Category Archives: Work and Career

Hard Work is Good Work

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In my interviews for the Legacy Project, I loved listening to the Texas accent. Apparently, some say the classic Texas accent is disappearing, but not among these folks. Many of these elders were from East Texas, with its soft, musical drawl and slow cadence. Twenty-five cents becomes “twenny-fi cints,” kid becomes “kee-ud,” business to “bid-ness,” and government to “gummint.” There was a lulling quality in my conversations with very old Texans, but also a remarkably clear way of condensing the past and expressing their feelings about it. And Texans are polite; no one hurried me along or refused to at least try to answer a question.

One thing that almost all the Texans had in common was that they grew up working – and working hard. Martin, 78, was typical. From a very early age, he was expected to work, and it taught him valuable life lessons. He grew up on a farm during the Great Depression, he told me, and that’s what kept the family alive. “We had enough to eat because of the vegetable garden.”

We chopped cotton, we picked cotton, we milked cows, we carried wood for the cookstove and the fireplace – we cooked over a wood cook stove. They cooked that way until the 1940s. The didn’t have electricity or running water until after I left home. We drew water from the well to do wash. You had to draw the water, put it in the tub. With everything that had to be done on a farm, we tagged along and helped.

Martin embodies the work history of many of the elder I interviewed, and he shows the legacy over his life course.

The family home that I grew up in was very religious, and the community I grew up in was about three hundred people. And we had church and family and our farm where we worked all the time, we worked round the clock and nobody had any money. There was school and work and that was it. And that was my life. And all during the Depression my family farmed that farm and when you could get little or nothing for anything, we managed to keep everything together. And when everybody around us was going belly up, we came through it. Just being around for those years, I got a lot of what I learned over my life.

At a young age, age fourteen, I guess, I was working seven days a week when I wasn’t in school and many days before school and after school, I was working on that farm. And I rode a school bus from school back to the farm and then work until dark and then my dad and I got the truck and we came home. But that was a normal work day. And like I said, nobody had any money. This is something that most people today can’t fathom, they can’t realize. We lived at a time when there was no money and you just really didn’t think about it because all of our friends were doing the same thing. And it gave me a value where I knew what a day of working was. I knew what it meant. I knew what hard work was and when your fifteen or sixteen, that’s a pretty good lesson.

He went on to a distinguished career in the military, serving in Europe, Korea, and Vietnam. After retirement, he worked for several corporations. Throughout the course of his career, what he learned from a childhood of hard work stayed with him. “I enjoyed working, sure, I made the work a part of my life. A job to me was a set of requirements and a group of people that you work with, you get along with, and you do the best you can.”

This vision of work came from a kind of childhood shared by many of the elders, but known to few younger Americans today:

I attribute any success I’ve had to my family because of the way I was taught. You know, when you’re thirteen and you’re getting up at four in the morning and milk the cows and feed the cattle and then going to school at seven thirty. Getting out of school at three thirty in the afternoon and then getting on the school bus and then going back out to the farm and working til after dark, and that’s before you even started studying.

I am still determined to be productive. Nowhere in the Bible do you find a retirement plan. We’re here for a purpose and I like to think that we need to find out what that purpose is and get about doing it, no matter how old we are.

Beware of Multi-Tasking

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Oliver’s (age 81)  lesson: Do one thing at a time, or you get “stress and chaos.”

It’s a scientific fact that you can only think of one thing at a time. Accept that  fact and work accordingly. Make a list of your projects and follow each one as far as convenient, then tackle the next. Many people take pride in handling several things at once without a plan. Their attention is constantly redirected, allowing stress and chaos to build, with nothing completed.

Look for Autonomy in a Job

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Stanley, 82, had a remarkable career as a highly successful entrepreneur. He freely admits he made many mistakes and sometimes lost money (but those, he says, were his best learning experiences).

Looking back over what made him love his career path, he highlighted on key point: Autonomy – the freedom to direct his own work life.

