I sometimes like to pride myself on being a lone wolf or not caring what other people think. I like to feel like I can read people pretty well or that I am witty and sarcastically funny. I like to think that I empathize with others and that I am a good communicator (or at least try to be - my mother would say that you can never ask me a yes or no question because I am too political).
Right now, I don't feel like all of those things. I can write my feelings here because the only one that comes here to read them is myself. When I use my blog, I feel like I can be more honest because I am not writing for an audience and this is not looking for pity or self-reassurance. But I do care how I perceive I care how this can be seen. I care about looking weak and vulnerable. I feel like to the best of my ability (and I will admit I am clearly out of practice) I have tried to find friends, people to hang out with, individuals with shared experiences, someone to date, someone to listen to and to talk with. I live by myself in Arizona and I get long periods of loneliness even though my grandparents and my uncles live minutes away.
It is nice to go see them and spend time with them. It is nice to be around people. Still, I feel like I am missing being around people my own age. I feel like I recognize or my perception is such that the more and more time I spend with my cousins the more I feel like to them I am that older single unmarried cousin - an outsider of sorts separated by years. When I try to talk and make friends with other people I get lackluster responses and am not invited to participate. There is something to wanting to be wanted and to feel like you have a place amongst others like yourself. And each time I try to invite myself to things or find mutual interest and common ground, I find myself getting rejected. In the past, I would brush that off and think it is simply a round peg trying to fit itself in a square hole. The discouragement comes from the fact that it just keeps on happening. And once I have continued asking and asking, I have started to become tired in asking and I start thinking maybe I am not someone they want there. I am not good enough.
Maybe I am arrogant. Maybe I am overweight. Maybe my hair is too long. Maybe I am not as vulnerable as I think I am and instead I am pushing them away. Maybe that is why so many bridges got burned in San Diego when I left. Maybe I am the problem. Today, we discussed the question of what do I lack yet in church... Maybe I don't want to know the answer because I am trying to convince myself I am doing better than I really am when in reality I am the problem. I try to be hopeful that God can make the best of an empty canvas or even one with issues like mine - he can see the potential perfection in each of us and that is why he has hope for us. I don't think I am too far gone. I do believe we can and consistently are changing all the time. I just see the common denominator in all of my recent interactions and are beginning to feel like maybe I just don't belong.
How does one find happiness in their life? My mother always talks about how I used to be such a happy little kid. What changed? Did life just kick me down too many times that I became cynical and I am making people not want to be around me? Enough thinking about the why... HOW DOES ONE FIND HAPPINESS AND VALUE IN THEIR OWN LIFE? I know I shouldn't look for others for validation but right now I feel like I can use a little help seeing the good when all I see is an empty room. Maybe what I am really trying to do is convince myself that I won't always be by myself.
Sunday, May 19, 2019
Friday, August 31, 2018
Creating Your Own Happiness
I liked my last post because I typically don't share some of the harder times in my life however pain is part of life and our trials can be our greatest teachers. I did find some relief by embracing my nerdiness. I have always been a nerd. Back in New Hampshire when I took calls in my cubicle at Fidelity, my friends and I were fans of League of Legends and our walls had small figures of our favorite champions. I even wore a few shirts from games I played - Ekko and Overwatch. Gaming was something we all were able to use to relate to one another. I even joked that I would arrange my future office as an investment consultant with LEGO Architecture to see what kind of conversations I could engage with my clients - travel, LEGOs or just investments.
I however resolved that although I accepted my nerdom, I wasn't yet a geek. After moving to San Diego, I realized I was a lot more normal than most of the people I met at church. I will admit that people do rub off on you the more time you spend with them. It was not long before I found a gaming store where you can play and buy games. I was able to play Mechs vs Minions, Firefly Adventures, Munchkin Panic and Mysterium. A lot of these games that I was playing with my friends were fun. I had another friend that was very much into anime. I already owned a lot of Studio Ghibli but my friends introduced me to lot of new shows that are awesome: Cowboy Bebop, Hunter x Hunter, Grimgar: Ashes and Illusions, Akame Ga Kill, Boku No Hero Academia, Your Name, A Silent Voice and Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? And yes, you read that last anime's title correctly... It was a weird time in my life.
With that being the setting, I want to say that with all these different forms of entertainment I truly enjoyed them. The difference between all of these nerdy and geeky habits and what comes next is that I joined the cult called Dungeons & Dragons. I never really understood what it was and there is still absolutely no way that I will wear a costume or cosplay when I am playing. I have standards. The amazing aspect of D&D is your imagination makes the experience whatever you want it to be. You can try to do anything. All you have to do is roll to see if it is a glorious success or "falling on your face" type of failure. D&D at its core is a tabletop game where you roll dice and have stats that influence your rolls based on strength, dexterity, constitution, intelligence, wisdom and charisma. The other aspect of D&D is roleplaying. The true difference between everything else and D&D is fundamentally, you are watching or interacting within built worlds. You are passive observers. In D&D, you are creating a character or a world with its own backstory, motive and style. The dungeon master is the main narrator for the adventure or campaign. He is responsible for weaving your stories together and giving you obstacles that will become the foundation to your character's legendary tale.
I started D&D by playing a tiefling rogue assassin. Tieflings are the spawns of devils with horns and a tail and solid colored eyes. My character has Mauri facial tattoos that would remind people of Darth Maul. He was raised as a mercenary in the Thieves Guild so he has an insatiable curiosity about his infernal heritage and the Underdark. The more I played, the more fun it became as we survived many sessions as our adventure continued to grow. Some of our group left to go back to school but wanted to keep playing. Our DM didn't want to mess with Skype but I was open to the idea so I decided I would try my hand at being a DM. This was the birth of our second campaign. I had many questions about how to start so I ended up getting a few manuals and started watching a bunch of YouTube videos and eventually found my own way or style as a brand new player and DM. The only negative ramification was that I also saw how much I was missing out in my experience due to the group that I was playing with. I wrote an email to a prominent DM named Matt Mercer and I feel like it explains it the best, rather than trying to rehash it:
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I however resolved that although I accepted my nerdom, I wasn't yet a geek. After moving to San Diego, I realized I was a lot more normal than most of the people I met at church. I will admit that people do rub off on you the more time you spend with them. It was not long before I found a gaming store where you can play and buy games. I was able to play Mechs vs Minions, Firefly Adventures, Munchkin Panic and Mysterium. A lot of these games that I was playing with my friends were fun. I had another friend that was very much into anime. I already owned a lot of Studio Ghibli but my friends introduced me to lot of new shows that are awesome: Cowboy Bebop, Hunter x Hunter, Grimgar: Ashes and Illusions, Akame Ga Kill, Boku No Hero Academia, Your Name, A Silent Voice and Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? And yes, you read that last anime's title correctly... It was a weird time in my life.
With that being the setting, I want to say that with all these different forms of entertainment I truly enjoyed them. The difference between all of these nerdy and geeky habits and what comes next is that I joined the cult called Dungeons & Dragons. I never really understood what it was and there is still absolutely no way that I will wear a costume or cosplay when I am playing. I have standards. The amazing aspect of D&D is your imagination makes the experience whatever you want it to be. You can try to do anything. All you have to do is roll to see if it is a glorious success or "falling on your face" type of failure. D&D at its core is a tabletop game where you roll dice and have stats that influence your rolls based on strength, dexterity, constitution, intelligence, wisdom and charisma. The other aspect of D&D is roleplaying. The true difference between everything else and D&D is fundamentally, you are watching or interacting within built worlds. You are passive observers. In D&D, you are creating a character or a world with its own backstory, motive and style. The dungeon master is the main narrator for the adventure or campaign. He is responsible for weaving your stories together and giving you obstacles that will become the foundation to your character's legendary tale.
I started D&D by playing a tiefling rogue assassin. Tieflings are the spawns of devils with horns and a tail and solid colored eyes. My character has Mauri facial tattoos that would remind people of Darth Maul. He was raised as a mercenary in the Thieves Guild so he has an insatiable curiosity about his infernal heritage and the Underdark. The more I played, the more fun it became as we survived many sessions as our adventure continued to grow. Some of our group left to go back to school but wanted to keep playing. Our DM didn't want to mess with Skype but I was open to the idea so I decided I would try my hand at being a DM. This was the birth of our second campaign. I had many questions about how to start so I ended up getting a few manuals and started watching a bunch of YouTube videos and eventually found my own way or style as a brand new player and DM. The only negative ramification was that I also saw how much I was missing out in my experience due to the group that I was playing with. I wrote an email to a prominent DM named Matt Mercer and I feel like it explains it the best, rather than trying to rehash it:
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Matt,
I am currently stuck between a rock and a hard place with my D&D group. I only started playing around 3 months ago and fell in love with the storytelling and the opportunity to create your own sandbox and make something that you as a player love or you as a DM experience with your players together. I began playing with a few friends and as they moved to different places, I started a separate campaign with them, myself as DM. Our original DM didn't want to make the effort involved in digital DM-ing which I completely now recognize and respect his decision after doing it for about a month.
I started our campaign by not having them create their characters until we had discussed the world at large so they understood what I was willing to do story-wise and generally what to expect. That helped them to then develop some amazing backstories and connections between PCs that has been awesome to use.
I had a lot of questions so when I asked our original DM, he referenced me to Critical Role. I started watching your show, Critical Role, from the beginning and it has been pretty epic.
The root problem I am facing personally being brand new to both D&D and DM-ing is that the majority of my PCs are still relatively new to D&D as well and it is a large group - 5 in person and 2 Skyping in from another state. I struggle instructing/engaging my PCs in the communal nature of the story. I feel like I always have to ask what they want to do and they immediately reach for their dice when I am hoping to engage with them or they engage each other socially. They struggle to roleplay and dictate what they want to do and it has been taking away from my perceived notion or expectation of how much more this experience can be:
I am looking more for what you describe the role of a DM to be. He/She is to have a story and give it to the party so they can make something new with it and give it back to you - many times as something you don't expect - asking for what's next... My group simply looks at the story I have crafted and instead of interacting with it, they hand it back to me full of arrows and covered with spell scorch marks, as if I was manning the throwing arm of a bucket of clay pigeons for them to take aim at all ready to go. As a DM I feel like I am being robbed in my experience and that the world I have created is simply being transformed into being full of punching bags or target dummies.
Do you have any suggestions on how to better connect with newer players to help them understand the collaborative nature of D&D instead of just having a DM providing you targets to use your spells and make attacks on? I am trying to create A WORLD for us to play in, when I feel like all they want is a gun range.
In the original campaign, we still struggle with balancing our party, being a mix of characters where some want to investigate and interact with the world and others that are clearly just a bunch of murder hobos. In my campaign where I am DM, the party still has the same issue of always wanting to steal from people or to kill without a second thought of developing the story - which if they were willing to do, would make it less of a burden on me as the DM and more fun for everyone as a whole.
I even went so far as to try and inception this concept into the PCs by allowing for them to use the downtime activities between actual sessions to improve their characters and earn some gold. When they wanted to research things that were pertinent to them and their backstory, I would dive into D&D cannon to find related lore that I could weave their individual motives together to build more of their bond as a party. As they adventure more and face villains, they would realize all of this affected each of their individual backgrounds. I went so far as to tell them that if they shared their information openly it would benefit everyone.
Still, they ask to go off and do their own things instead of moving together as a party and won't work together even when I prompt them that it would be for their mutual best interest to do so. Instead of solving the problem of them not having personal backstories, now they are missing the fact that they all exist in this world together and by working together, all of their desires will be resolved over time as a TEAM. One of the characters as a level 5 wizard wanted to take on a paladin boss and his hunting party by himself and another character wanted to steal a ship from a group of 15 armed smugglers that were providing them passage by initiating a surprise attack on their captain below deck - both situations would have obviously ended with their characters dead. I stopped the game briefly to explain that combat benefits the larger party early on in the game because you have less health and only have one turn to attack compared to all of their attack rolls.
Is it wrong to kill their characters now that they are finally invested in them to illustrate the point that this isn't Diablo or a FPS where you do it all by yourself? How do you help players get into character or illustrate the benefits of working as a team? The biggest struggle is to get them to roleplay period and have social interactions that would create those beautifully hilarious and amazing moments that only come from conversations between PCs or between PCs and NPCs.
Any suggestions or ideas would be extremely helpful because I am at the point where I almost want to quit DM-ing and just go back to simply being a player because it can be overwhelming and I am not getting the "mutual" aspect of the storytelling back that I am looking for. It feels fruitless creating a gift that is being shot at until it is full of holes. It almost feels like I should just write the book instead of playing with my friends because they just don't get it. It's not that I want to railroad them into MY STORY, it is that I want to railroad them into ANY STORY. They are missing the major component that D&D is storytelling and there is supposed to be dialogue and not just dice and spells and weapons and stealing.
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Again, I felt relatively justified in writing to Matt because my experience did lack the social and storytelling aspects. After a few more sessions, I was able to coax a few of my players to roleplay a bit more when I began treating their characters as breaking the fourth wall or as crazy by my non-player character that they would interact with. There were some players though that lost interest and wanted to change their character and instead of talking to me and working with me to write them out peacefully, they chose to commit suicide mid-game. I think this partially reflected poorly on me but more it reflected a lot on their connection to their character as well as the other people at the table. Nowhere in D&D does it actually say in the manuals that it is a roleplaying game. It by its very nature is simply a dice game to resolve interactions, both physical and social.
The reason I wanted to write about D&D was not to say that I am a nerd or a geek. I came to terms with that and that's okay. It was to say that I was going through a really hard time in my life and the power of creating a world and scenarios and reacting to situations with friends was something that helped lighten the situation. It kept me waking up with a smile on my face because of the adventures that I had crafted or experienced. It was a way that I could do that for my friends. I now live in a different part of the country and I find myself trying to make a new friend group but I can still create things using the building blocks left from these adventures. I am probably going to write a short book series using our characters and their adventures to save the world and it is going to be amazing. Happiness is an emotion that you experience through choice not circumstance. I was creating my own happiness through my imagination and shared experiences with friends just hanging out, laughing and making memories together. We were new so there were growing periods as well but I finally realized why so many people love this game. If you haven't tried it before, all you need is some dice and a good storyteller for a DM and a character sheet and you are off and running. Tolkien said the following when it came to fantasy, "Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don't we consider it his duty to escape? ... If we value the freedom of mind and soul, if we're partisans of liberty, then it's our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can!" This is my invitation to you to escape and create your own happiness.
Friday, August 24, 2018
Things Can Only Get Better
It has been a while since I have written down my feelings and journaled at all. I think it's because I want my writing to have inspiring or positive spins however the purpose behind this site is to be able to vent and express myself so I don't have to carry around all of my emotions all the time but have an outlet. The last year has been one of the harder ones in my life but I feel like I have been able to gain a partial understanding of what my father went through.
