Hard work - what is it, exactly?
We’ve been having an extended discussion over the weekend about what ‘hard work’ means, and what it has to do with financial and career success. “We” meaning my husband, a couple of our young mentees, and I. I think it’s a mistake to tell young people that hard work is everything. It isn’t! Working hard in the wrong manner won’t really get anyone anywhere. If hard work was the secret to success, there would be a lot of very wealthy ditch diggers and demolition crews, am I right? I worked much harder as a nanny than I do today. The mom of “my” kids once fell asleep at the table with her face in her mashed potatoes, so I think any parent or caregiver would agree that chasing kids around is quite hard work indeed. My hubby and I both come from a blue-collar background. We were taught the inherent dignity of busting your butt all day. Sitting around with soft hands and no practical skills is embarrassing where we come from. In fact I know I could never have fallen in love with a man who couldn’t use tools. My man can design a satellite, sharpen a chainsaw, build a battle bot, change the oil in a semi, debug code, and run a skidder. Which of these skills are ‘hard work’? I can’t do any of those things - or at least I haven’t tried so far - but I can put on a conference for 200 attendees, carry a sleeping child to bed, cook dinner for 20, type 100 words per minute, sew a Halloween costume, balance quarterly financial reports, build a chair, and fight five dudes with my hands duct-taped together. Some of these things at the same time. One of the first things you learn as an administrative assistant is that you’re expected to do things that people who earn 3-4x your wage abjectly cannot do. There is a double bind, because the better you are at your job, the less likely you are to get promoted. If you aren’t great at the detail work and EQ necessary for the position, then it’s assumed you’re more or less useless. On the other hand, the better you are at it, the more people panic at the thought of trying to replace you. I have felt like I do basically the same work that I did at entry level, other than obvious technological changes like moving toward paperless reports. Yet at one point I earned $7/hour for this stuff, with no benefits, and I was excited to get it. What I think about ‘hard work’ is that it depends on what is hard for the individual. It’s hard to work for a low wage and face all the issues that go with that: a long commute, roommates, juggling bills, unreliable transportation, an apartment/house/neighborhood with a lot of issues, no obvious solutions for problems that could easily be solved with more cash than you have. Or may ever have. It’s hard to put your spirit into tasks that nobody appreciates. It’s hard to wait on people who are mean and rude, and it’s hard to have a mean boss. Obviously it’s hard to be on your feet all day and do labor that is physically challenging. It can be fun, too, though. There is a lot to be said for being able to see visual progress on something that you worked on all day, or to be able to drive by and point it out to your friends. “I helped build that.” Does ‘hard work’ lead to success? Maybe? Not alone, though, and not out of context. If I just do 100 burpees in my living room, I’ll be sweating, but then what? I think the key isn’t so much ‘hard work’ in terms of exertion. I think it’s a combination of focus, accountability, and persistence. It’s not really ‘hard work,’ it’s emotional commitment and follow-through toward the desired outcome. That state of being invested in the outcome quickly leads to a strategic perspective. This is where success comes from - in understanding why things are done in a certain way. That is the birth of motivation. Someone who cares that things are done properly is someone who will see ways to streamline the process, guide others, expand into new areas, and all the rest. The truth is, doing this isn’t usually hard at all. A master of a field can walk in, take one look at something, say one sentence, and save ten million dollars. That person will be successful, but that contribution wasn’t hard. It was just the product of attention and decades of experience. We spent a bit of time listing off factors that contribute to career success that don’t have anything to do with hard work. There are probably hundreds, but these were the basic dozen: Personal work ethic Choice of field Training Timing Reputation Who you know Capital Location Credentials Strategy Coachability Talent/unusual insight or ability I happen to know someone who literally ran away to join the circus as a roadie for Cirque du Soleil. She had three items off this list: location, timing, and choice of field. They came to her town, she went, she said “take me with you,” and she went home to get her bag. That’s it. Didn’t see her for a year. I happen to know someone else who had at least eight items off this list, who got fired and was out of work for a year. What he was missing was work ethic, coachability, strategy, probably talent, and eventually reputation as well. When he started messing up, he Couldn’t Be Told and he blew up his career. Did he work long hours at a difficult job? Sure, until I had to get him a cardboard box to carry his stuff out to his car. Of the thousands of people I have met over the years, socially or through work or hobbies, the most chill have been 1. Martial arts people and 2. Astronauts. They never blink. Something has changed in their brains and they react with mild intrigue in situations where other people would panic. Hand either of them a wrench and see what they do. Hard work is valuable for its own sake. When we’re mentoring less experienced people, though, let’s not attack their characters and imply that they are lazy, but rather show them how much more interesting life is when there is something challenging and worthwhile enough to deserve that hard work. If we can’t find it, let’s make it ourselves. It just so happens that Independent Bookstore Day is the last Saturday in August. I told this to my husband, and he laughed, because it coincides with our wedding anniversary. He should have known.
