We seem to be writing a lot about work, as I’ve done recently on napping (at work), vacations (from work), and pouting (about work).  In the course of writing those posts, I came across this piece from last year about how younger employees - i.e., recent college graduates - need too much coddling in today’s workplace.  They’re expectations are high, and their thresholds for pain are low. (But let’s be careful not to turn this into a “kids-these-days” hate-fest.  I am almost one of those kids, given my age.  And besides, kids-these-days can do a lot of things better than kids-back-in-the-day.  But back to today.)

Nurtured on a steady diet of self-esteem, the swaggeringly confident children of the ’80s and ’90s are flying the nest and starting to land in the workforce. They’re clamoring for quick feedback, meaningful involvement, and pumped-up recognition-and roiling old-school colleagues who dub them impatient, needy, and arrogant. The kids are frustrated too: Entry-level duties are a far cry from the dream jobs they’ve been made to feel are their birthright.

So why is Generation Y like this?  The article suggests a few causes: too much praise as children, an inability to recognize their ability to “improve over time,” the false idea that they are gifted, and so on.  But they’ve done some good things for the workplace, too.

They’re civically engaged (garnering comparisons to the “greatest generation”), and they can be surprisingly loyal. “They’ll quickly leave a company, yes,” says Tammy Hughes, president of workplace consultants Claire Raines Associates. “But they will be extremely loyal to companies that demonstrate loyalty to them, and it’s a very civic-minded loyalty. They expect companies they work for to be responsible.”

So, they’re not so bad.

In the spirit of recent posts on napping, vacations, and work in general, you might enjoy reading a new book on the same general subject: How to Be Useful, “a self-described ‘beginner’s guide to not hating work’” by Megan Hustad. 

Rather than bombard us with, say, seven habits of highly successful people, or try to tell us what color our parachute is, Hustad explores some fundamental ways in which people can be happier at their jobs by making themselves more useful, even if they’re not at their Dream Job, or are stuck working for The Man.

Hustad’s career counseling comes at a fortuitous time for the under-30 set entering the workforce and struggling to find their niche, while their older colleagues wonder, sometimes bitterly, how to best manage coworkers in this generation.

I think this must be a backlash that’s been coming on since the Industrial Revolution.  With the specialization of the free market economies of the west, and now globally, over the past hundred years, people have been convinced they could do any job they wanted to do.  That’s how we end up with What Color is Your Parachute?  You like music, you like beaches, you like business, so why not open up a recording studio in Pensacola?  You like numbers, you like drawing, you like science, so why not find the one niche job drawing illustrations for NASA learning modules?  Problem is, we’ve convinced ourselves that we should only have jobs we love, and when the jobs fall through, or don’t live up to expectations, we pout. 

I am not sure if Max Weber ever said anything about naps in his The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, but surely he knew that a power nap at some time during the day is beneficial to the bottom line.  We’ve blogged before on the power of naps.  I think I talked about this article at some point in the past, and several more like it.  And more recently, we’ve blogged on working too much and the disappearance of the vacation.  And so, in the spirit of those posts, and this season of lighter workloads for many Americans, enjoy this far more usable article from The Boston Globe, giving you the best positions and schedules for napping, among other things.

HT: First Things Blog

Slate writes about the American vacation problem, which is that none of us seem to take them anymore. 

There are several factors at work here. To begin with, technology has helped iron downtime out of the economy. Many Americans are struggling to cope with job creep-the phenomenon of work quietly grabbing more and more of our leisure time. We are forever receiving co-worker or client messages on our BlackBerrys, or responding to work e-mails on our home computers on weekends, or lugging our laptops on vacation.

Yeah, yeah, we’ve all heard that before.  But it’s actually more complicated, I think.  How are we defining the word vacation, is it a good thing or a bad thing, and if it’s a good thing, when and where and how often should we be doing it?  God worked all six days and took a break on the seventh.  I do that, too.  So, perhaps I have all the vacation I need.  Is it my right to go to the beach, even if I don’t live next to one?  I don’t think it is.  If a man works a good, full day - which I’d say is about 12 hours, give or take - for five or six days a week, and he doesn’t do anything on Sunday, or anything much, then isn’t that enough? 

