Community Blvd

Wouldn't it be lovely to live where the streets had names like Paradise and Faith?  You could say, "I'll meet you at the corner of Hope and Peace."  Of course, we'd have to put up with things like, "Last night, shots were fired near the intersection of Chapel and Trinity, killing three.  The victims remain unidentified."

What Storytellers Do

The following I adapted from a speech by Tom Hanks' character in the film Saving Mr. Banks:

Forgiveness is what we learn from art, from books, from plays.  The author forgives himself.  Because life is a harsh sentence to impose on one’s self, and authors redeem themselves through writing.

The author must trust himself, must not disappoint himself.  Where there is blindness, the author gives sight, reveals truth.

The author’s characters, especially the main character, are precious to him.  If he trusts himself, he won’t be disappointed.  And every time anyone reads his words, they will witness characters revealed, understood, saved, honored.  They will love these characters with the guileless trust of children.  They will weep for their cares, they will wring their hands when they lose, and in the story’s final moments, they will rejoice in the humanity of these characters, they will sing.  For generations to come, the author’s characters will be honored, and they, as well as the author, as well as his audience, will be redeemed.  All these characters stand for will be saved—along with the author and his audience—not in life perhaps, but certainly in imagination. 

This is what we storytellers do.  We restore order with imagination.  We instill hope, again and again and again. 

Artists, authors, playwrights, all, trust yourselves.  Prove it to yourselves, and you will prove it for everyone for all time.  Your work is the meaning of your life, the fulfillment of your promise to the universe.

Common-Sense Terminology to Describe Units of Work

A primary purpose of language is to enable us to name things with reasonable terms we can all agree on that make sense.

Units of time, for example, are:  supereoneon, eon, era, period, epoch, and age.  And from there more granularly, I believe we would agree on millennium, century, decade, year, month, day, hour, minute, second, etc.

So what’s useful terminology to express discreet units of work effort?  The terms and the order I propose are:  Project, component, module, process, method, task, step, and detail.  I believe this is a clear, consistent, and common-sense way to conceptually modularize and express the elements of work.*

So I have a project, and I have to consider the components of my project, which is made up of modules, modules which are in their turn made up of processes.  Each process has methods, each method has associated tasks, each task has steps, and each step has details.

I'm not promoting an idiosyncratic grammar merely to appear clever.  My intention is to suggest a habit of easily using one appropriate term or another relative to the work at hand.  Is the work to which I’m referring at the project level, or does it deal with the details of a step?  Am I dealing with the methods of a process, or the tasks associated with those methods?  I’d like to be able to be able to use consistent terminology to characterize work and be immediately understood simply because there’s a general consensus that a task, for example, is more than a step but less than a method. 

Just seems to me that in English we’ve done a better, more precise job providing generally agreed-upon terms for units of time, for example, than for units of work.

*Note:  There are a variety of components in a project, including material.  Materials are, I suggest, part and piece, that is, pieces which make up parts.  There must be other components as well, but in this post I focus on the work effort itself, what must be done.

The Theatre of Facilitation

I am a software trainer by profession—what I refer to as my “day career.”  It’s my business, my S-Corp, my area of expertise and interest.  Software training works for me in part because it has a business model which is familiar to me:

• I  contact, or am contacted by, one of my agents.  A deal is made for a multi-week presentation.  (I review upcoming auditions.)
• I interview with my potential client (audition for the director), which usually consists of a live or taped example of my performance style.
• If selected for the role, I am sent contracts and other materials, invariably including a script, which I prepare for a train-the-trainer (T-3) boot camp (the rehearsal period).
• During the T3, in addition to the technical material, I am given lots of other useful information regarding dress code (costume), corporate culture (character development), and other role-specific information (director’s notes).
• Invariably I have resources to fall back on, subject matter experts (SMEs) who know more than I about the matters at hand.  (No theatrical parallel here—except that it means I’m not really the expert, I’m only a facilitator, much as an actor is not really the role, not really the person, but is portraying a person, backstory, theme, etc.)  It’s more important that I excel in my role as a facilitator (actor) than it is that I am an SME (the real-life person my character represents).
• During the training itself, there’s clearly a beginning (opening scene), a middle time (the dramatic arc), and an end (climax).
• So many practical elements must be addressed, the size of the audience (house), the mood and the abilities of the students (patrons) as good listeners.  Are they with you, are they learning—and hopefully enjoying themselves?
• At any time necessity may require changes to the script with limited or virtually no prior warning.  
• Anything can and will happen during training (the run of the show), depending on the audience, technical matters, and the instructor (actor) mood and competency in the moment.  The trainer (actor) has to improvise.
• There’s an abruptness to the end of training.  Relationships among trainers and their students, which may have been intense, usually promptly dissipate (when the show’s over, it’s over).  Everyone goes his or her separate ways, though as professionals it’s likely their paths will cross again (they may be cast together in another show).
• Even if the same training course is repeated, the audience is different and the trainer (actor) must respond accordingly.  And different contracts (plays) of course may be wildly different from each other, a universe unto themselves.

