David Brooks nails it again. The guy is a national treasure.
In his latest column, he writes about two different ways in which people plan their lives. The first he calls the Well-Planned Life, and he references this article by Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen (It’s a brilliant piece in itself, so please check it out. Actually, I was thinking of blogging about this article by itself, but time constraints are preventing me. I might do it in the future. Maybe. No promises.). Christensen planned his own life by spending an hour a day thinking about “why God put [him] on this earth.” Through dedicated effort, he found his purpose. Brooks correlates this mindset with Christensen’s Christianity. This to me was very interesting since Kobukson recently spoke about how Christianity affects culture.
The other way of living one’s life that Brooks describes is one that he calls the Summoned Life. Brooks describes it as follows:
This mode of thinking starts from an entirely different perspective. Life isn’t a project to be completed; it is an unknowable landscape to be explored. A 24-year-old can’t sit down and define the purpose of life in the manner of a school exercise because she is not yet deep enough into the landscape to know herself or her purpose. That young person — or any person — can’t see into the future to know what wars, loves, diseases and chances may loom. She may know concepts, like parenthood or old age, but she doesn’t really understand their meanings until she is engaged in them.
In this style of living/planning, one accepts what comes along based on circumstances and context. Someone who practices the Summoned Life makes decisions based on where he or she can fit within the current context. As Brooks notes at the end, the Well Planned Life is popular in America, while the Summoned Life is common in other (non-Christian?) places.
For most artists and maybe even activists, I think there needs to be a little of both. You don’t know what you can or cannot do until you actually step foot in the arena, but at the same time everyone needs goals.
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I agree with everything you said. About #1…I think...
I must admit, my initial gut reaction to Christensen’s ideas is that Harvard Business School and Christianity makes odd bedfellows. But I appreciate his efforts to bring his faith to bear on casting a unique light on his profession to bring forth a new perspective, which is valuable.
The allegory of Genesis supports the idea that purpose is essential. Adam and Eve were not created to dilly-dally in the Garden of Eden but were commanded by God to be custodians of creation. The work that they were meant to do was not the dreary work that we associate with the business of \earning a living\ now. It was a work that tapped the fullest of human potential. However, after the Fall, Adam was consigned to back-breaking tilling of the ground while Eve had to bear the pain of childbirth.
I afraid that scripture itself doesn’t seem to support Christensen’s thesis that purpose is something that is engineered by individual agency. This is made abundantly clear in the OT by the story of Joseph, who was sold by his brothers into slavery in Egypt as well as that of Esther, during the time when the Hebrews found themselves a vulnerable minority within the Persian Empire. In the NT, Saul of Tarsus was hell bent on a certain agenda but on the road to Damascus he had a transformative experience that was not of his asking and later he emerged as the radically different man named Paul with a radically different purpose. Saul/Paul has always struck me as the type-A personality; his Talmudic training in the \laws of our fathers\ under Gamaliel was equivalent to that of today’s doctorate degree, and he spoke both Greek and Hebrew. If he was alive in modern times, he could easily be the driven, high-achieving careerist, minus the part about stoning people to death.
I probably have more to say about dilly-dallying vs. purpose later tonight or tomorrow, but related to what you just posted:
Many people say that Paul is actually the one who invented Christianity. That is, back in the day, Christ was one of many people claiming divine lineage, but Paul was the one who transformed Christianity into the evangelical, all encompassing institution that it is today. He was the one who packaged it and turned it into a political and philosophical force. They say that without Paul, Jesus Christ would have just been another name way back when.
Maybe it’s similar to how Plato wrote about Socrates.
Do you agree? If so, it would definitely support the idea of Paul/Saul as a high-achieving careerist.
Yes, without Paul, Christianity likely would have remained an obscure Jewish sect. He brought it to the Gentiles. He made Christianity “multicutural” in cities of the Roman Empire like Corinth, Galatia, Thessalonica, Phillipia, all cosmopolitan centers like NYC or LA in America today.
This is Paul’s view on race, class, and gender:
There is no longer Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male and female. For you are all one in Christ Jesus. Gal 3:28
It is an amazing demonstration of what one man, armed with a mission in life, can accomplish. We are at our very best when we serve a cause or purpose greater than ourselves.