My father has always been open to taking risks in his professional life and in his investments. There was a company he had built with a few coworkers years after we moved to New England. It was a technology based company and they were one of the first companies to create speech recognition software. With all the potential applications for this technology his company was bought for more than a million dollars worth of stock. The acquiring company was fraudulent with their books and before my father was able to exercise and cash out on any of his stock, the accounting was exposed and the ink on the stock certificates was worth more than the value of the shares themselves. This situation coincided with our family moving into a new home we were building. He then went unemployed for more than a year. He worked for years, received an amazing payout and then had it stolen out from under him. I am sure there were many emotions that he felt over the next many months before he started working again. We lived off food storage and rainy day funds but with time, he is again very successful and he has many things that he didn't have before.
I am not saying that I have made and lost my first million. I am not saying that I have at all lived a day in his shoes. I am not married nor do I have kids. I think the best way to explain is to simply share what happened. Years ago, my life was generally led in a direction where I felt like it would be beneficial that once I graduated from BYU in engineering to go get my MBA. I spent the next two years doing that and I learned a lot. It was a good experience and I learned a lot of things I didn't know before: marketing, finance, investments, venture capital, business strategy, etc. I worked at an unpaid internship at a VC firm. I went to Japan. I did a lot of different things however in my haste, I realized that I went to the wrong institution for what I wanted to do with my MBA which was management consulting. I still feel like I have the intellectual capacity, emotional intelligence and work ethic to be successful in it however my resume and the brand of University of Utah is not tailored to consulting so outside of networking a bunch, it made for months of fruitless effort trying to find an entry point to pursue that career path. Even working with the college recruiters at the university provided what felt like no real benefit.
After looking through my network that I had made and cultivated so far through my professional and educational careers, I was afraid of being too picky in what I applied to as I approached graduation. I felt like I had an expiration date to find a job because of my pre-existing medical conditions that required me to have continuous health insurance coverage that I would lose once graduation arrived if I wasn't employed. I ended up connecting with an alumnus that had what sounded like to me was a really interesting and compelling career. She was able to consult employees of large companies on their investments but her primary role was first and foremost as an educator and secondary as a saleswoman. I was not qualified for this role because I lacked many certificates and licenses but I felt that I could work my way up to it over a few years and I and my family would all benefit from what I was going to learn about investments in general. Still, I felt slighted in all honesty. I was starting a new career in a new industry living at home with my parents making less as a full-time employee than when I was working as an intern and making 30-40% less than if I had stayed my course and stuck with engineering only with a MBA that I wasn't using and a $30k debt that I had to pay off. I decided to focus on my future and make the best out of my situation, all the time hearing former classmates tell me I had made a terrible mistake and that I was worth more and more qualified than what I was being asked to do. Honestly, I still agree with them but still what I was learning about finance, investments and retirement planning had a lot of value that I feel will pay off down the road.
I had to start at the bottom and work my way up. I took customer service and call center sales roles and within a year I had been promoted 3 times. I continued to work hard and was able to make a name for myself in a sales role but quickly hit a ceiling on my progression. I talked with the head of my department and he said that the best route for me would be to head out to investment centers and start doing sales face-to-face with customers and after proving myself I would be able to better qualified to apply for the original role that I was interested in or even some of the B2B sales roles in our department. I took his advice and after passing a few more licensing exams and networking a bunch with various managers in our company I was able to interview for a role where I would be doing essentially the same things I was doing at the phone site but at one of the local branches in San Diego. The hiring manager seemed nice and accommodating but he advised me that although I interviewed very well there were many things I would struggle with at the branch if I didn't start at the front desk. He told me that there was another candidate they would most likely go with but that the branches are really fluid and he would not hold me to any time requirement to stay in the entry level role before I would be interviewed again for the same position. He told me he just wanted me to become more comfortable in the way business worked in the branches. Understanding that I was an unknown entity for him, I was willing to work with that however that was not how my San Diego experience actually was going to go.
As my parents and I drove out, I got a call from that same hiring manager. He was transferring offices. There was a few projects that required a few local managers input and help and he was going to cover for them as one of the other assistant managers took his spot while he was gone. He said that he was still in the same area so he would make sure that things went smoothly for me. Since I arrived fully licensed, the assistant manager immediately put me to work. I did my best and arrived early and left late every day for months. I was part of a 3-person team to man the operational side of this office while most of the other branches in the area had 4 to 6 people. My coworkers were an interesting pair. One had chronic migraines that kept her out of the office more than she was in the office. She was the one that was supposed to train me because she had the most seniority. My other coworker had only been working at the company for 2 months and was still getting licensed but she was being groomed for the next role by the managers and did her best to exert whatever authority she could create over me if she wasn't taking time off and leaving me to run the entire office by myself. She offended customers and did not want to help people as much as she was looking for sales. Within weeks, I was outselling her. I met people like her before but I never had to rely or depend on them. She created conflict when there didn't need to be any and even straight out lied to our supervisor and blamed a few of her shortcomings on me. After multiple failed attempts to resolve things with her, I accepted that I just needed to get promoted and move on. Little did I realize, the original hiring manager had not communicated anything about what role I had interviewed for or my agreement with him to my new acting supervisor and I had failed to get any of it in writing.
To put this in perspective, I will quickly summarize the situation. Over a period of 2-3 months, I was hired as a fully licensed individual but was never once trained in the process and paperwork I was supposed to be assisting clients with. I was hired onto a 3-person team and for probably 3 weeks I was the sole employee that showed up for work because my coworkers were either on vacation or sick. I was told that I was hired so that I could quickly move into the role that I actually interviewed for and the individual that hired me wasn't even there nor did he communicate these facts to his replacement. I was overqualified and underpaid (again on both counts), overworked and underappreciated. The only benefit was not only had I negotiated a better starting salary but I was accruing a ton of overtime pay on top of that. I took on a variety of other responsibilities and acquired a few more additional licenses, both out of necessity and to show my capabilities, to fill in the gaps of my absent coworkers. When I had to leave for corporate training, the replacement manager had to call another office to get someone to cover for me while I was away when he had two employees that should have been capable to handle the work load that I was carrying for months as an untrained individual. Once I got back from training, my coworkers must have gotten an earful because finally they would show up for work but only occasionally were they both there on the same day. I took this opportunity to start working with some of the advisors in the local area, sharing the expertise that I had been trained in at the phone sites. This was successful and I was able to add value in many client appointments and took appointments myself to help out the advisors. 8 months pass and at this point the original hiring manager comes back. He starts grooming again the girl with the smallest tenure at the company. In fact, the girl that originally was hired in the role that I had applied to is out on maternity leave and he trains my coworker to fill in for her saying that I am indispensable in my role. I protest saying that I am ALREADY trained for the other role and I could fill the spot IMMEDIATELY. His response was so patronizing that I can only remember it as a verbal pat on the head and completely ignoring my statement of fact.
Unfortunately, I begin hearing from my friends back at the phone sites that layoffs are happening throughout the company. I feel safe now that I am out at the branch. Plus, I am indispensable and honestly I am the only one that shows up to work. To bring this long and painful experience to a close, I was let go. Partially because it simply was a RIF but also because a lot of miscommunication and lies that happened at the office that blamed me for mistakes made there. Some were indeed my mistakes and I took ownership for them but again they were mistakes that I made in ignorance because I hadn't been trained and wasn't told that they were being tallied up. The straw that broke the camel's back however was a mistake of my coworker who was filling in for the next role, which she pinned on me (intentional or not I still do not know). I have never felt like I could trust someone less than that girl nor have I met someone that was as willing to walk over other people and use her appearance to get ahead. It was completely and utterly shocking to me that someone like her could work in a customer service role being such a selfish and self-centered individual. With the time I spent at the company, I had learned to find satisfaction in genuinely helping and educating clients on what they ought to do with their investments to help them reach their goals. Personally I was being paid less than 0.2% of what I was earning for the company but I figured that would change as I would be promoted due to my performance and merit.
I learned that in personal finance, it is still an industry where it is more about who you know than what you know. They continue to rank and pay their sales people based on products which is a conflict of interest when it comes to what is in the best interest for the client. Promotional opportunities only open up if someone has been promoted, died, quit, or in my case, let go due to a RIF. I didn't have a social life because when I was working, I had 10-12 hour shifts every day and was using my weekends to study for licenses and other work-related things. I do not want to go through this hell again so I start applying to different jobs in other industries. I try using the expertise that I had gleaned and make a horizontal transition. No dice. I try going back to management consulting but use my experience in finance as my expertise. Nothing. Months go by and I know I have been away from engineering for far too long to ever go back to it. I remember basically nothing now since I went straight into my MBA from my undergraduate program. I am only being reached out by recruiters to go back into this hell I am trying so hard to get out of!
Everything so far is only the professional experiences I had since graduating with my MBA. Personally, there were some positive moments that I experienced in San Diego but they were scattered with negative ones as well. Within a month of moving to San Diego, I got into a car accident where I was cut off by a teenage girl driver and because she stopped in the middle of the freeway, I hit the back of her car. I was deemed to be at fault for someone else who had been texting in the middle traffic and lost control of her vehicle so my car was totaled and I had to replace it out of pocket, costing me $10k. After losing my job and months later, I finally have a social circle from my church where I feel like I have found some solid friends. I had previously tried dating with no success and quite a few horror stories: too focused on her career, straight up forgets we scheduled a date, won't accept me because of my faith, etc. I did have some amazing memories with these friends. We went camping together, grilling and bonfires on the beach, visiting national parks, and had a bunch of movie, food, and gaming nights together. I became close friends with one of the Marines in the ward and we spent time at the rec center on base called The Great Escape and went to a gaming store across from the base, At Ease Games. I went shooting with another friend and became friends with a less active member. He was getting back into the church but his family really didn't care either way as they were preoccupied with their rich lifestyle. They owned a few houses and companies and yachts behind the in San Diego Convention Center near Coronado. We completed a bunch of escape rooms, movie nights, anime nights and even began playing and running Dungeons & Dragons adventures.
Spiritually, San Diego was not the best with the exception of our Institute teacher. He was by far the best one I have ever had and was the most down-to-earth as well. The Bishopric was fantastic. The Ward was super inactive. Out of my friends, I was doing my best to reactivate four of them, of which two were either excommunicated or disfellowshipped. Spending time with them honestly was fun but taxing. Throughout my life, I hadn't had such a tough time spiritually. Doubt, frustration, and pride all were eating me up. It was affecting my trust in God and I was slipping in my activity. I did not lose my testimony in the gospel but my faith was definitely waning.
At home, I felt isolated. I had a roommate that was crazy. She was super excited to be living in America. She was Chinese and she was here to learn English which she spoke almost fluently but in reality was trying to work and start a business here without a visa or proper paperwork. I respected that she was driven and successful and I helped her when I could but I have dated in the past foreigners and my family had to work through immigration laws so her doing so many things that were in their essence were false and would've gotten her visa denied, frustrated me frequently. She was a convert to my faith but it was out of a social obligation she felt to her extended family, not out of any actual understanding or belief. She felt alone too so she tried many times to pursue me romantically and I repeatedly told her explicitly that I was not interested in getting into a relationship with her and asked her to stop. It was tiring and for months, I had to lock my door at nights. Not accepting my dismissal she would buy me things which I would give back to her or re-gift to my friends. I wasn't responding to her texts so she bought me a new phone because she assumed mine wasn't functioning properly when I told her that I just didn't want to talk. This made dating impossible in my social circle at church because she would want to sit next to me or hold my hand and I would simply bat it away. I have never been unkind like this before but she was relentless and I did not want to give her any reason why she would think I was leading her on. She simply thought that with enough persistence I would succumb and give in but obviously she didn't really know me. She later when visiting home and her company back in China was denied re-entry into the US and she still continues to message me on Facebook to which I do not respond. Unfortunately, this is also what my friends did to me shortly before I moved up to Utah a few months ago.
My family and I went on many trips during my time in San Diego - family reunion in Arizona, international trip to Peru, etc. On the international trip (which if you haven't been to Peru - go... it is totally worth it), there was some miscommunication between me and my friends over a Dungeons & Dragons campaign I was running. I let one of my friends continue it on while I was away and gave him some ideas of what he could do to continue the storyline. I didn't count on how crazy the session was and when he told me I thought he was pulling my leg. Through some textual miscommunications, I had offended him and in turn the group gossiped and without even realizing how blown out of proportion it had all gotten my whole friend group had written me off without talking to me before I had come home. I wouldn't have even realized there was a problem if one of them hadn't decided to go against the rest of the group's advice to ditch me at the airport and instead kept his promise to pick me up. I immediately went about apologizing to everyone and even though I a few of them acknowledged it had gotten out of hand, right now, none of them will talk to me. It was the most shocking and painful part of leaving San Diego. These were blokes that I had spent months of time with, listening to their problems, being their friend when no one else was, sticking up for them when they weren't there, having their backs and creating so many memories with and instead they burn me over a simple miscommunication between one of them and myself.
Let me again summarize: Moving back to Utah because I couldn't afford to live in San Diego any longer, I felt defeated, isolated, alone, worthless and generally a failure. I had even right before leaving had been given a job offer from a company in San Jose and had moved up to talk the job when at the last minute the offer was rescinded due to my driven record 3.5 years prior. When I had moved to San Jose I at least felt like it was to start a new beginning before that was crushed. Moving to Utah, it was because I was losing at the game of life. No friends. No job. Savings being drained with interest building on an outstanding student loan from my MBA that had remained fruitless. I will be honest, during this last year I have never had these thoughts but before in my life I have had out of body experiences and other feelings that made me think that I was slightly suicidal. Who would notice if I was gone? Do people even want me here any more? It's not that you don't have a will to fight, it's that you don't think it is doing anything and you must be doing it wrong because nothing is giving you any slack. I wouldn't ever ACTUALLY commit suicide. It is a selfish act and made out of cowardice and there is a lot of pain and problems you leave for your loved ones. And moving to Utah, I was heading back towards loved ones. I give Utah a bad wrap because generally, I feel it is overly concentrated and homogenous in its culture and demographics and so people try to individualize and will radicalize themselves or there seems to be a large "Better Than the Jones's" culture or atmosphere. I feel it comes from comparing to impossible standards and not seeing that life is a process. My frustrations were from the fact that my "process" kept being stopped by roadblocks so I feel like my personal bias makes me feel that my feelings were a little more justified than most. Still, this period and these feelings are why I feel like I understand what my dad went through a little more.
I put in the best effort I could. I tried my hardest and stayed true to myself. I even pursued my course of action because I could see a path ahead and it looked successful. Then everything started to fall down around and roadblocks popped in my path and I kept slipping each time I tried to get my feet underneath me. God has blessed me in many ways and I have many gifts that I can attribute to him and the opportunities that he has provided me in life but for whatever reason, for a year, none of that mattered. What lessons did I learn from San Diego? Taxes are high and the weather is amazing. I helped to reactivate a few people and in the end I hope they continue to stay on the gospel path because they no longer count me as a friend. You can help people and love people and trust people and that never means that it has to be reciprocated but it is the only reason or way to live regardless. I hoped I helped someone or touched someone in a positive way because for me, I walked away with a few fond memories here and there. I learned a lot about myself and different hobbies and interests that I really could identify with. I learned that without God, you will not be able to move forward. San Diego is a beautiful place and I would live there again under different circumstances but to be frank it was the hardest year of my life and I look forward to moving away from it and moving forward. It was in January 2017 that I moved to Southern California and I am so happy that I am no longer there. Honestly, life could be worse and I could be dead. I haven't even gotten into everything that happened that made things so difficult.