What are we doing to celebrate? And by “we” I don’t mean my husband and me, I mean “me and all y’all readers out there.” Is there an independent bookstore near you? Did you already know the answer to that, or is it inspiring you to check? I live within a half-hour walk of the nicest indie bookstore in our area. I love that place, and not just because one of the clerks is a super-smart and mega-fine surfer boy. I love it because I can count on the selection including plenty of interesting books I haven’t already read. I also love it because every time I’ve gone in there, I’ve gotten into a conversation with at least one other customer and one of the women who runs the place. These are people who live and breathe books, just like me. I want to make sure they continue to have somewhere to do what they do. Where will they go if people like me don’t shop there? More in my self-interest, where will I go if people like me don’t shop there, and there quits being any “there” there? There’s a big mall bookstore in the next town over. I can never find anything in there that I want to read, even though it’s twenty times bigger than the little indie store within walking distance. The manager spent ten minutes trying to hand-sell me a book that fell far outside my area of interest. “Your husband told me you like true crime.” Yeah, but not that kind! Know your audience, my guy. One night, we went into the big mall bookstore for half an hour while we were waiting for a movie to start. I wanted to buy what I call a BFB - “Big Fat Book” - for an upcoming camping trip. It’s family tradition to treat the Great Outdoors like a living room and sit around in camp reading for much of the day. { *** I MISS THAT *** } I wandered around, looking for any book more than an inch thick, only to discover that I had read almost all of them already. “Them” being the books that show up the most often on the “100 best” lists. All that was left was The Corrections, which I bought, and which was a terrific choice, but the process definitely poked one of my buttons. I found my husband, who always leaves the big mall bookstore with at least 2-3 good choices. “What am I going to do? I’ve already read everything!” I wailed. “No you haven’t,” he said, which was both entirely false and technically accurate. Hmph. I was there to comfort him when he realized he had exhausted the entire catalogue of Patrick O’Brian. It turned out, though, that my real problem was trying to find things that 1. suited my tastes and 2. had not already been read by me in the big mall bookstore. Growing up within easy traveling distance of Powell’s Books tends to ruin a person for any other bookstore. Nice try, Strand. Might as well call it a day, Green Apple. There is only one Powell’s. And if we keep on going like we are, there might not even be that. It’s our buying habits that determine whether there are any good bookstores. Anywhere. We can’t all afford to book a trip to London just because we need to stock up at Daunt Books. Soon we may be stuck with nothing but big, anonymous mall bookstores - or not even that. I admit, I really only consume ebooks and audiobooks now, as I have for the last few years. I do make an effort, though, to support indie bookstores. Whenever we go on a trip I seek out whatever is tiny and local. This is where I buy all my blank books and greeting cards. This is where I buy books as gifts for others. I only wish there was a way to buy ebooks directly from these indie stores, too, so they could have at least a percent of the sale. People who prefer paper books may scoff at this, but it raises the question which I must ask. Are your paper books bought at retail price from indie bookstores? Or are you buying off the remainder table? Or are you buying used? Or are you swapping with other people? Because at least when I buy an ebook, some of the proceeds go to the publisher and the author. Those other formats of paper books aren’t doing all that much to support the publishing industry. We treat books differently from other consumables. If we go to the movies, we’ve had the entertainment once, and we leave with nothing to show for it but the memory - and maybe a staircase moment when we realize there was a glaring hole in the plot. If we go to a restaurant, we’ve eaten the meal, and again we leave with nothing but the memory. When we read, there can be this expectation that we can cash it in, either by lending it to someone else to read for free, or selling it to a used bookstore. Maybe it’s time to question this. We’ve all been stuck at home for quite a while now, and books are the best way I know to be in one place while feeling like we are somewhere else. Cooler weather is coming. Maybe that’s why Independent Bookstore Day is scheduled at the end of summer. What are you going to read next? Where are you going to buy it? It might have been a relief to a lot of people if this happened to them, but it wasn’t to me. I tried to log in to a Zoom meeting and discovered it had been locked.
This came as a surprise, partly because it was an error message I had never seen before, but partly because I was logging in a minute early. I tried again a few times over the next ten minutes, only to keep getting the same message. This is where the story gets interesting, because of what I told myself while this was going on. When something happens, does it happen *to me*? Or does it just happen? I had the immediate, visceral response that this was happening *to me*. It was deliberate. “Everyone” had gotten together without me and decided they didn’t want me around. As soon as “everyone” had convened, they locked the room, relieved that they wouldn’t have to deal with me anymore. I told my husband. “This is pushing all my buttons.” He suggested the obvious, which was to email the host because they might not have realized that anything was wrong. I did this, because I feel better when I do my due diligence, but my shoulders were slumped as I put all my stuff away. See, there’s this whole ritual setup when we do these calls. I have a spot at the dining table where the lighting is good. I set up my equipment. I pull up a chair for my little parrot Noelle, at just the right angle and distance, because she likes to look at everybody and see herself on camera. I have to pull an old pillowcase over it because she’s dusty, and for other reasons that anyone who has spent much time with birds will understand. Then of course I have to go get her and carry her over. The reverse of this process lacks all the anticipation of the initial setup. At least I hadn’t put on makeup or straightened my hair... Then I checked my email again, only to see an entire thread of the other half-dozen people who couldn’t get in to the meeting. The host said to try again. Accidental setting error. Derp We did it all over again. My husband helped with the bird, who was quite stimulated by the unusual activity level. I logged in to the call and everything was fine. What was going on there, though? In the ten minutes when I felt like I was being deliberately rejected? Granted, I’d had a long, rough day. Our system was lagging and everything that would normally take five minutes took more like half an hour. I was tired and frustrated. One last hassle late in the day was just... a lot. I hadn’t felt on the verge of tears like that for a long time. Even so. Would others react the way I did, with sadness and futility? Or were there other “obvious” responses? One person might have been relieved and gone off to watch a movie or soak in the tub. Another person might have been angry, maybe pounded the table. Someone else might have used the opportunity to reach out and bond with another person over the experience. Yet another person would have assumed there was a technical failure on the platform’s end and shrugged it off. Someone else might have blamed themselves for lacking technical skills and felt stupid, or old. Another person might have been distracted and forgot the whole thing, never realized there was a technical issue, and then felt FOMO the next day. A different person might gloat over their own impeccable hosting skills and contemplate seizing leadership of the group. Someone else might have worried that something happened to the host and hoped everything was okay. Another person might have catastrophized: “why does everything always go wrong, this thing is going off the rails” and spun off into a paranoid fantasy that the entire grid was collapsing. Another approach might have been to assume the meeting had been hacked and start checking for signs of identity theft. I dunno. Chances are that each person responded differently and forgot all about it once the meeting resumed. Probably the most common reaction was, give it a few minutes and it will be fine. Technically, that was the correct response. The puncture in my esteem was patched later on. At the end of the meeting, someone asked, out of the blue, “If there’s time, could Jessica share one or two sentences about her parrot?” It was really funny! I gave the whole spiel about her: “Her name is Noelle, and she’s 22, and she’s a Congo African Gray parrot. She loves Zoom and she likes to look at you all on grid view.” I panned the camera so they could see how she relaxes by standing on one foot and curling up the talons on the other. Of course nobody would lock us out of Zoom! Whether I’m there or not is probably a matter of some indifference, but my sweet little poof ball is a welcome presence. She just stands there quietly blinking and nodding her head, looking ridiculously solemn. Fluffy professor. I read somewhere that when you’re 20, you care what everyone thinks about you. When you’re 40, you realize it doesn’t really matter what people think about you. When you’re 60, you realize nobody was ever thinking about you. I’m trying to embrace this perspective a little early. I’m mostly harmless, average in most ways, and I have solid training on keeping my remarks brief and to the point. Whatever else they may say about me, I’ve learned to keep my mic on mute unless I’m speaking and I know when to yield the floor. I try to remember that there are over 7 billion people in the world, and there’s no reason to try to be a part of every group. Statistically, most people will never know I exist, much less have an opinion on whether they like me or not. Better to calibrate and find a way to contribute, and seek out people on a similar wavelength. Or at least people who like parrots. Polio has now been eradicated in the wild on the entire continent of Africa.
