Impatience with Negativity

I’m tired of hearing why something won’t work. Ironically, I don’t think people see me as an optimist, but if I’m not…God help us.

I’ve been reading a lot of controversial stuff lately and it is amazing how much negativity is out there and how quick people are to shoot down ideas. Career columnist Penelope Trunk published a couple of Yahoo Finance columns in the past couple weeks on Etiquette tips in the Generation Y Workplace and advice for women to achieve success. Her suggestions were controversial–like “Show some flesh — but just enough” and “Don’t ask for time off, just take it.” These tips ignited a firestorm of self-righteous indignation and personal attacks from thousands of Yahoo readers.

I read the, “The 4-Hour Workweek,” by Timothy Ferriss. I actually have not heard or read any reviews of it, but I don’t need to…I can already hear the chorus of negativity from people who think his advice is at best idiotic and at worst, immoral. I mean, the central, tangible example he gives as a path to success is to 1) set up some kind of web business where you pass yourself off as an expert and sell advice to other suckers (like he does with the book) and 2) get your boss to let you telecommute so you can work 4 hours a week but trick the boss into thinking you are still working full time.

And finally, I saw the Michael Moore movie, Sicko, which continues his formula of shock and embarrass by asking uncomfortable questions of people and reporting only the facts that make his stories most appalling.

In each case, I do not agree 100% with the message or methods of these authors. However I believe they are all coming from a point of view that is authentic and honest in a search for solutions to problems. We have had enough of the negative–people just telling us “the world is going to end.” Nobody cares. There is nothing we can do about it anyway. So simply identifying the problems in our society merely serves to depress us. I think we’ve all believed that if only the problem could be defined, someone would solve it…but reality is it isn’t happening.

Giving people career advice on how to ace an interview is no good if all you end up with is working in a job you hate. Telling people not to tolerate harassment is no good if they can only see litigation as the alternative to suffering.

Describing a complicated plan to buy real estate or invest in foreign exchange or trade stocks or think and grow rich or whatever…is just a recipe for disappointment. Everybody has a freakin plan to sell you…their freakin plan. We read and we learn nothing because we can’t every really duplicate these things.

And health care reform? As Michael Moore describes, we are kept in a state of fear and desperation, afraid to ask for anything better, accepting without question the counter arguments of how any solutions would be worse than the awesome system we have now. Academics write papers, everybody talks about Sweden and France…but not in America.

But I think the tide is about to turn. It’s not just about radical voices–there have always been people who rattled the cages of the establishment and shocked us. What is different is that I believe we, as a society, are starting to do more learning by doing, learning by experimentation, and are becoming unshackled from our assumptions. It is less dramatic in the career and lifestyle areas, but the longer term implications are for a window of opportunity for social change.

It’s not the advice that matters…in the case of Penelope Trunk, telling people they can take off work without asking is, in most cases, a recipe for getting yourself fired. It’s such a radical suggestion that you have to say to yourself, “Why would she say that?” or “In what world would that work?” The answer is that our workplace dynamics are changing and we need to question what are the underlying principles? It gets people to start thinking and re-examining their assumptions.

As for Ferriss and his crazy book…if you actually read the book you can see that what he is ultimately talking about is how you take control of a purposeful life…now maybe my ideal life is nothing like his, but it is helpful to see the kinds of questions he asked and how he violated “the rules.” It’s not a cookbook to follow in his footsteps, it is an exercise in getting people to think differently and then test their own assumptions.

Finally, for Michael Moore. OK, taking a boat down to Cuba to ask for medical treatment from Guantanamo Bay is a pointless exercise of course. And when he is in Cuba, yes, I bet his people got better treatment than if they had just gone their on their own without the cameras. But we need to stop shooting these things down with the obvious objections and say, “OK, maybe the rest of the world is not perfect…but can’t we just do the things they do right?”

The scant evidence I have for a change of cultural perspective is what I see happening in online communities and social media. People are diving in headfirst to things like myspace and facebook and figuring it out as they go along. The open source movement…linux, etc. seemed like it didn’t have a chance when people first talked about it a decade ago. But people are experimenting and learning all over the place. They are tuning out of mainstream media and going online against steep learning curves to find and create value in many unprecedented ways. A blog entry cannot, in a few minutes of my theorizing, prove anything. But I believe there is a fundamental difference evolving. It’s not my job to write a paper that solves for it all…maybe I just start the ball rolling or kick it along a little bit. Then others will take up the cause.

This is the decentralization of movement politics. It’s a movement without leaders so much as protagonists. A terrible book I once read said that man’s ego was the fountainhead of human progress…the fundamental premise of individualism and key individuals driving everything through their rational ideas. I think the fountainhead ran dry a long time ago and what we are seeing now is the birth of a collaborative–not a collective–will or impulse, that, leveraged by technology-enhanced connections and social media is going to change everything.