggled and fell multiple times along the way, but I made it to the top and went home glowing with satisfaction. I have been determined to go back and “send” Misty ever since (climber parlance for leading the entire route without falling).

I hoped Sunday would be the day, but I awoke groggy despite eight hours of sleep, never a good sign. Misty gets packed on weekends, so when I arrived at the crag, I went straight to the route to get in line, depriving both myself and my partner of a proper warmup. I convinced myself that some pullups and stretching would suffice.

I psyched myself up for a strong, confident lead. When I started up the rock, I moved smoothly and gracefully through the first crux (the hardest moves). So far, so good.

Then things went wrong. Almost immediately, my arms pumped out; they burned painfully while my finger strength dropped to zero, due to a flood of lactic acid. Far from sending the route, I fell early. Stupidly, I grabbed the rope as I fell—a habit I thought I had broken—and burned a finger.

Determined to make the most of the climb, I continued up to the second crux. Last time I fell repeatedly at this spot, but I knew the key move now and resolved to climb through on my first attempt. I made the key move but then pumped out again, a good six feet above and to the side of the last bolt. In a split second, I realized that I was about to fall nearly fifteen feet, and I would do so in a totally uncontrolled way. I also realized that I had committed a cardinal sin: my leg was behind the rope, which meant I would flip upside down.

Thankfully, I freed my leg just as my fingers gave out. I peeled off the wall, whooshing down for what felt like forever. The rope caught and I spun sideways and slammed my back against the wall so hard that I saw stars. Fortunately I hit a smooth section and wasn’t hurt.

This was my first fall that really rattled me. I couldn’t imagine attempting the crux again in this condition. Humiliated, I lowered to the ground. My headspace was shattered. I felt groggy. I was climbing weak. My forearms and fingers felt wasted. I was not in a mindset to try hard new climbs or confront new fears. I just wanted to slink off and climb something easy so I could feel a hollow sense of achievement.

Abstractly, I knew I was having a Bad Day—a day that does not merely involve a bad performance, but that actually feels malevolent. I was in the opposite of flow. I was stuck in a headspace of internally-generated resistance.

Dealing with Bad Days

I had enough sense to recognize that my dilemma represented a learning opportunity. My biggest challenge of the day was not to climb a particular rock, but to learn how to deal with a Bad Day.

I wish I could report that I arrived at some dazzling revelation, but I didn’t.

While my two partners belayed each other, I closed my eyes and tried to mindfully process the malaise that had crept into me. I wondered if it was possible to somehow dissipate its force, to clear my mind, to become an empty vessel again into which flow might magically reappear. Despite my best efforts, I couldn’t get there.

I gradually realized that all I could do was keep climbing. Someday, I knew, I would be stuck high up on some multipitch route, exhausted beyond measure, rattled by a near-miss, wanting nothing more than to quit—and I would need to keep climbing in order to get home again.

Today was training for that moment. It’s not the kind of training I enjoy, but it’s vitally important.

I kept climbing. I tried another hard route, on top rope this time. When I couldn’t solve the crux, I hoisted myself up on the rope (another humiliation) so I could try the rest of the route. When my partner suggested a trad route, involving a more perilous form of climbing that is still new to me, I wanted to say no; I didn’t want to lead trad in this headspace. Instead, I nodded wearily, racked up my trad gear, and made the climb. It didn’t feel good, but I climbed safely. We wrapped up the day with a new sport climb. I did it on top rope, but it was my tallest climb yet and physically exhausting. I struggled up it anyway, despite an embarrassing number of falls and rests.

When the day was done, I had done very little that I was proud of—except keep climbing.

Taking stock

Other than practicing raw perseverance, the only other technique that I’ve worked out for handling Bad Days is to take stock afterwards. We can reframe nearly anything in life as an opportunity.

Before I collapsed into bed, I pulled out a pen and notebook and tried to translate the day’s badness into a series of lessons. I needed to develop a good warmup routine and honor it every climbing day. I needed to research flash pumps, which is apparently what I experienced by jumping right onto a hard route. I needed to practice falling and re-train myself not to grab the rope. Something about my at-home training regime was not developing finger strength in the way that I expected; I needed to do research and modify my training plan. Lastly, I needed to develop a mental framework for recognizing and responding to Bad Days—of which this post is an early result.

When I got home, Wendy asked me if I had fun. The honest answer was “no.” But I was glad I went.

I collapsed into bed, relieved to reach the end of this particular Bad Day.

In the morning, I awoke to a new start.

 

Image courtesy of Derek Christensen, who shares his own falling story.

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April Newsletter

Greetings, readers! I have been meaning to start a periodic newsletter about my writing and other creative work. Here is my first attempt. It’s an eclectic roundup about my new book, a forthcoming short story, academic work, and recommendations for other creatives I love.

Eating Glass

In March I finally launched Eating Glass: The Inner Journey Through Failure and Renewal, which I’ve been chipping away at for five years. I’m pleased to say that embracing my story has been one of the most liberating experiences of my life. The outpouring of support from friends and colleagues has been amazing, and many early readers have shared stories about their own brushes with failure. I feel incredible relief at bringing everything I have internalized into the light. It’s amazing how much power we can unleash when lean into fear.

I put together a book trailer, partly because I wanted to let readers see some of my favorite visuals from the nonprofit effort that inspired the book. I’m a little sheepish about the aesthetic quality, but it’s authentic, from the heart, and gives a sense of the book.

 

If you like the book and want to support it, here are a few ways you can help:

Leave honest reviews on Amazon or Goodreads. The review count is one of the fastest clues for busy shoppers about whether they should take a book seriously.Share with family, friends, or colleagues who might appreciate it
Connect me to any influencers you know who might be interested–such as authors, bloggers, speakers, or podcast hosts.My next big project is recording an audiobook version. I will announce that here when it’s ready.Derelict Anthology

I have been getting back into writing fiction lately, and am delighted to announce that I have a short story appearing in the upcoming Derelict anthology, titled “Celestial Object 143205.” You can preorder the ebook or the Kickstarter edition at this link. My contribution is a near-future SF story that features a competition between the United States Space Force and an eccentric Chinese billionaire. It will appeal to anyone fascinated by Elon Musk’s ventures with SpaceX.