When I worked, I worked seven  days a week if I had to. I have not one regret. I had the one thing that most people never achieve, and that is total freedom. Most people never have total freedom in what they do. I could do what I wanted. I could make decisions, I could make mistakes, but whatever I did, they were mine. There is a satisfaction to that, that you can’t put down on paper. It comes after years and years of doing what you’re doing, and you find out that you really know what has to be done and what shouldn’t be done, and you feel very good about yourself.

And that feeling of success within myself, and that feeling of satisfaction, it’s like nothing else.

The autonomy – most people never understand that. They’re slaves to somebody. This was a gift to me basically from my father, because he was the one who explained it to me, he was the one who started the company, and who instilled in me and my brothers the feeling that when you have this freedom – economic freedom, social freedom – there’s no money that can pay for it. You can’t buy it. You have to earn it, you have to feel it, and you know something? It doesn’t get better!.

Life Lessons from a Tuskeegee Airman

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We’d like to share the story of one of the true heroes we encountered in the Legacy Project. TUSKEGEE-AIRMENWe heard many accounts of overcoming adversity and discrimination, but no interviewee was more inspiring than Hiram Mann (pictured here in World War II). Hiram had to fight to find the work he loved, overcoming racial prejudice along the way. The struggle and the rewards of his 90 years were encapsulated in his first words in our interview: “I was one of the original legendary Tuskegee Airmen.”

In the early 1940s the military was almost completely segregated and the Air Force did not even allow Black people to enlist. But what if, as a young Black man, this was your chosen career, indeed your life’s mission?

Hiram’s experiences as part of this unique group allowed him to achieve his childhood dream, and so shaped his lessons for work and career.

Back when I wanted to get into the military, before America got into the fighting in WWII, I wanted to fly an airplane. I had never been in an airplane in my life, though we’d seen them fly over. Well, I was a Depression-era child and pennies were very, very, tight to come by, but I would save my pennies in a wooden box and go to the hobby shop and try to make model airplanes, because I wanted to fly so badly.

Sometime in early 1941, I wanted to know about getting flying instructions to fight for my country. The letter of rejection that I received said point-blank, no easy words to smooth it over, that there were no facilities to train “Negroes” to fly in any branch of the American military service. That ticked me off. I balled the letter up and threw it away. There were Blacks like me that wanted to fly. All over the United States there were others in similar situations. I went back to my job being a bellhop in Cleveland, Ohio.

I applied again and I was very lucky. I passed and I continued to pass all of the examinations that I was given and I was in the 27th class that graduated.

Hiram thus refused to give up despite setbacks and his own self-doubt that emerged from being raised in a segregated society. He needed a mix of courage, drive, patience, and forbearance to succeed in the 1940s military, where Black soldiers were unusual and Black officers a rare curiosity. Nevertheless, he achieved his dream of fighting for his country, putting his life at risk in the war in Europe:

I was in combat. I’m a combat survivor. One of the questions a young person asked me was, “Were you afraid?” And I said, “Yes, I was afraid! When you let somebody get behind you who’s shooting at you and they’re trying to kill you and you know they are trying to kill you, you’d be afraid too if you had any sense.” So I will not lie. I told him, “Yes I was afraid.” I could see the bullets coming.

Although others might have given up, Hiram refused to become discouraged by the racial environment in the Air Force. Instead, he used the military experience, despite its difficulties, to create a career path that would have been almost unimaginable to him as a child. He bacame one of the pioneers of desegregation in the military, sought after in his ninth decade as a speaker, and a living symbol of perseverance in the face of adversity.

In the Legacy Project, Hiram shared some of his lessons for living – all good advice for young people today:

On tolerance:

I accept my fellow man as an individual. I try not to prejudge. I try to enter, whatever the situation may be, to get going to it with an open mind. That’s the way I approach most areas that I get into. Tolerate the other person..Tolerance – that goes a long way

On perseverance:

My mother had her basic teachings, she would not let me look down. She would tell me: “Hold your head up. No matter what, hold your head up.” And, my mother could not stand when I would say that I don’t have the background to do so and so and so. “What do you mean you don’t have the background?” She couldn’t stand that word “background.”