This is such thrilling news that when I read it, tears came to my eyes. I thrust the headline at my husband. LOOK AT THIS! Only two countries are left, Afghanistan and Pakistan. How many people who live there have been maimed by polio, I wonder? It’s so sad. How long will it take until they’re free, too? Until no parent ever needs to worry about their child being crippled by a disease that could already have been extinct? This brings us to... vaccinations. Because of course the reason that polio is being wiped from the face of the earth is decades of public health efforts - and hundreds of millions of children getting their shots. I have never been shy about my position on inoculation, which is: give it to me. Shoot me up with everything and give me an extra dose just in case. My mom tried to get me a smallpox vaccine when I was a kid, for which I thank her, and I remain a bit disgruntled that she was denied. I’ve considered getting vaccinated for rabies because hey, you never know. All you preppers out there, surely you’ve considered this? Get your dentistry up to date, eye surgery maybe, and then the booster shots? No? What I want to know is, what is the official anti-vaxx position on polio? This is obviously a pretty important time to be thinking about public health and vaccines, considering that there are already several COVID-19 vaccines in various stages of development. There are, predictably, already protesters against a vaccine that isn’t even available for distribution yet. It cracks me up that people think it will be foisted on them. Given how hard it still is to buy stuff like disinfecting wipes right now, how challenging it is to get tested for coronavirus, it’s almost refreshing that anyone thinks there will be enough COVID vaccines for everyone. Come on. People like me might be able to get the COVID-19 vaccine within the first six months. Maybe. I say “people like me” because I have more than just the usual privilege. I’m also a COVID survivor, I live in a major hotbed for the virus, I have a strong desire to seek out a vaccine, and my doctor actually takes my calls. I’m a good test subject. Pick me, pick me! I’m confident in my ability to eventually get the shot. I also know I won’t be in the first tier, or probably even the fourth. I’m not a medical professional, I’m under 50, I don’t have any health complications other than being allergic to coronavirus, I’m not a caregiver, and I don’t even work with the public. Why would I get dibs over anyone else? I’ll tell you what. If a public health worker comes to your door holding a needle, please use the contact form and email me. I will get there as fast as I can and jump in front of you. I’m able to embrace the concept of vaccination because of my place in history. My mom kept careful records and got us all our booster shots. School enrollment demanded it. In the Eighties, if you didn’t want to participate, too bad. We didn’t wear seatbelts (bad) and people smoked in front of babies (bad) and there were no vaccine exemptions or homeschooling. It was a different time. It was also a time when the adults in the room remembered what these supposed “childhood diseases” were like. Some of them remembered from direct personal experience. There are a bunch of people in my family tree who suffered through something terrible before there was a vaccination for it. This is not a compelling argument for the anti-vaxx community, for some reason - they seem actively jealous not to have lost their hearing to measles, for example - so let me use an animal model. My mom had a puppy that died of parvo. I was telling my husband this story a few years ago when it occurred to me to wonder: did that puppy get its shots? Was this a family ‘derp’ moment? I Googled ‘parvovirus vaccine invented’ and found that it didn’t come out until 1979. That was years after that poor puppy died. There was nothing anyone could do. Okay, work with me on this. Are anti-vaxxers claiming that there shouldn’t be a parvo vaccine for dogs? That it’s better for puppies to die than to get their shots? Same argument. Are these people claiming that there should not be a polio vaccine? That it’s better for humans to die or be crippled by polio? How about tetanus? Did you know tetanus has a 10% kill rate? (Similar but unrelated question: did you know that wolves only have a 14% kill rate? Crazy, right?) Spare a thought for wolves, which have their place in this world. Explain to me, though, what place polio and parvo and measles and COVID-19 have. Why are we so obsessed with certain dangers toward humans and not others? The reductio ad absurdum of the anti-vaxx position would be that [shifts posture, adopts cartoon voice] we need to reintroduce the viruses that we have eradicated so they can live free back where they belong! Oh, um, which viruses are those? [checks notes] Smallpox and rinderpest? Would you like to also make a plea for Guinea worm? The truth is that it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to eradicate a virus. When we have even a minor success, it’s still a major victory. When we take out smallpox, it makes us believe that we can take out polio. When we finally take out polio, it will give us hope that we can take out tuberculosis and malaria. After that, we can go back to scrolling through the list of these predators of humans, the viruses and the bacteria and the spirochetes and the fungi and all the rest. In the meantime, let’s all pause in gratitude for the illnesses we did not contract. We’ve been insulated by decades of public health victories, which is absolutely the only reason that a loving parent could contemplate the prospect of ill children without waves of dread. We’ve been allowed to forget and it has made us over-bold. Let’s hope that this coronavirus pandemic will help more people snap out of it, so they can get behind me in line for - at least the flu shot. I’m playing around with a bit of reverse psychology right now. The idea is that I can’t have a backlog of anything anymore. If anything has been hanging around in my backlog for longer than, say, three days, I need to either deal with it or decide that I never will, and