There’s some evidence that the software training model is changing, simply because so much self-directed learning is becoming available, and the idea of a person actually training a group of others, even virtually, present only remotely over the internet, is somehow passé, very 20^th century.

Regardless, I enjoy software training in part because it’s the closest thing to live theater I’ve found in the business world.

A Successful Player

My window of time during which I might have become a commercial success as a working actor has closed. This is not a statement of fact, I’m stating what’s highly probable. The work, the fame and money, go to talent who have the credits. I've been a working actor all my life, but few if any of my credits are commercially substantial.

What works for me is a deep understanding of the choices I made when I was younger, why I made them, and what I wanted my career on stage to mean.

I am a man. In life, I inhabit many roles. My resume reads like an encyclopedia. I've played more roles than most men. I've lived to fullest extent possible, tried to. It was the right way, the honest way, for me to live. I lived in as many ways as I could, tempered only by my understanding of what was life-affirming. In biblical terms, I did not worship false gods.

I've always believed that civilization is marvelous but rather beside the point. Put another way, I wanted to observe and understand everything as best I could without prejudice, admitting my predispositions as I knew them. Understanding was my purpose in life. I might have taken more risks, but was never idle. I was busy gaining insight.

On my own terms, I’m a success. I have been the man I planned to be. My window remains wide open. The fresh air keeps me alive, the possibilities remain endless—at least until I end, perhaps even beyond if my legacy has any value.

I encourage my actor contemporaries to celebrate choices made, because they were made honestly. 

And those of you who are young? If you make the right choices, you may achieve commercial success. I know what I wanted, what drove me.

What do you want?

Time to Insight

I can’t regret what I did for computing, because computing has always helped me to think more clearly and live more openly.

A recent Microsoft marketing video reinforces, in a wonderfully abstract yet technical way, how state-of-the art data processing principles accelerate “time to insight”—what a lovely turn of phrase!

We could all improve our performance intervals from ignorance to insight, in relationships, in our art, in our work.  The best uses of computing power enrich our lives by increasing our awareness.

Keeping Up with Oneself

I am naturally inclined to having a “big picture” mentality—witness this blog.  I seem to have countless projects running in my head, countless more untethered ideas, vignettes of possibilities that bubble up in my awareness which I often scramble to write down before they pop into extinction, leaving a filmy trace of their promise.

Over time I have come to feel like I am not simply pursuing my dreams, but am racing breathlessly after them as they recede.  I’ve accomplished much, but so much more I only imagine I complete.

I had a friend when I was in my twenties who wanted to be an artist, a sculptor.  He spent some of his artistic energy collecting barrels of objects he imagined he’d one day make into works of art.  The rest of his time he spent planning, specifically drafting plans, like an architect designing structures.  These two efforts left virtually no time for building things, and when he’d occasionally attempt to do so he was at once dissatisfied with the result and taken aback by the amount of time making things actually required.  He decided, quite courageously I felt at the time, to stop attempting to make art.  He got rid of his barrels of stuff and just drew his plans for all the pieces he’d never complete, arguably never begin.

Our society emphasizes results and winning competitions, over process and thought.  We need things done, of course, but we need to improve how we do them and, more importantly, more fully consider what we’re doing in the first place and at milestones along the way.  A good software developer knows that time spent in analysis reduces time spent in coding and testing.  But we’re pushed to meet deadlines and have become inured to continually returning to the drawing board to come up with the next best thing, to produce new versions of everything from the latest couture to the latest weaponry.

But I digress, as I so often do when related ideas burst in my brain.  My point, my original point, was not to lament how our society stresses us to achieve, but to consider my friend the (former?) artist and his solution to his dilemma, and how I find myself barely able to keep up with my own plans, especially those plans which I have not yet given up on completing.

So, considering my own dilemma, here are a few thoughts for now:

I am losing the race to finish the things I’ve started.  I am old enough to have physical file folders the contents of which are yellow with age, and which I examine as if they were gathered, written, composed by some ancestor of mine, not myself. 

Instead of a “bucket list”—I have that in spades—I have a list of projects I know I will never complete.  In the manner of my friend, I’m calling them done before they’re even fully developed.  I have made peace with myself that I can’t do everything I propose to do.

I am considering exit strategies, ways to respect my ideas, my accomplishments, my failures, my best intentions, so that the chaos of my attempts at living well has more form to it—a theme, perhaps.  Some of my impulse here is leaving a legacy, I’m sure.  But more immediately, I need a better coping mechanism than chasing after illusions.  I need to more realistically manage my expectations, and this means continuing to improve on how I get things done, when I can expect to complete projects, and whether I want to follow some paths at all or not.

Maybe in simply writing this I’ve solved my dilemma, solving it by identifying it as a meta-project, a project of projects, and admitting to myself that catching up with myself is a task I’ll never complete.