I make an accounting of this not to look back. Life is meant to be lived as we move forward. I am doing this to lighten my load. To release some of the pain and frustration and doubt and just let it go. Things will be better. Things can only get better. It's time to dust myself off like Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes and get back on that bike - even though I know it is literally trying to kill me. Whether that metaphorical two-wheeler is dating, social life, career, family, faith, etc., when the sun has cleared and I look back at the contrast of what I had to go through I hope I remain humble and be grateful that He helped pull me back and got me to wherever I am going. We are never truly alone no matter how much we are asked to endure.
My father has always been open to taking risks in his professional life and in his investments. There was a company he had built with a few coworkers years after we moved to New England. It was a technology based company and they were one of the first companies to create speech recognition software. With all the potential applications for this technology his company was bought for more than a million dollars worth of stock. The acquiring company was fraudulent with their books and before my father was able to exercise and cash out on any of his stock, the accounting was exposed and the ink on the stock certificates was worth more than the value of the shares themselves. This situation coincided with our family moving into a new home we were building. He then went unemployed for more than a year. He worked for years, received an amazing payout and then had it stolen out from under him. I am sure there were many emotions that he felt over the next many months before he started working again. We lived off food storage and rainy day funds but with time, he is again very successful and he has many things that he didn't have before.
I am not saying that I have made and lost my first million. I am not saying that I have at all lived a day in his shoes. I am not married nor do I have kids. I think the best way to explain is to simply share what happened. Years ago, my life was generally led in a direction where I felt like it would be beneficial that once I graduated from BYU in engineering to go get my MBA. I spent the next two years doing that and I learned a lot. It was a good experience and I learned a lot of things I didn't know before: marketing, finance, investments, venture capital, business strategy, etc. I worked at an unpaid internship at a VC firm. I went to Japan. I did a lot of different things however in my haste, I realized that I went to the wrong institution for what I wanted to do with my MBA which was management consulting. I still feel like I have the intellectual capacity, emotional intelligence and work ethic to be successful in it however my resume and the brand of University of Utah is not tailored to consulting so outside of networking a bunch, it made for months of fruitless effort trying to find an entry point to pursue that career path. Even working with the college recruiters at the university provided what felt like no real benefit.
After looking through my network that I had made and cultivated so far through my professional and educational careers, I was afraid of being too picky in what I applied to as I approached graduation. I felt like I had an expiration date to find a job because of my pre-existing medical conditions that required me to have continuous health insurance coverage that I would lose once graduation arrived if I wasn't employed. I ended up connecting with an alumnus that had what sounded like to me was a really interesting and compelling career. She was able to consult employees of large companies on their investments but her primary role was first and foremost as an educator and secondary as a saleswoman. I was not qualified for this role because I lacked many certificates and licenses but I felt that I could work my way up to it over a few years and I and my family would all benefit from what I was going to learn about investments in general. Still, I felt slighted in all honesty. I was starting a new career in a new industry living at home with my parents making less as a full-time employee than when I was working as an intern and making 30-40% less than if I had stayed my course and stuck with engineering only with a MBA that I wasn't using and a $30k debt that I had to pay off. I decided to focus on my future and make the best out of my situation, all the time hearing former classmates tell me I had made a terrible mistake and that I was worth more and more qualified than what I was being asked to do. Honestly, I still agree with them but still what I was learning about finance, investments and retirement planning had a lot of value that I feel will pay off down the road.
I had to start at the bottom and work my way up. I took customer service and call center sales roles and within a year I had been promoted 3 times. I continued to work hard and was able to make a name for myself in a sales role but quickly hit a ceiling on my progression. I talked with the head of my department and he said that the best route for me would be to head out to investment centers and start doing sales face-to-face with customers and after proving myself I would be able to better qualified to apply for the original role that I was interested in or even some of the B2B sales roles in our department. I took his advice and after passing a few more licensing exams and networking a bunch with various managers in our company I was able to interview for a role where I would be doing essentially the same things I was doing at the phone site but at one of the local branches in San Diego. The hiring manager seemed nice and accommodating but he advised me that although I interviewed very well there were many things I would struggle with at the branch if I didn't start at the front desk. He told me that there was another candidate they would most likely go with but that the branches are really fluid and he would not hold me to any time requirement to stay in the entry level role before I would be interviewed again for the same position. He told me he just wanted me to become more comfortable in the way business worked in the branches. Understanding that I was an unknown entity for him, I was willing to work with that however that was not how my San Diego experience actually was going to go.
As my parents and I drove out, I got a call from that same hiring manager. He was transferring offices. There was a few projects that required a few local managers input and help and he was going to cover for them as one of the other assistant managers took his spot while he was gone. He said that he was still in the same area so he would make sure that things went smoothly for me. Since I arrived fully licensed, the assistant manager immediately put me to work. I did my best and arrived early and left late every day for months. I was part of a 3-person team to man the operational side of this office while most of the other branches in the area had 4 to 6 people. My coworkers were an interesting pair. One had chronic migraines that kept her out of the office more than she was in the office. She was the one that was supposed to train me because she had the most seniority. My other coworker had only been working at the company for 2 months and was still getting licensed but she was being groomed for the next role by the managers and did her best to exert whatever authority she could create over me if she wasn't taking time off and leaving me to run the entire office by myself. She offended customers and did not want to help people as much as she was looking for sales. Within weeks, I was outselling her. I met people like her before but I never had to rely or depend on them. She created conflict when there didn't need to be any and even straight out lied to our supervisor and blamed a few of her shortcomings on me. After multiple failed attempts to resolve things with her, I accepted that I just needed to get promoted and move on. Little did I realize, the original hiring manager had not communicated anything about what role I had interviewed for or my agreement with him to my new acting supervisor and I had failed to get any of it in writing.
To put this in perspective, I will quickly summarize the situation. Over a period of 2-3 months, I was hired as a fully licensed individual but was never once trained in the process and paperwork I was supposed to be assisting clients with. I was hired onto a 3-person team and for probably 3 weeks I was the sole employee that showed up for work because my coworkers were either on vacation or sick. I was told that I was hired so that I could quickly move into the role that I actually interviewed for and the individual that hired me wasn't even there nor did he communicate these facts to his replacement. I was overqualified and underpaid (again on both counts), overworked and underappreciated. The only benefit was not only had I negotiated a better starting salary but I was accruing a ton of overtime pay on top of that. I took on a variety of other responsibilities and acquired a few more additional licenses, both out of necessity and to show my capabilities, to fill in the gaps of my absent coworkers. When I had to leave for corporate training, the replacement manager had to call another office to get someone to cover for me while I was away when he had two employees that should have been capable to handle the work load that I was carrying for months as an untrained individual. Once I got back from training, my coworkers must have gotten an earful because finally they would show up for work but only occasionally were they both there on the same day. I took this opportunity to start working with some of the advisors in the local area, sharing the expertise that I had been trained in at the phone sites. This was successful and I was able to add value in many client appointments and took appointments myself to help out the advisors. 8 months pass and at this point the original hiring manager comes back. He starts grooming again the girl with the smallest tenure at the company. In fact, the girl that originally was hired in the role that I had applied to is out on maternity leave and he trains my coworker to fill in for her saying that I am indispensable in my role. I protest saying that I am ALREADY trained for the other role and I could fill the spot IMMEDIATELY. His response was so patronizing that I can only remember it as a verbal pat on the head and completely ignoring my statement of fact.
Unfortunately, I begin hearing from my friends back at the phone sites that layoffs are happening throughout the company. I feel safe now that I am out at the branch. Plus, I am indispensable and honestly I am the only one that shows up to work. To bring this long and painful experience to a close, I was let go. Partially because it simply was a RIF but also because a lot of miscommunication and lies that happened at the office that blamed me for mistakes made there. Some were indeed my mistakes and I took ownership for them but again they were mistakes that I made in ignorance because I hadn't been trained and wasn't told that they were being tallied up. The straw that broke the camel's back however was a mistake of my coworker who was filling in for the next role, which she pinned on me (intentional or not I still do not know). I have never felt like I could trust someone less than that girl nor have I met someone that was as willing to walk over other people and use her appearance to get ahead. It was completely and utterly shocking to me that someone like her could work in a customer service role being such a selfish and self-centered individual. With the time I spent at the company, I had learned to find satisfaction in genuinely helping and educating clients on what they ought to do with their investments to help them reach their goals. Personally I was being paid less than 0.2% of what I was earning for the company but I figured that would change as I would be promoted due to my performance and merit.
I learned that in personal finance, it is still an industry where it is more about who you know than what you know. They continue to rank and pay their sales people based on products which is a conflict of interest when it comes to what is in the best interest for the client. Promotional opportunities only open up if someone has been promoted, died, quit, or in my case, let go due to a RIF. I didn't have a social life because when I was working, I had 10-12 hour shifts every day and was using my weekends to study for licenses and other work-related things. I do not want to go through this hell again so I start applying to different jobs in other industries. I try using the expertise that I had gleaned and make a horizontal transition. No dice. I try going back to management consulting but use my experience in finance as my expertise. Nothing. Months go by and I know I have been away from engineering for far too long to ever go back to it. I remember basically nothing now since I went straight into my MBA from my undergraduate program. I am only being reached out by recruiters to go back into this hell I am trying so hard to get out of!
Everything so far is only the professional experiences I had since graduating with my MBA. Personally, there were some positive moments that I experienced in San Diego but they were scattered with negative ones as well. Within a month of moving to San Diego, I got into a car accident where I was cut off by a teenage girl driver and because she stopped in the middle of the freeway, I hit the back of her car. I was deemed to be at fault for someone else who had been texting in the middle traffic and lost control of her vehicle so my car was totaled and I had to replace it out of pocket, costing me $10k. After losing my job and months later, I finally have a social circle from my church where I feel like I have found some solid friends. I had previously tried dating with no success and quite a few horror stories: too focused on her career, straight up forgets we scheduled a date, won't accept me because of my faith, etc. I did have some amazing memories with these friends. We went camping together, grilling and bonfires on the beach, visiting national parks, and had a bunch of movie, food, and gaming nights together. I became close friends with one of the Marines in the ward and we spent time at the rec center on base called The Great Escape and went to a gaming store across from the base, At Ease Games. I went shooting with another friend and became friends with a less active member. He was getting back into the church but his family really didn't care either way as they were preoccupied with their rich lifestyle. They owned a few houses and companies and yachts behind the in San Diego Convention Center near Coronado. We completed a bunch of escape rooms, movie nights, anime nights and even began playing and running Dungeons & Dragons adventures.
Spiritually, San Diego was not the best with the exception of our Institute teacher. He was by far the best one I have ever had and was the most down-to-earth as well. The Bishopric was fantastic. The Ward was super inactive. Out of my friends, I was doing my best to reactivate four of them, of which two were either excommunicated or disfellowshipped. Spending time with them honestly was fun but taxing. Throughout my life, I hadn't had such a tough time spiritually. Doubt, frustration, and pride all were eating me up. It was affecting my trust in God and I was slipping in my activity. I did not lose my testimony in the gospel but my faith was definitely waning.
At home, I felt isolated. I had a roommate that was crazy. She was super excited to be living in America. She was Chinese and she was here to learn English which she spoke almost fluently but in reality was trying to work and start a business here without a visa or proper paperwork. I respected that she was driven and successful and I helped her when I could but I have dated in the past foreigners and my family had to work through immigration laws so her doing so many things that were in their essence were false and would've gotten her visa denied, frustrated me frequently. She was a convert to my faith but it was out of a social obligation she felt to her extended family, not out of any actual understanding or belief. She felt alone too so she tried many times to pursue me romantically and I repeatedly told her explicitly that I was not interested in getting into a relationship with her and asked her to stop. It was tiring and for months, I had to lock my door at nights. Not accepting my dismissal she would buy me things which I would give back to her or re-gift to my friends. I wasn't responding to her texts so she bought me a new phone because she assumed mine wasn't functioning properly when I told her that I just didn't want to talk. This made dating impossible in my social circle at church because she would want to sit next to me or hold my hand and I would simply bat it away. I have never been unkind like this before but she was relentless and I did not want to give her any reason why she would think I was leading her on. She simply thought that with enough persistence I would succumb and give in but obviously she didn't really know me. She later when visiting home and her company back in China was denied re-entry into the US and she still continues to message me on Facebook to which I do not respond. Unfortunately, this is also what my friends did to me shortly before I moved up to Utah a few months ago.
My family and I went on many trips during my time in San Diego - family reunion in Arizona, international trip to Peru, etc. On the international trip (which if you haven't been to Peru - go... it is totally worth it), there was some miscommunication between me and my friends over a Dungeons & Dragons campaign I was running. I let one of my friends continue it on while I was away and gave him some ideas of what he could do to continue the storyline. I didn't count on how crazy the session was and when he told me I thought he was pulling my leg. Through some textual miscommunications, I had offended him and in turn the group gossiped and without even realizing how blown out of proportion it had all gotten my whole friend group had written me off without talking to me before I had come home. I wouldn't have even realized there was a problem if one of them hadn't decided to go against the rest of the group's advice to ditch me at the airport and instead kept his promise to pick me up. I immediately went about apologizing to everyone and even though I a few of them acknowledged it had gotten out of hand, right now, none of them will talk to me. It was the most shocking and painful part of leaving San Diego. These were blokes that I had spent months of time with, listening to their problems, being their friend when no one else was, sticking up for them when they weren't there, having their backs and creating so many memories with and instead they burn me over a simple miscommunication between one of them and myself.
Let me again summarize: Moving back to Utah because I couldn't afford to live in San Diego any longer, I felt defeated, isolated, alone, worthless and generally a failure. I had even right before leaving had been given a job offer from a company in San Jose and had moved up to talk the job when at the last minute the offer was rescinded due to my driven record 3.5 years prior. When I had moved to San Jose I at least felt like it was to start a new beginning before that was crushed. Moving to Utah, it was because I was losing at the game of life. No friends. No job. Savings being drained with interest building on an outstanding student loan from my MBA that had remained fruitless. I will be honest, during this last year I have never had these thoughts but before in my life I have had out of body experiences and other feelings that made me think that I was slightly suicidal. Who would notice if I was gone? Do people even want me here any more? It's not that you don't have a will to fight, it's that you don't think it is doing anything and you must be doing it wrong because nothing is giving you any slack. I wouldn't ever ACTUALLY commit suicide. It is a selfish act and made out of cowardice and there is a lot of pain and problems you leave for your loved ones. And moving to Utah, I was heading back towards loved ones. I give Utah a bad wrap because generally, I feel it is overly concentrated and homogenous in its culture and demographics and so people try to individualize and will radicalize themselves or there seems to be a large "Better Than the Jones's" culture or atmosphere. I feel it comes from comparing to impossible standards and not seeing that life is a process. My frustrations were from the fact that my "process" kept being stopped by roadblocks so I feel like my personal bias makes me feel that my feelings were a little more justified than most. Still, this period and these feelings are why I feel like I understand what my dad went through a little more.
