The Plan
I have this problem.
I always forget what I’m obsessed with.
There are all these topics that trigger intense and excited ideas in me. I always recognize them when they come up in conversations, but if you asked me what I’m thinking about these days, I’d never be able to call them to mind.
So I finally did what a rational person would have done eons ago. I started writing them down. Any time one came up, I scribbled it in my name-brand notebook.1 Soon they were tugging each other out of the woodwork and all these crawly little lines appeared and — poof! — a tiny gigantic map of everything I’m obsessed with. Enough to start with, anyway.
“that almost-tangible buzz”
Now I know what it is I’ve been wanting to write about. Posts should begin to slowly creep forward and attempt to tease apart that magnificent tangle of ideas. For now let’s just dip in for a few of the highlights:
Engagement is critical. You know what I’m talking about. It’s that almost-tangible buzz that arises when someone actually pays attention. Kids can’t live without it. Spouses don’t do so well without it either. And engaging with an activity makes an outsized difference in the quality of your results. Engaging with what’s next to you seriously boosts joy. The importance of engagement pops up everywhere once you start looking.
I don’t really understand engagement, but it has something to do with attention. Which gets interesting in its own right, because you can only pay attention to one thing at a time, but of course you’re constantly doing all sorts of things at once. I don’t just mean multitasking in an overt way, like watching a movie while you fold clothes. I mean my fingers are typing and my brain is articulating ideas and my heart is pumping and I’m breathing and shivering and I’ve bitten a couple nails and listened to a song and shifted my position and yet I’m really only paying attention to one of those things per moment.
That’s where we get into habit. Habit is really useful if you need to process common inputs in standard ways without using up your single, precious attention to do so. And attention is perfect for exercising real judgment or solving new problems.
Now, this gives us a stellar grid for understanding bureaucracy, because bureaucratic procedures are to organizations what habits are to people. You have someone, somewhere, who is competent and engaged enough to make decisions about how to deal with new situations. That person creates the procedures everyone else follows without having to spend attention on defining the process. If you’re willing to trust everyone on the front lines to be that competent and engaged, you can eliminate bureaucracy because your employees will generally make the right decisions.
“bureaucracy…can be just the thing”
But if you have tons of employees and most of them are just there for the paycheck, suddenly you have to define everything in tedious levels of detail and enforce it externally. This also implies that organizational procedures — what I’m calling bureaucracy — can be just the thing when they’re used well, to smooth out common processes and free people to place their attention on the interesting questions and innovations that really require their engagement: the things, we could say, that add value to the world.
Value. What is worth wanting. What there would be more of in a more perfect world. But say you’ve made value, or found value. What do you do with beauty? What is a sufficient response to a solid idea or a really pleasing photograph or a damn fine wine? And how on Earth are you meant to take in the full deep-down gorgeousness of your wife? Appreciation takes practice. Getting better at appreciating value gives you a greater capacity for joy, deeper rest, more delightful work. But I don’t know yet how to get better at appreciating things. I fumble. I stutter. I take sips, not gulps.
So I’m on a pilgrimage, a constant search for value and the secret to taking it into me. I want to be a connoisseur of the world. I want to suck the marrow out of all this blatant glory sizzling in the leaves and books and friends all around me. I have to find and eat the truth. I am ravenous. So hungry, in fact, that if I’m to have any chance at satisfaction, I will need a plan, some tangle of clues that I can begin to tease apart. This is what pens are good for, friends. Keep your fingers moving.
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1 Fine. Yes. I have a Moleskine. I’ve been carefully cultivating a disdain for them for years, and one day Joe just randomly gives me one and of course it’s perfect at everything all the time. Hmph. The secret is to not respect the notebook. At all. Tear that sucker apart.