Haha! Okay, I won’t take a position on whether Paul accomplished good or bad, but at least I can say that the man was powerful! And even if I disagree with the message, I do have to give props to him in how he was able to organize effectively and create something that was inclusive (at the time, anyway).
I probably don’t know enough to comment on this, but it looks like most of the “do something about it” movements in the U.S. are based in Christianity. MLK was a pastor, every President has been Christian, and even Malcolm X quote the Bible more than he quoted the Koran. Tony Robbins and all the self-improvement gurus talk extensively about their religion, which is always Christian.
The only “do something about it” movement where we haven’t seen Christianity is the PUA movement. The religious backgrounds of such people is a mystery. (Pun intended.)
Indeed, I think that was the point of my old post about “Talent”–some people view laziness as a sin. As King’s grandfather said, “I can’t abide me a layabout.” The difficulty is that in the past, you could be a productive citizen just by putting your nose to the ground and churning out hard physical work. These days, one needs to find a passion in order to achieve the same level of productivity. To find this passion may sometimes require one to employ a “summoned” strategy.
For the record, I view laziness as somewhat of a sin. Not as much as I did last year, but I can see why the older generations sometimes want to kick some younger generation arse.
For this, I’d like to borrow from John Lennon: “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”
I thought I had it all figured out in high school: go to college, get a degree, get my dream job, build a career, settle down with a nice woman, start a family. Sounded simple, it’s tried and true and works. Then half way through college, I discovered that I really hated my major. I had to switch schools to study what I wanted. The girl I loved had to move to another country for family reasons. I stayed. I finally got my degree after spending 6 years in college, not 4 like most people. Then I got a job that paid me shit, yet I devoted myself to it. I worked constant overtime, applied myself, picked up new skills and got certified, got to know the people in every department, and got promoted several times. Then the economy took a dump and I got laid off.
So there I was, 28 years old, no job, living with my parents, no girlfriend, $80k in debt. Getting back on my feet wasn’t easy, and I consider myself more fortunate than most of my friends (many of them still haven’t recovered). One day I picked up a book on Bruce Lee and wished I read it when I was a kid. His philosophy is the only one I believe in:
“Don’t get set into one form, adapt it and build your own, and let it grow, be like water. Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless — like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water my friend.”
The only “do something about it” movement where we haven’t seen Christianity is the PUA movement. The religious backgrounds of such people is a mystery. (Pun intended.)
Religion and PUA movement would make even stranger bedfellows. But, with the proper turn of mind, one can find subtle hints of religion even in the most unlikeliest of places.
I once attended a PUA conference in NYC where I met a white guy in his 40s. I asked him how long he had been doing PUA stuff and what got him into it. He told me something which I found interesting. He said (paraphrasing)
I’m doing this to overcome fear. I have a lot of fear. It’s not just about the women. I mean, they’re like the carrots dangling in front of the horse’s face. They’re the motivation. But the real reason is me, which is to overcome fear.
This was interesting to me because he didnt look like a guy who had fear. In fact, he looked and acted fearless. What he was telling was a candid admission about himself from his heart.
I once attended a men’s group session where a talk was given by Ross Jefferies, who is considered to be one of the early pioneers of the PUA movement going back to the late 80s. In the midst of his talk, he said
Suffering = Pain * Resistance
Now one might ask themselves, why the heck is this guy talking about pain and suffering in a seminar about picking up women? You have to realize that these sessions are in part like an AA meeting. Many are into PUA studies because they’ve hit some kind of rock bottom in the past. It turns out that Jefferies had studied under a Buddhist meditation guru for many years and he incorporated a lot of spiritual teachings into his PUA work.
When a PUA coach makes a connection between “confidence” and “inner peace”, it has the ring of a religious sermon to me. When a fellow man at a PUA conference tells me he’s doing it to overcome fear, this is like confession and testimony.
When you are first exposed to PUA materials, one will find lots of snappy bits of “PUA wisdom” such as “the less you care, the more it’s there.” When I first heard that, I sensed in it faint echoes of Matthew 10:39.