Blog Updates

My blog has been quiet lately, but I did add a couple new pieces in March. Leaning Into Fear is about two things: one of my hardest rock climbs to date, and the decision to publish Eating Glass. The Pursuit of Connection asks what our lives would look like, if we sought to maximize connection rather than wealth.

Teaching

In January I taught an Irregular Warfare course at the School of Advanced Air & Space Studies (SAASS), and in February I served as course director for the SAASS Technology & Innovation course. You can find both syllabi at the links. It was fantastic being back in a classroom and connecting with our amazing students.

Other Fiction

I finished writing three other short stories recently and am currently shopping them around. Two received rejections recently. Although I would have preferred acceptance letters, the rejections actually felt good; they were tangible indicators that I’m moving again. I also received the nicest rejection letter of my life, from an editor I know:

Dear Mark, It’s great to finally see a new story from you. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to consider “Letter from Slowtime.” The story is sweet, moving, and nicely done, but I’m afraid it’s not quite right for me. I look forward to reading your next submission in the queue.

That story will go back out to a different publication later today. Fingers crossed.

Academic Writing

I have been slow getting back into academic writing since late 2017, given how painful my PhD experience was. I can’t even look at my dissertation without crushing anxiety. However, releasing Eating Glass gave me a new measure of energy, and taught me what I think is a useful heuristic for life: tackle whatever creative work fills me with the most fear.

This week I dug out my Stanford research, as well as notes and research ideas that my department at Stanford deemed too unconventional. I have been pursuing one overriding academic interest for about 15 years: how to conceptually model complex wars with multiple sides, and how to think about strategy in those wars. Diving into this again is vertigo-inducing, but this is where I think my big academic contribution lies. My goal in April is to complete a journal article that bites off the first piece of this.

Things I Love

Launching my book has reinforced for me just how hard it is for creators to get noticed in a noisy world. So I want to use my own modest platform to introduce you to other creators I love. Here is this month’s selection:

Army officer and blogger Joe Byerly is a hero of mine. We met at the Defense Entrepreneurs Forum around 2013-2014, after which he began writing From The Green Notebook, a blog dedicated to leadership, mentorship, reading, and writing. Over seven years Joe grew the blog into a thriving community. Joe and his growing team just launched the From The Green Notebook podcast. I loved their recent interview with Steven Pressfield; Pressfield is one of my favorite authors, and Joe and his cohost’s enthusiasm for the author in this episode is contagious.

Speaking of Steven Pressfield, his new book A Man at Arms came out on March 2nd. I haven’t read it yet, but I can’t wait. His book The Gates of Fire, about Thermopylae, ranks among my favorites, and The War of Art is among the best books ever written for creatives.

While we’re in this DEF-Pressfield nexus, DEF founder Ben Kohlmann started a podcast a few months ago called A Random Walk with Ben Kohlmann. He has lined up a really amazing set of interviews, but I especially loved his interview with Michael McClellan, author of The Sand Sea. Long story short, Michael put in many years of effort and wrote more than a million words in order to finally produce The Sand Sea—a sweeping historical fantasy set in a world based on the late 19th century. Michael devoted himself to his art, put in the long obedience required, and birthed a masterpiece. Oh, Steven Pressfield also mentored him and heartily recommends the book. I am halfway through The Sand Sea and am captivated; it’s one of the best fantasy novels I have ever read. It is dark and gritty at times, but features everything I love in fiction: amazing prose, a rich cast of three-dimensional characters, and a beautifully imagined world.

On a different note, Audrey Assad is one of my favorite singers. Her voice is a conduit through which beauty pours into the world. She made her name as a Christian singer, but as she has become more agnostic, her music has turned towards themes of exploration, mystery, and searching. Her journey has shaken some of her fans, so I wanted to help connect her to new ones. Some of my favorite songs include Irrational Season, Evergreen, and her cover of Mumford and Sons’ Sigh No More.

Lastly, I met Andrew Liptak when he co-edited War Stories, an anthology of military science fiction to which I contributed a story. Andrew is one of the smartest and most prolific observers of science fiction around. He offers both a free and inexpensive premium email newsletter called Transfer Orbit, which includes SF news and commentary. His premium newsletter is now my primary way of keeping up with the field.

 

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

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The Pursuit of Connection

Classical economic theory rests on a simple premise: individuals and firms are utility maximizers, which means they “seek to get the highest satisfaction from their economic decisions.” Expected utility theory lets economists model decisionmaking processes with math; they can predict purchasing behavior, assess how proposed tax rates will affect voting behavior, anticipate the success or failure of negotiations, or predict when disaffected populations will rise against their governments.

This framework has problems, but it is also a powerful way to study the world. However, it raises a key question: what goes into the utility function? In other words, what measure of “satisfaction” do human beings actually maximize? Many economists treat utility and wealth as interchangeable, which has a subtle cascading effect. From these microfoundations we construct an entire economic world in which all human activity aims at wealth accumulation.

This abstract view of wealth-maximizing individuals often rings true. There is nothing inherently wrong with the ethical pursuit of wealth, and economic self-interest has played a huge role in innovation, economic growth, and rising standards of living throughout history. However, these forms of progress have come at great cost. Individuals in liberal-democratic societies are profoundly alienated from themselves, each other, nature, and meaning. The consequences are evident in our soaring levels of anxiety, depression, loneliness, substance abuse, and suicide.

As I seek to live a good life, I often wonder what it would look to maximize a different kind of utility.

Lost connections

One of the most powerful books I’ve read in the last few years—Johann Hari’s Lost Connections—posits that the real locus of depression is found not primarily in brain chemistry but in our profound sense of disconnection. He identifies seven forms of disconnection prevalent in our world:

Disconnection from meaningful workDisconnection from other peopleDisconnection from meaningful valuesDisconnection from childhood traumaDisconnection from status and respectDisconnection from the natural worldDisconnection from a hopeful or secure future

Healing ourselves and our societies will, in turn, require intentionally reconnecting across all these areas.