On creating a legacy:

My legacy—I don’t know just what it’s going to be. I haven’t written it yet. But I do hope that I’ve contributed something to mankind, individually as well as collectively. I know that the Black pilots were instrumental in doing away with segregation in the United States. We broke the ice. We were a cause for eliminating segregation because of our combat record. We, the 332nd fighter group that later was re-designated as the Tuskegee Airmen, became the most requested unit to fly escort duty for the bombers because of the protection we gave them. There’s my part in that. Nothing I did individually, but my contribution to that will be part of my legacy. I’m very proud of the life I’ve lived. I’m proud of having been a Black pilot and of my contribution to society.

To learn more, here’s a video of Hiram sharing his life lessons to young people.

Develop Interpersonal Skills for Career Success

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Jack, 72, has had a varied and highly successful work life. Forced to drop out of full-time college for financial reasons, he worked at demanding jobs while pursuing his engineering degree at night (he eventually got a Master’s degree in the same way). He began working in “a really arcane area” in the electronics industry. He did well, but was denied a permanent position because his superiors thought – incorrectly – that his part-time degree was somehow inferior to a  conventional one. This set-back proved to be an opportunity that shaped his career; he landed an excellent job in the airplane industry, which in the 50s was taking off  (literally and figuratively).

Jack was thrown in with a hundred and fifty other employees, in an exciting, intense environment. And it planted the seed of the most important lesson he learned about work: Develop interpersonal skills. Jack’s views have even more weight because he worked his entire life in highly technical fields – the kinds that when you start talking about your job, people stare uncomprehendingly until their eyelids start to flutter. Nevertheless, it was the people skills that counted.

Our job was to make sure that the government got whatever it paid for. I was able to work at the top level of the company. At that time it was very, very hard to hire engineers, and I loved it. It was a completely different world. You’re just on your own with your wits, you’re dealing with people who have twenty, thirty years experience running departments with hundreds of people. It was enormously exciting. And it was scary and I loved to be in a little over my head. Right, you developed a cool under pressure, you develop a sense for not saying more than you had to, you developed a sense of being in command but being respectful of the other people’s positions.

When I asked about the key to his success, Jack made it clear that people often fail not because they don’t know their jobs, but because they don’t know people. He was known in his jobs as a problem-solver, and the more insoluable a problem seemed, the more likely it was to be handed to Ed. His people skills helped each time. He gave the following example.

In one of my jobs, they developed a new machine to replace the old ones, supposed to be four or five times more reliable. And  it wasn’t looking that way.  We were sending them it out into the field and the reports were coming back rom service, “Oh, it’s terrible, it’s really bad.”  And I pondered and pondered and pondered and I thought, “Look, this can’t be.’ And there was acrimony between engineering and service, people weren’t communicating. It had to do with interpersonal issues, lack of communication.

I said, “This can’t be.” Something was fishy. So here’s what we’re going to do. I made a proposal, which I sent to the board. We’ve got to take several thousand of these reports from the field and we’ve got to have a team with field staffers,  technical services, engineering, quality, manufacturing – bring everybody together. And we’ve got to go over every single one of these complaints and we have to classify it as to what the problem was, what’s the outcome, who’s responsibility it was. We’ve got to do this by service person, and by account, and whatever. And I had enough credibility that they agreed to do it. So we took five or six people, we went through thousands of these things. We laid the whole thing out. Low and behold, it was completely different from what everybody thought. My ability to bring people together helped solve the problem.

Jack attributes his ability to work so effectively with a wide range of employees, ranging from scientific experts to sales staff, to one basic principle: take yourself down a peg (or two). The idea is to focus on the others in the workplace as experts who need to be consulted, including (and perhaps especially) those who are lower in the hierarchy. The concept that one should enter a leadership position as the overseeing boss who knows best works far less well than a position of humility and willingness to learn from others.

Jack put it like this:

I think I had the attitude that I might have certain skills but mostly everybody here knows more than I do. Everybody. And that if I’m going to add value it’s going to be by making use of these people or by collecting information from them or marshaling what it is they’re doing. The last thing you want to do is assume you are superior. Everybody there is a genius, I knew nothing. I had a lot of innate skills which came out of my background, and I tried to diligently do my work. You really have to have the attitude that ‘I’m really going to honestly do my best to do a good job. And that doesn’t mean fudging it, doesn’t mean sucking up to anybody. It just means that whatever they give me to do, I’m going to try to do that to the best of my ability, working with whomever I have to work with.

