“We’ve separated the idea of vocation from the fullness of life, and narrowed it to career. This impoverishes women and men.”
~Krista Tippett. Wisdom seeps out of Krista — even through her Twitter feed.
(Photo by Chris JL / Flickr, cc by-nc-nd 2.0)
Never Give Up Doing What You Love
by Karen Albert, guest contributor
This is my dad’s canola field. At 82 he is doing what he loves, taking pride in growing healthy bountiful crops.
All his life he worked a demanding full-time job and farmed at the same time. He is retired from his job now, and some people say he should give up farming too. I say what does age have to do with it? Never quit doing what you love.
For the marketer, the freelancer and the entrepreneur, the challenge is to level set, to be comfortable with the undone, with the cycle of never-ending. We were trained to finish our homework, our peas and our chores. Today, we’re never finished, and that’s okay.
It’s a dance, not an endless grind.
—Seth Godin, from his blog entry “Dancing on the edge of finished”
~Krista Tippett, host
“Your hands are sliced up from twisting wires together, handling junction boxes made out of stamped sheet metal, and cutting metal conduit with a hacksaw. But none of this damage touches the best part of yourself.”
—Matthew Crawford, from Shop Class As Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work
Photo by Jeremy Kunz (distributed with instagram)
Michigan State University surveyed more than 700 employers seeking to hire recent college graduates. Nearly one-third said parents had submitted resumes on their child’s behalf, some without even informing the child. One-quarter reported hearing from parents urging the employer to hire their son or daughter for a position. Four percent of respondents reported that a parent actually showed up for the candidate’s job interview.
I don’t even know what to say about these finding. I see parents negotiating on the playground, but in the workplace for a 22-year-old college graduate? Oy.
From nprfreshair
Bring Your Parent To Work Day: So-called helicopter parents have hit the workplace, phoning employers to advocate on behalf of their adult children. Human resource managers say more parents are trying to negotiate salary and benefits and are even sitting in on job interviews.
~reblogged by Trent Gilliss, senior editor
(via nprfreshair)
Becoming Detroit: Reimagining Work, Food, and the Very Meaning of Humanity
by Krista Tippett, host
This trip to Detroit came about because of technological failure. It was a tremendous gift, and a revelation.
The technological failure was the connection between my voice and Grace Boggs. Her ears, after all, are 96. And when we weren’t able to have a real, fluid conversation between St. Paul and Detroit, I immediately decided we would fly to interview her in her home. This was a relief, really, as preparing for the interview had made me long to meet her.
Ever since my conversation with Vincent Harding last year, her name kept coming up. Her identity is full of unlikely conjunctions: Chinese-American and an icon of African-American civil rights, philosopher and activist, elder and change agent. She was born Grace Lee above her father’s Chinese restaurant in Providence, Rhode Island. She received a Ph.D. in philosophy in 1940. She had a heady life in intellectual, revolutionary circles of the early twentieth century, from Europe to Africa. 
She moved to Detroit when she married the legendary African-American autoworker, organizer, and civil rights thinker Jimmy Boggs. Together they were the heart and soul of civil rights in the Motor City.
Jimmy Boggs died in 1993. Already by then, years ahead of what most of us are experiencing as the new global economic crisis, the post-industrial future had begun to show itself in Detroit. In this emerging world, Grace Boggs is at the heart of reimagining, renewing, and “re-spiriting” this city — seeing the possibilities amidst the ruins of abandoned storefronts, houses, and industrial plants that have defined our cultural vision of Detroit in recent years. She learned, she says, to “make a way out of no way” from Jimmy Boggs. She draws on everyone from Hegel to Dr. King to Margaret Wheatley when she speaks of our capacity to “create the world anew.” With all she knows, and all the change she’s seen, the sheer magnitude of years she carries, you can’t help but listen when Grace Boggs describes the tumult of our time as a rare and precious opportunity: “What a time to be alive.”
This sweeping statement might be less infectious if it were not planted in a world of engagement that both affirms and continually informs Grace Boggs’ thinking. You walk into Grace Boggs’ living room — which is also the ground floor of the James and Grace Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership — and you are surrounded by joyful, passionate people who are literally recreating their corners of the world. She points them out as we speak. 
