I have a diploma hanging on the wall, of what my wife
describes as the “orange room”, a brightly
painted, bedroom cum office in the basement of our house. The diploma confers on
me the degree of Master of Arts in fancy Gothic script, and I sometimes look at
its framed gravitas with no small sense of pleasure. This satisfaction stems from the fact that I
earned this degree in middle age and is a culmination of a lifetime of formal
and informal schooling at a variety of institutions on both sides of the
Western Ocean.
However
as much as I enjoyed my experience at graduate school, with papers written, presentations given and
a thesis carefully constructed, much of what I learned seems to have disappeared
into the ether. For all the text books I have pored over and business models studied,
the thoughts that stick in my mind the
most, increasingly seem to be the those sayings uttered by people who didn’t
spend a lot of time navel-gazing at University.
Several
years ago I started the habit of entering a quotation or saying in my Outlook
calendar, so that when I got to work, a reminder would pop up with something motivational
to go along with my morning coffee.
Initially, I would search the web for quotes from philosophers that
sounded profound and weighty. For example,
every weekday morning for several months, competing Soren Kierkegaard quotes
would show up on my calendar. “Life can only be understood backwards; but it
must be lived forwards” and “Life
is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be experienced” Which of course sounded good at first
reading, however I didn’t have the time to ponder the deeper existential
meanings before the reality of the workday intervened. Other quotes came from my favorite poet, Rudyard
Kipling, which meant that “If you can
keep your head when all around are losing theirs and blaming it on you…..” and If you can fill the unforgiving minute
with sixty seconds worth of distance run….”
were both Outlook regulars. As good as they sounded, neither did much
either for my insecurity or procrastination.
After a
while it dawned on me that I was hearing more practical profundity from regular
folks than I was getting from the Great Thinkers of the Ages. I enjoyed the first moment of clarity when I
was vacationing in North Carolina several years ago. After a hard day at the
beach, I was lying on the sofa watching a program about Bass fishing. Now, I have never been much of a fisherman,
but was too lazy to find the remote and change the channel. I watched as a moribund Bass fisherman plaintively
asked the presenter Billy Bob (we will call him) why things weren’t getting
better for him. Billy Bob looked at his
whining student squarely in the eye and said “For THINGS to get better, YOU have to get better” I aroused myself from my stupor and wrote
this down immediately. Years of studies
in organizational motivation had been clearly and neatly summed up by this TV
fisherman a few choice words. Needless
to say it went on the Outlook calendar as soon as I returned to work.
The
following year I was flying into Salt Lake City on a ageing Delta Airlines DC-9
and was sitting next to a biker looking guy of about 60, who told me that the
last time he had flown was when he was on his way to Vietnam, probably in this
very DC-9 forty years ago! I laughed and we got to chatting. He told me that he was on his way back to his
job in the salt mines. Now usually when people use the term “another day in the
salt mines” it denotes any employment that people find arduous or boring, even
if it’s just in an office cube. This time however, he really DID work in a salt
mine somewhere on the Great Salt Flats of Utah, and was picking up his motor
cycle (his preferred choice of transportation) at the airport. During the course of the flight he gave me the
Cliff Notes on his life, good and bad, marriages divorces, triumphs and
mistakes. I asked him if he harbored the
wish that he had done things differently. He looked me in the eye and shook his
head. “You can’t live your life for
another man’s dreams” he said firmly. This time I scrawled it on the back
of a napkin before it found its way to my Outlook Calendar.
So whether it was a supervisor
wandering into my office after a particularly hard week and saying “Get over it, get on with it” or a
friend opining that “Working at his company is like “Making love to a porcupine – one prick working against thousands” I learned to listen more closely to the all
those sayings born of hard experience, resilience and wisdom that didn’t show
up in a 1001 Quotations by Famous
People. After all, whether it was Wieden & Kennedy the
advertising agency that developed Nike’s famous slogan “Just Do It” or the comedic interjection of Larry the Cable Guy’s “Git Er done”; at the end of the day, they
both essentially amount to the same inspirational catchphrase.
I’ll put them both on the calendar.
More from the Albion Bulldog shortly..
