Folks,
I am packing up and heading to Black Mountain, NC today. I will continue to post and email but will certainly be more busy as work is pretty much 24/7 at camp….not that the work is bad, just long.
I’ll miss my family and Josh and my dog. Other than that….Greenville can EMA.
On another note:
Anyone reading this page that wishes to help me find a job is welcome to contact me. I would like to eventually work in organizational development. I want to help design work so that people like it better. If done right, people will be happier (score one for us) and more productive (score one for the organization). I am willing to do any work that would help me along that path.
Why would I be good at it when I have no direct professional experience doing it? Three great reasons:
1) I have an obsession with work/life balance. Anyone that has read this website once or talked to me twice knows how I feel about the established career path and the endless hours people while away at work with no real engagement. My unwavering committment to the issue is easily seen by looking at the decisions I’ve made in life. If you employ someone to work on what they are obsessed with anyway, you’re bound to get a high level of committment.
2) I love to excel. I waste endless hours getting better at and learning stuff that is of no real use. I just like to do it. It follows that one of the things I like to see most in other people is improvement. I love to help people get better.
That is one of the main reasons I am going to camp for the summer. I get a chance to help all those little kids get better….at everything. For two weeks at a time I have to follow around a cabin of kids and make sure they don’t kill themselves. But they will also be following me around. Remember when you went to camp and there was that counselor you thought was the coolest person ever? You wanted to be just like them when you grew up. You still remember them. I want to be that guy. Isn’t that what you really want to do with you work anyway? You want to do something that, in whatever small way, affects people’s lives for the better.
3) I have an unnatural preoccupation with process. When I bowl, shoot basketball, or play golf I obsess about mechanics. When I think of the guitar I think of scales. When I think of software I think of the code that makes it go. Strategy fascinates me. Lots of people are good at stuff, but few people know exactly why they are so good at it. I like to break it down into component parts and examine what makes it work or not. This coupled with my drive to help people get better, coupled with my ability to write means I am pretty good at communicating to others what works and why it can be good for them.
These three things will some day allow me to design (talent three) excellent (talent 2) jobs (obsession 1).
For the record, these can also be very annoying talents. People hate arguing with me. I have a tendency to get on people’s nerves when I really compete at something. The inclination to break things down into understandable component parts makes me overanalyze and nitpick. This last one has cause me endless problems over the years.
Oh yeah. There is one other thing I’ll miss from Greenville: Riley. She lives up the street and I’ve become pretty good friends with her family. She can’t pronounce my name yet, but she knows who I am….and she loves my dog.
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