Category Archives: Human Relationships

Living on Spec

Posted by on May 29, 2015 Comments Off on Living on Spec

One of my children is an auditory learner in a world that honors visual learners, a person with kinetic intelligence in a world that honors academic intelligence. He told me that he wanted to know that getting training, where academics are a challenge, would get him a job.

It would be really nice if the world worked that way. I think everyone would prefer a world that worked that way. Unfortunately, it doesn’t, not at all. Instead of assurances of favorable outcomes, most of life is lived “on spec.” I explained to him that it is a business term that means doing something before you have an agreement on compensation. You need some research, so I do a research paper for you hoping you will pay me adequately. If you don’t, either I accept less than it is worth and insist on payment up front next time, or I simply write off the time I spent on it.

Artists are accustomed to working on spec. Rarely do they get a commission for a creative work, and that only after years of building a reputation. One warm summer evening in Nashville, I was standing outside the Bluebird Café for the evening program. I was by myself since I wanted to be sure to get in. A man approached across the parking lot and stood there with me. He was short and African-American. We talked. I asked if he wrote songs and if he played an instrument and if he had done any work I might know. He was non-committal and vague, giving me one word answers without being unfriendly. Eventually the doors opened, and he went in the back. Later that evening I learned that he was the evening’s attraction, Bobby Hebb, best known for Sunny.

He told the audience that night how many pairs of shoes he had worn out on the streets of New York trying to get a cut for the song, trying to get it recorded. Before he left that night, we had a good laugh together, largely at my expense. He was about the age I am now, and he died five years later. He believed in his song, his art. He believed that it should and would get recorded. However, he did not know—he wrote it on spec and wore out shoes selling it.

Hebb

Almost everything we do in life is on spec, not contracted for. We get an education, never knowing if it will lead to employment or anything more than a degree. Sometimes we end up hating the subject and changing to another major or switching to another career in graduate school. Even then, we are a nation of reinvented careers. I know an attorney who does data analytics, medical doctors with PhD’s as if they need both. My graduate training is in economics, something I did for 8 years, mostly using MS Excel. When I moved to a new city, I used down time at a printing plant temp job to teach myself MS Access, noticing a button that said “SQL.” My new found SQL skills got me a job in healthcare. I learned data mining and took an online course in SAS, and eventually I found myself in San Francisco working with SAS until I was laid off a year later, moving across the country to a firm that did not use SAS. Two years later they were acquired by a firm that used SAS, so once again I can use those skills. I learned all those skills on spec.

Doing things on spec is not limited to professional life. We join clubs and organizations on spec, either for professional networking or to build our social circles. I met the mother of my children speaking French at the Alliance Française. I met my current wife online. In the absence of foresight, we have no idea how the skills we develop today will work to our advantage tomorrow, whether speaking with someone who knows the language we just learned or electronically meeting someone on the other side of the world who is looking for the same things in life that we are.

Reading all of this, there is something in common, and there is no good word for it, so I will use the next-best word: faith. Now, I don’t mean faith in the sense of religious faith, as in believing in God to have eternal life. But, it is close to the religious faith that things work out for the best (I don’t believe that either.) What it means to me is that we do things on spec, and then we have faith that there will be some unknown and unpredictable return on our investment of time and effort.

Because we don’t know how that return may occur, the best we can do is find things that we get satisfaction in doing. I can’t say I enjoyed learning SAS. What I have tried to do in my life is become the best Sam I could be, put myself out there where other people had a chance of meeting me, and trust (have faith) that someone, whether a lover or an employer, would appreciate my efforts—all on spec.

Holding Hands

Posted by on May 13, 2015 Comments Off on Holding Hands

We were crossing the parking lot, leaving a restaurant with friends who had been married for over 30 years. Looking at us, the wife said, “Oh, look, they are holding hands,” as if it were a remarkable oddity. I smiled, and thought, “When did they stop holding hands, or did they never hold hands?”

Many years ago, when I was in my twenties, I lived in France. A French buddy was expounding on seduction, as men in every country do, explaining, “When I touch a woman’s hand, it is as if I had touched her breast or between her legs.” Of course, I never had the opportunity to hear the woman’s side of that encounter, so I have to be wary of accepting it verbatim. Nonetheless, it is true that touch, particularly the least threatening form of touch, the two hands, makes a connection between individuals.