I put in the best effort I could. I tried my hardest and stayed true to myself. I even pursued my course of action because I could see a path ahead and it looked successful. Then everything started to fall down around and roadblocks popped in my path and I kept slipping each time I tried to get my feet underneath me. God has blessed me in many ways and I have many gifts that I can attribute to him and the opportunities that he has provided me in life but for whatever reason, for a year, none of that mattered. What lessons did I learn from San Diego? Taxes are high and the weather is amazing. I helped to reactivate a few people and in the end I hope they continue to stay on the gospel path because they no longer count me as a friend. You can help people and love people and trust people and that never means that it has to be reciprocated but it is the only reason or way to live regardless. I hoped I helped someone or touched someone in a positive way because for me, I walked away with a few fond memories here and there. I learned a lot about myself and different hobbies and interests that I really could identify with. I learned that without God, you will not be able to move forward. San Diego is a beautiful place and I would live there again under different circumstances but to be frank it was the hardest year of my life and I look forward to moving away from it and moving forward. It was in January 2017 that I moved to Southern California and I am so happy that I am no longer there. Honestly, life could be worse and I could be dead. I haven't even gotten into everything that happened that made things so difficult.
I make an accounting of this not to look back. Life is meant to be lived as we move forward. I am doing this to lighten my load. To release some of the pain and frustration and doubt and just let it go. Things will be better. Things can only get better. It's time to dust myself off like Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes and get back on that bike - even though I know it is literally trying to kill me. Whether that metaphorical two-wheeler is dating, social life, career, family, faith, etc., when the sun has cleared and I look back at the contrast of what I had to go through I hope I remain humble and be grateful that He helped pull me back and got me to wherever I am going. We are never truly alone no matter how much we are asked to endure.
Wednesday, August 22, 2018
Wealth and Choice
I haven't been blogging as much as I used to and I have realized how therapeutic writing is. There has been a lot of stress, my job has held my social life captive with all the hours, the licensing exams, and now looking for a new job. It has been a long complex last few months. I wish I had more time to explore San Diego and to enjoy the moment. I hadn't really comes to grips with that until recently when my time here has begun to feel more fleeting and verbalized it until I was talking to a few strangers on a plane back to San Diego after visiting my family for my sister's homecoming from her mission to Latvia.
I had two very different conversations on my connections. The first was randomly with another Fidelity employee, also a Financial Representative, down in a branch near Baltimore and then another with an Indian woman discussing about her children. The first woman was engaged to an artist but was a dancer that felt compelled to work to support her fiancé even though they had to live apart to do so. She had a passion that she had to put aside to do something else for the sake of her future husband - she fell into finance like I did. As we talked, we came to the point where she came to a realization of something. It reminded me of a sign I read in Jimmy Johns one day:
The point of this story is that why are we postponing our goals to pursue money and fame? This dancer could run her own studio with her mother and enjoy what she loved for decades and possibly even a half-century but instead was willing to sacrifice her dream for the benefit of her fiancé getting to do that. I hope that she changes her mind, gets an online MBA and falls out of fiancé as quickly as she fell into it.
The Indian woman spoke of her son and how her daughter and son had to both face similar things. They were expected of from their culture to become doctors, professors, engineers, businessmen, etc. These are all positions of power and intelligence and respect. These roles are not important if there is not a whole array of individuals to work with and because of that, they are important. As both children struggle to figure out where their lives are going, their mother encouraged them as does mine to find something that will give you more choices and freedom that also makes you happy.
It was a question of conflicting paradoxes: the paradox of choice and the duality of wealth. There are so many choices of jobs, careers, degrees, dates, etc. There is too much. People have gotten to the point that they can't decide and so they let people choose for them. How do people decide? For my generation, the most common factors are the job title, the salary, and how easy is it. I think most people forget nowadays that what they are spending the majority of their day at is called work. It is hard. It is long. So most people who are lucky are able to get at least 2 out of the 3 things listed before. Even if you are not hardworking there are people who abuse the welfare system and can still get at least one of those things but that is a topic of discussion for another day.
The other paradox is the duality of wealth. The sign shows that not all wealth is simply financial. Financial security is nice! It provides choices and options and the freedom to do a lot of lovely things. However money is liquid - it comes and goes and will flow in and out rather quickly. It doesn't matter if it is taxes or expenses or lifestyle. The only way to really save enough for a rainy day is to make a conscious decision. When people chase wealth it is a very fleeting thing unless they take the time to figure out what is truly important to them in their lives. How much is enough? When do your wants start turning into needs? Is there a grey area or is it clearly black and white? When does supporting and earning a living turn into avarice and greed? How much is enough?
I had two very different conversations on my connections. The first was randomly with another Fidelity employee, also a Financial Representative, down in a branch near Baltimore and then another with an Indian woman discussing about her children. The first woman was engaged to an artist but was a dancer that felt compelled to work to support her fiancé even though they had to live apart to do so. She had a passion that she had to put aside to do something else for the sake of her future husband - she fell into finance like I did. As we talked, we came to the point where she came to a realization of something. It reminded me of a sign I read in Jimmy Johns one day:
The point of this story is that why are we postponing our goals to pursue money and fame? This dancer could run her own studio with her mother and enjoy what she loved for decades and possibly even a half-century but instead was willing to sacrifice her dream for the benefit of her fiancé getting to do that. I hope that she changes her mind, gets an online MBA and falls out of fiancé as quickly as she fell into it.
The Indian woman spoke of her son and how her daughter and son had to both face similar things. They were expected of from their culture to become doctors, professors, engineers, businessmen, etc. These are all positions of power and intelligence and respect. These roles are not important if there is not a whole array of individuals to work with and because of that, they are important. As both children struggle to figure out where their lives are going, their mother encouraged them as does mine to find something that will give you more choices and freedom that also makes you happy.
It was a question of conflicting paradoxes: the paradox of choice and the duality of wealth. There are so many choices of jobs, careers, degrees, dates, etc. There is too much. People have gotten to the point that they can't decide and so they let people choose for them. How do people decide? For my generation, the most common factors are the job title, the salary, and how easy is it. I think most people forget nowadays that what they are spending the majority of their day at is called work. It is hard. It is long. So most people who are lucky are able to get at least 2 out of the 3 things listed before. Even if you are not hardworking there are people who abuse the welfare system and can still get at least one of those things but that is a topic of discussion for another day.
The other paradox is the duality of wealth. The sign shows that not all wealth is simply financial. Financial security is nice! It provides choices and options and the freedom to do a lot of lovely things. However money is liquid - it comes and goes and will flow in and out rather quickly. It doesn't matter if it is taxes or expenses or lifestyle. The only way to really save enough for a rainy day is to make a conscious decision. When people chase wealth it is a very fleeting thing unless they take the time to figure out what is truly important to them in their lives. How much is enough? When do your wants start turning into needs? Is there a grey area or is it clearly black and white? When does supporting and earning a living turn into avarice and greed? How much is enough?
Sunday, March 26, 2017
Finding Joy
I feel like I have had a blessed life. I have had some really interesting trips, travels, experiences - both really good and bad from a worldly point of view. I truly am grateful for all of those things because they help make me who I am. Still, most people only remember the person that they see, their first impression, and it isn't always me. I have heard a variety of things: multiple personalities, could talk to anyone, no boundaries, and smiling more. Everyone is a critic and people see those things as positive or negative depending on their various situations.
I don't think people are observant enough though. I feel like people need to listen more and watch people to begin to figure out who they really are. It takes more time than a cup of coffee or a walk in a park. Social media is simply false advertising - the highlight reel that we put up ourselves for the world to see. The short answer is people are complicated.
God has a plan for all of us to become more like Him. He isn't any Instagram celebrity. His highlight reel would be more like an inspirational YouTube playlist. The question most people have is how do we become more like Him. How do we begin to see people like He did? How do we love like Him? We learn that kind of patience and charity not by studying it out in books or being on an island. We learn it through being together - living and interacting and bumping shoulders with people that we wouldn't normally meet. We have to see every interaction or chance encounter as an opportunity.
The Spirit of God helps us learn the attributes of Christ. In Galatians we read about some of these attributes, "But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance: against such there is no law." I have always found it easy to connect with some of these feelings or fruits of the Spirit because they seemed natural. Others, I have struggled with for a while, like joy. I know the Plan of Salvation is also known as the Plan of Happiness and there are times I feel happy but I don't know if it is joy.
I have been studying this gift of the Spirit. The scriptures teach that you can find joy through forgiveness. It is one of the fruits of gratitude. The joy that comes from service. The joy that you can feel in the Temple or in God's presence. Joy comes from companionship or family. Joy in celebrating the blessings and success of others. There is the joy that missionaries feel when they bring people to the truth. I keep thinking about joy because I feel like it should be easier. "Adam fell that men might be; and men are, that they might have joy."
We make choices in life and every one has an associated consequence. We may have been born into mortality and life is not easy but we were created so that we might have joy. We are here to be happy. If we choose God's path, we can find happiness in every step. Our surroundings may be clouded in temptation and trials but we can be a light unto the world and find happiness through our faith to press forward. We are not just asked to endure to the end but to endure it well. We can choose to be happy. Read your scriptures. Spend time getting to know people at church. Call a family member. Say a prayer. Ask God to bless you with joy. And when you find it, spread your joy because happiness and laughter are contagious and more enjoyable when they are shared.
I don't think people are observant enough though. I feel like people need to listen more and watch people to begin to figure out who they really are. It takes more time than a cup of coffee or a walk in a park. Social media is simply false advertising - the highlight reel that we put up ourselves for the world to see. The short answer is people are complicated.
God has a plan for all of us to become more like Him. He isn't any Instagram celebrity. His highlight reel would be more like an inspirational YouTube playlist. The question most people have is how do we become more like Him. How do we begin to see people like He did? How do we love like Him? We learn that kind of patience and charity not by studying it out in books or being on an island. We learn it through being together - living and interacting and bumping shoulders with people that we wouldn't normally meet. We have to see every interaction or chance encounter as an opportunity.
The Spirit of God helps us learn the attributes of Christ. In Galatians we read about some of these attributes, "But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance: against such there is no law." I have always found it easy to connect with some of these feelings or fruits of the Spirit because they seemed natural. Others, I have struggled with for a while, like joy. I know the Plan of Salvation is also known as the Plan of Happiness and there are times I feel happy but I don't know if it is joy.
I have been studying this gift of the Spirit. The scriptures teach that you can find joy through forgiveness. It is one of the fruits of gratitude. The joy that comes from service. The joy that you can feel in the Temple or in God's presence. Joy comes from companionship or family. Joy in celebrating the blessings and success of others. There is the joy that missionaries feel when they bring people to the truth. I keep thinking about joy because I feel like it should be easier. "Adam fell that men might be; and men are, that they might have joy."
We make choices in life and every one has an associated consequence. We may have been born into mortality and life is not easy but we were created so that we might have joy. We are here to be happy. If we choose God's path, we can find happiness in every step. Our surroundings may be clouded in temptation and trials but we can be a light unto the world and find happiness through our faith to press forward. We are not just asked to endure to the end but to endure it well. We can choose to be happy. Read your scriptures. Spend time getting to know people at church. Call a family member. Say a prayer. Ask God to bless you with joy. And when you find it, spread your joy because happiness and laughter are contagious and more enjoyable when they are shared.
Monday, March 20, 2017
What is the Point? Why Do You Do What You Do?
I have been more focused than usual on how motivations play a deeper role into what we do and why we do it recently. I don't know if it is the books I have been reading or my subconscious asking myself why in the world did I in an effort to get away from the calculator and cubicle lifestyle of engineering decided after business school to go into finance. Seems counter-intuitive if that was my end goal. In any case, it has been on my mind a lot lately and has been the filter that I have been looking through.
In my professional life, why does my branch feel the way that it does? Why does it feel like we are continually understaffed? It is because we are. The operations department is the expense and the consultants are the money makers. If the company as a whole is to make a profit, the consultants need to do as much business as possible and minimize the local costs as possible. Why are we not more helpful to more people? Why are we so focused on efficiency? What is the purpose behind the quantity and not quality approach? It is because from where I work, I don't see the quality. I am in the quantity role. The consultants will sit down with the high dollar customers and I have to get people from the front counter to their next location, whether that is out the door, into someone's calendar or into someone's office, as quickly as possible. We lose money on so many of our clients through free services and products because it is with a very small percentage of all of our clients where we get the chance to really make any money. Since I don't contribute to keeping the lights on, outside of being my charming self, I need to be as efficient as possible while looking for new opportunities for the money makers in my office.
The same can be true for the basic ideology behind financial planning. People hear about new products or new ways to invest but the basic principles are the same. As you save in the present for future expenses, you also need to save in ways to replace the income streams you will give up once you retire. Why do people talk about real estate investing or annuities or pensions? You no longer get a regular paycheck in retirement. You have to replace that somewhere and it needs to cover your basic expenses in retirement. How does social security play in? Have you covered what you need for medicare? You are spending less time earning money and more time spending it in retirement. Have you calculated your change in lifestyle expenses into your total savings as well? Do you have flexible investments that can be more aggressive that will also cover your flexible spending/expenses? People will invest in different ways and with different things but in the end the most important thing is that we help people to plan because it isn't about their money. It is about their goals.
No one really wants to invest and no one really wants to talk with us. They don't really want us to manage their money. All they really want us to do is help manage their stress. They want us to make sure that their fears and hopes and dreams and the same things for their children have been planned for. They want us to help their kids get to college. They want us to help them have time to spend with their children and grandchildren. They want to make sure that when they lose their health that they don't also lose their house to pay for it. People really don't lose sleep over the manner in which they get their returns as long as it meets their expectations. We help people manage those expectations and plan for the unexpected. We become shortsighted when we think the behaviors are as important as the motivations.
The same can be said for religious practices - the spirit of the law is more important than the letter. That being said, how often do we question or ask what is the point behind all the things we do in the name of religious obedience? Why do we go hometeaching? Why do we visit the poor, the sick, and the widows? Why are we asked to worship together or meet together at all? Isn't religion supposed to be about the personal relationship between you and God? Two weeks ago, I was in a elder's quorum meeting where the presidency asked what we as a quorum could do to increase attendance in our meetings? What could they do to help improve sacrament meeting worship in regards to passing the sacrament? The typical answers were given: make a rotation, make a map and have people patrol the hallways and ask people to get to class. This hadn't worked in the past so why continue to try something that has proven to fail? What would possibly produce a new outcome?
People are generally logical and we are driven by our emotions. Why not use the time we had in our meeting right then to fix some of the problems instead of using conjecture or waste time developing plans. Let's change the expectations right then! If there is an opportunity to serve, the correct behavior is to step up rather than look around. Let's be leaders instead of followers! The regular elders will fill most likely fill the empty seats but let's at least have someone passing and then we can perfect the process later on by asking new people to serve. With the lack of attendance in classes, this is again a question of expectations. What is expected of our teachers? What is expected by our students?