Realistic New Year’s Resolutions – from the Wisest (and Oldest) Americans

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Are you tired of New Year’s resolutions lists by now? I am pretty much satiated with blogs and media telling me how to lose weight, start exercising, get rich, etc., in 2018. And I recall reading that only a tiny fraction of New Year’s resolutions are ever acted upon. Is there a better source of wisdom for the new year? I think there is.

I reviewed the data we gathered from more than 1,200 elders in the Legacy Project, who shared their lessons for living for future generations. Based on the surveys and interviews, here are  resolutions in five areas of life that are worth a try. These suggestions from the oldest Americans may serve you better than the typical ones we make (and break) each year.

Work. “Ask yourself: Are you glad to get up in the morning?” When it comes to your job, the elders propose a diagnostic test: How do you feel when you get up on a workday morning? You may be ambivalent about your job and have your ups and downs. But when it comes down to it, how do you feel when you are having that first cup of coffee?

Are you at least in a tolerable mood, looking forward to something about work? If instead you feel dread and foot-dragging, the elders say it may be time for a change. As Albert, 80, put it: “It’s a long day if you don’t like what you’re doing. You better get another job because there’s no harsher penalty than to wake up and go to work at a job you don’t like.”

Marriage. “Let your partner have his or her say.” From marriages lasting 40, 50, 60 or more years, the elders find that deliberately showing your partner that you are listening is a major way to defuse conflict. Natalie, 89, told me: “I learned that when you’re communicating, to really listen to what the other person is saying. When I got married, instead of listening to my husband, I would be thinking what to say in reply, to contradict or to reinforce what I was trying to say. That is not the best thing when you communicate. You’ve really got to listen and let them have their say. When I was in my twenties, I had all the answers. Now that I’m in my eighties, I’m not so sure my answers are always right.”

April, 70, offered a specific technique: “If we were in some sort of struggle over something we would stop and say: ‘Which one of us is this more important to?’ And when we could figure that out, the other one found it so much easier to let go.”

Child-rearing. “Abandon perfection.” The elders we surveyed raised over 3,000 children, and from that experience they had a clear lesson: Resist the temptation to seek perfection, both in your kids and in your parenting. We logically recognize the futility of creating perfect children, but emotionally we often hold ourselves up to a perfect standard. The elders, in contrast, are the first to tell you: No one has perfect children. They admit that each of their kids experienced difficulty, a period of unhappiness, a wrong turn. They suggest we lighten up regarding our children and assume that failure is inevitable at times. Gertrude, 76, said: “We were going to have perfect children, and we were going to be perfect parents. It doesn’t work that way.”

Aging. “Accept it.” Unless you’ve been living in a bomb shelter over the past decade, you’ve seen the barrage of advertising for “anti-aging medicine.” There’s a whole subculture of practitioners promising to defeat the aging process. To this the elders say: Forget about it! Instead, they encourage you to accept the aging process and to adapt activities to your changing physical abilities and circumstances. The very active Clayton, 81, noted: “You kind of grow into it. You realize that if you can’t be running this fast, well, you just go slower, but you keep on running. Do what you’re able to do and accept that there might be some limitations.” And don’t waste a penny on “anti-aging” products.

Regrets. “Go easy on yourself.” I recently was asked to do a post for CNN on the topic of how to avoid having regrets later in life. The elders do in fact have some good suggestions on that topic. But there’s another point they make: The goal of living a regret-free life is unrealistic. Their recommendation: Go easy on yourself regarding the mistakes and bad choices you have made. Alice, 85, pointed out: “What I have learned from the mistakes that I’ve made is that you can’t change what’s happened in the past. You have to accept yourself, warts and all. Once a decision is made, you don’t get anywhere by looking back and second-guessing it. As somebody taught me years ago: “if you’ve bought a pair of shoes, don’t look at the shoes in the next store window!”

And a last resolution: don’t forget to seek advice from elders you know. They have practical tips for living a more fulfilling life. Happy New Year!

