Every Friday, I share juicy excerpts and commentary from awesome business books. I read ‘em, so you don’t have to. (Just kidding. READ THE BOOKS. LEARNINGS!) That’s why I call it Biz Book Friday.
Still working my way through my highlights from Henry Ford’s stellar autobiography (or really, autobizography), My Life and Work. (Previous posts are here!)
What’s speaking to me today is the concept of ambition. Or rather, desire and capacity for self-betterment. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from working with others, it’s that our levels of ambition are all so very different.
On advancing employees, Ford wrote:
There is no difficulty in picking out men. They pick themselves out because — although one hears a great deal about the lack of opportunity for advancement — the average workman is more interested in a steady job than he is in advancement.
It’s easy to pat ourselves on the back when we read a passage like this: Hey, I’m gonna do a startup. I’m gonna self-nominate. Hey, Ford says I’m special!
But…
Scarcely more than five percent, of those who work for wages, while they have the desire to receive more money, have also the willingness to accept the additional responsibility and the additional work which goes with the higher places.
Scarcely more than 5%? But… certainly more than 5% of us believe we fall in that group.
Do our actions back that belief up?
Do we actually, on a day-to-day basis, deliberately take on more responsibility? Take risks? Ask for more pay? Make ourselves useful beyond the call of duty? Go further?
Or do we just pat ourselves on the back for being special, and use that as an excuse to not do anything? (We could, after all. We could start at any time.)
But the vast majority of men want to stay put. They want to be led. They want to have everything done for them and to have no responsibility. Therefore, in spite of the great mass of men, the difficulty is not to discover men to advance, but men who are willing to be advanced.
Ford is talking about discrete traits in discrete people: Joe wants to be led, Jo will get out there and kick butt.
In my own life — watching the people I’ve met, the people I’ve worked with, the people I’ve hired — I’ve certainly found this to be true. It’s rare to find a person who will go beyond what’s on the spec sheet.
But I think this applies just as well to internal divisions. We contradict ourselves. We contain multitudes.
Maybe we’re 90% Joe, who just wants to be led. Even in our iconoclastic entrepreneur-worshipping pivot-frenzy, we want to be told what to do. We want somebody to guide us. Then, if we follow the guide — if we follow the nonconformist herd! — we can blame somebody else if it doesn’t work. Plus, of course, we’ve saved ourselves all that pesky higher thinking.
But maybe we’re 10% Jo, who’s willing to take on the extra, the risk, the work, the uncertainty of thinking, doing, reaching for more. The deciding.
Being wholly responsible for making the decisions that could create chaos in our lives.
Well. If we truly want to achieve what we claim we want to achieve, 10% isn’t enough. Jo’s gotta step up and expand her territory.
The accepted theory is that all people are anxious for advancement, and a great many pretty plans have been built up from that. I can only say that we do not find that to be the case.
Henry, I’ve gotta agree with you there. Even for ourselves, we set up plans which require super-human confidence, intensity, commitment, production. Then, naturally, we fail to rise to the occasion, because we’re only human. Then we say “Well, it wasn’t meant to be. I’m not good enough.”
No matter how right they feel, those pretty plans don’t reflect reality.
Maybe the real strategy is to admit that we are 90% Joe and only 10% Jo, and figure out how to work around — or with — that fact. To make it work for us instead of against us. To set up plans which support how we really are, instead of how we think we ought to be. Learning to create durable habits, maybe.
In conclusion? Well, other than “Henry Ford is brilliant and relevant” and “Wow, 5%?” I don’t have one for you. Or me. Yet.
As a parting shot, though, let’s refer to the best dialogue writer ever, Joss Whedon, in the form of Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
Buffy: I’m starting to think this working hard is hard work.
Willow: … isn’t it crazy like that?
Buffy: I thought it was gonna be like in the movies. Y’know, inspirational music, a montage, me sharpening my pencils, me reading, writing, falling asleep on a big pile of books with my glasses all crooked, ’cause in my montage I have glasses. But real life is slow and it’s starting to hurt my occipital lobe.
As in Buffy, so in life.
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Yes! I love Joss Whedon, and Buffy. And of course Henry Ford is cool too.
