The Achievement Habit (22 page)

The current situation was in some ways anticipated by writers from as far back as the earliest days of the Industrial Revolution. One of the most prescient books in this genre was written by Kurt Vonnegut right after World War II. In
Player Piano
he describes a future America where the majority of the people are either unemployed or working in highly alienating jobs, in a desultory army or doing meaningless public works projects.
¹
These people live across a river—it could just as well be the other side of the tracks or highway—from a small educated elite that runs the economy. In this society, machines do most of the work, and the jobs left for the majority of the human population provide no satisfaction.

A more nuanced understanding of the changes brought about by the way people choose to develop technology can be found in Harry Braverman’s scholarly treatise
Labor and Monopoly Capital
. Braverman points out that work that allows for self-expression satisfies human needs, and he traces the roots of the trend toward deskilling of both work and workers. In Braverman’s terms, the machines that enhance people’s skills are considered
life-supporting
, while those that deskill people and devalue their work are
life-destroying
.
²

Perhaps the best spokesperson for the need to define the proper role of machines is Mahatma Gandhi. Asked whether he was opposed to machines, he answered,
³

How can I be when I know that even this body is a most delicate piece of machinery? The spinning wheel is a machine, a little toothpick is a machine. What I object to is the craze for machinery, not machinery as such. The craze is for what they call labour-saving machinery. Men go on “saving labour” till thousands are without work and thrown on the open streets to die of starvation. I want to save time and labour, not for a fraction of mankind but for all. I want the concentration of wealth, not in the hands of a few, but in the hands of all. Today machinery merely helps a few to ride on the backs of millions.

The issues raised by Braverman and Gandhi are eloquently reinforced by E. F. Schumacher,
⁴
who looks at work from a Buddhist point of view. In his classic essay “Buddhist Economics,” Schumacher points out that work serves to feed our basic need for association with other people. In fact, work supplies several of our basic human needs:
⁵

1.
     
It gives people a chance to utilize and develop their faculties.

2.
     
It enables people to overcome their ego-centeredness by joining with others in a common task.

3.
     
It brings forth the goods and services for a becoming existence.

With this in mind, Schumacher points out that work is a basic human function that transcends the usual economic meanings associated with it:

To organize work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve wracking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence. Equally, to strive for leisure as an alternative to work would be a complete misunderstanding of one of the basic truths of human existence, namely that work and leisure are complementary parts of the same living process and cannot be separated without destroying the joy of work and the bliss of leisure.

If I am inspired by the humanity and beauty of Schumacher’s description of the Buddhist conception of what is called right livelihood, where does that leave me in terms of the current conditions in my own society? The answer, for me, comes from a strange place. I found it in Lawrence Weschler’s book
Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees
, an examination of the life and work of the contemporary artist Robert Irwin.
⁶

What is unusual and inspiring about Irwin is the experimentation he brought to exploring the boundaries of his craft. To me Irwin’s journey is a model for anyone in any walk of life. Take control over your life and work, it tells us. Instead of following the normal course of his profession, Irwin followed his curiosity and created a unique path of exploration and wonderment that provided a life force based on self-expression.

At least two things happen to most students who read Irwin’s biography. First, and most important, they realize that they do not need to stay within the bounds of their profession as
taught in school or practiced by their peers. Second, they learn about perception, which is for most of them a useful new way of seeing the world. As the title says, “Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees.”

Even those who stay in the system can make meaningful choices that support their principles and set them apart from their professional colleagues. Some people, for example—myself included—do not, as a matter of principle, do military work. Others choose to work on social betterment projects. More telling than the choice of work is an individual’s attitude toward and relationship to his work. Many people associate the freedom to make such choices only with highly skilled professional work. My experience is that such choices are available even in the most seemingly menial jobs.

I worked my way through school with various jobs. I have worked as a gas station attendant, a riveter, a handyman, a warehouse hauler, a door-to-door salesman, a stock clerk, a deliveryman, a street vendor, a postal clerk, a chicken farmer, an engineer, and a teacher. Was I any less intelligent or less of a person when I didn’t have a PhD attached to my name? No matter what work any of us does or what background we come from, we get to decide how to see ourselves and our world.
⁷
When you hold yourself in high esteem and keep a positive outlook on your future, others usually follow suit. By choosing the meaning we give to the people and things in our environment, ultimately we control our own experiences, no matter what work we are doing.

One of the hardest things can be to follow a path that’s different from what your family or society expects of you. It’s very possible that you were expected to join the family business, or have
the same career and life trajectory as your parents. And maybe that would make you happy—and maybe it wouldn’t.

When I grew up in the Bronx, my friend Mark got a lot of pressure from his parents because he was not paying attention to his schoolwork; he spent all of his time on the street, fixing cars. They insisted he go to a counselor, who put him through a battery of tests. The results showed that he had an aptitude for doing things with his hands! He ended up moving to a small town, where he opened a printing business and lived happily ever after.

Like Mark, many of us do have a sense as to what kinds of things we are good at and what naturally appeals to us, yet we are surrounded by well-meaning people like Mark’s parents who have formed ideas about what is the best path for us. The two idea streams are often in conflict.

When my wife, Ruth, was in school, her parents insisted that she study something marketable like secretarial or teaching skills, instead of doing the artistic and creative problem-solving work she was born for. This pressure led to a wrong professional choice, and it took many years for her to get on the proper path.