DELETE IT This is something I have tested over and over again on my clients, and it makes steam come out of their ears. There’s a glinting ember of something in here that really has my attention. Why are we so bad at letting things go even when they drive us crazy? My case is unusual in that I thought I was dying only a few months ago. I spent days in bed, too ill to sit up, too weak to hold my phone to my head. All I could think about was all the things I’d never said, the things I’d never done, and the stupid remnants of my life that my poor husband would have to sort when I was gone. It was sad, but it was also embarrassing and annoying. I got really frustrated with myself. This? This was going to be my dying epiphany? That I should have enjoyed life more and lived in the moment and not procrastinated so much? Pretty much. When it was starting to look like I was going to make it (before the next lung infection that challenged that idea), I understood that I had a chance to use this suffering for something. I did two things. I decided to treat myself as Version 2 and act as though I had physically died and started over as a new person. I let go of anything from my “previous life.” I gave myself permission to shrug off any residual feelings about that stuff. (Confession: I never finished reading The Aeneid in my summer Latin class, even in English, so that happened). The second thing was that I mulled over what I wanted to do with my new chance, my second bite at the apple. That was that I wanted to get a day job again and then go to grad school. Spirit acts fast sometimes. The opening for the job that I have now showed up in my husband’s email that same week. Everyone who has heard about my desire to get a fellowship and work on my PhD has been encouraging. I’m very lucky in this new job. Most of the people in my department are morning people; quite a lot of them clock in at 6:30 AM. We’re on 9/80s so we work long days. I worked it out with my partner that she does mornings and I do afternoons, so I work 8-6, and then we alternate Fridays. The two of us can cover nearly twelve hours a day, five days a week. This has built in at least an hour a day, and a full day every two weeks, when almost nobody is around. I can tie up any loose ends from the day, and then from the week. I’m almost always able to start Monday with a clean slate. It’s a nice feeling, something I’d like to get used to. Now that I’m gradually recovering and approaching my baseline energy level, I’m steadily working on things that didn’t get done while I was ill. This is where the reset comes in. The world shut down quite suddenly, as I’m sure you recall. Probably like most people, I had various things in progress that simply stayed that way, on hold. It’s a bit like those mystery stories where the people leave with half-eaten meals still on the table. A bag of stuff to take to the donation center, pictures to hang, that sort of thing. While I made a magical decision on what I thought was my deathbed, it didn’t magically whisk anything away. Everything I had thought about was still in the same condition as it had been in March. The major difference was that my email and DMs had continued to accumulate. This is where we get to the technicalities of this whole “Do it or dump it” idea. We start with two rough personality sorts. There are three main phases of action: initiation, maintenance, and completion. Most people tend to prefer one of these phases and dislike another one. There are two main moods of clutter: looking forward and looking backward. Some people prefer to anticipate the future and others cling to the past. Put these together in various combinations and see if they remind you of anyone you know. Are they stuck in a rut because they can’t get started, or because they don’t want something to end? (Not launching a business vs. not finishing their degree). Do they have a thousand projects because they like starting something new, but then get bored? Or are they surrounded by heirlooms and unsorted boxes because they can’t let go of the past? “Do it or dump it” applies to clutter like this. If you haven’t used it in the last year, ask for help and get rid of it. End of story. This applies equally to unfinished craft projects, unread books, clothes that don’t fit, broken stuff that you haven’t fixed yet, workout equipment, untested recipes, and supplies for remodeling or baking or whatever. I sorted my physical clutter long ago. Now I’m down to digital clutter - mainly email newsletters and [checking] 45 GB of podcast episodes - and pending projects. Here, “do it or dump it” means deleting anything over a certain age (or size, or from a certain source, or whatever works), or canceling something. I will never finish that illustrated “Bride of Godzilla” story I wanted to do because after I started the sketches, I learned about aggressive copyright protection. What is it that makes some of us cling to old, outdated stuff for so long, even after we’ve already demonstrated that we aren’t interested enough to engage with it? What are we thinking? Why do we do this to ourselves? I’ll share my motivations, which may or may not overlap with yours. I get attached to the potential of various future versions of myself - a version of me who can, for some reason, speak several languages while playing ukulele on a unicycle - and I don’t like admitting that some of it will never happen. Also, I have serious FOMO about anything I haven’t read but wanted to. Whenever I think about not having time to read every book in the world, my eyelid starts twitching. There are people who are quite good at the “do it or dump it” philosophy. For instance, I once worked with a young woman who had an empty email inbox 99% of the time. She said that she found having even a single message sitting in her inbox annoying. My husband is the same way with having a packed closet. When he gets a new shirt, he - I am not making this up - immediately gets rid of an old shirt. If you know someone like this, or even someone who has a different pattern of attachment than you do, there’s a simple solution. Go to this person and tell them about your predicament. “I can’t stop saving old receipts because I keep thinking I’m going to categorize them in my finance app one day.” The incredulous gaze of this unattached person should be very helpful in giving you the motivation to go ahead and either do it, or dump it. Or ask them to do it for you. They’ll probably think it’s funny. Then you’ll be free to do whatever you want - as free as, in fact, you already are. It finally happened. Someone stole one of our packages before we could go get it.
