As a storyteller, I’m constantly moved by and moving towards a good story. The right story in the right context is the perfect fit of a puzzle piece. The stories we tell are the foundational strands of our worldview. Of ourselves, of others, of what we perceive and expect of the world. The more metaphors we have–the more precise we can be in that view.
We grow not by converging on a few metaphors over time–but expanding the number of metaphors so we can broaden our experience. Fewer metaphors lead to entrenchment. More metaphors lead to enrichment.
Over the dozens of books I read in 2012–five metaphors stood out the most. I hadn’t heard them before–and they changed my world view.
1: Internecine Warfare (Power of Habit)
“Companies aren’t families. They’re battlefields in a civil war. Yet despite this capacity for internecine warfare, most companies roll along relatively peacefully, year after year, because they have routines–habits–that create truces that allow everyone to set aside their rivalries long enough to get the day’s work done.”
This is the fissure splitting a “modern” business from a post-modern business. In the Industrial Age–we balanced and regulated resources so everyone could produce. We copied the factory mindset to the white collar environment. Everyone had to have an office–but certain people ranked certain offices and affordances. Certain people did certain jobs because they passed the barrier of entry. Certain functions did and didn’t work together because it was “good for business”.
Unfortunately–there’s a diffusion of effect. Division of labor leads to dividing the pie–the focus is on business goals, but that focus in only achieved through a negotiated parity among all supporting units. There’s only so much glory to go around–the pie isn’t growing, it’s just being cut differently.
The paragon of modern business is founded on a triage of truces and regulation of routine.
Truces and routines set up this expansive and entangling net that limit everyone from bringing their highest and best work forward. This is the problem of when companies talk about reaching across the org chart–the org chart inherently creates the problem!
Office Space–A Classic in Workplace Insurgency
If you give everyone a title and a role to play in–eventually they will end up playing against each other. Cultures within a company feed and are fed by how that company institutionally stifles itself. And you wonder why going to work is so tiring? It’s because your work is a war zone–and you have to pay continuous partial attention to a simulated truce, when at any moment your entire workplace could turn on itself and self-destruct.
Think about that during your morning commute.
My own label for this is a “J-business”–through MBTI terminology for Judging. Modern businesses have an extensive Judging culture–post-modern businesses have an extensive Perceiving culture (Silicon Valley businesses are great examples of “P-businesses” which to cross the line). This is in a later post–I wouldn’t have gotten there without this metaphor.
2: Detroits are Everywhere (Startup of You)
“no matter what city you live in, no matter what business or industry you work for, no matter what kind of work you do–when it comes to your career, right now, you may be heading down the same path as Detroit”
Detroit is a once proud and now forgotten city. The Motor City was once a beacon of the Black Renaissance, the exemplar of automation and production–it was a place people rushed to. Now everyone has left, and the lights aren’t on because there’s no one left to pay them.
How many careers and fields have gone the same way in the last 20 years? How many will go that way in the next 5?
Here’s a great example. No one uses a typewriter anymore–but we’re stuck on the intentionally ill-designed QWERTY keyboard instead of the intentionally equipped Dvorak keyboard. What part of your career are you clinging to like QWERTY? What’s the coming disruption that will rip apart your market, or render your job a relic before you get to retirement? How far will that last degree carry you?
Detroit is an example of the decay and obsolescence that can come without thinking about it. It’s not political–though I think the auto company bailout was a stupid, reprehensible idea–it’s about resilience. Detroit–and much of America we euphemistically label “flyover country”–has lost its resilience. These beautiful and historic vistas are fastly becoming footnotes to American history, and it’s unfortunate.
What Was Left Behind
Your career can go the same way, without even realizing it. You spend so much of those forty hours in this Inbox Culture and heads down–hoping someone else has their heads up–without realizing you’re abdicating the most important part about your current job:
Finding the next one.
Success is a process, not a result–and just because you have a good job now doesn’t mean it will be good ten years from now. Or even five. The four-year career mindset is the norm. The job you have now is the platform for you to find bigger and better work–and even if your current position is your pinnacle, the effort to maintain proficiency is a part-time job on its own.
Your day job doesn’t give you resilience–it gives you a pause. You still have to keep your awareness up and honed. Detroit was lulled to sleep over forty years–it can happen to us in four. And there’s no safety net, no reset. The only choice is to always remain vulnerable–to look for increasing resilience. And to diversify our success from our day job to more things than we can count.
Detroit chose complacency over resiliency. Don’t do the same.
3: Career Capital (Cal Newport)
“The traits that define great work require that you have something rare and valuable to offer in return–skills I call career capital.”
The new capitalism isn’t driven by cash–it’s driven by craft. And finding the right craft eventually enables your calling–not the other way around.
Our whole paradigm is wrong. We’ve thought cash-craft-calling or calling-craft-cash. But the right answer–and the hard answer–is craft-cash-calling. You have to be ramen profitable before you can be ribeye rich. You have to be able to be in the game before you can love the game. And it takes work, practice, and pain before you break the success barrier.
This is the power of the 10,000 hours mindset–if you spend 10,000 hours in hard work and deliberate practice, the cash and calling will eventually come. Unfortunately–people often jump with a half formed (or unformed) safety net. They think their passion can outpay what they cost–and when the balance sheet turns, they are left broke and further away from what they should be doing.
Capital isn’t in the stock market–it’s in what we stock for ourselves. No one’s going to throw us a line until they see how good of a boat we can or could build.
