I'd Rather Be Writing » passion

Aligning Yourself with a Cause

Tom Johnson — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 05:24:57 +0000

At a department Christmas social the other week, we had a special meeting following lunch. During the meeting, people spontaneously shared their feelings about working for the Church or other thoughts they had. More than a dozen people stood up.

Although it wasn’t called such, the meeting was similar to a “testimony meeting,” which is something that Mormons do once a month for their church meetings. During these meetings, rather than listening to several members give talks, anyone who feels the desire can spontaneously walk up to the front podium and say pretty much whatever they want for as long as they want. This can be both exciting and dangerous, or dreadful and dull, depending on who gets up and what they choose to say.

Some testimony meetings are inspiring. Others are filled with long spaces of tense silence. At work, whenever we allow people to share their thoughts or feelings at the end of meetings, it highlights the interesting mixture of church and work — a mixture that feels new and sometimes awkward.

As I read up on the subject, it turns out that spirituality in the workplace is nothing new. In fact, it’s a huge trend in business management. Marques et al even say that “spirituality is the new competitive edge” (Spirituality in the Workplace).

Spirituality a “competitive edge”? Yes, but they’re not talking about spirituality in the sense of religion. Their definition of spirituality is broader. In their usage, spirituality is the desire to connect with a higher purpose and meaning. It’s the yearning to be part of something larger than yourself, or to find a calling that guides you. Marques et al say some define spirituality as “the way we orient ourselves toward the divine.” Others describe it as “an individual search for meaning, purpose and values which may or may not include the concept of a God or transcendent being.” In other words, spirituality can encompass many characteristics, but overall it’s the desire to align yourself with a higher purpose and meaning.

If you have this sense of spirituality about your work, you’ll be more dedicated and hard-working. You won’t do below-average work or spend all afternoon playing ping-pong and surfing the net, because you believe in what you’re doing. It’s not just a 9-5 job to you anymore. It’s a mission. You have purpose from the inside.

Alignment with the Cause

Instilling a sense of spirituality in the workplace is similar to aligning workers with a cause. If you can get buy-in for the cause, you boost performance. This makes logical sense, and researchers Giacalone and Jerkiewicz even say “data unequivocally suggests that spiritually based organizational cultures are the most productive” (Handbook of Workplace Spirituality and Organizational Performance).

Some organizations and companies can tap into a cause more easily than others. Disneyland employees, for example, often work at a lower salary than at other companies just so they can be part of the magic and imagination of Disney. When they walk into the Magic Kingdom each morning for work, they’re connecting with something greater than themselves. They’re working in the kingdom, making unforgettable experiences for people.

You don’t have to work at Disney to find a cause. Bill Pollard, CEO of Servicemaster, relates the story of a community hospital housekeeper named Shirley who gets excited about mopping and cleaning because she’s not “just cleaning floors.” She “sees her job as extending to the welfare of the patient in the bed as an integral part of a team supporting the work of doctors and nurses — she has a Cause — a Cause that involves the health and welfare of others.” (qtd. in Inspire!).

In other words, in her mind, she’s not just doing janitorial work. She’s cleaning bed pans and mopping floors so doctors can help patients return to health, so that patients can get well and rejoin their families with a full life.

Almost any company has a worthy cause you can believe in. My last three jobs involved working for a biochemical weapons testing facility, a large financial firm, and a nutrition company specializing in protein for triathletes. Although I didn’t always keep it in mind at the time, in the larger sense I helped protect the nation from terrorists (perhaps) by increasing the IT system administrator’s understanding of data storage techniques for housing video test data. I helped financial analysts increase the retirement funds, 401(k) portfolios, and other savings plans of thousands of citizens so they could lead more financially comfortable lives. I helped triathletes replenish their depleted muscles with protein so they could achieve their gut-wrenching physical goals of swimming, 2.4 miles, biking 112 miles, and running 26 miles.

But while I was involved in each of those companies, very rarely did I consider my alignment and participation in the cause. Mostly I was caught up in the details of documentation and missed the larger picture.