We always want to assume that our teachers have prepared a lesson beforehand. We don't want them simply reading from the manual. We enjoy a discussion or activities or any request for us to become engaged. Our expectations however are the boring lessons that we get every Sunday or the one we could have if we read the manual by ourselves from our own homes. We go to those classes despite our high expectations because of our sense of duty. Our hope is that we will have friends or family that will attend as well because it is a well known fact that misery likes company. So why do people not go to classes? It is because we don't want to. Our friends aren't in the classes. Our friends are in the halls. They are on our phones. They are in different places. They are everywhere but in that classroom. So how do we change that? Get to know the people that aren't there before they escape out into the parking lot. Introduce yourself before church starts!
Why do we ask people to hometeach one another? Why are we asked to become a Zion people? Most of these people I wouldn't normally associate with. I wouldn't pick them out of a crowd, nevertheless, work to become their friends. However, this is exactly the point. Many people don't have a friend at church. They don't have someone that hopes or checks to see if they are there so God adds that to someone's checklist. It becomes an assignment to work to become someone's friend. It isn't the lesson that is important or that we see them once a month. It is to learn to love them and care about them. It is through these relationships that we learn patience, charity and become more like Christ. Socializing and serving others is part of the process of refining us and smoothing out our rough edges. We will never make it back to God one-by-one. Salvation is a personal process but exaltation is a family affair. Heaven isn't really heaven if we were meant to be alone.
This brings me to tonight. I went to a missionary fireside. The missionaries were asking us to sum up the principles or doctrines for missionary work. People described talking about what we do with more detail or inviting people to activities. They talked about what we should discuss when we preach the restored gospel or how we have a duty or that we have been commanded to share the gospel. Again, they understand the letter of the law or the duty. They missed the whole purpose behind the gospel and the reason we have been asked to share it, even the way we ought to share it, which can be summed up in the commandment that Christ gave to love our neighbor.
People don't care about what you know until they know that you care. You can tell them that we have the restored gospel and that we have the fullness but why did you have to tell them in the first place? Why couldn't they see it? Why couldn't they feel it? Do you even know how much they already know? Do you know what they already believe? Shouldn't you ask? The most profound and long-lasting missionary moments occurred when I began by showing that I cared before I ever tried to correct someone else's behavior. How many people are surprised when their doctor tells them they ought to start considering a diet to lose weight? Most of the time, they already know that they need to change.
If you are trying to help someone, you don't need to identify their incorrect behaviors. You have to go deeper than the surface. You need to identify or help people recognize their latent or subconscious desires or fears. What is the point? Why do we do the things that we do? What truly motivates us? If you can figure that out, you will know how the gospel can help you discover true joy and happiness. If you want to change someone's life, help them discover that connection on their own.
In my professional life, why does my branch feel the way that it does? Why does it feel like we are continually understaffed? It is because we are. The operations department is the expense and the consultants are the money makers. If the company as a whole is to make a profit, the consultants need to do as much business as possible and minimize the local costs as possible. Why are we not more helpful to more people? Why are we so focused on efficiency? What is the purpose behind the quantity and not quality approach? It is because from where I work, I don't see the quality. I am in the quantity role. The consultants will sit down with the high dollar customers and I have to get people from the front counter to their next location, whether that is out the door, into someone's calendar or into someone's office, as quickly as possible. We lose money on so many of our clients through free services and products because it is with a very small percentage of all of our clients where we get the chance to really make any money. Since I don't contribute to keeping the lights on, outside of being my charming self, I need to be as efficient as possible while looking for new opportunities for the money makers in my office.
The same can be true for the basic ideology behind financial planning. People hear about new products or new ways to invest but the basic principles are the same. As you save in the present for future expenses, you also need to save in ways to replace the income streams you will give up once you retire. Why do people talk about real estate investing or annuities or pensions? You no longer get a regular paycheck in retirement. You have to replace that somewhere and it needs to cover your basic expenses in retirement. How does social security play in? Have you covered what you need for medicare? You are spending less time earning money and more time spending it in retirement. Have you calculated your change in lifestyle expenses into your total savings as well? Do you have flexible investments that can be more aggressive that will also cover your flexible spending/expenses? People will invest in different ways and with different things but in the end the most important thing is that we help people to plan because it isn't about their money. It is about their goals.
No one really wants to invest and no one really wants to talk with us. They don't really want us to manage their money. All they really want us to do is help manage their stress. They want us to make sure that their fears and hopes and dreams and the same things for their children have been planned for. They want us to help their kids get to college. They want us to help them have time to spend with their children and grandchildren. They want to make sure that when they lose their health that they don't also lose their house to pay for it. People really don't lose sleep over the manner in which they get their returns as long as it meets their expectations. We help people manage those expectations and plan for the unexpected. We become shortsighted when we think the behaviors are as important as the motivations.
The same can be said for religious practices - the spirit of the law is more important than the letter. That being said, how often do we question or ask what is the point behind all the things we do in the name of religious obedience? Why do we go hometeaching? Why do we visit the poor, the sick, and the widows? Why are we asked to worship together or meet together at all? Isn't religion supposed to be about the personal relationship between you and God? Two weeks ago, I was in a elder's quorum meeting where the presidency asked what we as a quorum could do to increase attendance in our meetings? What could they do to help improve sacrament meeting worship in regards to passing the sacrament? The typical answers were given: make a rotation, make a map and have people patrol the hallways and ask people to get to class. This hadn't worked in the past so why continue to try something that has proven to fail? What would possibly produce a new outcome?
People are generally logical and we are driven by our emotions. Why not use the time we had in our meeting right then to fix some of the problems instead of using conjecture or waste time developing plans. Let's change the expectations right then! If there is an opportunity to serve, the correct behavior is to step up rather than look around. Let's be leaders instead of followers! The regular elders will fill most likely fill the empty seats but let's at least have someone passing and then we can perfect the process later on by asking new people to serve. With the lack of attendance in classes, this is again a question of expectations. What is expected of our teachers? What is expected by our students?
We always want to assume that our teachers have prepared a lesson beforehand. We don't want them simply reading from the manual. We enjoy a discussion or activities or any request for us to become engaged. Our expectations however are the boring lessons that we get every Sunday or the one we could have if we read the manual by ourselves from our own homes. We go to those classes despite our high expectations because of our sense of duty. Our hope is that we will have friends or family that will attend as well because it is a well known fact that misery likes company. So why do people not go to classes? It is because we don't want to. Our friends aren't in the classes. Our friends are in the halls. They are on our phones. They are in different places. They are everywhere but in that classroom. So how do we change that? Get to know the people that aren't there before they escape out into the parking lot. Introduce yourself before church starts!
Why do we ask people to hometeach one another? Why are we asked to become a Zion people? Most of these people I wouldn't normally associate with. I wouldn't pick them out of a crowd, nevertheless, work to become their friends. However, this is exactly the point. Many people don't have a friend at church. They don't have someone that hopes or checks to see if they are there so God adds that to someone's checklist. It becomes an assignment to work to become someone's friend. It isn't the lesson that is important or that we see them once a month. It is to learn to love them and care about them. It is through these relationships that we learn patience, charity and become more like Christ. Socializing and serving others is part of the process of refining us and smoothing out our rough edges. We will never make it back to God one-by-one. Salvation is a personal process but exaltation is a family affair. Heaven isn't really heaven if we were meant to be alone.
This brings me to tonight. I went to a missionary fireside. The missionaries were asking us to sum up the principles or doctrines for missionary work. People described talking about what we do with more detail or inviting people to activities. They talked about what we should discuss when we preach the restored gospel or how we have a duty or that we have been commanded to share the gospel. Again, they understand the letter of the law or the duty. They missed the whole purpose behind the gospel and the reason we have been asked to share it, even the way we ought to share it, which can be summed up in the commandment that Christ gave to love our neighbor.
People don't care about what you know until they know that you care. You can tell them that we have the restored gospel and that we have the fullness but why did you have to tell them in the first place? Why couldn't they see it? Why couldn't they feel it? Do you even know how much they already know? Do you know what they already believe? Shouldn't you ask? The most profound and long-lasting missionary moments occurred when I began by showing that I cared before I ever tried to correct someone else's behavior. How many people are surprised when their doctor tells them they ought to start considering a diet to lose weight? Most of the time, they already know that they need to change.
If you are trying to help someone, you don't need to identify their incorrect behaviors. You have to go deeper than the surface. You need to identify or help people recognize their latent or subconscious desires or fears. What is the point? Why do we do the things that we do? What truly motivates us? If you can figure that out, you will know how the gospel can help you discover true joy and happiness. If you want to change someone's life, help them discover that connection on their own.
Sunday, March 19, 2017
The Five Temptations of a CEO
Patrick Lencioni is a fantastic author. I don't know whether to classify him as relatively unknown or simply that he writes for a very specific target audience that not everyone is a part of. The main medium that he writes in are small business fables that are quick reads - this particular book is about 100 pages long. What I love is that they aren't so wordy and they smoothly walk you through from a character's point of view a business model and then at the end of the book he lays it all out in a very obvious manner. When he is playing author and not consultant, he does have a very good sense of humor. The first book I read by him was about power of vulnerability and authenticity. It was entitled, "Getting Naked." My parents could only guess what the true topic was for the short novel.
I don't want to ruin this book, "The Five Temptations of a CEO," so I will simply share the business model. It applies to all leaders in an organization, not just the one at the top. Companies are definitely like a tribe where it would be difficult if there were too many chiefs and not enough Indians. The major blessing or difference however is if there is a shared mission or purpose then having coworkers, employees or people that have enough passion about what they do will step up and lead without having to be asked. This is why companies look to hire leaders into all levels of their organization. More importantly is being the right kind of leader and knowing what that means.
I take no credit for the following as they come straight from the book but here is the model and the self-assessment that make up the five temptations of a CEO:
This causes CEOs to make decisions that protect their ego or reputation or, worse yet, to avoid making decisions that might damage them. They reward people who contribute to their ego, instead of those who contribute to the results of the company. By focusing on results, they will ultimately achieve greater status and ego satisfaction but this requires a lot of work over a long period of time. It allows for too many risky episodes of status-loss along the way.
Advice: Make results the most important measure of personal success, or step down from the job. The future of the company you lead is too important for customers, employees, and stockholders to hold it hostage to your ego.
Empirical evidence of this phenomenon is that CEOs conduct performance reviews for their direct reports far less diligently then do managers at other levels. Why? It isn't because they are too busy or lazy, but because they don't want to deal with the prospect of upsetting one of their peers. Ironically, those same CEOs will not hesitate to ultimately fire a direct report when his or her performance problem becomes too costly, thereby severing the relationship completely. But they often fail to provide constructive or negative feedback along the way.
Advice: Work for the long-term respect of your direct reports, not for their affection. Don't view them as a support group, but as key employees who must deliver on their commitments if the company is to produce predictable results. And remember, your people aren't going to like you anyway if they ultimately fail.
Many CEOs, especially highly analytical ones, want to ensure that their decisions are correct, which is impossible in a world of imperfect information and uncertainty. Still, executives with a need for precision and correctness often postpone decisions and fail to make their people's deliverables clear. They provide vague and hesitant direction to their direct reports and hope that they figure out the right answers along the way. The chances that they will produce the results CEOs eventually decide they want are slim.
Advice: Make clarity more important than accuracy. Remember that your people will learn more if you take decisive action than if you always wait for more information. And if the decisions you make in the spirit of creating clarity turn out to be wrong when more information becomes available, change plans and explain why. It is your job to risk being wrong. The only real cost to you of being wrong is loss of pride. The cost of your company of not taking the risk of being wrong is paralysis.
Without this kind of conflict, decisions are often suboptimal. The best decisions are made only after all knowledge and perspectives are out on the table. Not every person's perspective and opinion can be agreed with, but they can be considered. When all available knowledge is considered, the chances of optimal decisions are greater - not to mention the likelihood of confidence in those decisions, which is just as important.
Advice: Tolerate discord. Encourage your direct reports to air their ideological differences, and with passion. Tumultuous meetings are often signs of progress. Tame ones are often signs of leaving important issues off the table. Guard against personal attacks, but not to the point of stifling important interchanges of ideas.
Every meeting has conflict so don't be deceived. Some people sweep that conflict under the table and let employees deeper in the organization sort it out. This doesn't happen by accident. The tone of meetings is set by the leader that is conducting it and after a CEO squelches any potential passion for peace, this sends a message. Boredom and agreeable meetings set in and executives start lamenting the real work that they could be doing instead.
People are unwilling to enter the fray of productive conflict if it doesn't feel safe. As a result, those reports position themselves around the inferred opinion of the CEO and conflict with one another only when it is politically expedient. Instead of creating a culture of creativity, trust and open dialogue for sharing important information, it is an atmosphere of "yes men."
Advice: Actively encourage your people to challenge your ideas. Trust them with your reputation and your ego. As a CEO, this is the greatest level of trust that you can give. They will return it with respect and honesty, and with a desire to be vulnerable among their peers.
I don't want to ruin this book, "The Five Temptations of a CEO," so I will simply share the business model. It applies to all leaders in an organization, not just the one at the top. Companies are definitely like a tribe where it would be difficult if there were too many chiefs and not enough Indians. The major blessing or difference however is if there is a shared mission or purpose then having coworkers, employees or people that have enough passion about what they do will step up and lead without having to be asked. This is why companies look to hire leaders into all levels of their organization. More importantly is being the right kind of leader and knowing what that means.
I take no credit for the following as they come straight from the book but here is the model and the self-assessment that make up the five temptations of a CEO:
Temptation #1 - Choosing status over results
The most important principle that an executive must embrace is a desire to produce results. Most CEOs were results maniacs before reaching their ultimate jobs. Once they "arrive," though, many of them focus primarily on preserving their status. This occurs because their real purpose in life has always been personal gain. With nowhere to go but down, it almost makes sense that once they have achieved their ultimate status, they will do whatever they can to protect it.This causes CEOs to make decisions that protect their ego or reputation or, worse yet, to avoid making decisions that might damage them. They reward people who contribute to their ego, instead of those who contribute to the results of the company. By focusing on results, they will ultimately achieve greater status and ego satisfaction but this requires a lot of work over a long period of time. It allows for too many risky episodes of status-loss along the way.
Advice: Make results the most important measure of personal success, or step down from the job. The future of the company you lead is too important for customers, employees, and stockholders to hold it hostage to your ego.
- Do you personally consider it a professional failure when your organization fails to meet its objectives?
- Do you often wonder, What's next? What will I do to top this in my career?
- Would it bother you greatly if your company exceeded its objectives but you remained somewhat anonymous relative to your peers in the industry?
Rationale
On a professional level, organizational success and personal-professional success are one and the same. Although it is healthy for any human being to separate his or her sense of self-esteem from success on the job, in the context of professional success these should not be divided. Too often, CEOs justify their own performance even when the organizations they lead are failing around them. CEOs must ultimately judge their personal-professional success by the results on the bottom line; only the CEO is ultimately responsible for the results of the company, and this must be his or her final measure.