This is a chronic problem in our area. People have been complaining about it on a daily basis the entire time we’ve lived here. It’s not like we didn’t know it was a thing. It’s even happened in our building before, in a pretty dramatic way. Earlier this year, pre-COVID, there was a group of young people squatting in the clubhouse of our building. The locks were finally changed in that room and we haven’t seen them around. This may or may not have had something to do with what has happened more recently. A young couple used a key to get into the lobby of our building, stole all the packages, then took the elevator down to the garage, broke into a bunch of cars and stole more stuff, and then finally drove away in a stolen vehicle. High drama! That was a few weeks ago. This is a condo building, and the Board had arranged to have the locks changed, but they were waiting on materials - and last night, it happened again. The only differences are that this time they didn’t steal a car, but they did force open one of the mailboxes, which is a federal crime. Among the stolen packages was something for me, an anniversary gift: a cardigan sweater for a middle-aged COVID survivor who keeps getting the chills, even in high summer. Okay, work with me here. Who would even want my frumpy old $34 sweater besides me? It’s out of stock, too. This is a minor annoyance for us. It’s not like they stole my antibiotics. That’s not the point. The point is that package theft is interesting for a lot of reasons. For people of our social class, petty crime is worse than stupid. There is no object you could steal that could possibly be as valuable as your professional reputation and clean background check. Go to prison and it’s all over - your career, your social network, probably your marriage and your relationship with your kids, and thus your house, retirement, savings, and credit score. You’re done. For what, though? What could possibly be in these seductive packages? This is the huge mystery to me. I know from our own orders that these little brown cardboard boxes are full of a lot of inexpensive, random stuff. Volume 5 in a fantasy paperback series. Men’s socks. A parrot toy. A power strip. A case of instant oatmeal. After all these years, surely it’s common knowledge that most deliveries are mundane. What is the resale value of this stuff? What are the chances that a thief would pick up something they personally found relevant? I highly doubt the 20-something girl with the glossy waist-length hair from the security video is going to be excited when she opens the package with my missing sweater. Maybe her boyfriend will want to wear it. Where does it all go? My husband says they probably throw it all out. Package thieves must spend a lot of energy tearing open boxes and pouches full of stuff they don’t want, hoping for a few categories that they can sell. We can only guess what those might be. Electronics? Prescription narcotics? (Do they even send those through the mail?) Jewelry? I think he’s wrong. This has been going on in so many cities for so long, there must be an adjacent opportunity. I’m willing to bet that someone takes all the random junk to... the flea market. Where else would people go to dig through a weird assortment of towels and dog toys and clothes and housewares? If I were running that kind of operation, I’d have various kids and elderly relatives opening the packages and sorting and repackaging everything every week. The thing about package theft is that it’s stochastic. Guaranteed, there are a lot of people who have stolen a package once, when the opportunity struck, only to realize it was a waste of time. The crews who do it regularly only have to change neighborhoods every night and they’re nearly impossible to catch. Packages on so many doorsteps, day and night, are creating this externality of the appealing opportunity. There are probably dozens or hundreds of people who never would have engaged in petty theft if they hadn’t been walking by at the wrong time. Then there are the organized forces, like the young couple that has hit our building at least twice, hopefully in something other than a Requiem for a Dream scenario. If it weren’t for this widespread availability of doorstep deliveries that they’ve been seeing since they were in grade school, maybe they’d be doing something else. There is no way this continues for another decade. Or, will it? My husband has had two bikes stolen since we moved to this area, both from supposedly secure parking garages. Bike theft has probably been a chronic problem since the very invention of the bicycle, which would be over two hundred years. The circle of Hell that is dedicated to bike thieves (the 12th, since you ask) must be pretty full by now. As a futurist, I often wonder what kind of phase change or technological development would put an end to something that is currently an ordinary part of daily life. There are a bunch of different things that could happen to put an end to package theft. The most obvious would be some kind of personalized, secure aspect to the delivery cycle. Either an autonomous delivery bot goes around on a circuit, and the user needs a complicated security key to get the package, or packages are delivered to some kind of coded lockbox. Possibly both. It would be easy to imagine one robot bringing the package to a building, and another taking it inside. Or a drone could drop it off on the roof, which I think is less likely, not that that would stop someone from pitching it to a lot of VCs. Another obvious way this problem could come to an end would be the advent of inexpensive, reliable 3D printers around the price of a television. People could make their own stuff and the only deliveries would be whatever medium goes into the replicator. The most likely way would be for package delivery to become prohibitively expensive. Either the fuel costs get too high, or inflation drives up the price of most consumer goods, or fewer people are willing to work in the warehouses and delivery trucks because some other kinds of competing job opportunities become available. Or it simply becomes impossible for consumers to trust that they can ever get their stuff before someone comes along and steals it. The seagull/lobster roll problem. Another model that might make sense would be to have neighborhood distribution centers around the size and availability of corner stores. In fact that’s almost guaranteed to happen, that wherever the package center was, snacks and drinks would be sold too. These would be like any other convenience store, except that the contents would be more highly personalized. I remember back to when Amazon only sold books. I also remember thinking it was stupid when they began to branch out and sell other consumer products, like shampoo. And I remember debating whether to buy AMZN at around $600/share - too rich for my blood; I bought AAPL and TSLA instead. Back in the early Nineties, routine package theft was not a problem we thought of, just like social media trolls and cracked phone screens were not problems we thought of. The interesting thing about futurism is that, while we’ll surely be wrong whenever we try to imagine one specific thing about the future, we’ll also be wrong if we assume that the future will look like today. Package theft is going to quit being a problem one day, but why exactly? And when? I sure wish I had that sweater. I am Perfectly Confident that this is a book that will influence my future decisions. Don A. Moore has done the enviable job of writing an instant classic, a highly readable book that should set him up well as a thought leader.