Aligning with Your Calling

If you work for an organization whose cause inspires you, such as Disney, or your church, you can hop on board the organization’s cause and find meaning and purpose no matter what your role. But sometimes your company or organization is more mundane – for example, a circuit manufacturer.

You could tell yourself that you’re not just writing instructions. You’re helping computer manufacturers build more power-efficient motherboards so that people don’t have to wait so long for pages to load. But despite this cause, sometimes it’s not quite strong enough to lift you through the dull moments.

When your organization lacks a compelling cause, you can at least take comfort in the idea that you’re pursuing your calling or vocation. For example, no matter what you’re creating as a chemist, if chemistry is your calling, just working in the lab doing chemistry might ignite you.

For many technical writers, as long as they’re working with the written word, crafting and shaping sentences, clarifying ambiguity, describing complex setups with a grace that taps into their core talent, it’s okay if their company’s cause bores them. It’s all right because they’re pursuing a career they love. They’re aligned with their calling.

And when you’re aligned with your calling, Pollard says “a creative power is unleashed that results in quality service to the customer and the growth and development of the people serving.”

The Problem

Aligning with your calling is ideal, but this can be an issue for technical writers, because almost no one feels that technical writing is a calling. In Technical Writing: Career or Calling?, Scott Nesbitt writes, “I believe that technical writing is a career — a career that can be interesting and rewarding. But it’s definitely not a calling.”

In Is Technical Writing Your Calling?, Michael Harvey also agrees that technical writing isn’t a calling. He writes, “I don’t think that writing installation manuals, product guides, or help panels is a calling. It’s a job — an enjoyable career if you’re good at it. The underlying activity — clearly communicating complex concepts or procedures to help someone get work done — feels close to a calling.” But it’s not a calling in the sense that you would leave everything to do it.

In a guest post I wrote for DMN Communications, I explored more or less the same topic. I concluded that technical writing isn’t something you can be unstoppable about, like you can with a calling. But if you hook into a related sphere that ties in closely with tech comm., such as film or story or code or illustration, and that’s your calling, you can use that passion to convert your job into something more meaningful.

A Creative Solution

Rather than looking at ways to find a calling in your current work, which can be an endless chase, Lance Secretan, former CEO of Manpower Inc., suggests a reverse strategy: apply your existing calling to your work.

For example, an ex-helicopter pilot once contacted Secretan for work. Secretan asked the pilot what his calling was. He said he loved to fly and used to transport people to the North Sea oil rigs off the main coast of Scotland during the economic boom in that area. Secretan ended up forming a new company to help service oil rigs with fleets of helicopters.

Secretan’s strategy is to find people passionate about a calling, and then “to align their Calling with our Cause, so they could create magical careers for themselves, while, at the same investing in our cause.” In other words, rather than try to inspire employees with a new passion or calling, he uses the existing passions or callings of his employees to grow his company (Inspire!).

So if you don’t find your calling in technical writing, try Secretan’s strategy: figure out what your calling is, and then bring that passion to your technical writing role.

For example, Michael Pick has a background in film. I assume this is what he’s passionate about, rather than creating help tutorials. But he brings his passion for film to his role as a technical communicator for WordPress by creating mesmerizing screencasts.

Another example: You might have a passion for creative writing. Rather than minimizing your calling as a creative writer, integrate your passion with your technical writing role. You could create scenario-driven help, where your characters (played by imagined users) encounter problems and you explain the solutions. You could write story-driven blog posts about your product for your corporate website. You could take special care to ensure that each button and interface label resonates with the clarity and precision of poetry.

One activity I enjoy is building websites. Rather than leaving my passion behind and relegating myself to the standard tech comm. tools, I can breathe passion into my tech writing role by creating and branding web platforms to publish my help (such as what I’ve done with Mediawiki).

But let’s say your real passion seems to have nothing to do with technical writing. You’re a helicopter pilot with a history of transporting soldiers to and from the field of combat. How would you integrate that passion into your role as a tech writer? The solution is simple: Look for work in the helicopter industry, writing manuals for helicopter pilots. And then immerse yourself in usability, interviewing and observing helicopter pilots in their own environment to assess their tasks and needs.

However you do it, find your calling and integrate it into your work.