His point is right on, I think it’s okay for different people to have different ambition… different sizes of “chomp” / hunger. And 5% seems about right too.
Different chomp sizes… I like it. And I agree with you, nothing at all wrong with it. It doesn’t take ambition to be a good, kind, giving person, to love and be loved. I am pro those things, and pro ambition only as much as it doesn’t destroy those things.
F-ing love that Buffy the Vampire Slayer quote. So true! So true!
I was once reading a blog post on the interwebs and it said something to the effect:
Did life just get harder?
Congratulations! You just leveled up!
Which is just to say that that’s the rub, you can advance, but guess what? Everything (workload, responsibility, risk, etc.) advances too.
Thanks, Amy! Always love your perspective.
Adda, “harder? level up!” bit is a great way to put it! Thanks for sharing.
“I read ‘em, so you don’t have to.” Thanks for that!
I know you were kidding, but it has been good to read your shared excerpts and commentaries.
I’m usually wary of letting my reading be mediated in this way (and one should be wary!), but it has definitely been good here. Before I hadn’t have considered picking up Henry Ford’s autobiography. Now you’ve persuaded me it would be an interesting read; even if I still don’t pick it up, at least I now have a taste of his writing style and perspective, and I’ve gotten to wrestle with some of his ideas and how they relate to starting web businesses in the 2010s, thanks to you.
The questions of motivation, ambition, superiority-inferiority, etc. are so fascinating! And not only the questions of their reality but of people’s perception of them. Reminds me of so many things… the above average effect, the concept of the Übermensch in Nietzsche, the whole meritocratic premise of capitalism…. The way that fans glorify will their idols, who love the attention but at the same time feel misunderstood, since their admirers are so unaware of all the boring, unmagical strategies and tactics that helped get them to where they are. And while Ford only observed 5% of people who demonstrated follow-through on their work ambitions, he was probably unaware of the heroics some of those other 95% showed in other parts of their lives when they encountered rare and unexpected challenges…
Love your proposed strategy of admitting that we may be 90% Joe and only 10% Jo. Stop wondering and hoping that you could be a Superman and concede that you’re gonna have to work on being the best Batman that you can. You probably don’t have Bruce Wayne’s zillion-dollar inheritance either, so sober up to the fact that you may have to spend 10 years at the dojo if you’re gonna move those mountains like you dream about doing. And if you do turn out to have some Superman in you, well at least you weren’t banking on it!
Sorry to have rambled on and bounced around so much in this comment. Anyway, enjoyed the post!
Evan, I totally dig rambly comments which are as interesting as yours!
The idolization of fans (and how that feels as the celebrity) is something that hits close to home for me. Not that I am idolized, or a true celebrity, but even with the kind of limited renown I have, there is a sense of people not getting how bad things can be on the inside while still looking spiffy on the outside. That’s why I do my damnedest to write honestly about problems! The alternative is to live a kind of lie… a very ISOLATING lie.
The montage thing made me think of the whole ‘every dog should learn to code and then do a cool startup and sell it for millions’ – no effort needed!
Me too, Mark! We always seem to fantasize in montages.
Love this! Nobody told me it was gonna be hard work. Crap!
It surprised me the first time a design client asked if I was also willing to update her blog. She didn’t mean keep it up to date in the back end, she meant write posts for her. Yeah… I could hear the crickets chirping in my head.
I’m gonna steal that Buffy quote and bring it out whenever I feel myself slipping from the 5%. It IS hard work, but it’s so satisfying… most of the time.
You’re better than porn.
Is Friday night; well it was two hours ago anyway, and the eternal question raised once again as every week does:
Should I stay at home or go out? I decided to stay and there were only two options to what to do with my precious time: A) Watch porn B) Read your blog
So here I am at two a.m., just finished to read all your posts -yeap, I aligned them from the very beginning and snort them like if they were cocaine- and must say it was worth it. I enjoyed the whole ride.
My favorite line: “You could say I’m responsible for my child, but I prefer to leave parenting up to inanimate objects.”
My favorite post: 7 Hardass Rules for Business and Life
You have managed to make me consider to open a twitter account just to follow you. Bruno
p.s. Exactly how attached am I to that hand? A lot, I’m a copywriter… and I also like porn.