After our interview, we are taken on a tour that is like a trip into a parallel universe to the Detroit we’ve seen in the news.
We meet Gloria Lowe, who is not merely putting formerly incarcerated and injured vets to work, but making houses livable and beautiful while creating urban models that are affordable and green. We meet Wayne Curtis and Myrtle Thompson, a couple who are tending one of Detroit’s 1,600 urban gardens. They’re not merely growing food, as they tell us, they are growing culture. Their way of talking about “food sovereignty,” about the necessity of flavor, about “nutrient density” reminds me of the chef Dan Barber.They are a living response to the question he’s often asked, of whether the local food movement is just for pampered elites.
Detroit’s urban agricultural movement began as a matter of survival and became a matter of consciousness, and of reimagining the essence of human identity and community.
So many of my conversations are ultimately about the vast, seismic changes of our time. No city could be held up more easily as a symbol of the destructive side of this change than Detroit. But nowhere have I encountered people as animated by change, as “privileged” to experience it, as in Detroit.
In recent decades, Grace Boggs has become ever more attentive to the word “evolution” wrapped inside the word “revolution.” The identity politics and rights focus of the rebellions of the 1960’s, she says, paved a way for a more enlightened and slower revolution now — a new and deeper sense of a common human identity, from how we work to how we eat to how we govern ourselves. Ever the philosopher, she reminds us that “we’re not only being, but we’re non-being and becoming.” In Grace Boggs’ living room, and in the Detroit of hope which she helps inspire, these lofty words become something to live by.
The Rules of a Creator’s Life
A fine list of rules from creativesomething to consider and contemplate on this gorgeous Saturday winter morning. Non?
Click to view a tad‒bit larger. And share with your friends, co‒workers, and creative icons.
~reblogged by Trent Gilliss, senior editor
Reuben found that, on average, both men and women lied about their performance. When participants had an incentive to lie, they lied more; and the incidence of lying increased as the monetary award for being chosen as leader increased. But while women kept pace with men on how frequently they lied, women did not exaggerate their performance to the same degree, and it cost them: women were selected a third less often than their abilities would otherwise indicate.
—Rebecca Knight of the Financial Times “Women at the Top” blog highlights research by Columbia Business School professor Ernesto Reuben, who finds that men “honestly believe their performance is 30 percent better than it really is.” This is research that should make all men and women pause as it concerns not only gender equality in the workplace but also ethics and morality.
~Trent Gilliss, senior editor
Light Painting the Mines of North Wales
by Trent Gilliss, senior editor
If you’re looking for a brief respite between Thanksgiving meals or a brief interlude to the NFL triple play, check out this short film by Andrew Telling and Owen Richards. They shadow photographer Robin Friend as he traverses the foothills of North Wales and descends into an abandoned Victorian mine at Cwmorthin to do a bit of light painting for his Slaughterhouse series:
“Although my mind kept wandering and playing tricks, it would always return to the absence of the men that used to work here. Their presence was palpable; this was their mine and I was trespassing. Each cathedral-sized cavern would have been leased and worked by one family. Grandfathers, fathers, sons, uncles, and nephews would have worked side-by-side, day in day out. These dark passages, steep crevasses, and sheer drops would have been their livelihood. This was their world. They would have spent the majority of their lives down here in the dark with nothing but a candle to illuminate the slate and their spirits.”
(h/t trishutchinson)
For at least some of those with soul-destroying morning commutes, liberation may indeed be at hand. A preliminary presentation posted by Stanford University researchers describes the effects of allowing customer service employees at a billion-dollar Chinese company to work from home: Productivity went up, as did hours worked, and employees seemed happier for it.
—Ray Fisman at Slate reports on a study that shows that telecommuting may not be the “working from home” joke many of us make it out to be. And, yet, when all the workers were offered a telecommuting option, half the employees opted to inhabit a cube, “preferring the hours in commute in exchange for the human interaction of office life and a fixed beginning and end to each work day.”
~Trent Gilliss, senior editor