The bible itself doesn’t talk directly about PUA, of course, but there are a specific passages in the Gospels that would be of interest to someone with a PUA bent of mind. In both instances, Jesus demonstrates “alpha-male” characteristics. In Luke 7, Jesus was dining in the house of Simon, a Pharisee, when an unnamed woman “known in the city to be a sinner” (likely a prostitute) burst into the room to approach him. No words were spoken but there was plenty to observe. “She brought an alabaster case of perfumed oil, and, taking a position behind at [Jesus’] feet, she wept and started to wet his feet with her tears and she would wipe them off with the hair of her head. Also, she tenderly kissed his feet and greased them with the perfumed oil.”
Taking into consideration the context of that time, a woman’s hair was one of her prized bodily possessions, along with virginity, you cannot help but realize what a sensual act of feminine submission this is. This is not the only place in the gospels where Jesus has something like this happen to him. A PUA reads this and asks himself, what or how did Jesus do, say, or act in order to provoke such a response in women?
This is tangentially related to the above discussion regarding PUA and religion but it was G.K. Chesterton who said,
“Every man who knocks on the door of a brothel is looking for God.”
Just read Brook’s article and his comments with interest.To me the constant process boils down to the same thing – take a stance and keep chipping away at it, regardless of what others think of it.Doesnt matter how long it takes, I dont think this stuff happens overnight. Life is an ever evolving thing.We all give and take from each other, and find new ideas every day. I dont believe anyone who thinks they have it all figured out. But to me, as long as your being honest and self-evaluating, you’re always being progressive. Like this blog is an open for ideas discussion and the author is, within his working life and family life, creating an open platform for discussion and exchange of ideas. We don’t need all this talk about activism and constant worship of figureheads from history and dead people. This blog is changing things right now and so are the comments. Thats enough. Sometimes we try too hard or look in all kinds of places, when the answer is staring at us right in our faces. Change is happening right now. Rejoice and feel good:)
I’d say that if one is driven and has a goal very early on in life, then one must pursue that and see what happens. Some people at a young age exhibit talents and predilections that later wind up being their purpose in life. But for a lot of us, no matter how deep the meditation and contemplation, there won’t be a clear cut answer as to what your purpose is in life.
I’m not knocking what worked for Christensen, but the idea of spending an hour a day contemplating what God wants you to do is a luxury. I’d think that the working poor don’t have the luxury of time to ruminate about such things when they’re consumed with the mundane task of just living daily life and what all of that entails. Short of some paranormal experience, I don’t think many people could honestly say with certainty why God put them here. I guess people can have influencing intuitive thoughts about what their purpose is here, but I also think it’s quite possible that one’s purpose might be more mundane and not as grandiose. it might be as simple as one’s purpose being to learn patience. Or compassion. Humility.
Also, in reference to brother Bruce….he also wrote, “To change with change remains the changeless state.” So for him, everything was dynamic and not static. I view the well planned view of life as a cookie cutter approach, a template. Or a conventional way of living life. And like jaehwan pointed out, the more creative types tend to lead unconventional lives. I think most people have both elements….you have a plan or idea, but as others have mentioned, life gets in the way, and you go in a different direction. And i suspect it is about chipping away at life and overcoming hurdles, no matter how painful. As Bruce also said, “Life is combat.”
Leon,
Good quote!
Kobukson:
Jesus a PUA??? I have to disagree with you on that Luke 7 passage. Actually, it seems like he did everything a PUA is NOT supposed to do. He didn’t “approach,” “neg,” or pull any of these games. (Although Jesus definitely could have them. Walking on water would almost definitely beat any of the magic tricks that Mystery pulled in The Game.) In fact, Jesus just did his thing and didn’t worry about pickup. He was living by the same advice that Tom Cruise gave Styles in the Game when he tells him that guys could be so much more if they just worked on improving their other skills.
ABC,
I like your outlook. When you talk about evolution, I think perhaps that’s what is lacking from a pure “Well Planned” approach. To evolve, sometimes we just need to observe and learn and feel good as we do so.
Mojo,
I agree. And I’m learning this too.
Did you see the post I just published on raising happy kids? Happy kids. What a concept! Imagine having happy kids while everyone is pushing pure achievement.
http://www.bigwowo.com/2010/08/raising-happiness-by-christine-carter-ph-d-review/
For a different POV see Driftglass, “How to write a David Brooks Column” http://driftglass.blogspot.com/2010/08/how-to-write-david-brooks-column.html
@ Mojo: The well-planned life isn’t cookie cutter if you’re the one planning it. The more desperate a person’s situation, the greater the need for a well-planned life. Planning and following through with that plan is what will get a person out of desperation.
