Rodent Regatta

It takes 43 muscles to frown and 17 to smile, but it doesn’t take any to just sit there with a dumb look on your face.

Despair, Inc.

You’re not being paid to believe in the power of your dreams.

Despair, Inc.

Some have suggested that my last few entries are turning this into an ”unemployment weblog.” Nothing could be further from the objective. This weblog is about getting out of the rat race.

During the weekend, I intend to add an ”About” page and post some things that relate to anyone who feels trapped in a race with no finish line. As I mentioned yesterday, this is as much about people who are gainfully employed as it is about those who are suffering some (temporary) depression associated with a prolonged bout with unemployment. Some of the most prosperous people I know feel trapped and are unhappy.

Feeling fulfilled by what you do every day is about more than how your profession or your stuff stacks up in the eyes of the Jones’s! If you don’t have a proven method or process for re-evaluating your career, your job and your interests, let me suggest Richard Bolles or Dan Miller as people who can provide tools for getting you on a better path.

For several years the ITEC trade show has come to Memphis. Never have I seen a group as confounded by the rat race in all my life. I’ve always thought of working trade show booths as equivalent to a public root canal without pain killers. However, today’s show reawakened me to the plight of the American worker.

I’ve never seen so many people who have absolutely no clue about why they have been put on this Earth. Every other booth served to fence off another person or people with a look of stark terror in their eyes. It was if each of them feared they’d be shot at dusk if the show wasn’t a success.

Ask a couple of them what a successful show entailed and they had no idea. Talk about meaning in life; trust me when I say that the ITEC show in Memphis proved to me beyond all uncertainty that people must find something bigger than themselves or some hot technology or the latest quota from their company to anchor their souls.

Jackie Sherrill has fired five key assistant coaches at Mississippi State University. R.C. Slocum has been fired by Texas A&M. Frank Solich is firing assistants at Nebraska. Dennis Franchione went home and went to bed rather than take the A&M job.

Many thanks to Rachel Lucas for yesterday’s words of encouragement. This theme of ”finding your dream” or ”seeking your passion” seems to resonate with a few folks.

After all it’s what most of us are seeking. For some it’s as simple as Is Your Job Your Calling? For others its a process that involves identifying and aligning skills, interests, aptitudes, goals and motivation.

However, to simply say Think and Grow Rich and you’ll transform your dreams into reality misses a fundamental point. Some people have lost the urge and ability to dream. It’s not a lack of motivation. It’s deeper than that.

It’s an inability to see ourselves as deeply engrossed in a field or endeavor as this example from James Lileks:

I support giving money to absent-minded scientists with pockets full of pencil stubs and cigarette butts, the sort of guys who can be found at a coffee shop writing algebra on a shirt cuff, the eggheads whose TV have an inch-thick pall of dust on the tube, and who unwind by listening to Van Cliburn recordings on a monaural turntable. Whether this sort of clich actually exists anymore Ive no idea, but Id like to think so; I have a long-standing attachment to the idea of the Eccentric, the clueless Cuthbert Calculus who cannot remember where he put his keys but can always find Orion in the night sky.

I’m not suggesting for an instant that all of us must become weirdos to pursue our dreams, but the single-minded focus on a something we feel passionate about is so often missed by the masses. More platitudes and ”you become what you think about” frustrates the person that has lost the ability to dream.

There has to be a way to return that person to an earlier state of mind that allows them to see beyond life’s current pressures, frustrations and fears.