Having read this work, though, it makes me wonder whether having read it might convince someone - though surely not me, ho ho - that they are now making wiser decisions than they were before, without actually doing anything differently. I have reason to question my own judgment after the way this year has gone. I made a series of errors in planning around this pandemic, the worst of which was the stupendously bad risk that ended in my nearly dying of COVID-19. While it can be hard to tell whether something was risky when the outcome is good, it’s easy to tell when the results are terrible. I’d really like to get better at avoiding more bad outcomes, especially since we’re all now facing the kinds of risk that can kill. “What are you wrong about right now?” This is one of the questions that arose in Perfectly Confident that stopped me in my tracks. There is probably something I’m wrong about at all times. My brother might tell you that it’s my belief in his dog Penny’s ability to speak the word ‘hello’ - but then that’s a zero-sum argument and if I’m not wrong, then he is. I’m willing to be wrong about certain things, like whether a friend will repay a loan or whether a recipe is worth trying. But what am I seriously wrong about, in terms of blind spots and strategy and errors in judgment? I started keeping a page in my day planner called ‘Decisions.’ In it I write down pending decisions that we haven’t acted on yet (usually things that include my husband, since I don’t tend to get stuck often on purely personal decisions). When the decision is made, I write down what it was and a brief rationale of why. It has been pretty interesting to be able to scan that list over the course of a year. Writing down your decisions and your estimate of how they are likely to turn out is a very intriguing exercise recommended by Moore. I’m going to take him up on it and start estimating my outcomes as well. Perfectly Confident is a wonderful and compelling read. It’s short enough that it could be shared with a reading buddy, and if you’re married, I definitely advise having a conversation about it with your partner. It’s also an excellent choice for work teams. I liked this book so much that I will read anything Don Moore writes, and I’m perfectly confident that will be just as fun and informative. Favorite quotes: Is it wise to believe that you, blessed among the many, will beat the odds and get lucky? Document your reasoning for making a decision, based on its expected value. ...self-fulfilling expectations of your success are not overconfident. They are accurate and they are wise. Ask yourself why you might be wrong. Please do savor the anticipation of a bright future. ...We live in a time of outrageous plenty. A friend of mine is trying to decide whether to get married. There’s an issue she has with her beau, and she hasn’t discussed it with him. How do I know? I know because she has discussed it with me at great length. This happens all the time. When people come to me for advice, half the time my answer is: Tell them what you just told me.
This is how you know whether you’re with the right person or not. Do you turn to each other when you’re confused or in trouble? Do you turn to each other when you need someone to talk to? Most people are still very much hooked in to the pursuer/distancer model of romance. They want someone they don’t know all that well. Often they have no idea whether that person even likes them or not, or whether they’re available. I once asked out a guy from my Latin class, and was rocked back on my heels when he gently informed me that he had a boyfriend. Our feelings of attraction to another person can be amplified by the lack of a chance that we’ll wind up together. Why is that? Why do we keep wanting people when odds are that they don’t want us back? What the heck is it that we’re looking for? My 11th wedding anniversary is coming up. Whenever my hubby and I are reminded of how long we’ve been together, we always look at each other with surprise. Where did the time go?? In some ways it feels like we’ve known each other forever, and in other ways it feels like five minutes. As worried as we both were about messing up our friendship by trying to date each other, it’s worked out. It’s weird that we got the fairytale romance when we weren’t even attracted to each other at first. This is the hardest part to accept for those who aren’t bought in to the companionate marriage concept. They expect to start with intense physical chemistry and let everything else work itself out. ...whereas to me, feeling intense physical chemistry for someone who was a bad match for my temperament and lifestyle is my actual worst nightmare. To me that’s like a drug addiction. Longing for someone who doesn’t care about me, hurts my feelings, ignores me, has incompatible values, wants a wildly different lifestyle, and can’t or won’t hold a conversation with me... sounds like... the dating/crush life of my teens and twenties? For whatever bizarre reason, a lot of people have someone in their life who fulfills all the qualities of a solid match. They can talk about anything and everything, they’re there for each other when times are tough, they laugh at the same stuff and enjoy spending time together, they basically agree on most things - and yet something about all of this seems to be a turn-off. It’s especially a turn-off when there is another player in the game, an elusive, unattainable, and pragmatically inappropriate person who is yet magnetically captivating. Turn to your crush? For what? Is your crush going to take care of you when you’re sick, help you move, cook for you, take care of your pets and/or kids, do favors for your extended family, and cheerfully share your home, your life, and your finances? Outside of your fantasies, I mean. Does your crush make you laugh, or even make you smile? Has your crush ever given you good advice or shown any insight into your life? Part of why I risked my friendship with my now-husband was that I realized what a huge part of my life he had become. He was the person I turned to. Several times he had given me the best advice of my life, and after a couple of years, I was starting to realize that I just made better decisions when he was around. I liked the person I was when we were hanging out. He was the first person I wanted to tell whenever anything happened. This is the first sign that your friendship is worth looking into a little closer. The reason you want to tell this person everything is a combination of factors. They’re reliable and there for you. They think you’re interesting and funny and they like to talk to you. You don’t have to explain why your joke or observation or news is worth sharing because you know they’ll get it. You don’t have to finish your sentences. You can communicate with a single word, or emoji, or a facial expression, or even by trying to avoid eye contact because you know if you look at each other you’ll both explode with laughter. (That’s the only time to not turn to each other). These are the feelings of a friend-marriage. Obviously these feelings are for everyone, not just romantic partners. Friends feel this way, and work buddies, and cousins, and neighbors, and teammates, and all sorts of relationships that will never end in marriage. This is part of how you know that your person is the one to turn to. It feels a lot like your other friendships. We turn to each other, and that includes our friends and families. Part of the reason we rely on each other is that we recognize the way our families have blended. I consider the well-being of his relatives, partly because I care about them and partly because I know he feels the same way toward mine. When it comes down to it, we turn to each other because sometimes life can be really hard, too hard to face it alone. We all have to turn to someone. It’s best when we can do this on a solid basis of trust and respect, affection and friendship. When we have all that between us, turning to each other is natural, and when it isn’t, we can turn to each other to work it out. I want to extend my sympathies to those who can’t wear a mask for medical reasons. As a COVID-19 survivor, I feel you. It is absolutely terrifying to have trouble breathing for hours at a time. Nobody should have to go through that.