Conclusion

The most fulfilling jobs occur when you are aligned with both the organization’s cause and your calling. This is why the engineers and other IT professionals at my work can stand up and share special feelings they have for their jobs. Many get up and say that it’s “night and day” compared to previous jobs they’ve had, and so on.

But any job can have the same spiritual underpinnings, as long as you believe in your organization’s cause (or as long as you remember how your work fits into the larger picture), and as long as you find a way to integrate your calling into your role.

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How Video Can Turn Your Career Around

Tom Johnson — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 04:31:05 +0000

When I talk to most technical writers, video is a format they haven’t done much with. This surprises me, because I find that, as a user, video tutorials are often the most helpful type of material for me to learn software. Video most closely simulates the universal desire we have for a friend to show us how to do something in an application. Perhaps I’m a visual learner, but the majority of us (some say 60 to 65 percent) are visual learners.

But video doesn’t appeal only to end users. Video can be an appealing format for technical writers as well. Creating videos can turn your career around, especially if you find technical writing a little dull.

For example, in 2005, Ken Circeo at Microsoft wrote:

I don’t know how you can become a tech writer either, because I just kind of fell into it myself. The reason this question surprises me is because there are so many interesting and exciting professions out there, I don’t know why anyone would ever choose to become a tech writer. Of the seven people on my team at Microsoft, none of us wanted to be a tech writer. We all set out to write novels, or news stories, or software – pretty much anything besides technical manuals.

He ends the article with a word of advice:

There. I hope I’ve done some good by saving you from a life of instructing users to “make sure you click this before you click that.” Please heed my advice. Maintain your sanity. Turn back. The bridge is out. (Tech Writing, Just for the Fun of It)

I commented on Ken’s post, encouraging him to try other formats, such as video. After I posted my comment, I realized his post was several years old. Later that day, Ken responded:

Thanks for taking time to comment, Tom. You must be prophetic, for shortly after I wrote that article I reinvented myself as a video producer here at Microsoft. I’ve converted my office into a sound studio and I now spend my days creating video-based instruction for Microsoft unified communications products. It has turned my attitude around completely. For the first time since college (when I was a lay-out artist), I can say that I truly enjoy my work.

He’s good at it too. Here are a couple of videos Ken created.

How to Save Time with Tagging

How Your Contact List Can Make You More Productive

Watching the videos, you can sense Ken’s enjoyment in producing them. My point is that videos are not only a highly user-friendly form of software help, they can also turn around your technical writing career, giving variety and interest to the “click-this, select-that” writing hypnosis.

If the video format is new territory for you, I encourage you to download a copy of Camtasia Studio, buy the best microphone you can find at a local electronics store, write out a script, and then go for it. Even if your manager doesn’t ask for it, doesn’t require it, and doesn’t understand it, your users will love it. And you might too.

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What I See — James Hall’s Essays and Florida

Tom Johnson — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 07:05:49 +0000

James Hall's book of essays, "Hot Damn"

On my father’s recent visit from Florida, he brought me a stack of books, one of them James Hall’s collection of essays, Hot Damn!

James Hall is a poet and crime novelist, but he once wrote essays for a newspaper for several years. This book is a collection of those essays.

The topics of Hall’s essays range widely — from adventures in Florida to experiences as a boy in a library, to buying a house, to eating Cheetos while watching sports. But one theme is consistent throughout: the celebration of life. Falling in love with something. Getting excited about an adventure or place that others might simply regard as ordinary.

I believe this attitude is something I’ve largely forgotten. Let me excerpt a few paragraphs that demonstrate his love for life, especially Florida.

In “Home at Last,” Hall explains that he turned down the Air Force Academy to attend Florida Presbyterian College — not for religious reasons, but to escape in to Florida:

I did four glorious years of college in the charming and soporific Satin Petersburg of the sixties. On holidays I explored the west coast, the Keys, camping at starkly primitive Bahia Honda, building bonfires on midnight beaches, discovering out-of-the-way taverns that served cheap pitchers of beer and spectacular cheeseburgers, bays where fish jumped happily into frying pans, the unair-conditioned piano bars in Key West where writers huddled in the corners and talked the secret talk. I had never felt so at home.