The more I think about it, the less I understand the difference between the well-planned life and the summoned life. When you’re passionate about something, you are going to plot out your steps to materialize that passion. That’s leading the well-planned life. Yet anyone who has ever held a passion knows that the feeling is far more like that of the summoned life. There is almost nothing you can do but to follow where your passions are pushing you, even if the rational part of you, the “planned” part wants to go in a totally different direction. Passions make you feel summoned, almost helpless against that passion, and yet passions are what you will plan your life around. So… what’s the difference?
TZ,
I meant “cookie cutter” in the context that Christensen was talking about, using business models and metrics, etc….that seems awfully calculated. And for his audience he was speaking to, it seems he’s coming from a very conventional, traditional sense. Go to school, get a good job, get married, raise a family.
I think of the unconventional life of my cousin who is an ex-pat. Spent a year in Paris as an exchange student and decided to drop out of Yale his senior year and stay for some 20 years. Struggled as a writer and artist for many years. Met his Korean girlfriend, who was also an artist in Paris. They’ve since moved to Seoul and both are established artists in Asia and in the States. Success, a career, came to him late in life.
Moreover, it seems as if Christensens’s prescription only works for those who have the means to achieve higher education. Does his metrics and business models apply equally as well for the working poor? For uneducated, unskilled labor? I dunno. It’s valid way of viewing the world, I suspect, if it worked for Christensen. I guess there’s more than one way to skin a cat…
Never said that Jesus was a PUA. But as strange as this may sound, there’s something about the Jesus model that if men learned to emulate, it may attract women. I’ve never explored this topic before.
Kobukson,
That was the big scene in The Game. If I remember correctly, Tom Cruise keeps telling Styles how much better guys would be if they spent time improving themselves and their interests rather than just focusing on picking up women. It’s a good point. Would Yo Yo Ma be as good of a cello player if he spent his time practicing PUA? Would Bruce Lee be as good at martial arts? Would Jesus be as good as whatever he was good at?
Mojo,
When you say “working poor,” do you mean in their jobs or in their life plans? If you mean life plans, I would bet that “well planned” is almost necessary to get out of their working poor status. When you’re poor, there isn’t much time to think and reflect. It’s always working, off to another job, dealing with bills.
If it’s about jobs, most working poor hate their jobs and wish they were out. It’s not about fulfillment or direction; it’s about doing what needs to be done to survive. It’s the difference between a “job” and a “career.” (and in the case of the working poor, many work more than one job.) AntiSocial Ladder posted a good Chris Rock definition a few days ago:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3YWszftWWg&feature=player_embedded
I probably mean both: working poor, as in employed but still living in poverty or just barely above the standards set forth in the US. And poor choices made due to environmental influences. And that’s also the point I was trying to make as well: sitting around pondering why God put you here on earth is a luxury, just for the reasons you cited. The working poor don’t have the advantage of deciding upon a career. It’s mostly low-wage, unskilled, type of jobs.
One also has to consider how a lot of institutions fail those who need help. HBO and David Simon’s “The Wire” series was a meditation upon that and how the drug war has failed as well. He also believes it’s quite rare for inner city children of the working poor to ever succeed when there is so much going against them: from the politicians, to the schools, the police, the violence, etc…. The only jobs that they gravitate towards are those in the drug trade. The steel industry in Baltimore is pretty much gone; lots of longshoremen and dock work at the harbor is gone or has dwindled compared to what it used to be. But it doesn’t have to be just the inner city and minority groups; poverty exists in all environments—poor working class whites in Appalachia,for example.
I wonder if it would be helpful for the government to begin trying to redefine role models in the urban areas. A government can only do so much, and people don’t always trust the government, but it’s probably better than role models who are drug dealers.
Yeah, I dunno if there’s much more that government can do to provide role models. Or how there can be a some sort of well-planned template for the inner city poor. Community youth groups to keep the kids active might provide a better environment or safe haven for inner city kids, but they too struggle with losing kids to the drug trade. It seems like these kids are functioning on the summoned life, just reacting and going with whatever life throws at them. There’s no planning for a future because for some of them, there is no future. There’s only the here and now.
