An interview is just a conversation (conversations are important and potentially transformative, so there’s nothing minimal or “just” about them).
At bottom, that’s what an interview is, for both the interviewer(s) and the interviewee(s): a conversation. A chance to share your interests, ask questions, learn.
Whether it’s for a job or a newspaper story, an interview is a conversation. It should be fun and enlightening. If it’s not, maybe get curious about why.
Without boundaries there is no freedom. Unlimited choice is no choice.
In terms of investing and the digital economy, boundlessness makes prosperity impossible, since the only acceptable outcome is more growth. This is Doug Rushkoff’s contention in the “Bounded Investing” section at the end of Throwing Rocks at The Google Bus, a numbered list of constructive proposals the book makes about how to make life better in the digital era.
Rushkoff is championing investments in enterprises close to where you live, but also enterprises that work on things you care about. “Boundaries don’t have to be solely geographically defined,” he says. “They simply have to define a mutually supportive range of businesses.
Your target could be the business sector in which you work, such as design services, equipment, and Web sites. Or your pool could be the various constituencies in biodiesel manufacturing, comic-book publishing, or natural health care. As long as there’s a network of business that support one another, the boundaries make sense.
This seems to me to be a playing field on which churches–congregations as well as regional and national councils–have a distinct advantage. The local church is geographically bounded. It ought to know more than any institution in town about the kinds of investments that are needed: healthy restaurants? A grocery store? A school? I’m sure there are congregations out there that are modeling this kind of bounded investment in their neighborhoods to make them stronger.
Denominations, for their part, can make investments of their still-considerable resources based on their values. The Presbyterian Church (USA) is working on “Transformational Investing” in places like Israel/Palestine. “Beyond a simple monetary return,” says the website of the Presbyterian Foundation, “The outcome being sought is transformation – hope in place of fear, peace in place of violence, empowerment in place of injustice, changed lives, changed circumstances.”
Boundaries are our allies in changing the world.
This is another post on Douglas Rushkoff’s new book, Throwing Rocks at The Google Bus: How Growth Became The Enemy of Prosperity. Read more posts on the book here. Throw yourself headlong into the Rushkoff rabbit hole here.
This is another post on Douglas Rushkoff’s new book, Throwing Rocks at The Google Bus: How Growth Became The Enemy of Prosperity. Read more posts on the book here. Throw yourself headlong into the Rushkoff rabbit hole here.
There’s a chirpy critique of startups near the end of Throwing Rocks that makes for great reading. It amounts to an observation that starting a new company with the aim of sustainably delivering an excellent product or service, along with consistent dividends to investors, doesn’t work in a digital economy insistent upon unchecked growth. For many startups (and the venture capitalists funding them) like mobile game maker Zynga, the game is to grow as quickly as possible, then get bought by Facebook and cash out.
The acquisition or the IPO is not the beginning of their company’s impact but the end.
“Startups are not trying to earn revenue (which is a liability),” Rushkoff notes. “They are setting themselves up to win more capital. They are not part of the real economy or even the real world but part of the process through which working assets are converted into new stockpiles of dead ones.”
The goal is not to own a real company. The goal is to sell a fake one.
I read a steady diet of startup literature as a way of thinking about innovation in church life and entrepreneurial leadership. Pastors and consultants in the circles I run with throw around terms like “Minimum Viable Product” with ease. We listen to Tim Ferris and fantasize about having that many ideas and the energy to bring them to life.
But I’m not so sure where that’s getting us. If that game is rigged to convert everything to capital and to leave behind the empty shells of the projects we cashed out before we moved on, then why am I listening so intently to startup “experts?”
Where are the experts in making an enduring impact in the real world?
If people are using the thing we make for something other than our intended use, maybe we should start perfecting it for how they’re using it and stop judging them for using it wrong.
Take youth group. I may bleed and sweat to design gatherings for, say, junior high kids, that teach them the Bible, but if they are consistently hacking my agenda to socialize with their friends, then maybe I can reverse engineer the youth group as a tool for them to socialize even better. Hack the hackers.
Give over youth group to hanging out? Give up completely on Bible study? No. Design the Bible study to meet the socializing need youth are expressing.
The same goes for parents.
If parents are insisting their kids participate in confirmation as a vague sort of cultural and moral rite of passage and not an entrance into active church membership, then maybe that signals the need for a high quality version of the thing they’re defaulting to. Maybe we could design confirmation to be a high impact experience of moral and religious exploration that issues in some sort of ritualized conclusion detached from the question of church membership.
What kind of impact might that have culturally? Who says a cultural rite of passage is less crucial today than institutional growth?
I talked to an 8th grader yesterday who’s crazy into paintball. He goes every Saturday to a facility 40 miles from his house and plays for almost 12 hours with kids he didn’t know before paintball. Throughout the week his paintball compatriots are his constant digital companions. It’s the thing he loves most in life.
I tried to connect. “I have a buddy from high school who makes a TV show about a paintball team,” I said.