You Need to Do What You Love

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Many students are involved in summer internships right now, so it’s worth taking a moment to learn this lesson from our elders: focus on work for its intrinsic value more than for external rewards.

Marty, 71, had a very satisfying work life as an engineer and entrepreneur. But he exhorts younger people to think about success not in terms of money, and gives you some important questions to ask yourself about your career.

Earning money seemed to be how they measured a success when we were young. Some people went to college but most people went to work, they got a job and went to work so everything revolved around: What are you earning?  What are you making? And so the more money you made the more successful you were.

And that became more important than: What should I do with my life? What do you want to develop? What do you want to learn?’  But by learning and experiencing that part of your life, you’re going to be doing something you like doing,  that you want to do, and money follows. Money follows. That’s the way it works.

And if money doesn’t follow, you’re doing something you like anyway. So it was like when I was a kid, down the street we had a shoemaker, a father with his kids and they did the shoes, leather soles and stuff. They were a pretty cool family. They loved working there and they loved making shoes and fixing shoes. So there’s ways to be happy without having to be this big-shot corporate guy.

The Key to Success? Say Yes!

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What is one major key to success at work? The elders in the Legacy Project have a strong recommendation: Say “yes” when opportunities come up. When I think of this lesson for living, one particular elder comes to mind: Father John Wilson.

The benefits “saying yes” at work are crucial for younger people in the early stages of their careers. They have time to start over again if something doesn’t pan out, and the possible gain by taking an uncertain step forward can be enormous. But the rewards of saying yes are not limited to the young, as Fr. John taught me.

On a hot August day, I pulled up to a dignified stone building with a row of gothic windows – very fitting for the residence of this Catholic university’s priests. I was met at the door by Father John. After he ushered me into the cool interior and we began our meeting in its quiet sitting room, I found myself in the presence of one of the happiest people I have ever met. Fr. John embodies a kind of peaceful enjoyment of life that seems a rarity today.

To the uninitiated it may seem odd to ask someone for career advice who tells you: “I entered the religious life when I was twenty, and I’ve been in for fifty-seven years.” What could happen during that time to a priest? It’s pretty much weddings, baptisms, and funerals, right?

Not in Fr. John’s case. He spent a career involved in secondary education, moving from being  the rector of a theological seminary to stints as president and rector of Jesuit schools, and as a translator at high-level conferences at the Vatican and for some of the century’s leading theologians. Despite some worries and self-doubt, when asked, he said yes to new opportunities.

For example, at one point in his career, Fr. John was asked to be the head of a large urban high school.

And I told them, “I think you’re making a mistake because the only thing that I know about a high school is that I once went to one and I know nothing else.” But I got the job anyway, okay. So you get the job and what you have to do is you have to take over. You have to make sure that it functions. You have decisions to be made each day and so forth and so on. And as long as you don’t take yourself seriously, you’re fine. It turned out to be wonderful.

But it was when he reached the age of our Legacy Project elders that Fr. John had to decide about a new opportunity – Would it be “yes” or “no?”

I was still working at age 69 when we got word that one of our men was murdered in Jamaica. He was a young Canadian priest, a man of great promise, in his late thirties. Of course our manpower situation isn’t rich, and they were looking for someone to go down to take his place, but people weren’t rushing to go. And so I said to my superior who was making the decision, “”Well, I’d be very tempted to go. And he said, “Absolutely not, I wouldn’t think of it. You’re much too old.”

So I said, “All right.” But other people kept asking for me and finally he said, “If you really want to go, then you can go.” But he said “What if they shoot you? What am I supposed to say to people?” And I said, “What you say to them, Father, is this. Better they shoot a man that is seventy than they shoot a man who is thirty-seven. Because we’re hoping that the man who is thirty-seven will do a lifetime of work. This man is pretty much finished here. So I spent six years there serving in the mission and I loved it. I was basically in Kingston but also on the north coast in the parishes. And I loved it, but then I had a heart attack so I had to come back and the doctors were convinced that the heat and the humidity were too much for me. I went back again, but they kept calling me back up to the States to do one thing or another. And so they finally said “That’s it,” but I’ll be going down there in a couple of weeks just to turn the dirt over for the new library at our school.