This book had a profound impact on my thinking. I continually encounter the same theme in my other reading. In Fragile Power, Paul Hokemeyer writes:

At the core of human pain is isolation from others and ourselves. We find relief from this pain in reparative human connections where we are seen and heard as vulnerable human beings.

In his book Tribe, Sebastian Junger notes the physical proximity of the industrializing 18th-19th century United States to traditional Native American societies. He writes:

It may say something about human nature that a surprising number of Americans—mostly men—wound up joining Indian society rather than staying in their own. They emulated Indians, married them, were adopted by them, and on some occasions even fought alongside them. And the opposite almost never happened: Indians almost never ran away to white society.

This phenomenon bewildered U.S. thought leaders at the time. French émigré Hector de Crèvecoeur wrote of Native Americans, “There must be in their social bonding something singularly captivating and far superior to anything to be boasted among us.”

The point is not to romanticize Native American culture or denigrate liberal-democracy, but to illustrate that human-beings evolved over tens of thousands of years to live in tight-knit communities, embedded in nature, in which rich human relationships and interdependency were constant. Our atomized existence today is deeply alien to human nature. Consider a hundred people living alone and lonely in their finely-partitioned apartment building, a frazzled mother alone at home with her toddlers most of the week, or a tired worker who commutes to and from an office where he sits in front of a computer for sixty hours a week. These alienating situations are a far cry from the rich relational life that our genes still remember.

The currency of connection

Going back to expected utility theory, there is no reason why wealth necessarily needs to be the primary measure of utility. We all maximize utility, according to the theory, but utility is whatever brings us satisfaction.

I often wonder what it would look like if “connection” was my primary measure of utility. In other words, what if I made decisions based on what would maximize my sense of connection?

Below are just a few thoughts.

Seek individual integrity: Many of us are deeply disconnected from our own selves due to inattentiveness, trauma, social pressures, cognitive dissonance, or confusion. A divided life fuels a sense of alienation and disconnection, so we should always work to heal inner division and seek integration. This means discovering our real values and identity, shedding harmful projections and messages, finding healing from past traumas, and embracing an authentic identity. This is a lifetime project that requires deliberate investment.Maximize rich relationships: We live in an age of shallow connection, so any attempt to create and sustain authentic, deep, human connection is precious, courageous, and rare. The quality of a life may very well be measured in its depth of human connection, so this is perhaps the currency we should maximize above everything. We should have a bias towards quality time with others, and should deliberately seek to create meaningful relationships, even when doing so feels countercultural. Prioritizing relationships often means rejecting our cultural obsession with productivity (an admitted challenge for me).Pursue meaningful work: The key word here is “meaningful.” If we have a choice (and I realize we often don’t), we would not necessarily seek the highest-paying or most prestigious work, but rather work that rings true to our souls, aligns with our sense of self and purpose, and accords with our values. This principle could also apply to how we use our leisure time. We don’t want to burden ourselves with unrealistic expectations and demands of our leisure time, but we should have a bias towards meaning. This could entail incorporating imagination, discovery, creativity, growth, and skill development into our leisure rather than merely consuming passive content.Maximize time in nature: Nature has a quiet, healing power that gently unknots the tension of our frantic daily lives. For me personally, maximizing this currency means continual engagement with the natural world—which can often be done in conjunction with other people and with physical exercise. It can also include small, daily experiences; I enjoy sitting outside in the mornings, and work outdoors whenever an employer lets me.Connect with our bodies: Many of us take our bodies for granted (at least until we get older) or even war against them. A life of connection would entail listening to the body’s messages, caring for it, protecting it from harmful influences (to include those we ourselves often inflict on it), and nurturing it through activity and exercise. Mindfulness practices can also be helpful here, as we are embodied creatures and the body-mind-soul connection is powerful and real.Commit to a hopeful and secure future: Today’s world often looks bleak and the future appears ominous; current trends include the pandemic, global warming, the unraveling of institutions, cancel culture, soaring economic inequality, and staggering debt. Our natural impulse is to escape, but this is another form of disconnection. I worry about our present crisis, but I also see this upheaval as fertile soil in which reinvention can and must begin. The great project of our time is imagining and designing a better way of organizing society, but this will be a lifetime project involving everyone. Maximizing connection means resisting the impulse to flee; it means committing, engaging, and finding a humble role to play within this great project. It means the intentional cultivation of hope by paying close attention to the world, with an eye for goodness and opportunity.

The pursuit of financial security and success will always be a deep part of human life, but if the psychologists are right that connection is a key metric for a well-lived life, then it’s worth considering how we might maximize connection in our own lives.

 

Photo by Marcus Woodbridge on Unsplash

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Leaning into Fear

The first time I visited Sand Rock, I sat at the base of a climb called Misty (5.10b/c), staring up the vertical sun-baked face. Misty was considered the best sport climb at the crag, and it looked both exhilarating and terrifying. The first bolt was high off the ground. The climb then proceeded through thin, tricky, balancey moves, and a freestanding boulder stood precariously close to the fall zone. Above the crux the wall leaned back just enough to make resting elusive; if a climber didn’t complete the route quickly enough, his arms would pump out and he would fall from exhaustion. I knew that I wanted to climb this route someday, and wondered when I might be good enough.

In the ensuing months, my climbing improved dramatically. I developed better strength, endurance, and technique. I was probably ready to try Misty, but fear held me back.

One day my partner and I finally tried. My partner led the route successfully, then asked me if I wanted to lead or top-rope. I hesitated. I knew I was capable of trying the route on lead, but leading a new route is terrifying. Each time you climb above a bolt, you venture into the unknown. You don’t know where good holds might lie, where you can find rests, and where you will exhaust yourself and fall. Because you are on lead—climbing above the rope’s last point of connection to the rock—almost every fall is significant. Every single move could mean a scary plunge into the void. Such falls are usually safe, but millions of years of evolution have conditioned the brain to believe otherwise.

I chickened out that day; instead of leading I opted to top-rope, which limited my falls to mere inches. I rationalized my decision every way possible. I was still developing my abilities as a leader; I liked taking slow, incremental steps; I could learn the moves on top-rope, then try leading the route once I found my confidence.

