Tag / work

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

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

What are you afraid of?

Why haven’t you started yet? Why have you not launched your side-hustle? Or started tackling that new skill you need to get a new career?

Is it really the fear of failure? If you start a side-hustle and it fails, who cares? You didn’t lose your job. You aren’t out on the streets.

If you try to learn a new skill and find that you are completely uninterested or you don’t have a knack for it, why does that matter? What has it cost you? Absolutely nothing.

So is it failure that scares us, or something else?

Maybe the reality is we don’t feel like we are good enough. We feel like phonies, that if we put something out there, people will see us as such – that we are not experts. We are simply amateurs, and they might scoff at us.

Or maybe it’s the actual shipping of your idea or work that scares you. Because in order to make it work, in order to get it started, you have to tell someone about it. You have to try and get someone to bite.

And they might say no.

Why does this terrify us? It’s just one person, or two, or ten. But you only need one person to say yes in order to get the ball rolling.

And if no one says yes, then make better work, make different work, until someone says yes.

Ask yourself today what you are really afraid of, then see it for what it is and act.

by Nathan Coumbe

Solve interesting problems

One of my passions, and pain points, is the state of modern education in the US. Everyone knows that it’s not working well: children are leaving schools, both public and college-level, less prepared for careers than ever before.

The reason is simple: schools are operating on outdated modes of education in which students are taught to sit still, obey, memorize lots of information, regurgitate it on a test, and then promptly forget everything they just memorized.

The creative ones, the wiggle worms, speakers, artists, drawers, engineers – they are all stifled in the name of obedience. Yes, I realize that to have 35 kids in a classroom, you can’t have them all doing their own weird and wacky things, but answer this question for me:

When was the last time you got paid to regurgitate information on a standardized test?

What is school for? Seth Godin asks this question often. I believe the answer should be to educate and prepare children and young adults to create, innovate, contribute, and solve interesting problems for society. It is not about asking, “Will this be on the test?”

None of the “tests” you face in real life are multiple choice, with answers you found in a textbook and memorized only to forget them a hour later. When an irate customer is standing in front of you, there is no clear, right answer. There is an answer that might make things better or not; it’s up to you to figure that out.

When a new idea is dropped on your desk by a leader, you have to collaborate with your team, find and utilize resources, synthesize information, and come up with a solution for the project. How is memorizing a bunch of unrelated information that is kept separate from other information in the spirit of division called “subjects” helpful in this regard?

Why not instead teach people how to solve interesting problems? Teach how to find answers to questions on their own, how to create connections between information across varying fields and periods of time, how to think, and more importantly, how to learn when formal education stops.

Greg McKeown triggered this train of thought for me in his book Essentialism when he wrote the following:

“What if schools eliminated busywork and replaced it with important projects that made a difference to the whole community? What if all students had time to think about their highest contribution to their future so that when they left high school they were not just starting on the race to nowhere?”

Greg McKeown, Essentialism

The Industrial Age in the United States has ended; factory work is quickly becoming a thing of the past, as much as parts of our culture want to hang on to it. Our schools cannot continue teaching in the same mold as as they used to, when everyone eventually went to work on an assembly line. Employers no longer need cogs in machines; they need creative thinkers and problem-solvers equipped with the skills of communication, collaboration, analysis, leadership, and learning (yes, it is a skill).

In short, we need to teach people how to solve interesting problems.

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

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

New toys

There is nothing quite like coming home and opening new toys. Even when you’re almost 30.

My new practice and teaching kit arrived today, and I could not be more thrilled.

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?

by Nathan Coumbe

You can’t always do what you want.

Sometimes all of your available time is taken up by getting things done that have nothing to do with your passion, your dream job, or anything else you are pursuing

The laundry has to be done; the home can’t be left unclean and disheveled; dinner must be cooked. Every artist, writer, musician, every genius in every field…they still have to eat, sleep, and live.

Do what must be done so that you can later do what you want done.

by Nathan Coumbe

Leave a legacy

What calls you? What pull do you feel in the pit of your stomach when you think about it? What is that something that fires you up, fills you with passion, excites you at the thought of contributing?

“You vocation will leave a legacy.”

– Dan Miller, 48 Days to the Work You Love

Vocation, career, and job are three different things, and vocation is the one on which you must focus first. Your vocation, your calling – that is what will leave its impact on the world.

I have been gifted with an insatiable curiosity all my life which has made me the consummate student, and the best teachers are always lifelong students. My calling, the pull I feel in my stomach, is to leave the world a better, more informed, more educated, and more beautiful place because of the knowledge and wisdom I hope to impart to others. Whenever someone talks about educational reform, or better ways of learning and teaching, or how to truly prepare others for the real world outside of an outdated, industrialized classroom, I feel called to contribute.

You see now that this calling can cover a variety of different careers: teacher, coach, politician, entrepreneur, musician, artist, writer. So many different titles could fulfill this calling as long as I use that career to leave the legacy for which I am striving.

So today, sit for a few minutes and listen to what your life has to say to you and about you. Recognize those moments when you feel truly inspired and truly tuned in to something going on around you or something to which you are listening. Ask yourself what you want to be remembered for when you are gone from the world.

What legacy do you wish to leave?