It makes it worse when nobody believes that there’s anything wrong with you. When I told my doctor I had been exposed to COVID, he wouldn’t authorize a test. This was back in the early days, when they were really hard to get. It wasn’t until a week later, when I described my symptoms, that he understood something was seriously wrong with me. If you’re in that situation, with doctors who don’t believe you and won’t listen, I feel you. It’s infuriating and scary. What’s it going to take, collapsing in the street? I know what it’s like to have doctors who won’t listen. When doctors won’t listen, nobody else will either. How can people be so awful? They don’t have a right to demand my private personal medical records, or yours either. You’d think anyone could tell I was having serious problems breathing. I’ve had a lot of experience with that lately. First, three weeks of COVID-19, Followed by an opportunistic respiratory infection that lasted another three weeks, And then bacterial pneumonia for my birthday two months later. There went another month. Nobody made me wear a mask when I had COVID-19, because I was too sick to leave my apartment. I didn’t have to put one on until I went to the COVID hospital to get my chest x-ray. That was a big deal because it’s not like I knew the name for ‘peribronchial thickening.’ All I knew was my chest was on fire. It’s a good thing I went in when I did, and got the antibiotics, because the next night I woke up in the middle of the night and felt like it was time to call an ambulance. Luckily, after about twenty minutes I felt better. I trusted the power of the antibiotics, and I’m glad I did, because they worked. My mom is allergic to almost all antibiotics and if she had what I did, she might not have made it. I can almost be happy I was the one to get sick instead of her, because I don’t have to worry about going into anaphylactic shock from taking azithromycin. You know, when I wore my N95 mask to the hospital, I had to wear it for about three hours. Both times. The COVID hospital in my area is four towns away. My friend who was exposed to the coronavirus on the same day as me took me. We both got really sick, but her symptoms started sooner than mine. A lot of people would probably think it was safe to go without masks, since we both already had COVID. Nobody knows whether there is immunity, though, or how long it lasts. Definitely nobody knew back in April 2020. My friend has a rare blood disorder that puts her in the hospital all the time, and I couldn’t risk her health, especially not after she dropped everything to take me to get my chest x-ray. I don’t think anyone else would have. I obviously wasn’t safe to be around. Am I now? I don’t know. I’ve tested negative twice, but I do still keep having weird leftover symptoms, like getting so cold I wake up shaking in the night. It’s hard to know. What if there is a small amount of the virus hiding away somewhere in my body, at levels too low to detect, and it surges back again at some point? There just isn’t enough information out there yet, even though millions of people have been exposed and nearly a million people around the world have died already. In eight months! There isn’t enough information, and so I wear my masks just to be safe. Did I mention? I wear three masks when I go anywhere. A surgical mask, a fabric mask over that, and a plastic face shield over the top. I’m still very frightened when I go out, because there are young people with no masks on all over the place and they keep coming close to me. A lot of people will say, Just stay home then. Believe me, I do. I almost never leave the apartment. I had to, though, to get my chest x-ray and my COVID tests and go to the pharmacy for my inhaler and my antibiotics. I didn’t feel like I could wait for them to come in the mail. I also have to go out sometimes to take out the trash or go in the laundry room in my building. I’m so nervous my hands shake. There are about 100 people in my building and only a couple of them wear masks. One young guy cornered me in the laundry room - it has only one door - to give me a speech about how he understands that I’m trying to be careful. If he really understood, he would have stood aside and let me out of the room without talking to me from only a few feet away. This was a surprise, actually. That guy thought he was trying to be nice. A lot of people seem to be going out of their way to pick fights and be mean. All this tension and anxiety just gets worse when people snap like that. All I want is for people to leave me alone, so I wear my masks and keep my head down. It’s like being the Invisible Man. I just want to get whatever it is done as fast as possible and go home again. I don’t think I can relax in public again until there haven’t been any cases in my county for a month. I keep hearing about people who have breathing difficulties that keep them from wearing a mask. I want to know more. I feel such a kinship with other people like me who are afraid their lungs are like a torn-up old plastic sack now. What is it? What happened? I don’t have a right to know, of course not. I just wonder what it is that’s so much worse than COVID or pneumonia. When I was sick, I walked slowly, but I could still get around. I didn’t get dizzy or fall down or black out or anything. I wonder how someone whose breathing problems were worse than mine could even go anywhere without a wheelchair and an oxygen tank? I hope all the people who do rely on supplemental oxygen are able to get it now. Same with nebulizers, inhalers, and all the other meds I’ve been starting to learn about. Whatever your breathing difficulty is, I hope you can recover. I hope there will be treatments for your condition, or maybe even a cure one day. I also hope we can all band together and try to beat the coronavirus. It would be nice to feel safe to leave my apartment without a mask on one day. How many of us ever thought we’d wind up needing a desk for every person in the household? So suddenly?