Some of us are complicit in vacating our vacations. Today’s overstressed workplace has spawned the phrase “extreme jobs”-hyperdemanding positions of 70, 80 hours a week, with intense deadlines and unpredictable developments that can torpedo a weekend, however cherished and planned. Jeffrey Immelt, GE’s chief executive, has boasted of working 100 hours a week for more than two decades. That translates to working six days a week from 7 a.m. to 11:30 p.m. One software engineer I wrote about at Electronic Arts, a video game company, had to work 179 out of 180 days during one stretch in 2004, usually for 13 hours a day.

Which is to say, it seems like half of us are hyper-obsessed with the idea of leisure and affluence to suggest to ourselves that vacations are obligatory, and the other half is so brainwashed by the drive for affluence and the faux-Protestant work ethic that we’ve convinced ourselves vacations are bad.  Both extremes seem confused.  Work hard, play hard, don’t be an idiot.  Best advice I ever got.

During my final year toward the Ph.D., like every one of my colleagues, I was looking for a teaching position somewhere around the world. During those last ten months, from August 2002 to May 2003, I applied for roughly 100 jobs, sending to each one a tailor-made, custom-built cover letter and an extensive curriculum vita, often with statements of purpose and teaching philosophy attached, for a total of about 20 to 30 pages for each application. Exhausting and expensive, especially for someone who studied for a decade to do my job. Of those 100 applications, I merited about ten phone interviews and four campus interviews and one job offer that came in late May. I took the job, then lapsed into a coma.

There is no article to link here, but this is the time of year when lots of people are looking for jobs, are moving out, are moving on. Not just academics. I’d like to hear about your own experiences getting work, how hard it was, and if you had any luck. My brother’s interviewing for farming jobs all over America, and I’ve got other friends looking. Do you have any similar stories?

How much money do you make?  This is one of the last undiscovered countries of the workplace.  It’s a great big secret.  People love to speculate about how much money he, or she, or they, make.  People love to be surprised by some modestly dressed colleague is pulling down a giant paycheck every month, or by a nice and colleagial coworker who makes peanuts for no obvious reason.  This Times piece discusses how this is changing, though, and how younger (under 35) colleagues are telling each other what they make: not in competition, but to find out if they’re nuts or not for agreeing to make what they make.  This is smart.  It’s also awkward.  So, what about you?  Do you have any stories about finding how how much, or how little, one of your colleagues made? 

Last week on American Idol, they raised a lot of money for a lot of people.  Millions and millions of dollars, raised by celebrities, by regular people, by everyone who watches TV.  None of this was bad.  It’s good to see people moved by pain and need to give.  But the whole spectacle of “Idol Gives Back” glosses over the truth of real charity.  No glut of cash from anyone, including the government, can change a human life like the simple solution of discipline.  Also called initiative.  Also called work.  After all, only a small percentage of America’s poor are unable work. 

In college, [Adam] Shepard read Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed, which argues that only government intervention can rescue the working poor from what Ehrenreich portrays as a desperate plight. Shepard doubted her thesis and wanted to test it. So after graduating, he went to Charleston, South Carolina, with a sleeping bag, a change of clothes, $25, and a made-up tale of woe. He spent the first two months in a homeless shelter while he worked as a day laborer. He later found a permanent position with a moving company, which gave him a stable income. This allowed Shepard to buy a (very) used pickup truck, rent and furnish an apartment with a coworker, and start saving. 

During this time, he was on a strict budget, buying clothes at Goodwill and lunching on peanut butter crackers and Vienna sausages. After ten months, he left Charleston due to an illness in his family. By that point, he had saved over $5,000. Along the way, he had met dozens of marginal citizens whose lives he found relentlessly fascinating. 

