Generation Ex explores every ‘ex’ in our lives - our expertise, our expectations and our experiences - and how they can be a catalyst for personal growth when your professional (or personal) journey suddenly shifts under your feet.
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Thank you.
It’s taken me a long time to realize that I am quite good at a lot of different things. Sadly, it’s taken me longer to realize that this is a terrible thing.
The slow uptake on both fronts has caused considerable professional angst for myself and probably more so for the people watching this journey right up close.
Let me see if I can explain.
My parents grew up in the shadow of the automobile industry, Detroit, Michigan. Motor City USA. The figurative engine that drove the US economy to greatness in the early to middle part of the 20th century.
Many extended family and friends lived on the promise that two decades of service earned you a pension, a house upstate and a dignified twilight existence as a sturdy brick in the foundation that was middle class American life.
That is certainly an over-simplification of things but I’m also not sure it matters.
Because it’s gone.
We have all read internet articles (well, let’s be honest, read headlines) that ‘kids today’ will have no fewer than 1000 different jobs from the time they leave school until they are comfortably settled on Mars, eating protein blocks made from crickets, living off their millions of dollars made in the ‘Gig Economy’.
…that reminds me - fuck you, ‘Gig Economy’…
The reality, though, was that for many, this was the case long before there actually were internet articles and for some, like me, it was entirely the point.
Is it possible to be visionary and stupid in one fell swoop? You bet your ass it is.
When I was very young - and time was available - my family would take to the road on extended camping/roadtrips out West. Places like Mesa Verde, Chaco Canyon, Zion, Tetons… uh, the rest…
They all became a part of the fabric of memory barely recalled but with an understanding of the legendary place they hold when writing the story of a life in your mind.
… or on Substack for friends and strangers alike to read...
At each of these parks, the information booths, gifts shops and sometimes even park rangers would have patches you could get that marked your passage through some of the most awe-inspiring lands the US has to offer.
My mother would carefully sew each new destination onto my tiny little Levi’s jacket and along with an awesome fake license plate with my name on it (always with an ‘H’ in ‘Jon’, though, you sonsabitches) it became a record of the places I’d been, the experiences I shared and the road I had traveled.
Yup, a tiny little, 1976, bad-ass, denim CV that you wear to school to show off to your friends.
It was rock-and-roll when rock-and-roll was still ‘Rock-and-Roll’.
But for me, that exploration never really stopped. Unwittingly, my parents unleashed a Jack Kerouac-styled toddler - shorter legs, fewer drugs - whose core approach to almost everything was driven almost exclusively by the mantra, ‘what’s that?’ and then stumble off in pursuit of shiny new experiences, people or knowledge.
Half an age later I found myself graduated from university on a Saturday (with nothing but a diploma), arrived home on a Sunday, got a phone call the following Thursday and had packed-up and moved to Washington, DC to start a temp job by the following Monday.
That temp job happened to be at the National Geographic Society where I would spend the next two years hopping from desk to desk for a day, a week or a few months, soaking up inspiration, ideas and random talents (Quark Publishing System circa 3.0, anyone?) and loving life.
I’m not sure what influenced whom, that experience cementing my tendencies or my curiosity landing in a perfect garden bed in which to grow but I have pretty much spent the intervening years tumbling unevenly like a giant Katamari ball, picking up knowledge, insight and experience on a great professional floodplain, notionally headed toward the sea but in no hurry to get there.
You know what terrifies people? People like that.
In the structured, cubicle-driven, hopscotch of career life, those who throw the pebble and zealously hop their way to a square, bend over, eat the pebble, take off their left shoe and throw it at their challenger (don’t pretend you know the rules either) are rewarded with board positions on companies that provide corporate guidance for places like Chalk’s Hopscotching Association of Manufacturing People Stuff, ‘CHAMPS’, for short.
Great achievements to be sure.
But what about those that played hopscotch for a bit, pocketed the pebble and a handful more, wandered into the nearby woods with stick in hand to find out how many skips he could get out of a pebble, hitting them baseball style across the surface of a pond?
… I don’t know this person…
…
… the answer is zero, zero skips…
And therein lies the rub. Watching a seven year old kid who was told to go play hopscotch plunk pebbles into a pond with a stick is hilarious. But as we develop as professionals trying to get your head around someone whose ever-evolving abilities read like a New York City diner’s menu is terrifying to most employers.
Understandably, when they pick up the phone people want to be sure the person they reach gives all the f’s about their one thing. Hopscotch. Coloring. Handwriting. Filing. Market Research. Product Development. Stakeholder Management. Transformational Change.
For many of the ‘cross-functional’ among us, the frowned-upon tension received in the constrained structure of assembly-line production writ large is palpable. I don’t doubt for a second there are magical workplaces where lemonade runs from the taps, ideas are celebrated regardless of source and we all nap under the shade of the Bodhi tree.
If you think your workplace is one of them ask yourself how many people you know complain about being bored, unchallenged, or underutilized.
I have spent over a year now working hard to bend the reality of my own professional path. I have chosen to lean into these tendencies instead of frantically changing my LinkedIn CV to better-fit a structure that leaves out so many divergent perspectives informed by curiosities beyond the game being played.
It hasn’t been easy but the beauty of succeeding means professional interactions transform into a cooperative effort to solve a specific problem rather than a biding of time doing admin at a desk until the next inevitable crisis - or worse yet, seeing the problem coming but having no authority to point it out or offer up a solution as is the case for many internal employees.
Don’t get me wrong it’s still a lot of work to reach into your tumbling ball of experience, pull out a CB radio, two hockey sticks and a box of raisins and convince someone whose focus groups keeps saying, ‘more loaves of white bread with racing stripes painted on them’ that there is a better way forward.
Sometimes you can’t.
But the tragedy for many is to have to then go paint racing stripes on loaves of bread knowing full well the answer lies elsewhere.
Me? I get to fill my pocket with raisins, grab a hockey stick and go see if I can’t shoot them over the house into the pool. Market research for someone I haven’t met yet.
If I learn anything I‘ll ping you on the CB…
Brilliant writing JS!
Sort of envy your approach. Most spend an entire lifetime searching for what you appear to have already realized. 🦁👌❤️