His eyes widened, and he asked, “What’s his name?”
“Dan Napoli.”
Dan and I grew up together playing football at recess and little league on weekends. In high school we would go out to the baseball field and throw each other fly balls against the outfield fence. We spent many Friday nights driving around Aurora in his Hyundai looking for people to hang out with, suspicious they were all hiding from us.
Near the end of the summer before we would depart for different colleges, Dan Napoli and I traveled to Phoenix with the remnants of our varsity baseball team to play in a regional tournament. We smoked and drank and got embarrassed on the field. It’s lucky we didn’t get arrested. Or killed.
I haven’t seen him since.
But there he was, coming up in conversation with a 14 year old I’d only just met, five weeks into a transition that is taking me and my family farther from anything called “home” either of us have known.
The kid’s eyes registered recognition.
“You know that guy?! He just made a documentary called ‘Fifteen’ about the San Diego Dynasty. It’s amazing! You have to watch it.”
And so I will.
Here’s to you, Dan Napoli. They love you in Chicago.
Someone invited me to a happy hour the other day that sounded like something a lot of people I know would be at. I put it on my calendar and looked forward to it.
Hours beforehand the inviter said, “It looks like there’s only three of us.” I thought about bailing. Me and two other people, one of whom I know a little and the other not at all? Uh . . .
I went. It was fun. I learned a lot from my two compatriots, particularly about the apartment search racket in Chicago and how to game it. I came home and immediately put some of that learning to work.
All it needs is a couple of people–maybe even one–for something constructive to emerge that you didn’t even plan for.
You should go.
I’ve been fortunate to work with people who are excellent and who eagerly partner with me on things because they know me and expect that whatever we do together, even if it fails, will make us better.
I stopped having to prove myself to those people long ago.
Transitions, though, mean that you have to prove yourself all over again to a whole new team of people (“transition” need not equal “move”). That’s a good thing.
When you’re the new person on the team you can’t fall back on what you’ve done before. Everybody knows more than you. There’s a new pressure to show off–your knowledge base, your record, your connections. Proving yourself can be a trap.
But the pressure to prove yourself can help you as long as you’re proving the right things. A former colleague said to me at the start of my last transition, “Begin as you intend to continue.” She meant, “avoid the trap of proving yourself by working late every day, because you won’t be able to keep that up and you will end up disappointing people.”
Beginning as you intend to continue is an invitation to prove yourself in the right way. You can begin and continue with curiosity about your new work and your new team. You can begin and continue with a willingness to own responsibility for what everybody is trying to accomplish together. You can begin and continue with a commitment to not take yourself too seriously and to contribute as much levity as you do intensity.
Proving ourselves is how we grow in the attributes we prize.
I have been lucky to work with people who cry. They care so much about what they’re trying to do and the people they’re trying to do it with that, sometimes, when they talk about it, they cry.
The tears aren’t always happy. But tears equal connection and passion and commitment. Where there are tears there is someone who gives a damn, and that is the best place to be if you want to do work that matters.
Today I’m grateful for the people with whom I’ve worked who cared enough to cry.
I’m kind of love with the idea of “leveling up” at the moment. The work we do is multiform, and the only way we get better is by choosing to work on particular pieces of it.
Sometimes that’s a choice to seek out a training or a coach. Learning Godly Play was a major leveling up for me (I did that with a partner–that’s never a bad idea). The Youth Ministry Coaching Program I did in 2012 was another one. I’m looking to level up even further with that particular platform in the coming months.
Other times it’s a choice to take advantage of some circumstance we didn’t create, like using a budget shortfall as a chance to level up our financial management game or putting a season of unemployment to work learning a different field. Choosing to level up means refusing to be a passive recipient of whatever slings and arrows come our way.
Where can you level up in the next six months?
(for the record, my sweater game needs no leveling up, according to Reverend Fem).
I’m travelling back from Kansas to Chicago today after a weekend with in-laws and squirrelly cousins.
Each of my three mornings here I have snuck off to the Braums ice cream joint down the street for my morning coffee. It’s a nice short walk, and I enjoy sitting in here listening to men in overalls talk about basketball. I’m confident none of them are typing blog posts on their phones in their booth.
Sedans need not apply to the Braums parking lot. Every vehicle here is a truck.
What it takes to participate in this local ritual is obvious enough. It is a ritual for men with trucks who can compare Roy Williams to Bill Self with some authority.
This is not where I live, and these are not my people. I feel as different from them sitting here as I would in London. Furthermore, I fear my different-ness is showing itself and they are starting to notice me. My intention to vote for Hillary Clinton is giving off vibes, perhaps?
Last night my 10 year old nephew declared it “beautiful” that his iPhone-using Republican father could PayPal money to his Democrat uncle who totes an Android device. “Beautiful,” he said.
Maybe the distance is shorter than it feels on Monday morning at Braums and its parking lot full of muddy trucks.
YoRocko! 