Additionally, a pronounced concern for the "next step" in a person's career is a good sign of susceptibility to Temptation Number One because it is a possible indication that success is gauged in terms of career advancement rather than current performance. The most successful CEOs focus almost exclusively on their current jobs. Although human nature dictates that we hope for a just share of acknowledgement, it is a dangerous part of human nature to entertain. Those who eventually get that recognition are the CEOs who aren't distracted by the occasional slighting that an unscientific press is sure to give. Interestingly enough, they experience a low degree of satisfaction from such press. After all, they take larger personal satisfaction from achieving results.
Temptation #2 - Choosing popularity over accountability
Wanting to be well liked by peers is understandable, but dangerous, problem for CEOs. Being at the top of an organization is lonely. There are very few people in a company with whom CEOs spend considerable time, aside from their direct reports. Most CEOs become friends with their reports and commiserate about the constant needs and shortfalls of employees. They develop a sense of camaraderie around their overwhelming responsibilities. It is no surprise, the, that when it comes time for a CEO to tell these same people that they are not meeting expectations, they balk.Empirical evidence of this phenomenon is that CEOs conduct performance reviews for their direct reports far less diligently then do managers at other levels. Why? It isn't because they are too busy or lazy, but because they don't want to deal with the prospect of upsetting one of their peers. Ironically, those same CEOs will not hesitate to ultimately fire a direct report when his or her performance problem becomes too costly, thereby severing the relationship completely. But they often fail to provide constructive or negative feedback along the way.
Advice: Work for the long-term respect of your direct reports, not for their affection. Don't view them as a support group, but as key employees who must deliver on their commitments if the company is to produce predictable results. And remember, your people aren't going to like you anyway if they ultimately fail.
- Do you consider yourself to be a close friend of your direct reports?
- Does it bother you to the point of distraction if they are unhappy with you?
- Do you often find yourself reluctant to give negative feedback to your direct reports? Do you water down negative feedback to make it more palatable?
- Do you often vent to them about issues in the organization? For example, do you refer to your staff as "we" and other employees as "they"?
Rationale
It is wonderful for CEOs to care about direct reports as people, so long as they can separate the success of those relationships from their sense of self-esteem and personal happiness. This is difficult because most of us try to avoid major disagreements with close friends, and it is impossible not to be concerned about a deep rift with one of them. If those close friends are your direct reports, the accountability within the organization can be threatened. The slightest reluctance to hold someone accountable for their behaviors and results can cause an avalanche of negative reaction from others who perceive even the slightest hint of unfairness or favoritism.
Those CEOs who are able to make close friendships with direct reports and still avoid a sense of favoritism often find it easy to use those reports as their personal "venting boards." All executives need people they can vent to about challenges they face in the organization, but CEOs must resist the desire to use direct reports for this service. It can lead to politics among the executive team, and more importantly, it can undermine the team's objective understanding of their own actions by creating an atmosphere of self-victimizing groupthink. Often this manifests itself during executive staff meetings in comments such as "When will these people stop questioning us and start understanding what we are trying to do?"
Temptation #3 - Choosing certainty over clarity
CEOs are sometimes unwilling to hold their direct reports accountable because they don't think it's fair. This is because they haven't made it clear what those direct reports are accountable for doing. Why don't they make these things clear? Because they give in to yet another temptation: the need to make "correct" decisions, to achieve certainty.Many CEOs, especially highly analytical ones, want to ensure that their decisions are correct, which is impossible in a world of imperfect information and uncertainty. Still, executives with a need for precision and correctness often postpone decisions and fail to make their people's deliverables clear. They provide vague and hesitant direction to their direct reports and hope that they figure out the right answers along the way. The chances that they will produce the results CEOs eventually decide they want are slim.
Advice: Make clarity more important than accuracy. Remember that your people will learn more if you take decisive action than if you always wait for more information. And if the decisions you make in the spirit of creating clarity turn out to be wrong when more information becomes available, change plans and explain why. It is your job to risk being wrong. The only real cost to you of being wrong is loss of pride. The cost of your company of not taking the risk of being wrong is paralysis.
- Do you pride yourself on being intellectually precise?
- Do you prefer to wait for more information rather than make a decision without all of the facts?
- Do you enjoy debating details with your direct reports during meetings?
Rationale
Intellectual precision alone is not the problem but when it manifests itself during staff meetings in terms of unnecessary debates over minutiae, it is a sign of real trouble. It is no surprise that many CEOs take a great deal of pride in their analytical and intellectual acumen. Unable to realize that their success as an executive usually has less to do with intellectual skills than it does with personal and behavioral discipline, they spend too much time debating the finer points of decision making.
Those debates are problematic for two reasons. First, they eat up valuable time that can be spent discussing larger issues, which often receive just a few minutes at the end of the staff meeting agenda. Second, and more important, they create a climate of excessive analysis and overintellectualization of tactical issues. If there is one person in an organization who cannot afford to be overly precise, it is the CEO.
Temptation #4 - Choosing harmony over productive conflict
CEOs fail to feel comfortable with the decisions they make because they don't benefit from the best sources of information that are available to them: their direct reports. Most people, including CEOs, believe that it is better for people to agree and get along than disagree and conflict with one another. That is how they were raised. However, harmony sometimes restricts "productive ideological conflict," the passionate interchange of opinions around an issue.Without this kind of conflict, decisions are often suboptimal. The best decisions are made only after all knowledge and perspectives are out on the table. Not every person's perspective and opinion can be agreed with, but they can be considered. When all available knowledge is considered, the chances of optimal decisions are greater - not to mention the likelihood of confidence in those decisions, which is just as important.
Advice: Tolerate discord. Encourage your direct reports to air their ideological differences, and with passion. Tumultuous meetings are often signs of progress. Tame ones are often signs of leaving important issues off the table. Guard against personal attacks, but not to the point of stifling important interchanges of ideas.
- Do you prefer your meetings to be pleasant and enjoyable?
- Are your meetings often boring?
- Do you get uncomfortable at meetings if your direct reports argue?
- Do you often make peace or try to reconcile direct reports who are at odds with one another?
Rationale
Lots of people complain about meetings taking up time that is needed for "real work." This is a sign that those meetings are not as difficult (or productive) as they should be. Executive staff meetings should be exhausting inasmuch as they are passionate, critical discussions. Pleasant or boring meetings are indications that there is not a proper level of overt, constructive, ideological conflict taking place.Every meeting has conflict so don't be deceived. Some people sweep that conflict under the table and let employees deeper in the organization sort it out. This doesn't happen by accident. The tone of meetings is set by the leader that is conducting it and after a CEO squelches any potential passion for peace, this sends a message. Boredom and agreeable meetings set in and executives start lamenting the real work that they could be doing instead.
Temptation #5 - Choosing invulnerability over trust
Asking for productive conflict does not always achieve it because people may not feel like their input is important or valuable. CEOs are relatively powerful people. Being vulnerable with their peers and reports is not a comfortable prospect. They mistakenly believe that they lose credibility if their people feel too comfortable challenging their ideas.People are unwilling to enter the fray of productive conflict if it doesn't feel safe. As a result, those reports position themselves around the inferred opinion of the CEO and conflict with one another only when it is politically expedient. Instead of creating a culture of creativity, trust and open dialogue for sharing important information, it is an atmosphere of "yes men."
Advice: Actively encourage your people to challenge your ideas. Trust them with your reputation and your ego. As a CEO, this is the greatest level of trust that you can give. They will return it with respect and honesty, and with a desire to be vulnerable among their peers.
- Do you have a hard time admitting when you're wrong?
- Do you fear that your direct reports want your job?
- Do you try to keep your greatest weaknesses secret from your direct reports?
Rationale
No one loves to admit being wrong, but some people hate it. Great CEOs don't lose face in the slightest when they are wrong, because they know who they are, they know why they are the CEO, and they realize that the organization's results, not the appearance of being smart, are their ultimate measure of success. They know that the best way to get results is to put their weaknesses on the table and invite people to help them minimize those weaknesses. CEOs who understand this concept intellectually but cannot behavioralize it sometimes make the mistake of finding symbolic moments to admit mistakes and weaknesses. This only serves to reinforce the notion that the CEO is unwilling to put real weaknesses on the table. Overcoming this temptation requires a degree of fear and pain that many CEOs are unwilling to tolerate.
Summary
Instilling trust gives executives the confidence to have productive conflict. Fostering conflict gives executives confidence to create clarity. Clarity gives executives the confidence to hold people accountable. Accountability gives executives confidence in expected results. And results are a CEO's ultimate measure of long-term success.
CEOs who follow this model still fail but mostly if they are thwarted by competitive and market pressures that are largely out of their control. Leadership and management are not the same thing. We can manage people and manage problems. Leaders need to expect to make mistakes and be able to change at a moment's notice. They need to rely on others and accept and acknowledge that they aren't the one with all the answers in the room. They have to take risks. Leaders need to act and can't settle for the same but require constant improvement. Good managers produce quantity but good leaders produce quality.
Great leaders find a way to produce both.
Great leaders find a way to produce both.
Sunday, February 5, 2017
The God Who Weeps
The God Who Weeps is a novel about how Mormonism makes sense of life written by a couple of Mormons, Terryl and Fiona Givens. Even as an active member of the LDS faith, I still felt like I learned a lot and it made me think about life differently. I liked how it was about the journey of faith from a different perspective and it made me think about some of the tenants of my belief differently. Still, the fundamental question that it asked with every new principle was the same. What does this mean to me in my life? What's the point? What is the real value of a religion or a set of beliefs if it doesn't cause you to change? I feel like anyone, Mormon or not, could see their lives and their relationships after reading this book in a way that could improve them.
This novel is so powerful because it simply provides a series of evidences that you as the reader can choose to use as you will. Whether or not there is a benevolent deity is based not on the evidence that is presented but what you personally conclude from that evidence. Theology, philosophy, and belief are all perspective. The following chapters were picked to help discuss who we believe our God is and what our relationship is with Him, His plan for us, and if we choose to follow that calling what the outcome will be. In essence, it is what we call within our faith, "The Plan of Salvation."
His Heart Is Set upon Us
Faith is not the end all in all. Doubt and faith are both required in life so there isn't necessarily progression for the new doubter or the new believer. The improbable nature of the universe or the chemical reaction that is human life or life in general, the way that the human mind works such that we contemplate more than simply our own survival but what is life or why do we exist... How we hunger for more in our lives than what this world can provide are all evidence of something more. The beauty of this paradox is we cannot prove that God exists. So if there is a god, who is He? What is He like?
There are many different ideas of God from all around the world. There are two main points that are expressed in our discussion that are guided by both faith and logic: (1) Not all conceivable gods have claim over us... Or in other words, we can reject some gods not because it is unreasonable to believe in them but because it is unreasonable to worship them. If your deity requires human sacrifice, how long would it take until there is no longer anyone left to worship? (2) If we are inclined to believe a powerful deity does preside over the universe, the assumption that he would be a more perfect embodiment of the morally good that we recognize and seek to emulate is not a fanciful hope or wishful thinking. It is a logical and reasonable inference that God is more rather than less generous and forgiving, who will extend the maximum mercy that He can, and impose the minimum justice He must.
We are never so vulnerable or defenseless against suffering as when we love. The pain felt by a parent when a child wanders away into addiction or the loss felt after the death of a loved one are but two common examples. Try to imagine then what God, Our Father in Heaven, feels being that He is the very embodiment of love. From the words of the prophet Enoch, he describes a vision from when he was taken into heaven and sees Satan's dominion over the earth and God's unanticipated response to a world veiled in darkness:
Whether it was the example of Christ, Ruth, David or Mary, vulnerability is their end objective. Each individual was asked in their own way to place themselves in a situation where they were opening themselves up to the possibility of paramount harm (dishonor, public humiliation, and even death), in order to serve as vehicles of His grace. Vulnerability is both the price of the power to save, and that which saves. When Christ was pressed by the crowds and a woman touches his garments and is healed, He asks who it was. This person did more than touch. She drew from Him healing power as He felt it flow out of Him. What does this mean? Christ's power to heal comes at a cost to Him. Take this the extra mile and begin to ponder the cost of the crucifixion and taking the weight of the sins of the world upon Him in the Garden of Gethsemane.
If vulnerability and pain are the price of love, then joy is its reward. All that exists in our world of meaning must exist in paired opposition. As much as God shares in our suffering, He delights in human happiness. With the mass of senses we have after "being created in His image," we can find ways to appreciate and find joy in the world around us. Some may see food as nourishment for survival but then what is the purpose behind all the flavors we are able to taste? Peacocks with their tail feathers and the changing colors in leaves that allow for the peacock to reproduce and the tree to keep the chlorophyll necessary to survive, these were never meant to please the eye? The fragrance of the rose or the lily which attracts the bees to help them pollinate, was it not designed to appeal to our sense of smell? The scriptures say,
Man Was in the Beginning with God
The idea in this chapter are there are two innate desires in all of us (at least to some degree). These are to understand who we are and where we belong. We don't feel like we belong or that we are looking for our home. Some think of this as we looking for something or somewhere but the idea that is presented in this novel is that we are simply trying to remember. The best explanation is that we are trying to figure out who are.
What are we made up of on a molecular level? What is life? When does life begin or when does life end? These are fundamental questions that have no clear answers. There are theories though. The same carbon, iron and oxygen that are the building blocks for our bodies came from nebulas and stars however, this is not the essence of the soul. We may have forgotten for whatever reason any life before this one (if it exists), it may have been on purpose because a life with opposition is about choice and one where it is best if we do not have all the answers because then there would be no choice at all. Also if we truly are children of God, we would be inexpressibly more miserable, if we had retained the memory of our former Glory, and past Actions.
The concept of what kind of children we are is still up for debate. If our souls are part of God's creation, then He could have prevented all sin by creating us with better natures and in more favorable surroundings. The problem is that in our own moral awareness, we sense we are responsible for our own choices because when we do something wrong, we feel guilt. If there was a good analogy to describe guilt, it would be a twisted ankle. The function of guilt is to prevent more pain, not expand it. Its purpose is to hurt enough to stop you from crippling yourself further. If God did not create us then we weren't born or created inherently good or evil. We were born free.
Even if we remove God, we can't remove our past and present circumstances. In our current state, we are the product of forces outside our control that influence our personality, inform our character, and shape our wants and desires. And yet, we know we are free. If we are not shaped by our environment, our inherited form from our parents, or even God, we have always been and always will be in the principle of free will. So if this concept is further extrapolated, we have free will which means we weren't created by God so then if we weren't created, we have always been. If we have an eternal past, it is only reasonable that we will have an eternal future.
Modern day scripture recorded in the Pearl of Great Price describes how before this life our spirits were present in councils where we choose this world and life. We knew that if we choose righteously, this life would be a test if we would choose God again. If they did well, then they would continue to progress and "have glory added upon their heads for ever and ever." There are two keys from this revelation: (1) It suggests that birth into this world represents a step forward in an eternal process of development and growth in an educative and not reparative way. Life is pain and it is not punishment. (2) We choose this world. If we face pain or loss, we chose this life that we are living. It also means that God chose us. We were unembodied eternal intelligences. He looked upon us and in His love chose us, counseled with us, and created this world for us.
