Interesting. There’s a graphically-novelized version of Studs Terkel’s book from 1974, Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do. Graphic novelizations make me cringe a little, but Harvey Pekar is behind it, so who knows.
Tag: work
People say you teach during the day and you’re free at so-and-so, but there’s a certain energy that goes into teaching people, it seems to me… and if you don’t give them that energy, then you’re immoral. And if you do give them that energy, then you’re wiped out. Because there’s only so much energy anyone has. So I’d rather drive a cab – I had a good time driving the cab, I wasn’t invested in it, you know what I mean? I could think about music, I could bug the cab, I could take time off to play a show – it really fit me. And I was making more money than most assistant professors too!
Steve Reich on resisting academia and driving a cab back in the early days.
Men Without Work | Mother Jones
Most intellectual failures, people who are smart but still don’t succeed, tend to be underspecialized.
That’s Andy McKenzie summarizing 11 main points from Colin Marshall’s interview with Robin Hanson. This point from their talk struck home for me. No, I don’t consider myself a Failure, but I know very well how endless curiosity doesn’t necessarily make you productive. Constraint is liberating, etc.
Not every end is a goal. The end of a melody is not its goal; however, if the melody has not reached its end, it would also not have reached its goal. A parable.
Nietzsche. Yeah, I kind of hate to be that Nietzsche-quoting guy, but I read it in Gretchen Rubin’s book The Happiness Project this morning and it stuck with me.
This waking dream we call the Internet also blurs the difference between my serious thoughts and my playful thoughts, or to put it more simply: I no longer can tell when I am working and when I am playing online. For some people the disintegration between these two realms marks all that is wrong with the Internet: It is the high-priced waster of time. It breeds trifles. On the contrary, I cherish a good wasting of time as a necessary precondition for creativity, but more importantly I believe the conflation of play and work, of thinking hard and thinking playfully, is one the greatest things the Internet has done.
Trevor Clark (@trevorclark), a guy I knew back in the old high school days of yore, recently did a two-part interview about his life as an adventure photographer.
The main thing I need for any deadline is a fast and reliable Internet source. Working away from my van, I just make sure I have a plan and if all else fails, I do the old-fashioned journalistic thing and find Internet, no matter what.
One time I even ended up in a couple’s bedroom (absolute strangers) at midnight, fixing their router so that I could use their internet to upload a set of images that needed to be ready for Italian distribution within the hour.
Badass.
Bob Sutton: Selecting Talent: The Upshot from 85 Years of Research
Rankings of 19 predictors of work performance. At the top of the list are “general mental ability” (as in IQ and related measures) and “work sample tests” (e.g., Can you type?).
I agree with Arnold Kling: “I love it that ‘years of education’ just barely beats out handwriting analysis.” Age is the worst predictor.
Bob Sutton: Selecting Talent: The Upshot from 85 Years of Research
To the Audience
Often insomnia would strike in, and I would ask aloud, to the darkness of the room, “will anyone appreciate this”? (My girlfriend had by that time developed the habit of using earplugs). And then in a spectacle of light rays and stars, the Fairy of Reason would appear to me and speak tenderly: “good hearted child, if you love it, some people, who have things in common with you, will too”. And then, on my knees, holding my hands together, tears shaking on the corners of my begging eyes, I would ask, “what if I’m just a freak and no one is like me?”
via snarkmarket
Being Individuals in an Increasingly Individualistic Culture
It would be nice… if the career advice industry would frame their obsession with passion in larger sociological context, and reinforce how new a concept it really is.
Being Individuals in an Increasingly Individualistic Culture
Success guide: 1. Cultivate risk tolerance. 2. Cultivate endurance.
http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf
Dan Pink’s TED Talk about motivation and the ineffectiveness of extrinsic rewards and incentives in the workplace. Intrinsic is where it’s at.
(Source: http://video.ted.com/)
A graph showing various vacation allotments and an interesting discussion of which vacation model is best.
Fun fact: I have a podcast
I haven’t talked about work much in the 3 or so years I’ve been running this site, but I thought it was time to share a side project I’ve been involved in. I’m a co-host of Stuff from the B-Side [iTunes link], wherein, twice a week, my friend John and I have a conversation about some aspect of the musical world. John knows about 38 times as much as I do and we always a good, low-key time.
I was looking back through the RSS file for our episodes and realized I’d been doing recordings for a half-year-ish now. The first couple (dozen) episodes I was in were pretty rough. But I always listen every week and it’s nice to hear (what I think somewhat resembles) progress. It’s certainly feels more comfortable in front of the microphones. It’s not nearly as strange to listen to my own voice anymore.
It’s nice that we get a lot of freedom to be the curious people that we are, exploring topics as we get fascinated by them or as listeners request them. Favorite episodes? I’m partial to the ones in which we talk about:
- Musicians who use alter egos (including a discussion about the post-modern meta-cultural qualities of Hannah Montana and Eminem)
- How to decipher classical music titles
- The 1980s cassette version of iTunes
- Guilty pleasures and what makes music “cool”
- Brian Eno’s Music for Airports
- Narcocorridos
- The life and times of Billie Holiday
- Terry Riley’s In C
- Wizard Rock
- Leonard Cohen
- The West Coast/East Coast rivalry
- The Dies Irae melody
- Etc.
Also, I’d be silly not to mention that I’ve got smarter, even more well-spoken colleagues that do many other podcasts [iTunes] that are even better.
David Foster Wallace, on success
Bookselling This Week: What has been the most satisfying part about all your success?
David Foster Wallace: What do you mean by success?
BTW: Being accepted by a major publisher, all the acclaim.
DFW: Well there’s no better feeling than working hard at something and having it come out good, even before you put the stamp on it. But with all the public stuff… it’s sort of how you like people to be nice to your child. There’s so much bullshit to trying to get accepted – reading a mean letter from someone you don’t even know, getting rejected. I think you need to invest way more into how it feels when you are in a room writing by yourself.
Will Smith: The Keys to Life = Running & Reading. I’m totally set! (via)
(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)
An economy that is more entrepreneurial, less managerial, would be less subject to the kind of distortions that occur when corporate managers’ compensation is tied to the short-term profit of distant shareholders. For most entrepreneurs, profit is at once a more capacious and a more concrete thing than this. It is a calculation in which the intrinsic satisfactions of work count.
Matthew B. Crawford, The Case for Working With Your Hands. NYT Magazine, 5.24.09. That last sentence is such a winner. (via)
Oliver Sacks’ desk. I like this workspace: a few books, paper, pencil, some raw metals, and a few photos of friends. [via @thebookslut]
I taught briefly in a public high school and would have loved to have set up a Ritalin fogger in my classroom. It is a rare person, male or female, who is naturally inclined to sit still for 17 years in school, and then indefinitely at work.
Mark Larson 