In my work, I’ve seen it. I’ve sat across the table from bad guys and asked them what happened to all the money you made, where/how are you hiding or laundering it? And a lot of times, I’ve been told, “I spent it all. Cars, girls, booze, parties, Atlantic City trips. All gone.” And the inevitable question would be why? They’d answer, “Beceause I never thought I’d live this long to be caught. I thought I’d be dead (from street violence) before going to jail.”
This is what David Simon had to say about The Wire series in an interview with Nick Hornby:
” I pitched The Wire to HBO as the anti–cop show, a rebellion of sorts against all the horseshit police procedurals afflicting American television. I am unalterably opposed to drug prohibition; what began as a war against illicit drugs generations ago has now mutated into a war on the American underclass, and what drugs have not destroyed in our inner cities, the war against them has. I suggested to HBO—which up to that point had produced groundbreaking drama by going where the broadcast networks couldn’t (The Sopranos, Sex and the City, et al…)—that they could further enhance their standing by embracing the ultimate network standard (cop show) and inverting the form. Instead of the usual good guys chasing bad guys framework, questions would be raised about the very labels of good and bad, and, indeed, whether such distinctly moral notions were really the point.
The show would instead be about untethered capitalism run amok, about how power and money actually route themselves in a postmodern American city, and, ultimately, about why we as an urban people are no longer able to solve our problems or heal our wounds. Early in the conception of the drama, Ed Burns and I—as well as the late Bob Colesberry, a consummate filmmaker who served as the directorial producer and created the visual template for The Wire—conceived of a show that would, with each season, slice off another piece of the American city, so that by the end of the run, a simulated Baltimore would stand in for urban America, and the fundamental problems of urbanity would be fully addressed.
First season: the dysfunction of the drug war and the general continuing theme of self-sustaining postmodern institutions devouring the individuals they are supposed to serve or who serve them. Second season: the death of work and the destruction of the American working class in the postindustrial era, for which we added the port of Baltimore. Third season: the political process and the possibility of reform, for which we added the City Hall component. Fourth season: equal opportunity, for which we added the public-education system. The fifth and final season will be about the media and our capacity to recognize and address our own realities, for which we will add the city’s daily newspaper and television components….”
Or what one of the show’s producers/consultant, and former Baltimore city detective and former Baltimore city teacher, Ed Burns says:
” Take just the term ‘war on drugs.’ I mean, they’re not warring on drugs. They’re warring on drug addicts and the users and the small-time dealers. They’re warring on neighborhoods. They’re warring on people who can’t stand up to them. They’re not warring on major dealers.
You can follow it in any city, I don’t care how small it is or how big it is. If the paper is pretty avid about covering who’s getting locked up, you’ll notice that they’re not getting the big guys. They’re not getting the big stakeholders.
I think their whole approach is almost as if they were trying to separate us, trying to separate the classes by saying, “Look what’s happened down there. Look at these people down there, these people and what they’re doing.”
When I was teaching, you’d have a kid in, say, his junior year of high school. And you’d give him a list of things he could possibly do when he gets out. He could be a doctor, lawyer, all this kind of stuff. We’d make one of the options “drug addict,” and there are kids who always check it off.
The media reports as if these kids have all of these options, and they consciously make this decision to become a drug addict, and to risk the consequences of going up to the corner and getting themselves killed. That decision was made for him long before that kid got to be in the 11th grade. A lot of guys don’t even get that far…..”
http://reason.com/archives/2008/03/07/someone-has-to-start-wondering
Christensen’s Christianity is LDS (Mormonism). They hold to a pre-mortal existence in heaven, whence God plucks them and puts them on the earth to attain some purpose of His. For an LDS, then, figuring out to what end one is here ranks perhaps much higher than for for many other Christians, who may tend to some of the models outlined in the Four Gospels of the New Testament rather than the Book of Mormon, where one “drops one’s nets” and follows the Christ, or perhaps “goes before Him to Galilee,” models that speak to the “called life” Brooks outlines.
Shodhin Geiman,
Thanks for your comment. I’ll be checking out your blog.