Top-roping Misty was a hollow victory; I knew I had missed an opportunity to grow. When I saw my fears reflected in that soaring rock wall, I declined a confrontation.

A principle for life

One of the things I love about rock climbing is that it forces you to confront fear every time you climb. This visceral confrontation with our innermost fears—and our triumph over them—is perhaps the very essence of the sport, which gives climbing its Zen-like quality. Sir Edmund Hillary famously said, “It’s not the mountain we conquer but ourselves.”

This makes climbing an extraordinary training ground for life.

Climbing has sensitized me to the sheer number of moments in my life when I face a choice: do I back away from fear, or do I lean into it? Those choices don’t typically have the life-or-death quality that climbing does, but the accumulation of these small decisions can shape a life.

Beginning this blog entailed a significant battle with fear. I worried about merely being another noise in a noisy world. I worried about saying the wrong thing and triggering a backlash. I worried about oversharing. When I face such encounters with fear, it is so easy to catastrophize expected outcomes.

Eventually, I leaned into that fear long enough to publish my first piece. Needless to say, none of my worst-case outcomes materialized. Instead, friends and colleagues enthusiastically welcomed my writing. I received kind notes and emails. Friends urged me to keep at it. Once I broke the ice and leaned into that particular fear, the Unknown’s tyrannical power was broken; posting new articles became much easier.

My biggest fear this year was publishing my new book Eating Glass: The Inner Journey Through Failure and Renewal (forthcoming). I worried it wasn’t good enough. It was too vulnerable. It would ruin my reputation and my life. My loud inner critic screamed one message over and over: “Shut the f*** up!!!”

Yet I knew that publishing this book was the necessary next step in my life. This was my Misty, the frightening wall I needed to climb. In a poem about getting unstuck in life, David Whyte writes:

Start close in,
don’t take the second step
or the third,
start with the first
thing
close in,
the step
you don’t want to take.

Like most occasions when we lean into fear, the rewards have been immeasurable. The support from friends and family has been incredible. I have had rich conversations with some early readers who saw their own experiences reflected in the book. Fully owning my story has helped me realize how much I was hiding, and how much that fear was holding me back. Now that I have committed to the book, I feel an exhilarating sense of acceleration into a future filled with possibilities.

A life at the edge

This commitment to frontier exploration is now a core value for me. Although I never live this out perfectly, I try to spend as much time as possible at my personal edge. Any time I feel that first prickle of fear, I recognize that an opportunity stands before me to learn and grow.

That is how each individual life progresses. Each time we take a tentative step into the unknown, we chip away at the frozen boundary of our potential. Our world enlarges. We discover new, previously undiscovered capacities within ourselves. Life at the edge has a kind of ratchet effect; once you take a step beyond the safe and familiar, you never truly go back. Each new experience becomes a part of your story, equipping you for every future exploration and confrontation.

Leaning into fear can take many forms. It might mean accepting a promotion you feel unqualified for, or agreeing to lead a project that eclipses anything you have previously tried. It might mean initiating a hard or uncomfortable conversation, or reading a book espousing a perspective you find threatening. It might mean seeking out and spending time with a community different from your own. No matter the outcome of these courageous acts, you always gain useful knowledge about yourself and the world.

Misty, Again

Yesterday, it was time to finally confront my fear of Misty.

I felt nervous and sick the evening before. I watched every video of Misty that I could find on YouTube, studying the moves. I tossed and turned in bed, in a nightmarish delirium, thinking I was on the route. I spent my three-hour drive to the crag contemplating my fears.

My partner and I warmed up on several easier routes, which was necessary but also an evasion. As the hours wore by and the sun marched across the sky, I knew I was stalling. It would have been so easy to justify a day “getting back into leading” on these easier routes, but I had made a commitment to myself.

We finally hiked out to Misty. We tied in, checked each other over, and stick-clipped the first bolt to prevent a ground fall. I gazed up the sheer face. It was now or never.

I started up. Once I passed the first bolt, I was in the fearful unknown, above my rope, one misstep away from a frightening fall between the wall and a giant boulder. My breathing grew harsh and ragged as I leaned out into space, hanging tenuously on a bad sidepull as I transferred my weight to the opposite toe. The slightest imbalance would send me peeling off the rock. I made the move, clipped, and continued on.

Misty was an exhausting struggle after that. I was already worn out from the morning’s climbing, and despite the presence of many good holds, Misty put me through the wringer. I needed to rest frequently by hanging on my rope. I struggled through a second, higher crux, trying again and again, my finger endurance diminishing with each subsequent attempt. The hard move was five feet diagonally above the last bolt, so every missed attempt sent me on a swinging ride. The harsh sun glared down. I poured sweat. I had never exerted myself so hard on a climb before.

Eventually, I clipped the anchors. It was not an elegant or beautiful performance, but I did it. I leaned into the fear, achieved my hardest lead to date, and pushed my frontier just a little further. Sometime soon I will return to climb it perfectly, without rests or falls.

New fears await me, as they always do, but that one will never trouble me again.

Standing at the base of Misty

 

The header image is not me, but a still from the best video of Misty I’ve found—shot with a drone. Kudos to the climber for a smooth, graceful performance.

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Committing Moves

When I started seriously rock climbing, I used a safe and static climbing style. I always kept three points of contact, carefully reached for the next handhold or foothold, and gingerly shifted my weight to ensure my feet would hold. Only when I was certain would I commence my next move.

This worked—for a little while. It is a good way to climb the easiest routes at the gym. It gets you familiar with the basic movements of climbing, and helps you overcome your fear of heights without much risk of falling. However, once you move beyond beginner grades, that style of climbing no longer cuts it.

To get up most climbs, you have to make what climbers call committing moves. These are moves that you can’t safely test before making them; once you initiate them, they are irreversible. Often times, you need to put weight on tiny nubs that you can’t possibly believe will hold you. Other times you need to hoist your body up on a heel hook, which will give you a split second to grab the next handhold. Still other times you need to make dynamic moves that rely on momentum.

You either finish the move, or you don’t. If you don’t, you fall.

