Blowhard, Esq. writes:
- If you love and are passionate about your job, that’s great, but why do we expect that from everyone?
- A woman, who now identifies as a man, takes large injections of testosterone and finds her entire worldview turned upside down. (Scroll to Act 2, “Infinite Gent.”)
- Here I thought Kieslowski was falling down the memory hole, but apparently not.
- Are novellas the future of publishing?
- Which book would you read 100 times? My answer: none.
- Good interview with David Ritz, co-writer of Marvin Gay’s “Sexual Healing” and ghostwriter of numerous pop star autobiographies.
- The highest grossing February releases of all time: #1. THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST. #2. 50 SHADES OF GREY.
- Stats Du Jour: “Romance fiction is the largest and most profitable sector of the publishing industry: 13 percent of the adult fiction market, 40 percent of all e-books sold, with earnings of nearly a billion and a half dollars per year, more than twice that of the next most lucrative genre, crime fiction.”
- All of this 50 SHADES talk is a good excuse to revisit Ray Sawhill’s super two-part Salon piece on eroticism in movies, which you can find here and here.
- Is a better suburb being built in Texas?
- The average American would recognize most meals in ancient Rome.
- I don’t always drink beer, but when I do, I prefer that it be brewed with animal genitalia and smoked with dung.
- How to make the best buttermilk fried chicken.
Blowhard, Esq.
Callowman
Sherbrooke
Eddie Pensier
Enzo Nakamura
Epaminondas
Fabrizio del Wrongo
Fenster
Brundle Guy
Glynn Marshes
Paleo Retiree
Atypical Neurotic
Question Lady
Sax von Stroheim
Sir Barken Hyena
The Mistaken
Uncouth Reflections 
Oh Lord, how I hate the “I’m passionate about my job” meme. All those companies that start with a lie — “our most important asset is our people” — and then lard it up with “we’re passionate about…” Blech.
Hey world, I am flat out great at my job, and I have ZERO passion for it. But I do a good job because I expect it of myself and because I get paid to do a good job. Reason enough.
I wouldn’t read any book 100 times either. Probably the most I’ve done is about 15, but that was back when I was teaching and would read and re-read books every year. Just on my own I’ve probably peaked at about four re-reads for “Tender Is the Night,” my favorite book (I didn’t say the best book, I said my favorite). Though that includes reading it in two different versions (different sequencing). Does that still count as four? Or as two and two?
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The expectation that one should be passionate about a job has caused a lot of anxiety. Hell, most of us don’t have a recreational passion, let alone passion for a line of work. Add me to the list of people who are damn good at what they do, but could take or leave the actual work. That’s the most prudent mindset to have, for 99.9% of people.
The transsexual hormone thing is getting interesting. It’s pretty obvious that taking a hormone you aren’t born with causes drastic changes in one’s mind and body, which of course brings up issues of innate sex and gender differences.
That Texas suburb looks great.
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“If you can’t do what you love, love what you do.”
Psh, what a bunch of hooey, though I admit it seems to work for a small number in the population who approach life with seemingly the greatest attitude ever. I confess I view them with a mix of envy and angst, as they often end up with good jobs without ever appearing to TRY for it. It just falls in their lap. A guy I know with no college education – a supposed job prospect killer in the bay area – went from being a bouncer at a bar to a high-earning salesman nearly overnight. He was just in the right place at the right time, and all that…
Anyway here’s a good piece from Slate on how the self-actualizing zeitgeist that works for the elite only increases the anxiety of people who will never have some administrator job at a NYC art museum. (Heh, or at least that’s my take.)
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/01/do_what_you_love_love_what_you_do_an_omnipresent_mantra_that_s_bad_for_work.html
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Personality is everything. It really is. Connections help, but if you have a certain personality and reasonable intelligence, the sky’s the limit. Nothing wrong with that. I used to fret over it, but once I let go of my aspirational thinking with regards to somehow changing my personality, I’ve been pretty damn happy.
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I’ve been told to be a Buddhist too, so I won’t care about status-climbing nor let my identity get mixed up with what I do for a living. But I’m too cognizant of the fact that I’d be changing my mindset to accommodate failure. I know that once I’m over the hump, as it were, it won’t matter, but knowledge of the motivation undermines the effort.
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The “passion” thing is more about being into your job while you’re doing your job. As Elbert Hubbard used to say, “If you work for a man, WORK for him.” These are the people that seem to get ahead “effortlessly”. You can spot them as even as interns, and they are usually rewarded with jobs. Employers know that the guy or gal who is into the job is priceless. Even if they’re only pretending. It doesn’t matter. We’re all pretending. Nothing is more effortful than purposely holding yourself back from work. I myself, for instance, felt crappy all day today, and deliberately attempted and accomplished little on the job, just to punish the world. Man, it was a long, hard day.
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I agree that loving your work is not a bad thing to push on the cognitive elite as a value since productivity and satisfaction are likely related at high levels. It also makes sense that the issue will probably cut the other way with the non-cognitive elite, which will feel pressured to love the work when they simply don’t, and don’t want to force a smile,
That’s not to say employers of the non-cognitive elite are wrong to push happy talk and happy face. Disney is just an extreme example of something capitalism routinely does: fabricate a pleasing way of interaction as a way of increasing profitability, whether at the cosmetics counter, the burger place or the reception area at a law firm. People may well gripe about that as an unpleasant part of work–having to put on the mask–but that’s just the 20th century version of the unpleasantness of having to go down into the mine or out in the fields. It’s not the worst thing.
I also find it humorous that this article griping about happy face obligations was written by an academic. Academics don’t know how good they have it in largely being shielded from happy face obligations. Get the paper published in the right journals and for the most part you will do fine. But this just shows how sensitive and persnickety faculty can be at the very idea that someone *might* expect them how to behave.
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On a sort of related note, why is a damn career so important? I’ve never understood why reaching the top of the corporate world was so important for so many people (money aside). I mean, if you’ve sacrificed a ton of your life to become CEO of a cheese factory, how really important is it in the big scheme of things?
This whole, work is the be all and end all of life is just bizarre in my opinion. I’d much rather be a wage-slave with a family that loved me, with hobbies and interests, and a degree of personal freedom rather than some corporate drone shackled to their desk by golden handcuffs.
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