Hurry

When you want to hurry something, that means you no longer care about it and want to get on to other things.

— Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance


Hurry

In human affairs of danger and delicacy successful conclusion is sharply limited by hurry. So often, men trip by being in a rush. If one were properly to perform a difficult and subtle act, he should first inspect the end to be achieved and then, once he had accepted the end as desirable, he should forget it completely and concentrate solely on the means. By this method he wold not be moved to false action by anxiety or fear. Very few people learn this.

— John Steinbeck, East of Eden


Busy

If you are too busy to read, you are too busy.

– Richard Foster
Freedom of Simplicity

Live Life’s Questions

I want to beg you as much as I can . . . to be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek answers which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything.

Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

Take whatever comes with great trust, and if only it comes out of your own will, out of some need of your innermost being, take it upon yourself and hate nothing.

– Rainer Maria Rilke
Letters to a Young Poet 

Growth

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.

– Edward Abbey

Perhaps it is my natural temperament to do things deliberately and with purpose (after all, it is the tortoise who wins the race). Maybe it is my persistent skepticism. Quite possibly it is an outgrowth of my intuitive personality type (INTJ). Whatever the reason, I have always been resistant to Wall Street’s incessant demand for growth from public companies.

I have an MBA. I know that investors demand growth because growth drives the stock price up. And investors want the stock price to go up. Q.E.D. But at what price? And over what time horizon?

Yesterday’s announcement of the Pfizer / Wyeth merger reminded me of the long odds such marriages have at success. Depending on who you read, anywhere from 50 – 80 % of mergers fail – destroying vast amounts of shareholder value in the process. Why pursue such a risky strategy?

I am in the process of launching a web-based career management site and if my nascent little company ever reaches the size that we have shareholders, we will continue to drive growth organically and sustainably. We will pay dividends to share the wealth. We will stop growing when doing so means preserving the long term viability of our enterprise.

I have my suspicions as to why “growth at all costs” is so prevalent. Wall street and the board rooms of corporate America seemed to be fueled by transaction fees and bonuses. Filtering the behavior of corporate executives through these simple lenses reveals that short-term vision can be blinded to long-term implications. In any case, they would do well to behave less like a cancer cell and more like a redwood tree.

Reading

Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they are written.

– Henry David Thoreau, Walden

I have always been a deliberate reader. When I stumbled across this quote while reading Walden so many years ago, it simply gave me permission to enjoy the pace at which I read. Good writing is more than just conveying ideas or recounting a story. Good writing creates a mood, and images, and evokes emotions — and these cannot be digested while speed reading.

One of my favorite writers is Pat Conroy, and my favorite book of his is Prince of Tides. When I read this poetic prose I am drawn in to the rich and colorful images Conroy is able to create. Every sentence feels like a sculpture carefully crafted.

I had the opportunity to hear Pat Conroy speak shortly after the Prince of Tides was published. He described at length his mean and abusive father which he cataloged in The Great Santini. In a misguided attempt to protect his male children from growing up to be “sissies,” Pat Conroy’s father refused to let Pat learn how to type. As a result, Pat Conroy writes all of his book longhand.

I have concluded over the years that there is a qualitative difference between writing longhand and typing on a computer. When writing longhand the pen is an extension of my arm connected directly to my mind. With a pen in my hand ideas tend to flow more transparently onto the paper. The process is slow and deliberate. Ideas form and reform as they make their way down my arm and out through the nib of the pen. 

A computer and a keyboard represent a considerable barrier to the flow of ideas when compared to the simplicity of pen and paper. Although I touch type fluently, and have been for almost 30 years, my brain has to supervise as it translates my ideas into keystrokes which then emerge on a busy (and often distracting) computer screen. Granted, I can type much faster than I can write longhand, but this isn’t always a good thing. Some have accused Pat Conroy of sounding as if he swallowed a thesaurus. I know that his rich choice of words and images flows from the painstaking effort of forming every word slowly in his mind and then transferring them to paper through the fluid motion of his hand.