The "American Dream" is a fallacy.
You don't have to start at the bottom. You don't have to work your way up, from customers, guest, clients, captains, resources, chairmen, etc. etc. Happiness is not a Metric to be analyzed and sold in company memos and resourcing propaganda.
Happiness is Ethical, not Capital.
Find me, with the language and motivational resources and inner desire to contribute to life, to our being, in such a way as to be humble, to earn little, and call me miserable. I may be at peace, and I may inspire calmness, love, hope, and acceptance to all I encounter.
Find me, blessed with position and affluence from my very beginning, and praised, piling honors upon myself to sell my brand and increase my empire and legacy, all the while anxious about images and concerned first and last for my own interests alone, and others falsely as they may further my goals, and laurels and awards will shower me as I take credit for every good fortune that follows, believing it all the fruit of my own efforts...
Happiness is Ethical, not Capital.
Happiness is not a resource to be parsed and calculated. It is -while a means- an end, in persons. This we can see in gratitude, in selflessness, in restrained and loving humility, in the fear of giving offense, in consideration, in selfless sacrifice... in long-term efforts for constant, growing, and often unheralded rewards in others. All for the good, noticed and not.
Not everyone can be whatever they want. Sometimes, essentials not up to "Desire" or "Passion" or Hard-Work" or "Determination" are simply not present when they need to be. Clear example: none of these will get 10 lbs of things in a 1 lb bag, nor 3 hours work in 30 minutes. While we may estimate need and capacity in error sometimes, an even better example: an old woman needing to catch a bus on-time after walking an hour, when the stop is supposed to be 20 minutes away, and the driver left 10 minutes early. "Anything is possible"... Really? The American Dream?..
No. This "American Dream", "YOLO", "Unlimited Opportunities" thinking is a LIE. The have's are attributed what they do not wholly deserve, the have-nots the illusion that economic might makes right, and that anyone can do this - like modern Disney movies- if they just believe! Well, beliefs can be wrong. Here we confuse what happiness is, with what economic means can provide, and affluence with appreciation. Confusion upon confusion.
We can all be happy to one extent or another once we accept our circumstances and our abilities to strive from within them, with an attitude of gratefulness for the ability to share the benefits of living and thriving along the way, as-we-can.
We can all be ethical. We can't all be icons.
This, if anything, is the American reality, that surpasses our dreams:
we can be good and do good, wherever we are.
xv 2015.06.10
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Wednesday, 10 June 2015
Wednesday, 1 April 2015
PERSONALITIES (NOT) FOR HIRE
PERSONALITIES (NOT) FOR HIRE
You are not going to hire personalities which will challenge or solve problems endemic to your hiring, training, and status-quo regimen as overseen by your human instrumentality-resources-capital-relations whatever department. By this mechanism, your company will only be as good as your model employee statistics, as-allowed by your HR structured algorithm hiring-filter, and no better. The one thing this guarantees before any other, is the security of your corporate status-quo, not as idealized, but as-is. As-is your HR direction and habits. As-is your "model" desired employee abilities, aptitudes, tolerances, and narrowness. As-is your company, not as-it-will-become.
Different personalities provoke different dynamics, tolerances, aptitudes, approaches, results, yes - but also capabilities; complementarity and harmony. Give a child only one toy, one quality to play with at a time, and require them to replace it with one other when they tire, and you do their growth and imagination a great disservice! Their mind will no longer draw creative connections between dinosaurs and dolls, between war, polemics, evolution, change, predation, harmony and disharmony, advancement and decline. They will imagine a soldier or barbie doll, or a dinosaur being a dinosaur. The connections between things that tie all things together, and their comparative qualities and worth - the complements - fall by the wayside.
In agriculture, distinct qualities are also mutually beneficial: years ago, there were many varieties of banana widely available in the US, and widely grown. When one crop was harmed, another crop more resistant to the illness would thrive, and vice-versa. Prices and availability were more stable due to this more stable, if variable, supply. Now, most all banana farming has diminished in favor of a few crops, firstly the Johnson banana. What happens to this one varietal is incredibly important due to the limited varieties grown now and, should a major illness befall this crop at some point in the future, as often occurs, we will be hard-pressed to fulfill the Johnson's supply in our markets. Nature allows variety for good purpose. We'd be wise to adopt this lesson.
Among bee colonies and populations, this lesson is also true. Most all bees are female, workers and their queen. Drones are male, and necessary for all the colony to survive. The queen, neither drone nor worker, also works her duty for the good of the whole. When one invasive species of hornet invades bee colonies in Japan, immune to their sting, several varieties may diminish, but one with a higher body temperature tolerance has adapted a behavior to defend itself: the workers will cluster over and around the invading hornets en-masse, buzzing their wings at such velocity as to raise the internal temperature of the cluster above the tolerance of the hornet so that it dies, while keeping that temperature just below the survivable limit of the bee. This distinction and unique learned behavior has allowed this variety of bee colony to endure something that has devastated others productive colonies, at a nominal cost to the colony per-event compared to other colonies being completely predated by these hornets.
As to our ideals: there is no perfect batting average. When we confuse what inspires us with what we are and have been, and filter our potential accordingly, we do something uniquely different to ourselves than what has occurred to allow us such a perspective. We limit ourselves to only the success of the past, consolidating our efforts into only the known, while neglecting our preparedness for the unknown. Where we so often draw from life experience to solve business, interpersonal, service, and capability problems, we would trade these unexpected capacities in for what we know has worked in the past, but what we can not know will work in the unforeseeable future. Even the best planner can only see so far, through so-many variables and possibilities!
