Intellectual Ore

I have a sort of fascination with self-improvement.  I’ve been reading Steve Pavlina’s blog on and off for about a year; Stephen Covey and I go back at least half a decade.  Over the weekend, I had the good fortune of snagging a copy of How to Win Friends and Influence People (original 1936 printing) for $5 from a street vendor near NYU.

Carnegie’s book, arguably the first self-help book written by an American author, is the most “primary” in its orientation; it’s filled with lucid firsthand observations of daily life, along with a lot of statistics from direct measurement.  Covey’s book, on the other hand, is more longitudinal, presenting what he’s found to be “recurring themes” in other authors’ writing.  Steve Pavlina writes about everything from failure in the video game business, to how to become an early riser, blending what he’s read with firsthand experiments.

In some respects, these three couldn’t be more different.  Behind the facade of similarity put on by being male and white, one finds a Mormon with a PhD, a machine-part salesman from Missouri, and a game-programming atheist from Las Vegas.  Maybe, in a parallel dimension, we could put the three against each other in an ultimate deathmatch over, say, same-sex marriage.  For now, however, I’m content in the knowledge that these three can’t be that far from the truth, given that they’ve managed to arrive at consensus on how to improve one’s life.

Richard L. Florida agrees with me about housing (from Who’s Your City):

In this respect, the way we house people today seems a bit out of sync with other demands of our highly mobile and flexible economy. The United States has long prided itself on being a nation of homeowners. We boast that more than 60 percent of Americans own their homes. We encourage young people to save enough to buy one of their own. We provide all sorts of public incentives — from tax write-offs on mortgage interest to public investments in infrastructure–to encourage home ownership. It is, after all, the centerpiece of the American dream.

I can’t help but wonder whether this dream doesn’t belong to a bygone industrial era. A central element of the creative economy is its flexibility. People change jobs often. Companies outsource tasks. Technology enables us to work from places we never could before. An increasing number of individuals and businesses find their mobility a necessity for taking advantage of new opportunities. Strangely, our system of homeownership dramatically limits mobility, and in a country where nearly two-thirds of residents are tied to their houses, this means that the economy will suffer.

The creative age may well require alternate forms of housing–something between ownership and renting. In many markets today, it makes more financial sense to rent rather than own. But rental options can be limited, and renovating a rental apartment to suit your taste can be pricey. One option might be to follow the lead of commercial real-estate developers and managers who often build out office space to owner specifications in exchange for a long-term commitment. As we’ve seen, there are many reasons to live in a superstar or hotspot city, but wanting to own a home should not necessarily be among them.

Sometimes, I see conversations where two people are both talking, but neither is listening. By viewing the exchange in the third person, one can watch how the two parties react to each other; this sort of detachment simply isn’t possible in situ. The two can talk, and talk, but never reach any agreement about the issues.

There are plenty of conversations where it’s just communication; if there would be more listening and less talking, maybe some progress could be made toward agreement. However, sometimes agreement isn’t possible. In these cases, it’s not communication at all; it’s real, substantial clash in the way two people feel about an issue. These kinds of disagreements (the “real” kind) can spawn all sorts of other mini side-battles, and I’m often amused at how often the “side arguments” are mistaken for the real issues. I’m reminded of a passage from Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:

It’s not a personality clash between them; it’s something else, for which neither is to blame, but for which neither has any solution, and for which I’m not sure I have any solution either, just ideas.

The ideas began with what seemed to be a minor difference of opinion between John and me on a matter of small importance: how much one should maintain one’s own motorcycle. It seems natural and normal to me to make use of the small tool kits and instruction booklets supplied with each machine, and keep it tuned and adjusted myself. John demurs. He prefers to let a competent mechanic take care of these things so that they are done right. Neither viewpoint is unusual, and this minor difference would never have become magnified if we didn’t spend so much time riding together and sitting in country roadhouses drinking beer and talking about whatever comes to mind. What comes to mind, usually, is whatever we’ve been thinking about in the half hour or forty-five minutes since we last talked to each other. When it’s roads or weather or people or old memories or what’s in the newspapers, the conversation just naturally builds pleasantly. But whenever the performance of the machine has been on my mind and gets into the conversation, the building stops. The conversation no longer moves forward. There is a silence and a break in the continuity. It is as though two old friends, a Catholic and Protestant, were sitting drinking beer, enjoying life, and the subject of birth control somehow came up. Big freeze-out.

And, of course, when you discover something like that it’s like discovering a tooth with a missing filling. You can never leave it alone. You have to probe it, work around it, push on it, think about it, not because it’s enjoyable but because it’s on your mind and it won’t get off your mind. And the more I probe and push on this subject of cycle maintenance the more irritated he gets, and of course that makes me want to probe and push all the more. Not deliberately to irritate him but because the irritation seems symptomatic of something deeper, something under the surface that isn’t immediately apparent.

When you’re talking birth control, what blocks it and freezes it out is that it’s not a matter of more or fewer babies being argued. That’s just on the surface. What’s underneath is a conflict of faith, of faith in empirical social planning versus faith in the authority of God as revealed by the teachings of the Catholic Church. You can prove the practicality of planned parenthood till you get tired of listening to yourself and it’s going to go nowhere because your antagonist isn’t buying the assumption that anything socially practical is good per se. Goodness for him has other sources which he values as much as or more than social practicality.

So it is with John. I could preach the practical value and worth of motorcycle maintenance till I’m hoarse and it would make not a dent in him. After two sentences on the subject his eyes go completely glassy and he changes the conversation or just looks away. He doesn’t want to hear about it.

We’ve all heard the history: first came the agrarian age, with its plows, small-town agriculture, and general stores. The industrial revolution followed, with stories of company towns, trusts, and robber-barons. After that, we entered the “post-industrial” economy, the hallmark of which is the personal computer’s growing importance in the workplace.

My friend Sebastian and I were talking a while ago, and we came upon the importance of analytical skills in the workplace. “That stuff can all be outsourced,” he claimed. “All the value in modern organizations is created by right-brain, lateral thinking.”

Before reading the book, I was inclined to agree with Sebastian. As computers penetrate deeper into the fabric of everyday life, they’re being used to do things far beyond their creators’ wildest dreams: computers provide customer service, trade stock, and control robots. They are everywhere yet nowhere, as the line between “personal computer” and “home appliance” continues to blur. The computing power of today’s microwave oven would give a purpose-built mainframe of 20 years ago a run for its money, performance-wise.

Yet try as they might, computer people still can’t program creativity. In 17 chapters, Florida details the renewed emphasis on creativity, in “work, leisure, community, and everyday life”. Some of the topics taken up include:

• Is it true that “the world is flat”, that “location is dead”?
• Why is it that a city’s “gay index” is so strongly correlated to its “creativity index”?
• What do cities like Seattle, San Francisco, Washington DC, Austin, and Boston have in common? What about these cities allows them to attract so many talented people, and offer such high quality of life?
• When did wearing jeans to work become acceptable?
• Why, in a recent survey, did respondents say they’d prefer to work as a low-paid hair stylist, over a highly-paid machinist?

Needless to say, I think this is a fantastic book; my only gripe is the amount of data presented inline with the text - it really deters from the exposition at times. Otherwise, if you’ve got the patience and want some real, intelligent reading, The Rise of the Creative Class is for you. I would highly recommend it.