In “Florida Trifecta,” spending time near ancient ceremonial grounds, Hall writes,

As my psychic tuning fork hummed, we drank a beer together on a peak overlooking one of the assembly plazas and were quieter than we would have been almost anywhere else on earth. I no longer cared if we went over to Cabbage Key. This was fine. We could stay there all afternoon, standing shoulder to shoulder with the ghosts of our noble forebears who knew and loved this land when its waters were crystalline and dense with fish, its breezes uncontaminated and dense with fish, its breezes uncontaminated by the noise or particulates.

In “The Names of Things,” Hall describes a walk on the seashell-full beaches of Sanibel island:

Lace murex, wentletrap, lightening whelk, junonia. The names are as exotic and various as their shapes. Cones and tulips and angel wings, baby’s ears and worms. Their bright colors litter the beach before me and crunch underfoot. With every step down the sugary sand I cringe with guilt at the possibility that I am destroying hundreds of rare specimens.

In “Winning Me Over,” Hall drives through the Everglades:

It was nearly a quarter of a century ago that I first journeyed west out Tamiami Trail and fell instantly in love with that broad and water expanse of sawgrass and anhingas and alligators. What struck me on that first trip was the way the vast and mesmerizing distances seemed to open up immediately after passing beyond the city limits of Miami. At that time I did not yet know the name of a single bird or bush or tree, and my eyes were not yet attuned to the nuances of that profoundly understated landscape, yet I sense the aching silence, a mysterious, almost sacred hush that seemed to resonate from the immense spread of sky and land.

In almost every essay, Hall’s love of life comes through:

In “Nude Woman in the Grass,” he describes the experience of being gripped by a book for the first time.
In “Dream House,” he narrates a house he fell in love with, purchased, and lived in for eight years.
In “Touchy Feely,” he celebrates the sense of touch in vivid, prolonged ways.
In “Hemingway,” he sees past the flaws that critics point out in Hemingway and values him for his character.

Hall also has a good dose of wit and sarcasm, and the essays are far from any kind of inspirational writing. But in almost every essay, there’s an aesthetic component that uplifts me. The way he sees an experience, or describes a place or person, has an element of rapture with life.

I think remarkable literary writers have this same celebration of life inside them. Think of Walt Whitman, who, in Song of Myself, wrote passages like,

Oxen that rattle the yoke and chain or halt in the leafy shade, what
is that you express in your eyes?
It seems to me more than all the print I have read in my life.

Finding this attitude isn’t about looking on the positive side, or avoiding negative gossip or criticism. It’s about looking in to the ordinary and seeing something moving and alive. It’s about learning to marvel at what others regard as plain.

Perhaps Hall’s essays resonated so strongly with me because of my time in Florida. Hall moved from Kentucky to Florida, and then spent the next thirty years of his life there. I must admit that I never viewed Florida as a literary paradise. It’s hot, muggy, and subject to urban sprawl like any other place. But that’s not what Hall sees. Whether he’s picking up sun-bleached shells on a beach, or staring out into the ocean for several days straight, or going into an old diner where they plaster the walls with dollar bills, he’s jazzed about the experience. He celebrates the life that happens all around him.

As I think back on my four years in Florida, it was a literary goldmine. All too frequently I dismissed my surroundings as mundane, as unworthwhile. And yet, it seems no matter where I live, the landscape is just as ordinary as it always is. Hall taught me to stop looking other places and instead look right where I am. To look into the ordinary and see something more. And with that something more, embrace it.

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Counterpoints to “7 Blogging Beginner Mistakes”

Tom Johnson — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 18:11:59 +0000

Tibu Puiu from the Lost Art of Blogging asked me to check out his post on the “7 Blogging Beginning Mistakes and How to Avoid Them.” Although I agree with much of what he says, I’ve decided to play devil’s advocate here and see what counterarguments I can find against his points. I’ve listed Puiu’s headings below followed by my counterarguments.

1. Not blogging on self-hosted blogs.

Puiu’s argument is that freely hosted blogs such as with Blogger and WordPress limit the amount of customization and control you have, and when you do decide to get serious and switch to a self-hosted blog, you lose all your subscribers.