This is a subject that tends to come up a lot, because everyone at my work was sent home to work for the indefinite future - with no notice. They’ve been continuously hiring, too, so all the new people like me were expected to provide all our own equipment. Can I just say that sitting in a wooden folding chair for two weeks was a great way to bond with my work partner? And also to perhaps permanently alter the shape of my caboose? (Not sure about hers) (Never seen it) We’ve all been told to plan to work from home at least through the end of 2020. Personally I plan on things remaining more or less how they are through the beginning of 2023. I’d rather be wrong, of course! But it’s psychologically much easier for me to plan just to keep on keepin’ on for three years. Same apartment, same job, same schedule, same... furniture? I’ve heard a lot of stories about the truly pitiful situations that a lot of people have found themselves in, and the time has come to acknowledge them and take action. By this I mean, yes, of course, we can’t have hundreds of thousands of people evicted and living in the streets. What utter nonsense. Just restructure everyone’s debts, from the banks and the mortgages on down. If I owned rental property right now, I’d definitely rather have a grateful, loyal tenant keeping guard over my biggest asset than an empty shell crying out for squatters, vandalism, and who knows what else. That being said. This is about all the office workers and students who are suddenly finding themselves trying to get a full day’s work done amid a total and complete lack of ergonomics. I’ve spent the last three months working full-time in a corner of our living room that is precisely four feet square. I measured it. It doesn’t take much square footage to get in the zone and get some quality work done. It does, though, take a flat surface and somewhere decent to sit. This is quite clear in my mind as I gaze lovingly at the office chair I bought with my stipend from work. I assembled it before bedtime, since it arrived at 9 PM, because I couldn’t bear to wait for it one more day. My poor flat and striped bottom. You know I used to work with hoarders? One of the things that always boggled my mind was how so many people could fill rooms from floor to ceiling with ‘bargain’ items, all bought for $1-5, and then feel like they Could Not Afford anything. Anything! I would point out that if you have a hundred things you bought for a dollar, then in one way or another, at some point, you had a hundred dollars. If you had twenty things you bought for five bucks, then you had a hundred bucks. If you in fact had five hundred things (balls of yarn, sets of markers, stuffed animals, shirts, coffee mugs, refrigerator magnets, etc etc etc) then you probably had enough cash flowing through your life to buy a nice piece of furniture. What would it be? A replacement for your lumpy, sagging old mattress? Or a bed frame to get it up off the floor? A big bookshelf? ...a desk? In this particular case, I’m changing the frame on this a bit. The concept here is not that there may be enough money for something nice, rather than a large pile of small objects. The concept is that there is probably enough space in the home for a desk of some kind, if some other objects are removed. Keep in mind, I have lived in a space smaller than 800 square feet for the past five years. Currently we are at 650 square feet. Three apartments back, I gave away a bookshelf on Craigslist to make space for the little secretary desk that I have now. There was no room in our apartment otherwise. My choices were: in front of the oven (blocking the fridge), inside the bathtub, or in front of our door. Or simply get rid of the bookcase and make space for something I use every day. Our next apartment was even smaller, so the commitment and the trade paid off. I had a desk before, of course. It was made from a top I bought at IKEA for $12. I bought it because it was the biggest desktop I could find, which made it obsolete when we downsized. See, I would never suggest that someone else do something I am not willing to do myself. I got rid of something that was once very important to me, a bookcase I assembled myself and moved half a dozen times. It used to contain my cookbook collection, which I have since digitized. In the physical space where I had that bookcase, I now have a little desk. It’s possible to put together a makeshift desk, or create a study/work area, without using a piece of furniture. One of my coworkers has a TV tray that she uses on the couch. I’ve seen photos of other people working in the driver’s seat of their car - not driving for a living, just sitting out in the driveway for some privacy - or on cushions on the balcony. A lot of people are using their dining table. I know from my home visits that about 90% of dining tables are used for storage 364 days of the year. This is what I mean by trading for a desk. If all that stuff goes away, then someone has somewhere to sit and work. My husband, stepdaughter, and I have all worked together for days on end, sitting at the same dining table, and that location alone might solve a lot of problems for a big family. My bestie and I both have bathtub trays, and we’re not ashamed to admit that we both have the habit of sometimes working while we soak. (Me, on personal projects - her, I won’t ask so I don’t have to tell). A lot of households have completely viable furniture that could be a desk for someone. Maybe something weird, but still something about the right height that has a flat surface. An end table, a coffee table, a dresser, a kitchen counter, a rolling toolbox? An actual desk? A lot of households also have plenty of square footage for someone, either in the garage or an extra bedroom or some other place. When I was a newlywed in my first marriage, I had my desk set up in the walk-in closet next to the bathroom. Bookcase and filing cabinet in there, too. Stephen King wrote Carrie in the laundry room. Thomas Wolfe was very tall, so he stood and wrote his books on top of his fridge. The thing here is to value humans and human activity over any random pile of stuff. Marie Kondo told everyone to make sure your stuff ‘sparks joy.’ I say it’s more important to build your personal environment around the stuff you like to do. Everyone in the house should have physical space to sleep, bathe, eat meals, stretch, relax, make things, and (now, alas) study or work at home. Any clutter that is in the way should be removed so the people can simply do their thing. If there isn’t room for you or for anyone else in your home to get your work done, look around and figure out where it could happen. We might be here for a while. |
AuthorI've been working with chronic disorganization, squalor, and hoarding for over 20 years. I'm also a marathon runner who was diagnosed with fibromyalgia and thyroid disease 17 years ago. This website uses marketing and tracking technologies. Opting out of this will opt you out of all cookies, except for those needed to run the website. Note that some products may not work as well without tracking cookies. Opt Out of CookiesArchives
January 2022
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