And he wrote a book about it called Scratch Beginnings, “to disprove Ehrenreich’s argument about endemic poverty.” 

Critics have dismissed Shepard’s claims by pointing to the fact that he enjoyed an array of government services, from food stamps to bus rides to homeless services. But everyone Shepard encountered at the shelter and in the bad neighborhood he later lived in was already using the same services. It wasn’t the public services that lifted Shepard out of destitution-it was his own initiative. Indeed, if spending money on government services were the best way to cure poverty, it would no longer be a problem. 

You really ought to check out the story, and the book.

There’s an element of the poor housing market that hasn’t gotten talked about very much, so I was glad to see this article about it.  It’s about people who want to move to a better job - a raise in salary, maybe, or a dream job they’ve been waiting on for many years - but who cannot move because they can’t sell their homes.  As a man who’s moved several times in the last few years, I knew that buying my first home would severely limit my mobility.  When you rent, you can get out of dodge as soon as your next employer wants you there.  When you buy, you are married to the land.

The rapid decline in housing prices is distorting the normal workings of the American labor market. Mobility opens up job opportunities, allowing workers to go where they are most needed. When housing is not an obstacle, more than five million men and women, nearly 4 percent of the nation’s work force, move annually from one place to another - to a new job after a layoff, or to higher-paying work, or to the next rung in a career, often the goal of a corporate transfer. Or people seek, as in Dr. Morgan’s case, an escape from harsh northern winters.

Now that mobility is increasingly restricted. Unable to sell their homes easily and move on, tens of thousands of people […] are making the labor force less flexible just as a weakening economy puts pressure on workers to move to wherever companies are still hiring.

But you know, it’s a blessing, too.  I don’t want anyone to hate on me for saying this - because I’m not speaking to everyone’s situation - but maybe it’s a good thing to be married to the land in such a way.  Maybe it’s an anchor that some Americans need.  We move so much, we jump from job to job, place to place - which is simply the nature of a knowledge-driven economy - that we cease to see any benefit in being stuck to a place.  But maybe being stuck can make some of us stop looking for the next great job and start looking for ways to make our lives better where we are.

Willpower is a paradoxical thing, according to these researchers.  For one, we can use up our willpower.  For example, if you need to work late all week long, requiring a lot of willpower, then your diet may suffer that week. 

The brain’s store of willpower is depleted when people control their thoughts, feelings or impulses, or when they modify their behavior in pursuit of goals. Psychologist Roy Baumeister and others have found that people who successfully accomplish one task requiring self-control are less persistent on a second, seemingly unrelated task.

This is commonsensical stuff, for sure, but new studies are backing it up.  The paradoxical thing, though, is that - even while willpower is depletable - it’s also like a muscle and can be extended and strengthened.

In psychological studies, even something as simple as using your nondominant hand to brush your teeth for two weeks can increase willpower capacity. People who stick to an exercise program for two months report reducing their impulsive spending, junk food intake, alcohol use and smoking. They also study more, watch less television and do more housework. Other forms of willpower training, like money-management classes, work as well.

Hooray for self-control.

How do you view your livelihood–as sacred or secular work?

For many people, unless they are serving in the ministry, they’d probably answer “secular.” But in doing so,  Alex Brubaker says they would be falsely operating under a paradigm that segments all earthly activities into two distinct categories–the sacred and the secular. Instead, he writes:

God gives each of us different gifts, passions and callings, and for some of us, these gifts are in the realm of business. If our calling is to advance God’s kingdom through business, then that is our highest calling.

Whatever our calling from God-whether in the marketplace or in the Church-our calling is noble and sacred, and the old paradigms fall away. In fact, the sacred and the secular overlap and coexist. Personally, I have found a greater integration of my work (the so-called “secular”) and faith (the “sacred”) with the realization that I can minister in the marketplace through my business. All aspects of my life, including my work in business, are ministry

So, to go back to the original question, how do you view your work–as sacred or secular–and why?