Generational work ethic

Given the choice, however, I’d rather make history than simply take it in and post it to Instagram with a grainy old-fashion filter.

The Gen-Y losers in this country want to explore and revel in the greatest accomplishments of mankind’s glorious history — they just don’t want to try to participate in making history themselves.

Full article here. (h/t Dave Tate)

If you listened to Adam Carolla’s OWS rant, you’ll hear similar sentiments. Heck, an older friend of mine told me he’s interviewed for tech management jobs but they don’t want to hire him, not because he’s not capable, but because there’d be too wide a generation spread between him and the workers who all want their participation ribbons because they showed up and did the minimum requirements of their job.

That’s pretty messed up.

Is this the case across the board? No, of course there are exceptions, but they are just that: exceptions to the rule.

But here’s the kicker.

This sort of work ethic can still work out, if they can find a way to make it work. I tell my kids to leverage what you love to do and work to make a living off that. It doesn’t have to be “math and science” and that you must be a doctor, lawyer, or these days a mobile app developer. The world needs plumbers, the world needs musicians, the world needs artists, the world even needs someone to say “do you want fries with that”. Of course, I want my children to be successful, live a comfortable life, and would rather they own the empire than be a cog on the lowest rung. But I realize that well… yes, in a way the whole “Gen-Y/Millennial” mess was “our” own doing; reap what you sow, right?

I want to sow different seeds. Maybe I should say I want to sow “heirloom seeds” (hopefully that’s a good metaphor).

Youngest was watching me fix an ugly sink drain clog, pulling apart pipes and so on. He thought it was pretty cool, and I told him there’s no shame in it because people will always need plumbers and you can make a good living that way (and generally be in charge of your own life); it might be a dirty job, but Mike Rowe has demonstrated lots of jobs are dirty and we need every one of them. Many times when we have contractors working at the house, we’ll get to talking. They get all down on themselves for doing manual labor compared to me writing software, as if somehow my job and thus I am “higher” than them and their job. It always shocks me to hear this because I don’t consider myself anyone special, but I know this attitude comes from how our society has degraded manual labor. I always respond to them I can’t do what you do which is why I hired you — your job, my job, neither is more or less important, just different and both vital to making the world go ’round.

So if you love wood working, great. Now find a way to make money at it. Oldest loves to invent creations in the video game Spore, so I’m trying to get him to parlay that love of digital creation into something that could take him further… so I bought him a Wacom tablet and am having him learn how to use it and software like Painter, Photoshop, and so on. He’s actually getting pretty fluent with the tablet (I still feel awkward in using it) and doing some neat things in Painter. And yes, the world needs graphic designers, or storyboard artists, or comic book writers.

Frankly, I’d like to hope I’m not raising my kids to have the same sort of “win a participant trophy and feel good about it” attitude, because when I got one of those “participant” ribbons as a kid I knew what it meant — loser, thus I swore I’d not lose again. To me it was motivation to do better, today it’s validation that “I’m special and I’m someone.” Yesterday I told Oldest to move a large, heavy, and bulky mattress upstairs and he stared at me, then complained how it’d be awkward and worked to come up with every excuse not to do it. I gave him a “So what? Life’s full of awkward and hard to do things, but that doesn’t give you any reason or excuse to get out of doing them — they still need doing. You’ve got a brain to figure out how to do it, and muscles to enable you to do it… so get to it.” Sure he grumbled the whole time, but he did it… when he didn’t think he could. Hopefully there was small breakthrough.

If you want to work four hours a week and work on some cause-based project, go for it. Just realize that while you’re spending your 20s mooching off the little value left in mom and dad’s house, which is massively underwater, you’re going to be screwed in 20 years.

Your parents are going to be broke, 80 years old and burning off the last of their savings in a retirement home. You’re going to be fighting for work and taking care of them. You will be sitting with $100K in student loans for a graduate degree no one cares about and a resume that reads worse than a migrant worker’s while you read the “Four Hour Retirement” at the four-hour line at the unemployment office.

I don’t want this for my children, and I know they’re going to grow up in a world surrounded by it. I worry for my kids and what they’re going to have to put up with and do because of what an entitlement-based-culture is going to force upon them. But on the same token, I understand wanting to work on some cause-based project and think there’s nothing wrong with it, so long as you can find the way to fund it, manage it, and well… I’m going to be kicking your butt out of the house when you’re in your early 20′s so you better find a way to make everything work.  And if you can succeed at it, awesome. It doesn’t even mean you have to be a millionaire. If you become a monk, give up all worldly effects, and have little more to deal with than eating, bathing, praying, and running the monastery’s bakery or brewery so the bills can be paid and it’s all self-supporting, that works too!  Because in the end, it doesn’t really matter what you work at, so long as you’ve got the ethic to work at it.