Here is the distinction of advice and advising: how dangerous it is to go all-in and headlong into the future based on only our limited perspective and interpretation of the past! Just because we /think/ can filter what we allow to affect us, should we? What do we stand to lose in the process? How can we know?? The difference between faith and certainty, even potentially false certainty, is trust, and openness. Limiting who-we-become to only what we know, when the future and our disposition in it is ultimately unknowable, is the height of presumption.
Even the greats have off times, and redundancy and controlled failures are part of all efficient designs in the real world. The only thing guaranteed by homogeneity, be it in corporate-culture hiring practices, agriculture, evolution, or learned behaviors, is susceptibility of the whole to the problems of the few, as determined by those controlling the odds. Odds are, what is first being controlled is the perceived, and not actual, integrity of the system - before the crises, plagues, hornets, or whatever eventual unplanned event comes.
Inteligent variety and adaptability are crucial to healthy communities. The difficult makes us tough by learning to endure, the comfortable consoles us and allows the calm and capable to relax. The unplanned, external, and uncontrolled cannot be insulated indefinitely from the whole, and when it comes, the whole will be better served and more capable by it's inclusion, not exclusion, of many varieties of people and players in many positions.
Selective discrimination is good for some things, but not for all things. It is malignant when planning for the unknown, which is always around the bend.
-xv. 04/2015.
You are not going to hire personalities which will challenge or solve problems endemic to your hiring, training, and status-quo regimen as overseen by your human instrumentality-resources-capital-relations whatever department. By this mechanism, your company will only be as good as your model employee statistics, as-allowed by your HR structured algorithm hiring-filter, and no better. The one thing this guarantees before any other, is the security of your corporate status-quo, not as idealized, but as-is. As-is your HR direction and habits. As-is your "model" desired employee abilities, aptitudes, tolerances, and narrowness. As-is your company, not as-it-will-become.
Different personalities provoke different dynamics, tolerances, aptitudes, approaches, results, yes - but also capabilities; complementarity and harmony. Give a child only one toy, one quality to play with at a time, and require them to replace it with one other when they tire, and you do their growth and imagination a great disservice! Their mind will no longer draw creative connections between dinosaurs and dolls, between war, polemics, evolution, change, predation, harmony and disharmony, advancement and decline. They will imagine a soldier or barbie doll, or a dinosaur being a dinosaur. The connections between things that tie all things together, and their comparative qualities and worth - the complements - fall by the wayside.
In agriculture, distinct qualities are also mutually beneficial: years ago, there were many varieties of banana widely available in the US, and widely grown. When one crop was harmed, another crop more resistant to the illness would thrive, and vice-versa. Prices and availability were more stable due to this more stable, if variable, supply. Now, most all banana farming has diminished in favor of a few crops, firstly the Johnson banana. What happens to this one varietal is incredibly important due to the limited varieties grown now and, should a major illness befall this crop at some point in the future, as often occurs, we will be hard-pressed to fulfill the Johnson's supply in our markets. Nature allows variety for good purpose. We'd be wise to adopt this lesson.
Among bee colonies and populations, this lesson is also true. Most all bees are female, workers and their queen. Drones are male, and necessary for all the colony to survive. The queen, neither drone nor worker, also works her duty for the good of the whole. When one invasive species of hornet invades bee colonies in Japan, immune to their sting, several varieties may diminish, but one with a higher body temperature tolerance has adapted a behavior to defend itself: the workers will cluster over and around the invading hornets en-masse, buzzing their wings at such velocity as to raise the internal temperature of the cluster above the tolerance of the hornet so that it dies, while keeping that temperature just below the survivable limit of the bee. This distinction and unique learned behavior has allowed this variety of bee colony to endure something that has devastated others productive colonies, at a nominal cost to the colony per-event compared to other colonies being completely predated by these hornets.
As to our ideals: there is no perfect batting average. When we confuse what inspires us with what we are and have been, and filter our potential accordingly, we do something uniquely different to ourselves than what has occurred to allow us such a perspective. We limit ourselves to only the success of the past, consolidating our efforts into only the known, while neglecting our preparedness for the unknown. Where we so often draw from life experience to solve business, interpersonal, service, and capability problems, we would trade these unexpected capacities in for what we know has worked in the past, but what we can not know will work in the unforeseeable future. Even the best planner can only see so far, through so-many variables and possibilities!
Here is the distinction of advice and advising: how dangerous it is to go all-in and headlong into the future based on only our limited perspective and interpretation of the past! Just because we /think/ can filter what we allow to affect us, should we? What do we stand to lose in the process? How can we know?? The difference between faith and certainty, even potentially false certainty, is trust, and openness. Limiting who-we-become to only what we know, when the future and our disposition in it is ultimately unknowable, is the height of presumption.
Even the greats have off times, and redundancy and controlled failures are part of all efficient designs in the real world. The only thing guaranteed by homogeneity, be it in corporate-culture hiring practices, agriculture, evolution, or learned behaviors, is susceptibility of the whole to the problems of the few, as determined by those controlling the odds. Odds are, what is first being controlled is the perceived, and not actual, integrity of the system - before the crises, plagues, hornets, or whatever eventual unplanned event comes.
Inteligent variety and adaptability are crucial to healthy communities. The difficult makes us tough by learning to endure, the comfortable consoles us and allows the calm and capable to relax. The unplanned, external, and uncontrolled cannot be insulated indefinitely from the whole, and when it comes, the whole will be better served and more capable by it's inclusion, not exclusion, of many varieties of people and players in many positions.
Selective discrimination is good for some things, but not for all things. It is malignant when planning for the unknown, which is always around the bend.
-xv. 04/2015.
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