Careers

Young Money

Young Money Book
~ Brian ~ Leave a comment

Perhaps more than any generation before us and certainly no less than any other, millennials seek work imbued with meaning beyond a paycheck. The aspiring young financiers profiled in Young Money: Inside the Hidden World of Wall Street’s Post-Crash Recruits aren’t exceptions to that. Sure, they seek power, status, accomplishment, access – and, of course, money. But for most of them these things don’t win out over the inescapable emptiness they find in the dismal labyrinth of Excel spreadsheets that is the life of a young analyst on Wall Street. In many cases, they have reached the pinnacle of post-graduation success only to find a winding staircase of further obstacles and challenges that leads to yet grander heights of worldly success. In the end, they’re less afraid of the failure to reach those heights than the emptiness awaiting them in the corner office.

Young_Money

Kevin Roose brilliantly dissects the Wall Street recruiting machine. He exposes the process that leads directionless overachievers down a well-travelled road to material riches. The road serves as a sort of “cashing-in” on their abundance of talent, ambition, and fear. Many start out having drunken the Kool-Aid that they are somehow serving the wider good of society, rather than fueling a financial engine that allows the vast corporate empires they work for to amass more wealth and enrich those at the highest rungs of the corporate ladder. Others admit full well the moral compromises their work involves, but they crave the money to pay off their student loans quickly and the chance to learn skills they might transfer to the work they want to do later. Sometimes that works out, but for many later never quite arrives.

Probably the best part about this book is the sympathetic portraits Roose writes about his young up-and-coming subjects. He’s both sensitive to and objective about their efforts to reconcile the inclination to achieve with the yearning for purposeful work. Having entered the workforce post-recession, this generation of recruits clings to the security of an established foothold of economic power, while at the same time acutely aware of both its moral precariousness and vulnerability to hubristic collapse. Even as the harried young financial footsoldiers pull themselves back and forth to the office (when they do indeed leave it), this awareness induces a chronic psychological strain. It’s a tough thing to watch the best and the brightest mortgage their souls like that. It makes you wonder about those on the other side of the trade. And it reminds you of the peace we all have to make with how we choose to spend our time on this earth.

Bearish Outlook

~ Brian ~ 1 Comment
The Beaufort Diaries by T Cooper
Beaufort Diaries
The Beaufort Diaries by T Cooper

Horatio Alger this bear is not. It isn’t your great grandfather’s rags to riches story when a polar bear becomes a climate refugee and works his way through dead-end jobs as a cub laborer on fishing trawlers, eventually earning enough dough to go wing it in sunny Los Angeles. Having been an actor myself pursuing fame, fortune, and mostly just a way to make a living doing what I loved, the tale of Beaufort the polar bear doing the Hollywood hustle endeared itself to me at the outset. Despite the bad influences of Leonardo DiCaprio and Beaufort’s cokehead Icelandic girlfriend Svava, Beaufort maintains a down home sensibility forged deep in the Artic heartland.

Unfortunately, this sensitive soul of a bear gets ostensibly crushed under the mirage of Hollywood dreams. A familiar story of the downward spiral of celebrity plays out in an often engrossing and sometimes achingly uncomfortable way. Beaufort’s self-absorbed self-destruction has you sympathizing and disgusted with him in turn. Cooper goes to some less than cuddly places with our bear hero’s story. Sexual avarice, addiction, and the aching loss of hope pile higher atop Beaufort than the towering glaciers of his youth stretched up to the sky. He takes professional risks, that while seemingly admirable, are filled with artistic compromises and egoistic obsession.

A move to New York and a genuine submission to the discipline of recovery offer some relief from his anguish. Beaufort begins to approach his art from a place of humility and self-abnegation. He decides to tell the story that is in him to tell. And such is the lesson buried within Cooper’s funny and strange piece about a polar bear who lost his way in more ways than one. We come into our own when we look within ourselves to see the self as God sees it, and look outside ourselves to see the world as God sees it. In doing that, we see what is best in us is what the world needs most from us. What is lacking in us is what the world cannot give. And we need not find it there. Rather, when brokenness and wholeness don’t quite fit together on any given day is when we have to hold still in patience waiting for the pain to pass. Pass it will. For we can’t avoid being wounded, but we can live through our wounds and the living is the balm that heals us.

Beaufort has his sour and petulant moments. He isn’t the most endearing of characters as the story winds on, but he has an outlook that makes the reader want to comprehend the way he experiences the world. Understanding it to be a moderately naïve and charmingly chivalrous optimism that often turns icy before melting afresh into cheerfulness, I – and I dare say the world – could certainly do with a more bearish outlook on life.

