Category / work

by Nathan Coumbe

You are doing just fine. Relax.

We are constantly getting caught up – in what we don’t have, haven’t accomplished, how far we have to go, what we need to be doing next to get where we think we want to go.

It’s exhausting.

It’s also very frustrating and discouraging if you are not careful. When you find yourself getting caught up in all the stuff bouncing around your head, it helps to take a step back and look at things from a bird’s-eye view.

View your life on a timeline. I will illustrate with my own:

15 years ago, I was beginning one of the darkest periods of my life: bad relationships, growing up way too fast because my home life was falling apart, deep depression, severe anxiety – these were just a few of the treats I unknowingly had in my future.

10 years ago, I was just beginning college with an idea of what I wanted to do with my life – an idea that changed almost a dozen times in five years.

5 years ago, I was finishing my senior year of college. After graduation, I took a job making money that had me living below the poverty line in Mississippi. I was making about half of what I spent on my college education.

In the last five years, I graduated, got married, worked in five distinctly separate fields, got promoted three times, was actively recruited by a company because of skills I developed outside of college, and more than doubled my income.

It’s easy to get stuck on how far you have to go and all the things you haven’t yet accomplished. Don’t forget to look back and see how far you’ve come. The perspective will instantly change how you feel.

Relax. You’re doing just fine.

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by Nathan Coumbe

Averaging out

It is amazing that our workplaces push so hard to average out employees in a culture that places so much emphasis on sports.

“How could you have a soccer team if all were goalkeepers?”

–Desmond Tutu

On a football team, players have specific roles assigned based on their talents and, many times, physical traits. Quarterbacks don’t fill in for linebackers and vice versa.

The only way for businesses to thrive is to focus on and develop the strengths and differences of their teams; averaging them out into mindless automatons squashes creativity, collaboration, and synergy. Different strength areas in an individual combined with the complimentary strengths of others make an effective team.

If there are genuine weaknesses inhibiting an employee from performing, it must be addressed. However, to focus exclusively on weaknesses, rather than the uniqueness of the individual, makes little sense. Even as children we were taught not to attempt to fit round pegs in square holes. The shapess are different, and they are ideally suited certain places.

The same is true in work: find the right person with the right talents that multiplies the performance of a role and team.

Making everyone a linebacker makes for a losing team.

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by Nathan Coumbe

What would it take to replace you?

Think about your work and personal life for a moment.

What qualities and skills would your employer look for in a new hire were she attempting to replace you?

Be that person now.

What would your spouse, significant other, or children look for in a partner or role model if you weren’t around?

Be that person now.

Start.

Be the person others in your life want and need; you will become nearly impossible to replace.

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by Nathan Coumbe

The instrument is a means to an end

Instrument – noun 

  1. A tool or instrument; 
  2. a thing used in pursuing an aim; 
  3. an object or device used to produce musical sounds.

The purpose of an instrument is to accomplish a goal. Play a song; perform surgery; type a book; draw a sketch.

Why, then, do we spend so much time focused on learning the tool, the means to the end, rather than pursuing the end itself?

How ridiculous would it be for a surgeon to spend four years of her education learning how to use a scalpel? His end goal is to perform surgery, and the scalpel is simply a tool to help her achieve that goal. So she focuses on what he is trying to accomplish, rather than on the scalpel, and learns to use the scalpel to achieve the goal – helping the patient lying in front of her.

A drum set, trumpet, guitar, or violin is a tool used to create music. And yet, in conversations I’ve had with other musicians and from my own personal experience, an inordinate amount of time in the education of a musician is spent on technical exercises or non-musical experiences. 

I am not diminishing the importance of mastering every facet of one’s tool – a surgeon must be a master with a scalpel; a musician must be in total control of her instrument. But to focus on technique, on the instrument only, while ignoring the purpose for which it was created, is to learn only half of a craft. 

How different would an artist’s life be if every exercise or technical study was drawn from a major work in her field? What if, in learning a song, one created one’s own technical exercises that enabled mastery of the music being played, rather than technique for technique’s sake? 

Learn medicine, not scalpel technique.

Learn to create art, not how to use a pencil.

Lean to play music, not an instrument.

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by Nathan Coumbe

What if we all just stopped?

Is every single person born with the potential to be creative?

Yes.

So if we are all creative in some unique way (and we are), what would happen if we all stopped working in areas or jobs in which we felt obligated, and we all started working in our own areas of creative genius?

Does each of us have the potential to succeed in our unique creative gift? Is it that many of us never get the chance because of environmental factors or fear?

Could the marketplace support 100% engagement by all creatives? I think so; creativity doesn’t have to be writing, art, or music. Some people are creative in areas of building, business, leadership, plumbing, carpentry, or any other area that a modern society needs in order to thrive.

Food for thought.

by Nathan Coumbe

It may not feel like much

It may not feel like much when it’s all you can physically do.