He makes a good point here. A web host plan is fairly inexpensive and provides you with a ton of extra options for your blog. However, if I’m not mistaken, Lorelle’s blog is a WordPress.com blog. And so are many other popular blogs. Content is king. While it’s fun to customize and style your blog, the focus of my blog is to communicate, to write, to evaluate and analyze. I think I spend too much time playing with the technology and not enough time crafting thoughtful posts.

You can buy your own domain for $10 and point it to your wordpress.com or blogspot.com domain. You can also route your feed through FeedBurner without having your own web host. Then when you switch to a real hosting plan (but keep your domain), you won’t lose the subscribers to your feed.

2. Not blogging out of passion, but out of lust for money.

Puiu says to blog about what you’re truly passionate about and not sell your soul for adsense money by writing posts that target keywords such as mesothelioma. While I agree that you have to be passionate about your topic, if you can make sufficient money blogging about mesothelioma, then by all means do it. It beats working a second job. Actually, if you can make good money blogging at all, wow. All the blogging jobs I’ve seen have offered meager pay. Still, there’s nothing wrong with writing about dry topics for pay. In fact, many technical writers do it every day.

3. Design cluttering.

Puiu says to de-clutter your site from all the unnecessary sidebar content, spammy banners, and unaesthetic colors. I agree with much of what he says here. Cruise around the WordPress theme sites looking for attractive themes — there’s a 10:1 ratio of “eye-hurting themes” (as Puiu says) to pleasing ones.

However, I do value blogs that make it easy to find content — with top 10 lists, indexes, related posts, classic post lists, and other useful features (which might be considered clutter). And even if the theme is ugly, I mostly read content through my feedreader, which strips out formatting. Content is separate from design.

4. Commenting issues.

Puiu says to allow comments, respond to comments, and comment on others posts. Turning off comments or requiring registration takes away from the basic interactive foundation of blogging. Yes of course commenting should be open and encouraged. But the more popular your blog gets, the harder it is to keep up with comments. Soon you’ll be spending as much time responding to comments as you spend writing new posts.

As far as commenting on other blogs, if you link to their blogs, the Kramer plugin does wonders in automating trackbacks. Linking to posts is a great way of commenting without physically commenting below their posts.

5. Stats show off.

Puiu isn’t keen on showing-off stats, but if you look in my upper-right corner, you’ll see a chiclet showing 600+ readers to my blog. Although I can see how having a low number might turn readers off, if you’re proud of your readership, by all means show the chiclet. Not only does it clue readers in as to whether you’re blog is worth reading (the chiclet provides a bandwagon rhetorical appeal), it also makes you more aware of your readers.

I find that my readers fluctuate in cycles — after some posts, I lose 50 readers, and then regain them after a day or two. Overall the reader chiclet makes me think more frequently about who is reading my blog. And when I land on blogs that have 1,000+ readers (or 1500K, like Tech Crunch), I know the blog must be worth reading.

6. Bad content and text formating.

Puiu says to keep the posts grammatically correct, well-formatted, spell-checked, chunked with section headings, etc. He also despises people who steal others’ content. Of course you shouldn’t just steal others’ content (although I have a Shared Items from Google Reader page). But writers can overemphasize grammar. They can agonize over the perfection of each sentence. On a global scale, however, the requirement for highly literate prose is declining. People care more about relevant business content, technical accuracy, and thoughtful analysis. If you mistake “brake” for “break” or write “to” instead of “too,” readers will forgive you.

7. Early monetization.

Puiu says not to try monetizing your site before you accumulate enough readers to make the ads worthwhile. Sure, wait until you have a bunch of subscribers before you start enticing them to click ads. However, my experience with Google’s ads convinced me that ads on a blog are a waste of time. Unless you have a product-based focus to your blog, the readers may not be interested in clicking ads.

On the other hand, text-link ads can be a lot more worthwhile. Last month I received more than $1300 to place about 20 text-link ads on back posts.

Overall Puiu’s advice is good. I just wanted to explore other perspectives on these ideas. A while ago I wrote a post titled 20 Usability Tips for Your Blog that contains many of the points Puiu encourages.