Have I ever mentioned that I hate painting? Yet last year I decided that I simply could not face another winter of staring at white walls. So I made lemonade from the lemon of a downswing in work. And while I'm still ambivalent about the "Shamrock Shake" green of the bathroom, everything else has (so far) lived up to expectations.
Podcasts are good for improving the time spent inching a brush along trim and drywall. Sometimes, too, it's good just to unplug and go on walkabout through one's own head. Ultimately, though, there's only so much edge that can be taken off the tedium for days on end.
That's where the big picture--the "vision" thing--has to step up.
Running back a dozen years in memory, it recalls the crunch of getting one-point-oh of a bet-the-branch-office web application out the door. The boss--a born schmoozer and salesman if ever there was--turned his considerable talents on us, "selling" us on what a successful project meant to us.
A per-transaction business model, according to him, meant that eventually we could scale to the point where we might occasionally stroll into the office to work...if only as a break from spending all that money we'd be making.
It was horse-hockey, and we all knew it. We knew darned well how profit-sharing worked in the context of the larger firm. We knew that the CAD folks would still have to produce drawings to make the app.'s floor plan component work. We knew that the boss (a huge admirer of Steve Jobs) would never, ever run out of ideas for the programmers to implement. Besides, someone had to bring in new clients for someone else to set up and baby-sit. And, for pete's sake, we were slogging through the tail end of the dot-com bust recession: That whole instant millionaire thing was soooo 1999, don'cha'know?
In short, we didn't for a minute buy into the notion that we were creating the business equivalent of a perpetual motion machine. Jokes about how we would spend all that money (e.g. cappuccino bars in every cubicle) were common currency.
In 2015, that web application is still chugging
along, albeit downgraded from "flagship app." to merely the nucleus of a
more comprehensive (re-branded) product. Of course, the "vision"
never panned out. There were layoffs and re-orgs and fire-drills and
over-orchestrated "innovation" initiatives and nearly every other
productivity-nuking trick management has its arsenal.
Yet there's a reason Mark Knopfler's (slightly NSFW) Stand Up Guy is indelibly linked in my mind with the boss. He's good at what he does. The vision of coming into work just because you feel like it is undeniably seductive. It covers both the extrinsic motivation of having great wads of cash (and vacation time) to burn, plus the intrinsic motivation of offering a venue for the mastery of one's craft.
Similarly, the motivation for all that futzy painting (tri-colour in the case of the living room) had nothing to do with aspirations to interior decoration and everything to do with how it would feel to wrap my line of sight in colour while white and gray warred for dominance outdoors. Even burrowed under a slanket, warmed only by the laptop fan and the sandbag-like weight of a sleeping cat, it was worth it.
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* The second-most infamous sound-byte from George H.W. Bush (after "Read my lips"). The 1988 U.S. Presidential election (a.k.a. "The shrimp, the codger, the wimp, and the dodger" was not exactly a banner season in politics.)