Pro Programming

~ Brian ~ 1 Comment
Analyzing the book Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age by Douglas Rushkoff
Program or Be Programmed by Douglas Rushkoff
Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age by Douglas Rushkoff

Computer literacy is a prerequisite to full participation in digital society. In Program or Be Programmed, Douglas Rushkoff explains why mere computer skills aren’t enough to become a shaper of the future we will live in, or even to influence the present shape of things as they are today. Our lives run in part according to processes and systems driven either wholly or in large part by the way in which software is designed. In both subtle and obvious ways, the choice architecture underpinning processes we participate in every day is guided by unseen hands that programmed how they would work. This happens every time an automated resume screening tool parses data and sifts through applicants before their submission makes contact with a human. It happens when the store of our choice (online or physical) decides what targeted discounts to pitch us for our next visit. It also happens when an algorithm determines search results or when its not-so-distant cousin offers up the next potential life partner or sex buddy via electronic matching services.

None of this is arguably good or bad, but someone’s deliberate thinking made it so. Programs function the way they do by someone’s design. Some of the consequences are intended, while a great many of them aren’t. We can either passively live at the mercy of these important, living operating systems or we can actively shape their design ourselves. But to shape them, we must learn to program or learn enough about programming to influence what gets programmed by others.

One step we can take besides sitting down to learn Python, C++, Swift, or Ruby (which certainly doesn’t hurt) is to study the values of the age of programming. By doing so, we can reset some of the terms by which we live our lives and determine the extent to which technology influences us, our habits, and our value systems. I’ll only focus on a couple here, but all ten of those Rushkoff discusses in Program or Be Programmed are worth considering.

Choice

Digital programs often force binary choices that implicitly limit choices where no such limitation truly exists. Rushkoff rightly points out that we often have a much broader array of choices than the program, bounded by the imaginary limits of its author, offers. And, even more powerfully, we have the power not to choose at all. We can decline a false choice about even such fundamental notions as race, gender, age, political affiliation, or religious belief. Our choices are of our own choosing and need not be determined by programming not of our own making.

Identity

Anonymity comes easy on the Internet. I can present the mask I want people to see. This can cut us off, Rushkoff warns, from being fully present in so much interaction that takes place via digital media. It’s easier to depersonalized and distance myself from the human impact when I don’t face the person. I must claim my identity and bear it openly for my digital communication to mean anything. “Nothing is perfect unless it is personal,” G.K. Chesterton once wrote in The Everlasting Man. Perhaps nothing is perfectly personal, but it must be personal to mean something.

Perhaps an Intention

Humans are the only creatures we know of that participate in their own evolution as a species. Can we do less than participate fully in the design of the programming that shapes the evolution of our culture? Can we do less than apply our personal understanding of the range of choices that ought to be part of the future humankind builds? Can we not see that to get on with programming ourselves is preferable to going along with the program?

Cathedral Builders

~ Brian ~ 3 Comments
Reflecting on Following the Path: The Search for a Life of Passion, Purpose, and Joy by Joan Chittister

Vocation is an outworn word. Modern day career counseling doesn’t really include notions like “having a vocation” or “finding a calling” anymore. There’s talk of matching skill sets to career paths or making sure your job search leads to a position with a good fit. From the sound of things, it has more in common with trying on clothes or cramming yourself into a mold as gently as possible. This isn’t what spending your finite energy to do your life’s work is all about.

Following the Path: The Search for a Life of Passion, Purpose, and Joy by Joan Chittister
Following the Path: The Search for a Life of Passion, Purpose, and Joy by Joan Chittister

To say each of us has certain gifts we can offer our brothers and sisters isn’t the same as saying we have “skill sets.” No, gifts retain the ineffable quality of their transcendent origin in the divine. Gifts come with a responsibility to place them at the feet of one another – to offer them up in service. Skill sets are simply purchased at the price of the sweat of our brow, having earned them by patient practice and dogged persistence. Both have their place and their usefulness, but only gifts give us purpose as well as productivity because only gifts call forth what is silently written on our hearts in secret intention. To puzzle out the intent behind our lives and gifts is one of the great joyful confusions we have in our time on this earth. To turn aside from discovering the hidden graces offered by the embracing of our gifts is to refuse the measure of divinity poured out upon each of us in a unique, irreplaceable way.

What Joan Chittister points the way toward in Following the Path is the commitment to do what it is in us to do. We do it with the courage not to quit when the resistance is most acute and the despair is most severe. That is precisely the time to connect with the essential core of who we are, remember what we stand for, and insist on a life’s work that is congruent with our most deeply held values. This is how we ought to approach the question of how to spend our time and how to encourage those we love to follow their own path specific to them.

We are called to be more than good workers. We are called to be cathedral builders. We fashion out of the fabric of our lives a tapestry of stories. Some are woven of adventure, some of tragedy, and still others of profoundly blissful comedy. What they all must be is grand tales of giant proportions. No petty drama or small-scale farce will grace the stage of life we act upon. The work we do and the life we live must be grander than that. We build monuments, not statues. We build cathedrals, not huts.