Committing moves can be terrifying. Even experienced climbers do not like to fall; falling is scary, and many fall situations involve at least some risk of injury. A skilled climber makes continual risk calculations as she moves over the rock. It is in committing moves where her mental game is honed and put to the test.

Committing moves in life

I love this concept of committing moves as a metaphor for entrepreneurship and life. It provides such a tangible and visceral image for the decision points we often face.

Many people never want to make committing moves; they fear irreversible decisions, particularly when they perceive risk. They fear marriage. They fear quitting their job or taking a loan to launch a small business. They hesitate to speak up with a contrary opinion, because once they do, there is no going back.

To live without making committing moves is to stay on the beginner walls. One can enjoy a safe and contented life that way, but growth opportunities are limited.

I am conservative with risk, but many of my biggest life gains came through committing moves. I married Wendy (although I had no doubt about that one). We had kids at a time when life seemed impossibly busy (I felt pretty good about that one too). On a couple occasions we bought houses instead of renting, which worked out well. I founded Uplift Aeronautics. Later, I founded Rogue Squadron and accepted a scary amount of funding to scale. My entrepreneurial experiences were hard and involved many falls, but were the most satisfying and enriching experiences in my professional life. I wrote pieces for publication. In most of these cases, I can thank friends and family for pushing me to take risks I was afraid of.

Running a business or organization is filled with committing moves, because you must often make irreversible resource commitments with long lead times before the results come in. Yes, you should make use of small bets and low-risk experiments whenever possible, but you often need to put all your chips in.

The psychology of commitment

There is an entire psychology around how we make committing moves. My favorite treatment comes from Arno Ilgner’s wonderful book The Rock Warrior’s Way, which is a great manual for life even if you do not climb. We can roughly divide the decision process into two parts: before we choose to commit, and after.

Before we commit, we need to observe ourselves. We must tame our own psychology; if we are riddled with negative self-talk like fear or doubt, we must identify and eliminate it, because it will do nothing to help us. We should approach a committing move relaxed and confident.

We must accept the situation as we find it, not waste precious energy wishing or pretending it were different. We must study the details closely, and focus our attention on every possible source of advantage. Our senses should be attuned to possibilities, not obstacles.

However, we must also understand the risks entailed. We should consider very carefully what happens if we successfully make the move, but also what happens if we fall. We do ourselves no favors if we lie to ourselves about the danger we face. Pretending away risks is a terrible strategy. We can use exercises like murder boards and pre-mortems to help illuminate the real risk.

Then comes the moment of decision: do we commit, or do we not?

Both are acceptable decisions. If a risk is not worth it, we can downclimb or get lowered. In life, we can back away from the venture or purchase or relationship. Nothing is lost. We have learned something about ourselves in the process, and will be better-equipped to face similar moves in the future.

But once we make the decision to commit, we must commit 100%. There is no longer any going back. You have made your decision, and now you must climb until you succeed or until you fall. You have already calculated the risks and have already accepted the consequences of falling. Thus, there is no value in second-guessing yourself or ruminating on your dilemma. In fact, you are most likely to succeed at this point if you climb boldly and confidently. Any hesitation will undermine your prospects.

After you make the committing move, you must close the feedback loop. Whether you made the move or fell, you have much to learn. You now have a new entry in your repertoire of life experience. How accurate were your judgments about the probability of success, or the consequences of failure? What was your mental state? How could you have improved? If you succeeded, are you honestly digesting any lessons or is your ego rushing you to overlook them? If you fell, what did you learn? How are you growing?

As you gain proficiency with committing moves, they become habitual. You will regularly encounter new kinds of moves, but internalize the psychological process for meeting them. You build up an experience base with falling, which will help tame your fears about future falls and help you distinguish safe falls from unsafe ones.

Like many things in life, learning to make committing moves is a lifelong journey. I am still learning. Each time I encounter one, I take a long pause, close my eyes, and focus on my breathing. I wait for the shakes to pass. Then I make my decision. Sometimes I succeed, sometimes I fall. Slowly, I am getting better.

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What I Learned in 2020: Adding My Light

Happy holidays, readers. I hope you have managed to find some measure of meaningful connection, joy, and peace during these last few weeks of 2020.

It is remarkable how many faith traditions have evolved similar December rituals and festivals. As the days grow shorter and colder, sunlight and warmth seem forgotten. In the heart of that darkness, many of us come together with friends and family in rituals that involve light. We adorn Christmas trees, decorate our houses, and light menorahs or candles. Whether we celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah, Yuletide, Kwanzaa, or something else, we gather to push back against the darkness and hold out hope. The New Year falls a short time later, and our December reflections help to guide our planning for what’s to come.

That core message of the winter holidays seem more relevant than ever this year. I see a lot of jubilation that 2020 is ending its reign of terror, as if 2021 will somehow be different. I expect it will not be. We will wake up on January 1st to the same world we put to bed the night before.

But that does not mean we should despair. The winter holidays are not simply about hitting the reset button, but are a seasonal reminder that we must keep vigil and hold forth our lights. Cynicism and depression are always temptations, but that is the easy way out. The winter holidays present a harder challenge: they ask us to keep our candles lit.

Surveying the darkness

I won’t rehash the issues we collectively faced in 2020, but will say a bit about my personal journey this year. I will acknowledge up front that I am extremely fortunate and grateful to have stability and security during the pandemic.

With that said, this was a difficult transition year for me. I have dedicated most of my professional life to military innovation, but much of my work came to an unexpected and unhappy end this year. I dusted myself off and moved to Montgomery, Alabama in July, where I am now enjoying my new role as an Air Force professor. The job is wonderful and I love my colleagues, but I still feel disoriented. As I consider the future beyond this assignment, I yearn for some noble purpose that I can commit all my energy and talents to.

More and more, I don’t think I can go back to military innovation. My heart has been broken too many times. Over and over again, I have made considerable personal sacrifices to develop big, bold new ideas, and over and over again the System has been disinterested in what I have to offer. I initially thought I would use this new academic season to write about my lessons learned, but I have discovered that I can’t do so without being swept away to a dark place of anxiety and depression. That is the primary reason I have not blogged consistently.

