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Quote of the Day: Continuous Effort
“Continuous effort – not strength or intelligence – is the key to unlocking our potential.” – Winston Churchill
I finished the book. Delivered it to the publisher Monday and billed it Friday. It just took some effort. Churchill is right about that. I am not the smartest guy around and certainly not the strongest. But I am good enough at what I do that by starting and finishing tasks I get the job done.
I do not think there is anything that gives a person real satisfaction than finishing a challenging and worthwhile project and knowing you did a good job. It does not matter whether it is writing a book, building a house, harvesting a crop, or winning a war. They say Alexander the Great cried after conquering India because there were no more worlds for him to conquer. I get that. I would cry, too, if there were no more books to write. Finishing a book makes me a happy man.
I think the need to create is a fundamental part of being human, and important to happiness.
Writing a book does not pay as much as the day job. But unlike a lot of the work I do at day jobs, it leaves me with a final product, something I can point to and say, “I did that.” My dad was an architect. Like writing, it is a job that pays very, very well or pretty poorly. He was not getting paid very, very well. He advised me to go into engineering rather than architecture because of that. And yet, when we were driving around my hometown, he would occasionally point to a building and say, “I designed that.”
His father was a carpenter and later a chef. Once when I was in my teens I showed Papouli (grandfather) a model of an Iowa-class battleship I built. He pointed to the superstructure and told me, “I built the chart room on that ship.” Later, when he was in his late seventies, he was still working as a chef at a restaurant in my hometown. I asked him why, and he told me, “When the food I made comes out of the oven, it means I am alive.” Making a meal gave him joy.
I sometimes wonder how many people in today’s society lack the joy of actual creation. How many jobs are consumed in endless rounds of meetings and doing processes that do not create anything so that the end of the day, or week, or month – or year – nothing real has been created or accomplished? Or even if you are making something, the job consists of adding a small widget on a big product, so there is no sense of accomplishment. Sure, there is a paycheck, but man does not live for pay alone.
The people I know that are happiest seem to be the creators, the ones doing something. That can point to something and say, “I did that.” The people that seem the least happy are the ones who go home each day without having done anything of substance, even if they are getting well compensated for their time.
Do you know who spends all day not creating anything of real substance? Mid-level bureaucrats, whether in the public or private sector. Is it any wonder so many are miserable – and so often seek to pay that misery forward to everyone around them?
Published in Group Writing
I finally have hardware to code. Nothing works. But every day the nothing gets a little smaller.
Our Ricochet hero, Calvin Coolidge, shared this:
You have written something quite profound in an intimate and personal way. I love reading your comments about your family – each is quiet and loving and revealing. It makes me wish I’d known them.
I would like to extend your thinking a little here. There is a concept attached to the the idea of capitalist enterprise called “creative destruction”. It involves the transformation of wealth, a financial term, from one state to another. I spent most of my working career transforming the societal funds transfer approach from paper to electronics. And this did indeed cause drastic shifts in the distribution of wealth. I’ve never thought myself creative in an artistic design or literary sense that results in tangible physical products or structures but I think there was perhaps an element of creativity in my work removing us from a deluge of paper.
You created something at the end. It may not have been tangible, but it was a product. At the end you can say, “I did that.”
What does a middle-level bureaucrat create? Forms and reports. A new process manual no one is going to read. Impenetrable regulations no one can understand. They resent it and resent people who do create. That is a lot of what is behind Obama’s “You didn’t build that.” He wants to strip pride of creation away from creators.
I can’t imagine not writing. Good or bad, it’s like breathing.
Boy do I get that.
You see what happens when those bureaucrats get a chance at controlling the most ordinary activities of the people like healthcare and education. Then they connect with the appropriate corporate sector institutions like medical providers and schools and the game is on. They take control of medical protocols and education curricula. We are in the process of seeing an effort to do just that in every sector of life. The technology has given us perhaps more bad possibilities than the good we can do. The government and the cons will pose enormous challenges.
Congratulations! (Συγχαρητήρια)
But the widget worker or ditch digger or mid level bureaucrat might do his day job the best he can and create a family or have a thoughtful conversation at church or with a neighbor or help share his life and love with anyone who might cross his path. Some of us have special talents that we should use, but anyone can persist at living a good life. And there is not a need for a finished product.
You are right. It’s those we elect who allow the bureaucracy to gain its own power and it is the senior bureaucrats that sustain that.