Archives for April 2022

The secret to being a writer is to assume at bottom that everything that’s inside you is also, in some form, inside everybody else.

But the secret to being a person is realizing that not everybody feels exactly the way you happen to, at the exact time you happen to be feeling it.

The worst daily oppressors in our lives are the folks who show up in a manic mood and expect everyone to meet it. Or in a grouchy mood, expecting everyone else to stick their own manic moods where the sun don’t shine.

I think that’s one reason I get along so well, on the regular, with Benjamine Knight Barger, the chief operating officer of Pro Rhetoric, LLC, or as she’s known around here, “My Professional Ride-or-Die.”

Not only are Benjamine and I very different people—we’re pretty much The Odd Couple—we don’t even share time, or space in common.

She’s on Mountain Time in a place with no Daylight Savings, so half the year it’s one hour earlier in her native Phoenix; and this half of the year, it’s two hours earlier. I also get up earlier, so that I’m working most mornings for three and a half hours before she enters her cockpit. And she’s working well after it’s Miller Time in Chicago.

Meanwhile, there are about four exciting days per year when one of us isn’t suffering some kind of apocalyptic weather misery that the other can only begin to fathom. Benjamine will never know what it is to shovel a foot of snow the moment a fella wakes up in the morning. And I have been in Phoenix in the summer, when it’s 10 degrees hotter at the airport because the concrete radiates heat. I would sooner live on Mercury, which doesn’t have haboobs.

We share a lot, Benjamine and I: A social mission and a business sensibility. Lore from our long professional adventure. Hundreds, by now, of common acquaintances. And almost a decade of the kind of friendship that can only be forged in daily toil—alternating annoyance and forgiveness, defeat and victory, worry and relief, tension and release. And permanent respect.

But it’s equally good that our differing daily circumstances and surroundings—and we haven’t even gotten into the profound cultural differences between Chicago and Phoenix—remind us that we can’t assume we know what’s going on in the other person’s head.

Because we don’t even know what’s going on in the other person’s front yard.

Occasionally, I’ll be tripping through the Writing Boots archives looking for one thing, and I’ll find something else that deserves to be reprised, maybe. Like this piece, from March, 2010. —DM

***

Kent State PR professor Bill Sledzik has started a yak on the subject of professional “passion” on his good blog, Tough Sledding.

Here’s what I think about professional passion: Passion is a strong word, best reserved for human love and other obsessions over which we are powerless and which we would do without a paycheck.

If you say you’re “passionate about strategic planning” or “passionate about branding,” then what do you say to your lover, in the dark?

“I made a philosophical connection to the public relations discipline,” Sledzik claims in his post. That’s more than a lot of people manage to achieve on the Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays of their lives.

But there’s more to it than that. There’s Murray’s Hierarchy of Professional Needs:

1. The work is not disagreeable. Even when I’m writing a brochure for my buddy’s environmental consulting firm, I’m working with words. This works for me, and it means I never sit down at the desk wondering how I’m going to drag myself through the day. I know that once I get writing, the time will go by quickly, and pleasantly enough.
2. Usually, the work is a challenge you feel like facing. Americans are programmed to say we’re always up for a challenge, but obviously, we only want certain kinds of challenges, at convenient times. (For instance, we don’t want to be challenged, this morning, to figure out why our car won’t start; and 10 times out of 10, the words “challenging boss” are a euphemism for “nightmare.”) But when you can set ’em up and knock ’em down with sustainable effort and repeated satisfaction, that’s the second step on the long road to professional passion.
3. Only you could do the work the way you do it. You’ve made this work your own to the point that ready-made procedures and other people’s templates just don’t cut it for you. At some point, without thinking about it, you stopped imitating and began innovating, in function and form both. You “found your voice.”
4. The work, and the way you do it, feels utterly connected to who you are—and who your parents were, and probably who their parents were, too. I still wouldn’t call this “passion,” because there is no chance for orgasm. But I would also say that “fulfilling” is too tame a term for this feeling, whether it lasts for a fleeting moment, throughout a precious project or over a miraculous year or two.

I’ve been lucky enough to spend most of the days of my work life on those first three steps, and though you’ll never catch me saying I’m “passionate” about my work, I’ve also been also fortunate to reach number four on several unforgettable occasions in my life, which I catalog and file in a searchable index in my head, in the cramped “Gratitude” section. (The latest entry: Standing with tears in my eyes before a group of speechwriters with tears in their eyes, put there by speeches that I chose, because I know communication and feelings and how they work together, because my mom and dad taught me.)

But every day can’t be Christmas.

On a typical Tuesday, where do you stand on Murray’s Hierarchy of Professional Needs? Or do you have a Hierarchy of your own? (You’re not obliged to answer, but you do need to know.)