Although I remain a devoted U.S. military officer, I have also struggled to find that sense of purpose in my academic studies of war. My career has coincided with a particularly disastrous time of U.S. foreign policy, and our problems abroad pale beside our problems at home. More and more, my oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States has led me to look within our borders. However, I am not entirely sure what that means for me personally and for my academic research.

What this amounts to, for me, is a winter season of waiting. It is a time of faithfully serving my students and equipping them for their own leadership journeys, but also of sitting quietly with my uncertainty about the future, trusting that every winter gives way to spring.

Looking for the light

Despite the sense of winter darkness, I continue to search for the bright places. They are always there, if I look for them. Here are a few hopeful lessons I have learned this year.

The darkness itself is a source of rich life

I owe an immense debt to David Whyte, Parker Palmer, and Jerry Colonna, three men who experienced similar winter seasons, found new life, and then had the courage to write about their experiences. David Whyte’s poem Sweet Darkness is now one of my favorites. I especially love these lines:

The dark will be your home

tonight.

The night will give you a horizon

further than you can see.

Life asks many things of us in its different seasons. In these winter seasons, life asks us to sit still, enjoy the quiet moments of each day, and let the journey unfold. Darkness has so much to teach us, if we let it. This has been a year of profound learning about myself and my journey through this world.

Letting go can be liberating

The opening stanza of Donald Justice’s poem Men at Forty stunned me when I first read it:

Men at forty

Learn to close softly

Doors to rooms they will not be

Coming back to.

The first half of life is a time of discovery, exploration, and openness. As we grow older and learn who we really are, life asks us to make commitments to the people and tasks we care most about. However, making whole-hearted commitments requires focus, which often means letting other things go. This year I have begun closing doors to things that no longer work for me. That is a little scary, because I am not entirely sure which new doors will open, but I am learning to trust my soul’s intuitions about what is not good or true for me anymore. That is a kind of guidance, however imperfect.

I love to write

Writing has always been my deepest passion, but I somehow lost it under the weight of adult responsibilities. This year gave me the time, motivation, and opportunity to reconnect with that lost love. This partly meant more discipline and better organization, but also meant rekindling powers of creativity and imagination that I had let atrophy.

It is difficult and frustrating work sometimes. Building a readership is hard, and I am riddled with insecurities and self-doubt. My biggest writing project this year was a raw and vulnerable book about growing through failure. It is so vulnerable, in fact, that I remain tormented by the decision whether to publish it or bury it forever.

But I am at least producing. I am finishing things. This year I created my website, wrote blog posts, finished my book, wrote four short stories, and made good progress on two academic books. I am staying faithful to the writing, even though I don’t know where it will lead. Some of my most cherished moments this year were rich conversations with individuals touched by my writing. This, if anything, is my candle in the winter dark.

I glimpsed the power of local community

I have worried for years that liberal democracy no longer works. Economic inequality is off the charts, Congressional deadlock has made effective governance almost impossible, and political polarization has been steadily worsening. The election of Donald Trump was not a cause but a consequence of these trends (although he certainly catalyzed them), and 2020 was only a continuation of existing trends. I have often wondered what might come after liberal democracy as we have known it, with its tattered institutions. Is there any alternative to resurgent authoritarianism?

My one intuition is that renewed local communities might hold the key. The individualism of Western countries, and the U.S. in particular, is toxic and a major driver of anxiety, depression, and dissatisfaction. Human beings evolved to live in bands and tribes, surrounded by constant supportive community, not to wall themselves off in isolated apartments and houses and interact primarily through economic transactions or the Internet. Yet very few of us have ever known anything different.

I had glimpses of a more communal life when I lived in Jordan, but I ironically experienced it firsthand during COVID19 lockdown. My family and our two neighboring families formed a quarantine “pod” (judge if you must, but it was a careful and effective way to quarantine while maintaining mental health and social support). Each evening we wrapped up our Zoom calls, rubbed our eyes, and stepped out into the sunlight. We drank beers and grilled burgers and talked late into the evening. We waved and greeted every passing neighbor, all of whom were out on walks in record numbers. These moments of contact were fleeting and tenuous, but this was the most communal life I have lived in decades, and it was rich and wonderful. The stories that cheered us this year were of brave and creative grassroots effort to patch society up and hold it together, amidst the grotesque failures of our broader political, economic, and public health systems. Many of us have lost sight of those experiences, under the weary months of the pandemic and its ugly politicization, but they were real and hold an important message.

I find great inspiration in NYT Columnist David Brooks and his Weave: The Social Fabric Project, “a cultural movement renewing America’s social fabric.” Most of us cannot change the world, but we can change our local communities. I have little experience in this kind of work, so have much to learn, but my soul resonates with that message. I take that as a hopeful clue about my own future.

Leaving California was hard, but my family and I decided to commit to Montgomery. We bought a house, intending to stay a while. It is an unlikely place for a Silicon Valley entrepreneur to commit to—underdeveloped, relatively poor, still plagued with racism and structural injustice—but it is a place that I believe holds great promise, and needs investment and care from builders and activists. The long battle for justice and equality continues to play out here; one of my favorite experiences here was watching the John Lewis memorial at the state capitol, and I will write soon about the city’s growing efforts to grapple with its legacy of slavery and racism. I also believe the city has great economic potential, with its large population and inexpensive real estate. For now I am largely imprisoned in my house and office, but I eagerly await the day I can watch Montgomery come back to life. Perhaps there is a role here for an entrepreneur who knows how to build things while battling entrenched bureaucracies.

Finding your own light

There is a wonderful scene in The Year of Living Dangerously when Guy Hamilton and Billy Kwan are discussing how to deal with misery that seems to far exceed our own capacities. Billy’s answer is that “You do whatever you can about the misery that’s in front of you. Add your light to the sum of light.”

I often think about that quote, which provides a continual and living challenge. What does it mean for each of us to add our own unique light? How does that play out in our families, friend groups, workplaces, and local communities?

Tonight many people around the world will be raising their middle fingers to 2020 and their Champagne glasses to 2021. Amidst the revelry, whether bitter or hopeful, it is worth remembering that the darkness will be with us a while. But it is also worth asking how we can add our light.