We Are That We Might Have Joy
This same idea that life is a blessing and that all things are created for our good is further expanded in this chapter. Many Christian faiths believe that soon after the Creation that there was the Fall and Original Sin. However the logic behind this thought process does not make true sense for then why would God descend to earth only to be punished or take up a fallen state? Would he be still be counted perfect and sinless if he was to inherit the sins of Adam and Eve, the first parents of all mankind? Why would perfection don imperfection? We in the Mormon faith don't believe in Original Sin nor do we look at Fall as a fall but more as an ascent. Pain is not punishment - it is growth. In Revelations it speaks of the councils of heaven and how many of those spirits chose to come down to earth to learn from their experience. We chose a life of pain because we want to grow and become more like God and our Savior, Jesus Christ.
Our physical bodies are carnal in nature but that doesn't necessarily mean sinful. It means that our bodies strive to do as nature would intend, to survive and reproduce and live on. Our carnal desires represent those same feelings when we feel hunger or other physical appetites, including physical intimacy. Those feelings are present when we show distrust or question motivation or instruction because again our bodies are designed to fight for their own survival. But if we look to the example again of the Savior, at the end of His life he gains a perfected body. In his mortality He had to struggle with the same appetites or feelings as you and I but he overcame them. He learned and gained knowledge from physical experience. He progressed and grew and his love and charity deepened through hardships that he faced. Pain is again not a sign of punishment as it is progress.
So returning back to the Garden of Eden, many look at Adam and Eve's decision to chose the apple as a sin. They did in fact disobey God's commandments. Still, let us look deeper at the decision itself because it may not have been as simple as right or wrong choices. Is every choice we make in life black and white or is there some grey? The first choice was to stay in Paradise in God's presence forever. The second choice was to eat the fruit that delicious to the taste, beautiful in appearance, and would give them knowledge of good and evil. Adam and Eve had some level of moral judgment. They were not without some sense of right and wrong but the knowledge this fruit would provide is physical experience. This makes God's final injunction about death more making them aware that the cost of experience can be pain. So why is this important? The decision to partake of the fruit was made out a good place, a desire to become more like God, to progress. This wasn't a mistake in God's planning! Sending Christ as the Savior wasn't a backup plan but part of the choice in helping meet the price of both justice and mercy. We could learn from our mistakes through repentance and the grace that belongs to Christ's sacrifice. This was a choice between two Good decisions, not one right and one wrong. So do we still call this a Fall? Man was cast out of God's presence but it was to experience and grow to become like Him. It was to progress. It was to experience pain and joy.
The purpose of mortality is not to survive. It is to learn and grow. It is learn from our experiences and to master our bodies to control our appetites. We too often believe there is an association between sin and guilt. The pain of guilty is a feeling that we are wrong or inherently unworthy. Those wide generalizations are not true. There is a major difference if we change our perspective to that were we don't feel our pain as guilt but as weakness. We are imperfect creatures. Christ saves us regardless of how far we fall short. Guilt comes from the belief that we owe Him because He is exchanging grace and salvation for our obedience. They do not equate. Salvation is a gift of love. Our obedience if it is to equate needs to also be out of love. It is through gratitude and love and obedience that we are able to accept the place in heaven that Christ provides us through His mercy and grace. Our obedience and righteousness is not to earn our place but to help us grow and develop so that we will find joy there.
None of Them Is Lost
We need to understand that God is on our side. Obedience to Him and His laws bring joy and happiness. He being perfect also designed a perfect plan but this plan was for our benefit, His imperfect children. What does this mean? It means that through the ages when men debated the ratio or amount of people that God would save and bring to heaven in their understand of heaven and hell, they didn't make the connection that God doesn't want to save a chosen few, the naturally gifted, but He desires to save all His children. His plan allows for that to happen but it respects a fundamental law, our agency. We have reasoned that the universe is governed by laws, some that we understand currently and others that will take time but for every action there is a reaction or a natural consequence as it were. John Stuart Mill describes human liberty as the freedom "of doing as we like, subject to such consequences as may follow." From our perspective of an all powerful deity, we may think those consequences look like punishments and rewards, but they were chosen. What we become is built upon a lifetime of small decisions and we can decide to change at any time as well.
When we think about our fundamental natures, who we are becoming, it is our own choices that shape our identities. The consequences of our choices will most often affect others. The part that people feel is unfair is the pain that we suffer regardless of our personal decisions but that is part of life. Again, this kind of pain is growth. Guilt is real too. Guilt comes from choosing to position ourselves in opposition to God - to sin knowingly. Misjudgments or simple errors have the ability to cause pain but that is not the same nor does it have the intensity of guilt. We are choosing to put ourselves in opposition to God or joy and love which by the laws of nature will cause misery. If we look at Dante's Inferno, he describes the different levels of hell as being places that people would go to on their own accord. The damned crossed the river Styx into their torments "eager for their river crossing." A lifetime of choices or the culmination of their true desires is what awaited them. What we worship is what we become.
An example from this chapter recorded the experience of an inmate of a concentration camp that heard a commotion and when he went to investigate found a prison guard mercilessly beating a female prisoner. He whispered, "What can we do for these people?" Another inmate replied, "Show them that love is greater." In that moment, he realized the other person was focused on the guard, not the victim. They considered the actions of greatest moral gravity to be the ones we originate, not the ones we suffer.
To see our mortality as a test is generally a great analogy but we have to be careful how far we take it. The part we go astray is when we lose sight that again that life is a test to measure progression and advancement. It measures again what we are becoming. When we begin to talk about earning our salvation we begin to think that this life was meant to be a spiritual evaluation instead of a spiritual formation. The only person that we are competing against is ourselves. There is no level of spiritualism where if you pass 50% you make it into in heaven, while others had only scored a 49% so they earned eternal damnation. God offers salvation and His grace to all men to choose for themselves freely. Heaven is a state of being - a blessed and sanctified nature. It is not a place we enter but a culmination of choices that allow us to become celestial beings.
This sanctification and perfecting process is only made possible through the Atonement. It is the willful suffering of someone completely innocent to choose to take upon Himself the price of all mankind's transgressions, sins, sufferings, pain and afflictions of every kind. He was completely alone during the culmination on the cross of Calvary. Although we cannot comprehend how that was done, it still begs the question of why it is accepted as the price paid for those that choose to accept that gift of repentance and forgiveness for themselves? Why does grace work? It is because we do not have a perfect knowledge. We are never given perfect instruction so our accountability is only partial and incomplete. Christ breaks that cycle and we are allowed to move forward and progress. But He broke the cycle in more than one way.
When we consider the fleeting time we are given in mortality and remember the eternal nature of the soul, Christ broke the chains of sin and of death. The time in which mankind can experience this perfecting process is not constrained to mortality but extends beyond death into the life after. We will continue to perfect ourselves and many people will learn of Christ and choose Him not in life but in death however, repenting and choosing a new life in his image will be increasingly more difficult without having the physical experiences to build upon. Again, this perfect plan by our perfect God is made so none will be lost - including the unbaptized infants and non-Christians. It is not that God is excusing them of sin but allowing them to learn, progress, and grow. He loves all men so His perfect plan is not going to default those who have not had the opportunity or the ability or capacity to choose His plan to damnation. This is what is meant in Peter's claim that "the gospel was preached also to them that are dead, that they might be judged according to men in the flesh, but live according to God in the spirit." The gospel of Jesus Christ - faith, repentance, baptism and receiving the Holy Ghost - and its ministry and blessings are extended to both the living and the dead.
Participants in the Divine Nature
The reason that we see that God's love is not limited in any capacity - living, dead, young, old, saint, sinner, etc. - is because we are not limited in our capacity. We were not created in the sense of God making our spirits, otherwise our spirits would not have the ability to do evil but would be inherently good. If we were not created then we must have always been and we always will be. This life or mortality is simply part of our existence that we pass through as part of our progression. But in what way are we to progress? To use a crude analogy from the book, Ender's Game, a leader tells a commander at the end of a battle, "We won! That's all that matters." To which the commander replies, "No. The way we win matters." God loves all His children. He wants us to have what He has and to do so has given us the tools and the example of how to become like Him. It is not His power or His glory that He wants to bestow as much as it is the understanding, knowledge, and attributes that He has obtained through learning and experience. Our mortality is the framework built to allow for that. This is why exaltation could not be given as Lucifer suggested in the pre-mortal council but it had to be experienced through mortality as was God's plan. The lie that is spread is that we can obtain this through "spirituality" and "religion" is unnecessary.
When Mormons describe through scripture heaven or heaven on earth, it is called Zion. It is a utopian-type community where "God is with us." It is not a solitary Zen. It isn't a private enlightenment. It is a place where there are families and groups of people coexisting and working together. This is why God again refers to himself as a Father. Families aren't a creation of society but a divine institution tied with the very fabric of nature. The reason for this is because the type of Christ-like characteristics that we are attempting to foster and nurture and develop are things like mercy, generosity, and self-control. "Kindness only exists when there is someone to whom we show kindness. Patience is only manifest when another calls it forth.... What we may have thought was our private pathway to salvation, was intended all along as a collaborative enterprise, though we often miss the point." We become perfected through lovingly learning to coexist because we have all experienced that many times working together can feel like a fiery furnace - this is intentional.
I myself struggle with this. I find that I hate working with whom I consider to be stupid people. I hate judgmental people. Sounds hypocritical but what I mean is that people fail to see the perfection that lies inside someone's desire or natures regardless of their own shortcomings and imperfections. When Enoch described what he saw and shared in regards to God's love, he was overcome with emotion. He wept over our disobedience and pain and shared in God's joy through our redemption that is only made possible through the Atonement. For a long time, I thought that my Sabbath day worship was only about partaking in the sacrament. It was becoming clean through the renewal of my covenants that I made at baptism and in the temple. The social aspects of the Sabbath were not important - however that is wholly untrue. Exaltation again is done through unity. We repent on an individual basis but we become exalted as a people and as families. We need each other.
In this last chapter, the authors use a particularly vivid metaphor. They describe a young boy who jumping around the yard, pretending to fly around, proclaims that he will eventually live among the stars and walk on the moon. They then contrast that to the rocket scientist that works and studies and learns the necessary laws of physics that will create a rocket ship and ask, who is more likely to achieve the goal? The one that through obedience and action learns and gains the necessary knowledge or the other? Obedience grants one knowledge and so both the knowledge and obedience frees them. It allows the scientist to grow and develop as an individual. People mistake this type of obedience as that of a blind sheep following a shepherd. And yet it is with that same analogy that the Savior describes us and those that drift away. He preached of searching for the One. The analogy of the prodigal son could be used not just to describe each of us but to illustrate what our union may be like once we leave mortality and return to our heavenly home.
The knowledge we gain in this life carries with us into the next. The study of science is a study of the laws of nature and the universe. The refining of Zion is in communities and creates in us the ability to gain the attributes of Christ. A study of Christ and Zion is a process of learning how to love as God does.
This novel is so powerful because it simply provides a series of evidences that you as the reader can choose to use as you will. Whether or not there is a benevolent deity is based not on the evidence that is presented but what you personally conclude from that evidence. Theology, philosophy, and belief are all perspective. The following chapters were picked to help discuss who we believe our God is and what our relationship is with Him, His plan for us, and if we choose to follow that calling what the outcome will be. In essence, it is what we call within our faith, "The Plan of Salvation."
- God is a personal entity, having a heart that beats in sympathy with human hearts, feeling our joy and sorrowing over our pain.
- We lived as spirit beings in the presence of God before we were born into this mortal life.
- Mortality is an ascent, not a fall, and we carry infinite potential into a world of sin and sorrow.
- God has the desire and the power to unite and elevate the entire human family in a kingdom in heaven, and, except for the most stubbornly unwilling, that will be our destiny.
- Heaven will consist of those relationships that matter most to us now.
His Heart Is Set upon Us
Faith is not the end all in all. Doubt and faith are both required in life so there isn't necessarily progression for the new doubter or the new believer. The improbable nature of the universe or the chemical reaction that is human life or life in general, the way that the human mind works such that we contemplate more than simply our own survival but what is life or why do we exist... How we hunger for more in our lives than what this world can provide are all evidence of something more. The beauty of this paradox is we cannot prove that God exists. So if there is a god, who is He? What is He like?
There are many different ideas of God from all around the world. There are two main points that are expressed in our discussion that are guided by both faith and logic: (1) Not all conceivable gods have claim over us... Or in other words, we can reject some gods not because it is unreasonable to believe in them but because it is unreasonable to worship them. If your deity requires human sacrifice, how long would it take until there is no longer anyone left to worship? (2) If we are inclined to believe a powerful deity does preside over the universe, the assumption that he would be a more perfect embodiment of the morally good that we recognize and seek to emulate is not a fanciful hope or wishful thinking. It is a logical and reasonable inference that God is more rather than less generous and forgiving, who will extend the maximum mercy that He can, and impose the minimum justice He must.
We are never so vulnerable or defenseless against suffering as when we love. The pain felt by a parent when a child wanders away into addiction or the loss felt after the death of a loved one are but two common examples. Try to imagine then what God, Our Father in Heaven, feels being that He is the very embodiment of love. From the words of the prophet Enoch, he describes a vision from when he was taken into heaven and sees Satan's dominion over the earth and God's unanticipated response to a world veiled in darkness:
"The God of heaven looked upon the residue of the people, and He wept; and Enoch bore record of it, saying: How is it that the heavens weep, and shed forth their tears as the rains upon the mountains? And Enoch said unto the Lord: How is it that you canst weep?"Enoch goes on to ask this question three times and he isn't asking why do you weep but how are your tears even possible. The answer was the same as we concluded above, which is that God is not exempt from emotion but His pain is as infinite as His love.
"Unto thy brethren have I said, and also given commandment, that they should love one another, and that they should choose me, their Father; but behold, they are without affection, and they hate their own blood... and misery shall be their doom; and the whole heavens shall weep over them, even all the workmanship of mine hands; wherefore should not the heavens weep, seeing these shall suffer?"It is not their wickedness, but their "misery," not their disobedience, but their "suffering," that elicits the God of Heaven's tears.
Whether it was the example of Christ, Ruth, David or Mary, vulnerability is their end objective. Each individual was asked in their own way to place themselves in a situation where they were opening themselves up to the possibility of paramount harm (dishonor, public humiliation, and even death), in order to serve as vehicles of His grace. Vulnerability is both the price of the power to save, and that which saves. When Christ was pressed by the crowds and a woman touches his garments and is healed, He asks who it was. This person did more than touch. She drew from Him healing power as He felt it flow out of Him. What does this mean? Christ's power to heal comes at a cost to Him. Take this the extra mile and begin to ponder the cost of the crucifixion and taking the weight of the sins of the world upon Him in the Garden of Gethsemane.