This metaphor turns everything around. That day job may suck, or that degree may lose value, or your friends may be limiting you–and that’s ok. Don’t go for a wholesale change–refactor what’s good in your present. Become an individual lean startup–keep pivoting around your current skills and the new ones you need to build. And use those pivots to give you enough cash to keep going.
Pivot enough–and you will come across something unique. Something that doesn’t fit the normal job description–something built on your own creative mode of expression. Take that and run. The more you run–the more you love running. And then you will have a calling.
The guilt and failure seep in when we striving for a calling, but realize we don’t like the craft. If you want to be a chef–don’t buy $2000 of gear to realize you hate knife work. Spend some time in a restaurant kitchen–then invest up. Investing won’t create a calling–it just builds on the craft you’re already growing.
How Will You Handle the Fire?
When we turn capital inward–then we see the brilliance we’re capable of. Our calling is revealed through our work, not for it.
4: Icarus Deception (Seth Godin)
“The part of the [Icarus] myth you weren’t told: In addition to telling Icarus not to fly to high, Daedalus instructed his son not to fly too low, too close to the sea, because the water would ruin the lift in his wings. Society has altered the myth, encouraging us to forget the part about the sea, and created a culture where we constantly remind one another about the dangers of standing up, standing out, and making a ruckus.”
We all know the most graphic part of Icarus’ story–Icarus flies as high as he can, the wax melts off his wings, he falls into the sea. Hubris is the lesson–but for the price of hubris, we also forget to strive. We collapse being a high flyer with being arrogant and pompous–resulting in us being afraid to fly at all.
Icarus Fell–But That Doesn’t Mean Don’t Fly.
The Icarus Deception is the assumption flying closer to the sea is safer. But it’s not–it’s a false sense of security. Fly too close to the waves, and when you need to pull up because of a larger sea or swell, you’re sunk. Those wings will drag you to your grave.
How many of our days are spent avoiding flying closer to the sun? How many of our days are spent inside avoiding any sunlight at all? How can we enjoy the horizon if we are still hovering close to the surface?
Flying closer to the sea isn’t safer–it’s not much easier either. And there’s no resilience–there’s less room for error. So what you can survive a fall from five feet–where’s the glory in that? Where’s your uniqueness? Where’s your challenge?
As we deceive ourselves–we also fall into the peer norms of deceiving others who choose to fly higher. Just because you’ve let your assumptions choose for you doesn’t mean you should prevent someone else from taking on their challenge. But that’s what happens when we label our jobs, label other people, and scoff at expectations of career and work.
Someone willing to walk away from a guaranteed retirement scares us. Are they stupid? What are they thinking? Don’t the want the sure thing? Isn’t it better to play it safe?
No, it’s not. Not anymore. Never again.
Godin’s twist on the Icarus story is a great metaphor about living an unfulfilled life. About denying the world your art. Whenever I think about not succeeding–I come back to the idea of flying closer to the sea. And which view gives me the better horizon and experience–then I pull back up.
5: Two Ovens (Google Era)
“Meanwhile, your kitchen is populated with two ovens, neither of which works.”
In this metaphor–the frantic 9-5 worker has lost an oven and bought a new one, but the installation company didn’t install the new one! So there’s the installed, broken oven and the uninstalled, new oven sitting on the floor. And both are useless!
Think about that. Two piles taking up space–so we make a third one for our pizza boxes.
We all have piles in our homes and lives we say we’ll get to, but never do. Think about that year (or two) you didn’t submit your taxes on time. Was there a good reason? Probably not–you just didn’t give yourself time to get to it. So the receipts and fear pile up.
Our workdays are not built for resilience–because we are expected to have a 40+ hour workweek, our bosses find ways to make that happen. And we’ve grown up with a fair share of guilt for not clearing our plate–we have become trained to feel a pang of guilt for leaving early. Even though it makes better sense so we can beat rush hour, then log in once we get back home.
The stress of being at our limits during work spill over to home–our freezers are full of frozen meals. We think watching television is an effective form of relaxation, we spend little time improving our bodies, we become entrenched and engulfed in this cycle of minimizing habits. Yet we don’t realize breaking free from this orbit has such potential to catapult us.
Our lives rotate around these two ovens. Around other piles in the periphery we intend to get to–but never do. We let our weekday routines hammer us down, then let our weekend routines gluttonize us. There’s a reason we hate Mondays–we truly aren’t ready for them.
But what if we got rid of Mondays altogether. How much more invigorated could we be with a four-day workweek (probably not a four-hour workweek)? What about shifting start and stop times so we don’t have to endure the commute?
We’ve let our lives be built for us where there’s a constant ping of access, action, and contact. And there’s little room for us to stop, think, and breathe–we have to make that room for ourselves. We have to work at getting rid of the second oven–both through our systems deciding and guiding us, and through deliberately working to increase our capacity. That means eliminating the Industrial Age assumptions we’re working other–and embracing what works for us individually.
Maybe you don’t need an oven at all?
Burners May Be All You Need
Metaphors For Your Story
These were the top five metaphors I was struck by in the last year. Each one challenged my own assumptions, my worldview, and most importantly–the stories I told about myself. It’s been an incredible journey to integrate these images.
My work in consulting is a work in design–it’s a work in building the right story for a business or a coaching client. But “right” and “best” are relative and unique–taking the effort to find and create the most resonant story is the hard part. I hope to find even better metaphors as this year moves forward.
What metaphors did you uncover in the last year?
photo credit: Legozilla via photopin cc
photo credit: country_boy_shane via photopin cc
photo credit: liber via photopin cc
photo credit: stevegarfield via photopin cc
photo credit: julochka via photopin cc