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The Promise and Peril of Orbiting the Giant Hairball (Part II)

In my last post, I wrote about Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool’s Guide to Surviving with Grace by Gordon MacKenzie, a sort of spiritual guide to creative individuals who want to survive and thrive in bureaucratic organizations.

In that post I provided a brief overview of the book and shared a few thoughts about the initial difficulty of entering orbit. Large organizations have structural incentives to fear launching their employees into the distant unknown, so aspiring innovators have to build up a reservoir of trust by demonstrating their loyalty and competency.

Once a creative individual finally achieves orbit, he or she discovers that new challenges await. How does one manage a career that roams so far from the heart of the institution? How does one stay credible and relevant? How does one ensure that his or her creative work finds its way back into the organization?

The short answer is that these questions have no easy answers. Part of the journey into orbit around the giant Hairball is learning to live daily with the questions themselves, and discovering your own personal answers through experimentation, experience, and a lot of luck.

A multitude of orbits

MacKenzie offers a metaphor, not a roadmap. There is no right or wrong way to orbit the giant hairball, and there is no “one size fits all” solution. Although I have forgotten most of what I learned as an Astronautical Engineering major, I can tell you that there are many different orbits for different purposes.

Suborbital Flight. If you want to rise in the Corporation, you probably need to spend the majority of your time in the Hairball. That needn’t stop you from brief forays into the stars. When the space tourism industry kicks off, passengers will likely not reach orbit at all (at least at first) but may still taste brief periods of weightlessness above the stratosphere before sailing back to earth. Many Corporations offer this kind of experience to their all-stars. In the military, for example, top performers can still progress through the ranks while intermittently taking time to learn foreign languages, study in civilian academic institutions, or embed in the private sector. You can return to the Hairball with unconventional new perspectives, and work within the system to nudge change along.Low Earth Orbit. Satellites in Low Earth Orbit circle close to the planet, where they can map every nook and cranny of the surface below. A career spent in LEO might mean staying close to the Hairball, but in slightly elevated places that allow both unconventional exploration and opportunities to drive change. Many leaders, for example, maintain personal staffs or brain trusts that help design and implement innovation efforts. In the military, this might mean working in a Commander’s Action Group, internal think tanks, on a commander’s innovation initiative. Such assignments are not necessarily a fast track to promotion, but they give you room to exercise your imagination while staying close to centers of Corporate power. You can move from role to role, developing broad knowledge of the organization and mastering the ability to work within it.Geostationary Orbit. Geostationary orbits are cold, remote, and distant, allowing a satellite to hover over a single point of earth almost indefinitely, beaming services like communications links and satellite TV into particular communities. A career in GEO might mean developing extraordinary depth in a particular subject, until you become your Corporation’s “go-to” person for that subject. These individuals likely spend a considerable amount of time far from the Hairball, in quiet places where they can think deeply, write, and create. Getting to GEO is hard work, and the connection to the Hairball can be tenuous. This can make advancement difficult, especially in an organization like the military that requires frequent job rotation. Individuals in GEO need to work hard to maintain relationships that will allow them to penetrate the Hairball and actually create change, but if they are passionate, talented, and have healthy relationships, they can often stay close to the work they love. Many eventually find and settle into long-term roles that protect their ability to stay with their subject.Elliptical Orbit. A satellite in elliptical orbit spends leisurely periods far from the earth, then swoops in with ever-increasing speed for a quick whip past the earth before sailing back into deep space. This is almost the opposite of suborbital flight; a career spent in elliptical orbit means brief, periodic forays down into the Hairball, then long seasons of creativity and autonomy in deep space. My own career has followed this trajectory. On the positive side, you spend enough time in the Hairball to stay fresh, current, and credible; on the negative side, you confuse everybody. It would almost be easier if the Corporation could cut you loose, but you keep showing up and nobody knows what to do with you. This is not a recipe for promotion, but it is an adventurous lifestyle that offers rich, unconventional opportunities.Stargazing. I have been very, very lucky in my career. I know many exemplary people who dream of the stars but never found a way to get there. If you are in this category, you should not stop looking up. In whatever role you find yourself, you are still the captain of a rich, imaginative, inner world. You still have dreams, still possess and can cultivate creativity, and are still free to reach out and explore the world, its people, and their ideas. Yes, you have organizational constraints, but your life is still your own, and nobody can stop from you slipping outside at night and looking up at the sky. With some initiative and an open mind and heart, you can reframe and redefine your role. The reality is that, as much as we might dream of a life in orbit, much of the hardest and most important creative work is done in the heart of the Hairball. That is where we need change the most, and you are in the heart of that knotted lair. You can fight your own battles there, and you can also serve as a kind of mission control or ground station, teaming with those in orbit to pull in their exploratory work. And who knows? Maybe, one day, your fortunes will change.

The reality is that, as much as we might dream about perfect jobs that allow us to fulfill our spacefaring ambitions, Orbiting the Giant Hairball is primarily a state of mind. Creative freedom comes through an inner journey of continuous reflection and vigilance. An employee can work to cultivate this freedom from deep within the belly of the beast; on the other hand, those rare, creative career opportunities might prove unfulfilling if we do not cultivate the right mindset to receive them. Some of my most grueling battles with Hairballs came when I was in creative, autonomous assignments—indeed, because I was in those in those assignments. Those were the times when I needed to work hardest to maintain a proper mental and emotional framing of my journey.

Remember: each of us is on our own path. Wherever you might are today—whether hurtling through deep space, or looking up from terra firm at the night sky, or somewhere in between—you have choices and opportunities, which can take you towards or away from creative freedom. There is no fixed answer. Part of your journey is learning to chart your own path, whatever that might look like.

Image courtesy of The Swedish Space Corporation

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The Promise and Peril of Orbiting the Giant Hairball (Part I)

Disruptive military officers like to pass around a quirky little book called Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool’s Guide to Surviving with Grace by Gordon MacKenzie , who worked at Hallmark Cards for 30 years, carving out an identity as a renegade artist with the job title “Creative Paradox.” Using an eccentric combination of text, doodles, and other art, MacKenzie lays out a philosophy of rediscovering and employing one’s creative side within a stifling corporation.