I’m speaking, of course, on producing, practicing, or creating when there just isn’t enough time in the day to get much of anything done. On those days, all you can do is all you can do.

And all you can do is good enough.

Write a few sentences instead of fretting over not writing a chapter.

Practice your instrument for 15 or 20 minutes instead of saying, “screw it” because you didn’t master an entire piece today.

Draw a doodle comic, not some magnificent portrait.

Go for a 10 minute walk rather than beating yourself up over the fact that you didn’t spend an hour at the gym.

Incremental improvement. Streaks. Baby steps. 5 minutes here; another 8 minutes there. This is how progress is made.

Change your mindset; realize that you are building mental fortitude and creating habits when you do just a little something each day rather than adopting an all-or-nothing mindset.

You might feel like you suck. You don’t. You’re doing a heck of a lot better than the person that decided not to show up today.

And if you can’t do anything at all, wipe the slate clean and show up again tomorrow.

by Nathan Coumbe

Stop telling people to avoid the arts

How many of us have told someone that she should choose a real major, one that is applicable in today’s job market, rather than pursue something creative like art, music, or literature?

(RAISES HAND)

Why do we do this? It is well-meaning enough, I suppose: we don’t want them to struggle financially, we don’t want them to fail, we don’t want them to get hurt because it is so hard to live as an artist…

Let’s just stop, shall we?

What if the person to whom you gave this advice is actually quite talented as a writer? What if she has spent so much of her free time drawing, painting, and sculpting that she has become a fantastic artist? Do you really feel comfortable telling her that she should go get her MBA, work in middle management, collect her benefits, get the 401(k) match, and just worry about “all that artsy stuff” in her off hours, because she can’t make real money in the arts? Why is that good advice (especially when that last claim is bogus)?

Handle Money. Fail often.

Why don’t we teach her instead? Let’s make sure that we are teaching our children how to handle their finances, how to live on a budget, spend less than they make, save money, make money, and how to avoid debt at all cost (this is the real reason so many of us starve these days). We should most definitely teach her not to go $100,000 in student loan debt for her MFA in painting, but that does not mean we should tell her not to pursue her passion – those are not the same thing.

At the same time, we should also be teaching her to fail and fail often. Have her start trying to sell her art online. That doesn’t work? Should we tell her that she should quit and go get a real job? No! You don’t tell a child to stop trying to ride a bike because she fell off and scraped her knee; you tell her to get up and encourage her to try again.

Do the same thing with your creative child or friend. Encourage her start teaching other people what it is that she knows. She can make online videos of her work so that others can see it and her ideas will spread. Find whatever avenue works for her.

Encourage

There has never been a better time to be an artist than today – the market is wide open, the possibilities are limitless. You can be an artist in anything at which you are talented; it does not have to be a traditional “art”. Let’s focus on teaching our family and friends the right skills they need to survive and thrive – let’s teach creativity, leadership, personal finance, marketing and storytelling. Then let’s send them forth to pursue that which they most truly enjoy.

If we can teach them to handle money well, and to learn and grow from failure, they will all be fine.

We will all be just fine.

by Nathan Coumbe

Why did they not follow a passion?

One of the most common subjects we talk about these days is following our passions. Some of us are passionate about music, art, or writing, while others enjoy business, finance, and marketing. Regardless of the specifics, many of the conversations among our peer groups revolve around ways in which we can pursue careers and success in these areas. It has gotten me thinking about our parents’ generation and those that came before.

Most of the media on television or the internet today lampoons the adults of the mid-20th century, who went to a white-collar office job or a blue-collar factory job every day, did the same boring thing day after day, left at 5pm, came home, and spent the rest of the evening watching television before falling asleep and doing it all over again the next day. It is obviously satirical in many cases, but it also doesn’t seem far from the truth.

Why did our parents and grandparents do that? Was that all that was available to them? Did they not have specific passions they wanted to pursue? Were they actually content with working simply to earn an income to buy a house with a two-car garage for their 2.5 children to live happily ever after in the suburbs? Did they not also spend time with their friends and family discussing art, music, or writing and how they might pursue these areas? Does that explain why so many of them are portrayed today as drinkers and layabouts at home?

I don’t have an answer to this question; it just seems to me that the idea of pursuing passion areas as a career is a relatively modern one. Perhaps it is born from the end of the industrial age where factory work (and yes, office work counts) has been replaced by information work. We are now required to be creative and unique in order to stand out and survive in a globalized economy.

I just want to know if the passion was there and got stamped out, or if passion just never entered their minds.

by Nathan Coumbe

Your time or your money?

40 hours is a lot of time, and this doesn’t even include the time spent getting to and from work; on a good day, it takes me 30 minutes one way to get there – on a bad day, more than an hour.

How much of that 40-hour block is spent actually producing work or making a profit for your company? How much of it is spent staring at a clock?

At what point does making more money become less valuable than having more time?

Can you be satisfied, temporarily, by only making enough to get by while you create and ship something that truly matters to the world?