Sometimes, though, you can be lucky and have a protector. Andy was my closest friend in graduate school. During his funeral, in a very moving eulogy, his nephew tearfully expressed his gratitude. The nephew, now a successful architect, felt deeply indebted to Andy for having taken him in and supported his studies in architecture after his own father disowned him for deciding not to go into the family business.

Mark, Ruth, and Andy’s nephew all faced conflicts about career-path choices. Such issues are very common for college-age students. Even without outside constraints, it is not uncommon for people to change their choices in midstream. Some do it
several times. Others spend most of their working lives hunting for the right career, and some drop out completely. Often when I speak with students, I explain to them that many people, even very successful ones, do not know what they will do “when they grow up.” It is all part of the adventure of life, and the best thing is to enjoy the voyage.

The constraints on our career paths tend to be self-imposed. It is said that we all rise to our level of incompetence. I can’t say that I have found much truth in that. What I find more to be the case is that we tend to
rise without thinking
. There is a ladder that exists in many career paths, and society brainwashes people to think they are supposed to climb it. Not every new award, degree, or promotion is a good thing for the individual.

There are a great many ex-somethings floating around who would have led much more satisfying and productive lives if they had stayed in the trenches, doing what they really enjoyed, rather than moving in what looked like an upward direction. A woman named Diane spent many years as a nurse before getting promoted to supervisor and then to administrator. It was a lot more money and power, yet she realized that she wasn’t helping anybody anymore, and quit. Being so far removed from the patients she cared about had killed her enthusiasm for the job. Now she’s a martial arts instructor instead!

If in doubt, go back to the earlier exercise where you asked yourself three questions: “Who am I?” “What do I want?” “What is my purpose?”

It’s a good idea to revisit that exercise frequently. Now I’d like you to do it once more and add a new word: “What do I
really
want?” Keep asking it, over and over, until you feel you have gained insight into your own desires so you’re no longer at the mercy of society’s ideas of what is good for you.

The most important things we can know about a man are the things he takes for granted, and the most important things to know about a society are those which are simply assumed and seldom noticed.
⁸

—Lewis Wirth

The things we take for granted, and simply assume, are the basis for our self-image, and give the things in our lives their meaning. By making our background assumptions explicit, we are able to affirm them or change them. Doing this gives us the opportunity to change ourselves from puppets to truly autonomous beings.

Some people achieve autonomy through sheer stubbornness and rebelliousness. Although that may work, it is not a healthy way to approach change. A more rational approach is to look at everything that is obvious to you.

Make a list of all the things in your life that you do not normally notice. A good heading for such a list is “Things that are too obvious or too trivial to list.”

For example, your list might include the following:

I don’t really listen when my wife talks to me.

I will never clean out the garage.

I do not get enough sleep.

I never seem to get around to phoning my cousin.

I always support the same political party that my parents did.

My attitude toward money is the same as my father’s.

In the coming days, notice how much of your behavior is based on items on this list. If you are happy with these things,
go on with your life. If you want to change any of them, cross them out on the list—both actually and metaphorically.

One of the things I very much like about problem statements in the form of points of view (see chapter 3) is that the POV statement tends to reveal underlying assumptions and make the desired objectives explicit. Formerly, many people operated on the basis of unspoken and unnoticed assumptions. Now, with POV, more assumptions are stated explicitly. Unfortunately, countless assumptions still go unnoticed and may in fact unnecessarily bias the solution.

The role unquestioned assumptions play becomes obvious if we look back at sociopolitical norms of the past, things like the absolute power of royalty, political participation only for men, property passed to the eldest son, slavery, serfdom, a prohibition on divorce, only men being allowed to file for divorce, only property holders being allowed to vote, child labor, colonization, and the “white man’s burden.” For a long time each of these was assumed to be an intrinsic part of the given culture, and passed unnoticed and uncontested until its presence was brought into the foreground and its legitimacy questioned.

A parable that nicely illustrates the relativistic nature of our social norms is the story of the young man who walked into a small town dressed only in a white sheet and did not speak except for babbling sounds. The townspeople assumed the poor fellow was insane and locked him up in their mental hospital. A week later, twenty more people walked into town, dressed identically in white sheets and babbling in the same way as the original fellow. At this point the townspeople released the first man; clearly he was part of a religious sect.

The overriding message here is that if you are going to do
something outlandish, you had better get a group together; otherwise, people will think you are crazy.

Many institutions in our society are widely accepted, and yet if you looked at them within the white-sheet-babbling framework, they would make no sense if there weren’t a lot of people participating in them. Imagine what would happen if there were no universities, and I approached you on the street and suggested that you pay me a lot of money for at least four years. In return I would give you lectures on subjects you have never heard of that I happen to be interested in, and if you jumped through enough hoops, at the end of the four years I would give you a piece of paper with your name on it—let’s call it a BS. Would that sound reasonable?

I once heard an Indian guru give a parable describing the history of banking.

A man was sitting on his front porch, watching the world go by, when suddenly he got a vision consisting of four letters:
B
-
A
-
N
-
K
. So he got a piece of chalk and wrote the letters on his front door. Shortly thereafter someone came up to him and gave him some money. The man was surprised and perplexed, so he put the money in a large box. All day long people kept giving him money, and he kept being perplexed and putting the money into the box. Finally, at the end of the day, the man went into his house and took all his money out from under his mattress and put it in the same box.