I loved the people, the people are marvelous. And you’d be out there in the country and you’d hear two masses on a Sunday and each mass would last three hours. Because before you preach the people have an hour to share their week with one another. And I’d have congregations of eighteen or twenty and I’d think to myself “If you were back in Boston you’d be preaching to five hundred or eight hundred people. What are you doing down here? You’re wasting your time.” And then I thought to myself “No, because see God isn’t a mathematician. And these people are changing me. I don’t know how much good I’m doing them, but they’re doing me a world of good.”

Like most other elders, Fr. John’s message is clear: Think carefully about saying “yes” when opportunity knocks – it can change your life.

Jeremiah’s Lesson for Living: Wisdom Gathered by our Summer Interns!

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Our summer interns are back! Two great undergraduates spent part of the summer interviewing older Welcome-Interns-Signpeople about their advice for living. Here’s the post from Margo Rieman, a junior attending Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana, majoring in Management and Psychology and minoring in French. While conducting her interview, Margo learned the importance of thinking wisely, working hard and saving your money. Here’s her report:

When one is young, it can be difficult to make smart decisions and spend your time wisely because understanding and effectively anticipating the long-term costs and benefits associated with a given choice can be challenging. Many people rely on past experiences and invested costs when making life decisions. However, ignoring other factors – particularly the future – may result in a short-sighted perspective.

Jeremiah, a former World War II veteran and now a 99-year old New Yorker, had some wisdom to offer on this topic. Jeremiah made it clear that there are certain things in life that should be prioritized when making major life decisions, despite your immediate wants and needs. Jeremiah recants his experiences below and emphasizes the importance of thinking wisely, going to college, and saving your money.

I was a veteran in World War II. I could have gone to college on the G.I.’s Bill of Rights but I wanted to live, more or less. If you grew up in the 30’s you didn’t have the same opportunities as you do today because of the lack of money. So once you’re in service, and you accumulate some money, after you get discharged you have this money supposedly – what they call, “on the books” – coming to you, so you want to go out and buy a car, which is a mistake. I should have used it to go to college. I wasn’t a gambler or anything like that so I kind of accumulated quite a bit of money.

That perspective, the war, changed me, you know. Plus I had a high school education, and I wasn’t real smart, in fact I was below level but I could have went to college. I didn’t want to, I wanted to have a good time. Well, now I’m pushing 100. I never saved any of my money, and I’m broke. When you see on the television that you need hundreds of thousands of dollars for retirement, they’re not far off.

Jeremiah concluded:

Work hard, save your money. You’re always going to have stressful experiences, but if you know what you’re doing, you can do it. Be conservative. Be very dedicated to what you’re doing. You gotta have fun but it should be 20 percent of your efforts. The thing is if you do it when you’re young, you’ll be better off when you get older.

Jeremiah’s advice forewarned me of the importance of saving while I’m young and to work hard in all my endeavors. He gave me confidence that I will succeed if I am knowledgeable and experienced in the work I am pursuing.

 

 

“You Have to Do What You Enjoy!” Three Great Tips for Making the Most of Your Work Life

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Harry, 76, told the Legacy Project about his work life and what made his career successful and fulfilling. Good lessons for all of us trying to succeed in the world of work.work

1. Having worked as a psychology professor, university counseling center director, psychologist in private practice, and as a management consultant engaged in leadership development, I have learned that you have to do what you enjoy. We spend a great deal of time at work. If it isn’t enjoyable, isn’t stimulating, isn’t fun, if you don’t enjoy the people you work with, if it doesn’t have meaning for you, then find something that does. Life is too short to do something you don’t like and enjoy.

2. When engaged in your work, put your full amount of energy into it. I have worked with people who have regretted decisions about their work and their lives. It’s better to take the risk than to wait until later in life and regret not taking the chance.

 3. Give the gift of feedback. Many of us may shy away from giving critical feedback in the workplace. Some of us may shy away from giving positive feedback. If individuals have no awareness of the impact of their behavior, how can they change it? Awareness is necessary for change. Positive feedback helps to reinforce the behavior. The awareness that one may give to another is a gift, even though it may smart in the giving.