If vulnerability and pain are the price of love, then joy is its reward. All that exists in our world of meaning must exist in paired opposition. As much as God shares in our suffering, He delights in human happiness. With the mass of senses we have after "being created in His image," we can find ways to appreciate and find joy in the world around us. Some may see food as nourishment for survival but then what is the purpose behind all the flavors we are able to taste? Peacocks with their tail feathers and the changing colors in leaves that allow for the peacock to reproduce and the tree to keep the chlorophyll necessary to survive, these were never meant to please the eye? The fragrance of the rose or the lily which attracts the bees to help them pollinate, was it not designed to appeal to our sense of smell? The scriptures say,
"Yea, all things which come of the earth, in the season thereof, are made for the benefit and the use of man, both to please the eye and to gladden the heart; Yea, for food and for raiment, for taste and for smell, to strengthen the body and to enliven the soul. And it pleaseth God that He hath given all these things unto man."For He has set His heart upon us. He loves us because we are His children. We are children of God.
Man Was in the Beginning with God
The idea in this chapter are there are two innate desires in all of us (at least to some degree). These are to understand who we are and where we belong. We don't feel like we belong or that we are looking for our home. Some think of this as we looking for something or somewhere but the idea that is presented in this novel is that we are simply trying to remember. The best explanation is that we are trying to figure out who are.
What are we made up of on a molecular level? What is life? When does life begin or when does life end? These are fundamental questions that have no clear answers. There are theories though. The same carbon, iron and oxygen that are the building blocks for our bodies came from nebulas and stars however, this is not the essence of the soul. We may have forgotten for whatever reason any life before this one (if it exists), it may have been on purpose because a life with opposition is about choice and one where it is best if we do not have all the answers because then there would be no choice at all. Also if we truly are children of God, we would be inexpressibly more miserable, if we had retained the memory of our former Glory, and past Actions.
The concept of what kind of children we are is still up for debate. If our souls are part of God's creation, then He could have prevented all sin by creating us with better natures and in more favorable surroundings. The problem is that in our own moral awareness, we sense we are responsible for our own choices because when we do something wrong, we feel guilt. If there was a good analogy to describe guilt, it would be a twisted ankle. The function of guilt is to prevent more pain, not expand it. Its purpose is to hurt enough to stop you from crippling yourself further. If God did not create us then we weren't born or created inherently good or evil. We were born free.
Even if we remove God, we can't remove our past and present circumstances. In our current state, we are the product of forces outside our control that influence our personality, inform our character, and shape our wants and desires. And yet, we know we are free. If we are not shaped by our environment, our inherited form from our parents, or even God, we have always been and always will be in the principle of free will. So if this concept is further extrapolated, we have free will which means we weren't created by God so then if we weren't created, we have always been. If we have an eternal past, it is only reasonable that we will have an eternal future.
Modern day scripture recorded in the Pearl of Great Price describes how before this life our spirits were present in councils where we choose this world and life. We knew that if we choose righteously, this life would be a test if we would choose God again. If they did well, then they would continue to progress and "have glory added upon their heads for ever and ever." There are two keys from this revelation: (1) It suggests that birth into this world represents a step forward in an eternal process of development and growth in an educative and not reparative way. Life is pain and it is not punishment. (2) We choose this world. If we face pain or loss, we chose this life that we are living. It also means that God chose us. We were unembodied eternal intelligences. He looked upon us and in His love chose us, counseled with us, and created this world for us.
We Are That We Might Have Joy
This same idea that life is a blessing and that all things are created for our good is further expanded in this chapter. Many Christian faiths believe that soon after the Creation that there was the Fall and Original Sin. However the logic behind this thought process does not make true sense for then why would God descend to earth only to be punished or take up a fallen state? Would he be still be counted perfect and sinless if he was to inherit the sins of Adam and Eve, the first parents of all mankind? Why would perfection don imperfection? We in the Mormon faith don't believe in Original Sin nor do we look at Fall as a fall but more as an ascent. Pain is not punishment - it is growth. In Revelations it speaks of the councils of heaven and how many of those spirits chose to come down to earth to learn from their experience. We chose a life of pain because we want to grow and become more like God and our Savior, Jesus Christ.
Our physical bodies are carnal in nature but that doesn't necessarily mean sinful. It means that our bodies strive to do as nature would intend, to survive and reproduce and live on. Our carnal desires represent those same feelings when we feel hunger or other physical appetites, including physical intimacy. Those feelings are present when we show distrust or question motivation or instruction because again our bodies are designed to fight for their own survival. But if we look to the example again of the Savior, at the end of His life he gains a perfected body. In his mortality He had to struggle with the same appetites or feelings as you and I but he overcame them. He learned and gained knowledge from physical experience. He progressed and grew and his love and charity deepened through hardships that he faced. Pain is again not a sign of punishment as it is progress.
So returning back to the Garden of Eden, many look at Adam and Eve's decision to chose the apple as a sin. They did in fact disobey God's commandments. Still, let us look deeper at the decision itself because it may not have been as simple as right or wrong choices. Is every choice we make in life black and white or is there some grey? The first choice was to stay in Paradise in God's presence forever. The second choice was to eat the fruit that delicious to the taste, beautiful in appearance, and would give them knowledge of good and evil. Adam and Eve had some level of moral judgment. They were not without some sense of right and wrong but the knowledge this fruit would provide is physical experience. This makes God's final injunction about death more making them aware that the cost of experience can be pain. So why is this important? The decision to partake of the fruit was made out a good place, a desire to become more like God, to progress. This wasn't a mistake in God's planning! Sending Christ as the Savior wasn't a backup plan but part of the choice in helping meet the price of both justice and mercy. We could learn from our mistakes through repentance and the grace that belongs to Christ's sacrifice. This was a choice between two Good decisions, not one right and one wrong. So do we still call this a Fall? Man was cast out of God's presence but it was to experience and grow to become like Him. It was to progress. It was to experience pain and joy.
The purpose of mortality is not to survive. It is to learn and grow. It is learn from our experiences and to master our bodies to control our appetites. We too often believe there is an association between sin and guilt. The pain of guilty is a feeling that we are wrong or inherently unworthy. Those wide generalizations are not true. There is a major difference if we change our perspective to that were we don't feel our pain as guilt but as weakness. We are imperfect creatures. Christ saves us regardless of how far we fall short. Guilt comes from the belief that we owe Him because He is exchanging grace and salvation for our obedience. They do not equate. Salvation is a gift of love. Our obedience if it is to equate needs to also be out of love. It is through gratitude and love and obedience that we are able to accept the place in heaven that Christ provides us through His mercy and grace. Our obedience and righteousness is not to earn our place but to help us grow and develop so that we will find joy there.
None of Them Is Lost
We need to understand that God is on our side. Obedience to Him and His laws bring joy and happiness. He being perfect also designed a perfect plan but this plan was for our benefit, His imperfect children. What does this mean? It means that through the ages when men debated the ratio or amount of people that God would save and bring to heaven in their understand of heaven and hell, they didn't make the connection that God doesn't want to save a chosen few, the naturally gifted, but He desires to save all His children. His plan allows for that to happen but it respects a fundamental law, our agency. We have reasoned that the universe is governed by laws, some that we understand currently and others that will take time but for every action there is a reaction or a natural consequence as it were. John Stuart Mill describes human liberty as the freedom "of doing as we like, subject to such consequences as may follow." From our perspective of an all powerful deity, we may think those consequences look like punishments and rewards, but they were chosen. What we become is built upon a lifetime of small decisions and we can decide to change at any time as well.
When we think about our fundamental natures, who we are becoming, it is our own choices that shape our identities. The consequences of our choices will most often affect others. The part that people feel is unfair is the pain that we suffer regardless of our personal decisions but that is part of life. Again, this kind of pain is growth. Guilt is real too. Guilt comes from choosing to position ourselves in opposition to God - to sin knowingly. Misjudgments or simple errors have the ability to cause pain but that is not the same nor does it have the intensity of guilt. We are choosing to put ourselves in opposition to God or joy and love which by the laws of nature will cause misery. If we look at Dante's Inferno, he describes the different levels of hell as being places that people would go to on their own accord. The damned crossed the river Styx into their torments "eager for their river crossing." A lifetime of choices or the culmination of their true desires is what awaited them. What we worship is what we become.
An example from this chapter recorded the experience of an inmate of a concentration camp that heard a commotion and when he went to investigate found a prison guard mercilessly beating a female prisoner. He whispered, "What can we do for these people?" Another inmate replied, "Show them that love is greater." In that moment, he realized the other person was focused on the guard, not the victim. They considered the actions of greatest moral gravity to be the ones we originate, not the ones we suffer.
To see our mortality as a test is generally a great analogy but we have to be careful how far we take it. The part we go astray is when we lose sight that again that life is a test to measure progression and advancement. It measures again what we are becoming. When we begin to talk about earning our salvation we begin to think that this life was meant to be a spiritual evaluation instead of a spiritual formation. The only person that we are competing against is ourselves. There is no level of spiritualism where if you pass 50% you make it into in heaven, while others had only scored a 49% so they earned eternal damnation. God offers salvation and His grace to all men to choose for themselves freely. Heaven is a state of being - a blessed and sanctified nature. It is not a place we enter but a culmination of choices that allow us to become celestial beings.
This sanctification and perfecting process is only made possible through the Atonement. It is the willful suffering of someone completely innocent to choose to take upon Himself the price of all mankind's transgressions, sins, sufferings, pain and afflictions of every kind. He was completely alone during the culmination on the cross of Calvary. Although we cannot comprehend how that was done, it still begs the question of why it is accepted as the price paid for those that choose to accept that gift of repentance and forgiveness for themselves? Why does grace work? It is because we do not have a perfect knowledge. We are never given perfect instruction so our accountability is only partial and incomplete. Christ breaks that cycle and we are allowed to move forward and progress. But He broke the cycle in more than one way.
When we consider the fleeting time we are given in mortality and remember the eternal nature of the soul, Christ broke the chains of sin and of death. The time in which mankind can experience this perfecting process is not constrained to mortality but extends beyond death into the life after. We will continue to perfect ourselves and many people will learn of Christ and choose Him not in life but in death however, repenting and choosing a new life in his image will be increasingly more difficult without having the physical experiences to build upon. Again, this perfect plan by our perfect God is made so none will be lost - including the unbaptized infants and non-Christians. It is not that God is excusing them of sin but allowing them to learn, progress, and grow. He loves all men so His perfect plan is not going to default those who have not had the opportunity or the ability or capacity to choose His plan to damnation. This is what is meant in Peter's claim that "the gospel was preached also to them that are dead, that they might be judged according to men in the flesh, but live according to God in the spirit." The gospel of Jesus Christ - faith, repentance, baptism and receiving the Holy Ghost - and its ministry and blessings are extended to both the living and the dead.
Participants in the Divine Nature
The reason that we see that God's love is not limited in any capacity - living, dead, young, old, saint, sinner, etc. - is because we are not limited in our capacity. We were not created in the sense of God making our spirits, otherwise our spirits would not have the ability to do evil but would be inherently good. If we were not created then we must have always been and we always will be. This life or mortality is simply part of our existence that we pass through as part of our progression. But in what way are we to progress? To use a crude analogy from the book, Ender's Game, a leader tells a commander at the end of a battle, "We won! That's all that matters." To which the commander replies, "No. The way we win matters." God loves all His children. He wants us to have what He has and to do so has given us the tools and the example of how to become like Him. It is not His power or His glory that He wants to bestow as much as it is the understanding, knowledge, and attributes that He has obtained through learning and experience. Our mortality is the framework built to allow for that. This is why exaltation could not be given as Lucifer suggested in the pre-mortal council but it had to be experienced through mortality as was God's plan. The lie that is spread is that we can obtain this through "spirituality" and "religion" is unnecessary.
When Mormons describe through scripture heaven or heaven on earth, it is called Zion. It is a utopian-type community where "God is with us." It is not a solitary Zen. It isn't a private enlightenment. It is a place where there are families and groups of people coexisting and working together. This is why God again refers to himself as a Father. Families aren't a creation of society but a divine institution tied with the very fabric of nature. The reason for this is because the type of Christ-like characteristics that we are attempting to foster and nurture and develop are things like mercy, generosity, and self-control. "Kindness only exists when there is someone to whom we show kindness. Patience is only manifest when another calls it forth.... What we may have thought was our private pathway to salvation, was intended all along as a collaborative enterprise, though we often miss the point." We become perfected through lovingly learning to coexist because we have all experienced that many times working together can feel like a fiery furnace - this is intentional.
I myself struggle with this. I find that I hate working with whom I consider to be stupid people. I hate judgmental people. Sounds hypocritical but what I mean is that people fail to see the perfection that lies inside someone's desire or natures regardless of their own shortcomings and imperfections. When Enoch described what he saw and shared in regards to God's love, he was overcome with emotion. He wept over our disobedience and pain and shared in God's joy through our redemption that is only made possible through the Atonement. For a long time, I thought that my Sabbath day worship was only about partaking in the sacrament. It was becoming clean through the renewal of my covenants that I made at baptism and in the temple. The social aspects of the Sabbath were not important - however that is wholly untrue. Exaltation again is done through unity. We repent on an individual basis but we become exalted as a people and as families. We need each other.
In this last chapter, the authors use a particularly vivid metaphor. They describe a young boy who jumping around the yard, pretending to fly around, proclaims that he will eventually live among the stars and walk on the moon. They then contrast that to the rocket scientist that works and studies and learns the necessary laws of physics that will create a rocket ship and ask, who is more likely to achieve the goal? The one that through obedience and action learns and gains the necessary knowledge or the other? Obedience grants one knowledge and so both the knowledge and obedience frees them. It allows the scientist to grow and develop as an individual. People mistake this type of obedience as that of a blind sheep following a shepherd. And yet it is with that same analogy that the Savior describes us and those that drift away. He preached of searching for the One. The analogy of the prodigal son could be used not just to describe each of us but to illustrate what our union may be like once we leave mortality and return to our heavenly home.
The knowledge we gain in this life carries with us into the next. The study of science is a study of the laws of nature and the universe. The refining of Zion is in communities and creates in us the ability to gain the attributes of Christ. A study of Christ and Zion is a process of learning how to love as God does.
"The divine nature of man, and the divine nature of God, are shown to be the same - they are rooted in the will to love, at the price of pain, but in the certainty of joy. Heaven holds out the promise of a belonging that is destined to extend and surpass any that we have ever known in this wounded world."The other aspect of this sanctification process, learning to love and become more like God, is that it is a lifetime commitment. It will continue into the eternities. We don't believe or have a relationship with a static God or an unchanging being. It is in that eternal perspective that we are taught to focus. It is like beginning a hike and knowing where you are going and focusing so much on the peak that you forget to enjoy the views along the way.
"What if the possibilities of Zion were already here, and its scattered elements all about us? A child's embrace, a companion's caress, a friend's laughter are its materials. Our capacity to mourn another's pain, like God's tears for his children; our desire to lift us from our sin and sorrow - these are not to pass away when the elements shall melt with fervent heat. They are the stuff and substance of any Zion we build, any heaven we inherit. God is not radically Other, and neither is His heaven."The problem though is if we always think or focus on the future we can forget to find joy in the journey. God is love and so we must learn what God's love is. We learn through repentance and accepting the Atonement. We learn through obedience. And eventually we learn through seeing others as God sees us. We learn more about God through our interactions with others and ourselves. It is through learning to control our passions and to mourn with those that mourn that we can also find joy in life and find God's love in all our relationships.
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