Why
May 5, 2000
7:10 a.m.
I tend to eat lunch alone. Most of the time this is by choice (I think so, anyway, he says, checking to see if his deodorant is working today [grin]). I do this because the lunch hour is prime break time. I do my thinking at lunch hour, or I use it to consider stories, or to look at problems at work from a few different perspectives. Or I do those ticky-tacky things we all have to do. But mostly I think. When I teach project management courses, I make a point to tell people that I consciously schedule an hour a day--not counting lunchtime--to do nothing but think. My students look at me like I suddenly grew a pumpkin-sized wart on my forehead. "How do you do that?" they say. "Well," I reply, "You go to your Lotus Notes calendar. You find your schedule for the next week, and you block out an hour." (aside: Notes is the company system ... sorry Notes people, but I really hate this product. I only put my calendar in Notes because everyone else uses it to schedule their day. For my own system, I currently use Netscape's calendar, but I've got to admit I'm the type of person who will change every 6 months to a year). They grimace about now, a look that screams out Come on, Ron. You know what we mean. I talk about Bill Gates and his thinking weeks (hey, regardless of your opinions of Microsoft, I think you've got to applaud someone who leads a major company and actually spends focused time trying to decide where it's going to go and why). I ask my students about things that might have happened in their recent projects because they hadn't thought about something in advance. I tell about times where I've even walked to the library to spend my hour thinking when traffic got too heavy around the office. Thinking is the precursor to leadership, I say. With no thought, how can one credibly ask anyone else to do what they say? In the end, I stick to my guns, and they shrug and probably figure I'm just slacking off -- never mind that my projects pretty much all run smoothly (at least when looked at from the outside), come in on or under budget and generally better than schedule. Neener, neener, neener. Don't get me wrong. Sometimes I don't get to take my hour. Sometimes life intervenes, or someone needs my time. I realize in the last year or two, though, that I have come to enjoy taking lunches alone because that gives me an extra hour or so for this process. Yesterday, however, I got neither my hour for thinking nor my hour for lunch. Yesterday, one of my co-workers asked me and another guy to go to lunch. So, we did. We talked about the environment at work, some of the changes that are expected (things always change, eh?). We talked about people. We talked about leaders of the company in terms that would alternately please and aggravate them, I'm sure. In other words it was your basic gripe session. One of the things we all talked about was why we were working in the first place. This is the heart of the matter, I think. Why do you work? Is it just to pay the bills? For that matter, why do you do whatever you do? Sitting there in the dark little restaurant, with the voices of forty conversations flooding the background and the smell of sesame and teriyaki hanging in the air, I realized I was sitting with people who were doing things they didn't really want to do. I became uncomfortable. I started seeing the way their smiles had a downward turn at the corners of their mouths. I see problems. I really do. And I'll complain about them with the best of us. There is a point, though, where my spirit needs to see hope. More importantly, there's a point (I realize now) where my spirit will not let me dive down too far. At that point, my inner self begins to build reasoned arguments about why and how things can be better. Not perfect, of course. I'm human. My bosses are humans. Their bosses are human. I need that, you see? I need to know there is hope and that things are progressing. Otherwise, I don't perform at my own best. Sitting in the restaurant, I actually thought "This is why I like Science Fiction. This is still the genre of hope. It's still the field of ideas and of social change." In the car on the way back, in the quiet spaces between conversation, I applied the same thinking to my writing. It's a complex subject that is not well served by a single analysis, but my reasons for writing are on a similar track. I write because it breaks boundaries. Telling stories has the capacity to take people to places they have never been before. It has the capacity to take me to places I've never been before. Telling stories exercises perception, and craft. It stretches knowledge. In the end, I'm also figuring telling stories will put bread on my table. It's that part of the equation that sometimes raises its head and gnaws at me. Yes, me, the curmudgeonly preacher of business approach, the keeper of the Ever-present Accept-O-Matic, the preacher of constant (Dare I say Persistent) work, can still be worn down by the business side of things. But I can't tell a lie. This is a part of why I write, too. A part of me enjoys the business end of publishing. I want to succeed at the business end. And I will. Part of feeling better about the business is accepting it for what it is and addressing it in the same fashion. Part of succeeding in any business is being able to see it for what it is, making a plan, and sticking with it. I didn't realize it as I wrote them, but I think the last few entries were almost mandatory to get to this one. Strange how that happens, eh? Did they cause this one? Or was it just odd coincidence that this lunchtime discussion occurred the day after a story of mine got bounced. You can spend days and days asking yourself these types of questions, I suppose. When I got back to the office I realized how much I missed my hour.  And they pay you for that? Daily Persistence is © Ron Collins |
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