I have made a career out of orbiting the giant Hairball of the U.S. Air Force. I have had the most unusual career of anyone I know in the military, mostly through deliberate decisions to avoid traditional career moves in favor of opportunities where I could breathe free air. Through all those assignments, my motivating purpose has been to develop novel ways to serve the Air Force and help it deal with the dynamic challenges posed by our national security environment.

Because I am such an oddball, I am often asked to mentor other oddballs. I am happy with the choices I have made, but orbiting the giant Hairball is not easy, and it is not for everybody.

Over the next few posts, I figured I would share a few of the lessons I have learned along the way. Although my lessons are specific to my Air Force experience, I think these lessons will broadly apply to anyone trying to achieve orbit in a corporate environment.

MacKenzie’s Metaphor

The Hairball, in MacKenzie’s view, represents the corporation. A Hairball has corporate gravity that draws all nearby mass into its tangled, impenetrable core. All that extra mass only increases its gravity, sucking everything into its “mass of Corporate Normalcy.” The Hairball embodies process, routine, precedent, norms, office politics, boredom, standardization—all the characteristics of Dilbert world that we love to hate.

The way for Creatives to survive, MacKenzie writes, is to launch into orbit. He is worth quoting at length here:

Orbiting is responsible creativity; vigorously exploring and operating beyond the Hairball of the corporate mind set, beyond ‘accepted models, patterns, or standards‘—all the while remaining connected to the spirit of the corporate mission.

To find Orbit around a corporate Hairball is to find a place of balance where you benefit from the physical, intellectual and philosophical resources of the organization without becoming entombed in the bureaucracy of the institution.

If you are interested (and it is not for everyone), you can achieve Orbit by finding the personal courage to be genuine and to take the best course of action to get the job done rather than following the pallid path of corporate appropriateness.

To be of optimum value to the corporate endeavor, you must invest enough individuality to counteract the pull of Corporate Gravity, but not so much that you escape that pull altogether. Just enough to stay out of the Hairball.

Through this measured assertion of your own uniqueness, it is possible to establish a dynamic relationship with the Hairball—to Orbit around the institutional mass. If you do this, you make an asset of the gravity in that it becomes a force that keeps you from flying out into the overwhelming nothingness of deep space.

This is a wonderful metaphor, because it gives equal importance to the creative impulse and the necessary pull of the organization’s mission. Freedom is not found through escape, but through service. This makes it a helpful framework for those who, either willingly or unwillingly, must seek their freedom within a large organization.

The metaphor is also helpful because it does not present a single right answer, but rather a dynamic tension. Most true things in life exhibit that kind of tension. As much as we would love to have clear-cut answers to life’s hardest dilemmas, life usually asks us–on an almost daily basis–to sit with our dilemmas, carefully consider the competing values involved, and find a situation-specific way forward.

The challenge of entering orbit

The first lesson I learned is that getting to orbit is not easy. It takes hard work and a great deal of luck, and not everybody finds a way to slip the surly bonds of earth.

Corporations do not like firing employees into orbit. Corporations are always resource-constrained, which means they want all hands on deck tackling urgent and important problems. Corporations also like their employees close at hand, where they can monitor them and ensure they are being productive. They only like to approve things with a high expected return on investment.

Permitting an employee to enter orbit runs against all of an organization’s instincts. The individual is, to some degree, beyond the reach of accountability. He or she is still drawing on the organization’s resources, still taking home a paycheck, but is not available for the organization’s most pressing lines of effort. The individual is doing… she is doing… hell, the corporation has no idea what she is doing. Her ROI is undefined. She is earning strange degrees in obscure subjects that have no immediate relevance to the corporate mission, or networking with communities that seem totally unrelated to its work, writing a book that she herself can’t explain after three years, trying to develop a product that nobody on the existing product teams quite understands. You can hardly blame the corporation for fretting over this.

When you are in orbit, you are detached and adrift. You spend a great deal of time exploring territory nobody has ever explored before, which means it takes a lot of time to even learn to ask the right questions. It involves many strange forays and serendipitous encounters before you can even hope to show your first results, let alone return to earth with a value-adding innovation. Worse, many of those pioneering astronauts will never really show ROI; every individual catapulted into orbit is a small bet, and we can only hope that enough bets pay off to justify the whole space program.

Entering orbit takes work

All of this means that the corporate overlords are right to be concerned. Letting any employee into corporate orbit takes tremendous trust. If you want to enter orbit, you have to earn that trust.

The U.S. military, for example, offers a wide range of off-the-beaten-path opportunities for extra education, cultural or corporate immersions, or other unusual assignments, but most of these programs are highly selective. To get in, you have to prove yourself a loyal and talented servant of the Hairball. In my case, I spent six years—ten, if you count the Academy—doing exactly what I was told, mastering my core profession of being an Air Force pilot, living at the heart of the Hairball, before I was accepted into an Olmsted scholarship to learn Arabic and move to Jordan.

Any time I have a mentoring conversation with a restless young professional who yearns for orbit, I start by telling them the same thing: before you even think about these unorthodox opportunities, focus on excelling in your primary career field. Cal Newport develops this idea in So Good They Can’t Ignore You, one of my favorite career development books. He argues against the conventional “follow your passion” model for finding meaningful work; instead, he argues for deliberately growing career capital through excellent performance, which ultimately allows you to gain more autonomy.

Even after you make that first foray into orbit, you will likely need to return to the Hairball from time to time to maintain your credibility, stay connected to the organizational mission, and report on what you have discovered. Upon my return from Jordan, I spent two years back in the Hairball, reestablishing my credentials, experience, and reputation in a flying squadron before I launched out into orbit again as a SAASS student and being selected to earn a PhD.

There is no right answer to how you should balance your time in the Hairball and your time in orbit; it is highly dependent on your organization, your personal situation, and your values and goals. In my next post, I will review a few different orbital trajectories.

The post The Promise and Peril of Orbiting the Giant Hairball (Part I) appeared first on Mark D. Jacobsen.