I thought about not mentioning this at all on my blog. I mean, for most people, religon is a pretty private matter. It’s right up there with talking about personal finances, sex, and medical issues. Why is it so hard to just come right out and say it? Try this quote on for size:

“Startlingly, this great sceptic, this non-guru who believes in nothing, is still a practising Christian.” -Times Online article on Nassim Taleb.

I came across an article on Nassim Taleb, of the Black Swan fame. The tone of the writer shows how harshly one is judged based on one’s religious beliefs, especially in the context of how it affects our job. If you are a politican these days, your religious beliefs could potentially make or break you, depending on what kind of mood the press is in.

I wonder if people gave Pascal a hard time?

Last summer, I started a conversation with a stranger at a random social gathering. At the time I was searching and I was willing to take suggestions from just about anybody. By the end of the night, the man (who was in a drunken stupor at this point) said this to me: “I’m sorry Alfred, I can’t tell you what to do with your life.” It was the truth. It is up to me to decide what is good and right for me, no matter what other people say. As helpful as this man wanted to be, he wasn’t in the position to call the shots for me.

I wouldn’t say that going to church is an unbeaten path, but I am interested in seeing where it takes me.

Then all of a sudden, it started again. How should I put it? The voice of some nagging phantom/narrator: “Alfred, you’ve rested for long enough, shouldn’t you be getting back on your quest?”

The quest of course is still resolving this odyssey business.

A friend of mine (i.e. voice of reason) recently pointed out to me, that I was still searching. I asked him straight up: how does one resolve this “searching” business.  His answer: it all comes down to figuring out what is important to you, right now and in the future.

For some reason, I went on to read up on something Paul Graham wrote: The essay where he was addressing the high schoolers. He suggests that instead of working towards a goal, we should “stay upwind.” I would paraphrase this in RPG analogy: while you are waiting for the plot to advance, you should kill monsters and level-up yourself. Staying upwind keeps you being productive instead of spending too much time fantasizing about the pie in the sky.

So, looks like I have two high-level goals to be working on:

• figure out what is important to me
• stay upwind

I think that the next couple of posts will be me trying to work through these items.

I just got a postcard in the mail from my vacationing friends. Normally I like to put up postcards at my cubicle at work, but I think I’ll just keep this one at home for a bit.

You probably don’t need me to tell you that if you don’t like your work, you are dying a little bit inside every day. In that case, going straight to hell is going to be the most direct way to your final destination. I think that it takes a lot of courage to admit that the ship is not going the right way and a course correction is in order.

(Moving away from the metaphoric hell is probably best.)

One of the “live” sessions that I attended involved various exercises using various types of cards. One exercise was called the Skills Card Sort, which involved taking a stack of about 40 cards. Each card has a skill (as a verb) and a short description. Then we had some time to sort the cards by our strength in that particular skill.

Here are my top 21 skills (randomized):

• motivate
• invent
• analyze
• listen
• synthesize
• implement
• entertain
• organize/plan
• coach
• evaluate
• initiate
• compose
• design
• coordinate
• maintain records
• budget
• estimate
• delegate
• monitor
• problem solve
• expediate

I think part of finding something that we like to do involves playing to our strengths. What skills are you good at? In what arena do you excel at? What skills not in my top 21 can you think of for yourself?

The latest post on the working dead struck a chord with many readers including myself. I am sure that there are some people that are satisfied with getting paid to do nothing. The fact of the matter is, if you are at any task or job where you have no feeling, passion or purpose, you are effectively a zombie. When managers give busywork to better manage the “doing nothing,” it actually makes things even worse.

Have I been a zombie? At various times and positions in my career yes. While the first couple of hours of sweet freedom is fine, there is really only so much web surfing and solitaire that you can do before you have to come face-to-face with the issue at hand. Wouldn’t it be more responsible to go to your manager or boss to let him know that you got some free time to deal with stuff? Oh yeah, there are actually stuff that you don’t want to do, or heaven forbid, the dreaded busywork. This is actually assuming that your manager is available to talk with you.

I think that the working dead who have internet access have a real opportunity to really make a difference at work or for themselves. I have embarked on secret skunkwork projects. I have bettered myself by learning new programming languages and tools. But unless you like doing research for a living, this is actually a tough way to pass the time.

Being a working dead zombie is very stressful for me. Part of me is screaming for freedom from the desk, to go to the beach or the library. Another part of me is trying to sooth emyself, reminding myself that keeping a low profile will get me yet another day closer to payday. Having contradictions in my head causes me stress.

Eventually, the thing to do would be to deal with the situation. This could mean: getting into a different position at the same company; finding a new job at a different company; going back to school; going on vacation; or going on a sabbatical. I have done all of these. The fact of the matter is, going on a sabbatical (mine was unofficial and unpaid) is the only one that did anything for me. At least I am honest with myself about wanting to do nothing for a while, instead of having the internal turmoil of getting paid to do nothing. More precisely, being on a sabbatical lets you really go after the things that you really want to do, rather than just being a zombie. Naturally, I am assuming that you are not a zombie in your spare time.

What essentially happens when you do this is you are excavating layers of your consciousness from the outside to as deep inside as possible, until you strike gold. I’ve tried this exercise at various times in my life with mixed results. Sometimes I come up with goals that I used to have when I was a young child, other times I end up with something that just isn’t so satisfactory. I think that the problem with me is that writing as a brain-digging tool is not really doing it for me.

So, what could we try instead? Well, this summer I had the fortune of landing an interesting job. Well, if you’ve known me for any length of time, you know that when I use the word “interesting,” I really mean to say odd-ball off-the-wall wacko.

Anyhow, the job is being an unskilled labourer flunkie, working under the supervision of a man who is renovating his house. The man in question is actually an old-coworker of mine, so he went easy on me; he used to be my manager so I am used to having him as my boss. The duties of the job is essentially: perform whatever task is required of me by my boss. Things include putting up insulation, ripping out parts of the house, moving heavy things around, and when there is nothing else left to do: digging in the backyard.

To be more specific, the digging was really filling in a ditch that has already been dug. Nevertheless, filling in the ditch required me to dig at the large mounds of previously dug dirt, and then filling up the ditch. For all intents and purposes, I am digging.

This was back in July, when the weather was sweltering hot. My allergies were killing me, but I wanted to give the work a decent effort anyways. I managed to get into “the zone” moving the piles of dirt around. I got into an amazing line of thoughts and questions: what would I rather be doing instead of digging? Was there something urgent that I really needed to be working on?

Well, yes. I wanted to learn to play Kermit’s rendition of Hurt. And I wanted to get my blog rolling.

I didn’t quit the gig right away after coming to this realization. But when I eventually quit, I did exactly what I set out to do.

The process that I went through was something like that of a certain prisoner of war. If you are not familiar with the story, this man spent his POW days by playing golf in his head. When he was finally released, the first thing he did was to hit the golf course to play the best game ever in his life.

While I wouldn’t say that I totally discovered my life purpose, I can say with satisfaction that I am one step closer. Maybe I should go back to digging to see what else I can come up with.

Digging image used under Creative Commons from: