The Nonstarter Problem
My life thus far can be most succinctly summarized as lost opportunity. Like many people, I feel like I have this grand potential just yearning to be expressed, but there are systems in place in our society that make it difficult to work outside of established channels. What do I mean by that? Well to avoid a lot of issues with interpretation, I can state it mathematically. Our lives are not subdividable.
We can’t be half a parent, or one quarter a doctor and three quarters a lawyer. There are certain things that are all or nothing, with powerful forces at work that select for people who excel at any one thing. We are a Michael Jordan society and glorify the idea of virtuosos who work at something for a decade or two and finally make it big, to the esteem of their colleagues. At least in America, this notion of striving for something is practically written into our cultural DNA.
But I strive to be a renaissance man. I don’t really care about fame or power, or even money for that matter. I’m interested in hundreds of things and could spend a lifetime dabbling in a bit of this and a bit of that. One of my favorite quotes is “specialization is for insects.”
The irony is that I have the training to be a successful engineer. But I’ve been spinning my wheels for a decade now trying to be an entrepreneur. I’ve never really had the luxury of working at a job that I felt was sustainable, making an impact and pushing my potential. I’m envious of people who have that. I feel like a fraud.
So let me get to the point. I have not had a traditional career, because I feel that being a good engineer would only represent perhaps 10% of what I want to do with my life. Anybody feel the same way? I imagine we’ve all had that soul-sucking realization, deep into a workday, where we would simply like to be doing anything else than what we are doing. But we can’t, because of debt, or children, or other seemingly endless obligations.
Or because the money is good. We’ve worked hard our whole lives for this job, and what are the chances of finding something else this secure where we can make similar money? So we hold onto the job, for years even, and allow its pressing urgency to consume the other 90% of the hopes and dreams we may have once had for ourselves.
I’m finding that my worst career mistakes have been painful in proportion to my bending to someone else’s will. It’s like that 10% fulfillment that I was holding onto got reduced to 5% or even fell to zero when I was doing the most menial work (in my case moving furniture in the early 2000s).
Our jobs pay well, but at what cost to our psyches? If only there was a way to transition from an all-or-nothing society to one in which we tap human potential to create an order of magnitude more health and happiness than we have today…
That may just be starting to happen. After a lot of years of watching this stuff, I’ve noticed a shift in the freelancing field. These are awesome:
But this is AMESOMER:
When I saw that site yesterday, it’s like fireworks went off in my head. There’s been a transition from the idea of an entrepreneur as a lone wolf to one in which he or she can contribute slices of time at the going rate for a chosen field.
Imagine a place where freelancers can work together on projects and share the risk and reward. I don’t know why that never occurred to me. This is the concept I’ve been waiting for my entire life. Something between Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and Elance, where an entrepreneur can jump in, perform a few hours of work, and get paid at the going rate for the field. Computer engineers make $100,000 per year, so why can’t I work for four months and earn the $33,000 that makes for a good living in my home state of Idaho? Then I could spend the other eight months working on the pie-in-the-sky ideas that could revolutionize our lives.
Now we can begin to extrapolate. They say real unemployment in the US is somewhere between 10% and 20% if you count the underemployed and people who have stopped looking for work. I think it’s actually higher than that. If we look at current production in America, divided by human potential, I’d be surprised if employment is even 50% of what’s possible. Heck I’d say it’s 10% at most. How many hours a day do you waste at YOUR job? I’ve often felt that on any given day, I only get one hour of real work done. Two at most. That’s just 25% productivity. And that doesn’t even count the support staff of administrators that increase GDP but are non-producing as far as providing goods or services.
For businesses like call centers and Walmart that profit from “unskilled” labor, they are tapping just 1% of their human potential. Categorizing someone as unskilled is like calling someone a moron. It’s unjust because it removes the element of possibility. I’m a firm believer that every human being has not just a skill, but a multitude of talents that go far beyond what others see. If they had to fulfill that potential to save the world, maybe I’m naive, but I truly believe that most people could do it.
And they might just have to, the way things are going. The current state of things is self-evidently not the future that my generation dreamed about while we were growing up. The sociopaths are too powerful and are over-expressed in the business world. Public and private debt are so high now that they probably can’t be paid off, and the fact that politicians aren’t up to solving the debt issue doesn’t help. We are in real trouble. And Obama’s jobs program, as optimistic as it is, doesn’t address the problem of people opting out of “drudgerous” work.
I’ve always dreamt of having a small lab with a dozen other geeks, where we design and build disruptive technology. Instead, I’m currently an out of work deadbeat trying to scrape up enough money to avoid bankruptcy. On paper I’m a complete and utter failure. But how many great inventors and artists were perceived as failures in their day? That thought is what drives me to try to see a little further and imagine greater.
So maybe if we focus on the nonstarter problem - people like you and me who would love to make something of themselves but so far have not had a viable path towards their goals - we might finally see some real progress. Because the problem isn’t working harder or taking on more responsibility. That stuff comes naturally with a love of something. It’s cultivating imaginations and sparking innovative movements that lead to prosperity and seemingly impossible things like the moon landing and high temperature superconductors and someday fusion, youthful longevity, artificial intelligence, a cure for cancer and all of the other things that are not likely through existing means. And the best part is, businesses will have a larger, more engaged, more dedicated labor pool from which to draw from.
Join me on Twitter @zackarymorris
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