When men shake hands in business, it is firm, brief, and often perfunctory; however, when friends shake hands, they maintain the touch longer, and may engage the left hand on the handshake or with a pat on the back. When men shake hands with women, if they maintain the grasp a millisecond longer than expected, they are conveying the kind of message that my French friend was describing.

Holding hands can establish or validate or maintain a connection between people. Some situations call for more than holding hands. When a friend described to me the death of her young children in a car accident, I did not hold her hand: we embraced. When I met another mother from the PTO in the supermarket, I asked why she looked down. She told me that her sister was dying of cancer and was afraid that her young children would not remember her. As we talked, in the middle of the supermarket, she began to cry. I embraced her right there. Describing the scene to my mother, she asked, “What did you do?” I told her, “I cried, too.” However, those are rare instances. Usually, we can reach out for each other’s hands, to help and to comfort and to say “I love you.”

My wife and I are from two different and distant countries. As we became acquainted on the Internet (thank you, Skype), it was important to us to build and maintain connection, something we discussed. We made sure that we were available to one another for sufficient time to hear how the day had gone and become part of each other’s lives despite the physical distance.

Now, that distance is no longer an obstacle, as we have been married for three years and living together, but the challenge of maintaining connection is always there is a world filled with distraction, some pleasant, some less so. Part of that connection is physical; part of that connection is emotional; however, the boundaries between the two are not clear ones. Some couples consign love-making to the physical connection and leave it at that. We don’t.

When we walk into a supermarket, we hold hands, or my wife slips her arm around mine. We don’t think about it—it is simply part of who we are. When I am driving, we are often holding hands in routine traffic. It was not very difficult for our friends to spy us holding hands. I hope it keeps us as young as school children holding hands for fire drills or to cross the road, but I have no doubt it will keep us connected and focused on how fortunate we are to be together.

It has been written that the eyes are the windows to the soul. I wonder if the hands are not the doorknob to the soul. If you have not held hands with someone close to you for a long time, try it—and then let me know what happens. I recommend it.

Resolving Differences

Posted by on July 27, 2014 Comments Off on Resolving Differences

We come with strongly held but divergent points of view. Although we both have right on our sides, we often fail to see the merits of the opposing view. Nonetheless, we remain focused on a favorable outcome, recruiting allies, using available means of communication to push our agenda. We are strong and tough, and winning is not the most important thing—it is the only thing.
Now, tell me: am I describing a social media thread, an American election campaign, the latest hostilities in the Mideast, or your last business meeting?
As I have watched the latest round of violence unfold in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it occurred to me how symbolic it is of human failure to communicate and cooperate in a wide range of settings. Both the Israelis and the Palestinians have strong emotional and historical ties to the land they are disputing. That these ties are in part based upon different religions makes their claims both more emotional and more central to their identities as individuals and as peoples.
It is also clear that if they found a way to cooperate and live in peace, the political boundaries they are fighting about would become less and less important over time, as economic ties and networks, social networks and business relationships supplanted political and religious stands in the importance of individuals and groups.
What is lacking in their relations, what is so important to our own, in business and personal relationships are these:
1. Even when we disagree we need to find ways to move the process towards the ultimate goal of agreement. By continuing to build Jewish settlements in the West Bank, by continuing to lob rockets and build tunnels under the Israeli border, both the Netanyahu government and Hamas are failing to move in the right direction.
2. We need to recognize that the other’s point of view has merit. If the Israelis and Palestinians really recognized that fact, it would be much harder for either to inflict violence, violence that they currently seem quite eager to inflict.
3. We need to recognize the humanity of the person facing us—dreams, disappointments, joys, sorrows, challenges, all of it. It might be an individual or a nation, but our opponent brings human needs to the encounter, and those needs have to be recognized for a negotiation to move forward.
4. We need to carefully listen if we are to accomplish these goals, to determine the way forward, to hear the part of the opponent’s view that has merit, and ultimately to hear the humanity of our opponent.
5. Only then can we reach out with a win-win solution, which is the only kind of solution that works in business.
We cannot solve the problem of war in the Middle East, but we can all do a better job in our personal and business relationships—especially if we wish to avoid the poor example set for us by Netanyahu and Hamas.