Goldberg Productions Blog

Viewing your career as a stream of days full of intention and practice instead of a ladder with rungs to be sequentially conquered sustains your work life in a way that is fun, engaging, present – and ultimately more successful. My grandmother used to say: “The doctors that practice medicine? Or the attorneys that practice law? They’re just practicing!” We’re all practicing, really. We lose sight of this when we think in terms of predefined titles and accomplishments. Practicing with intention keeps our head in the game and our feet on the ground.

Setting an intention is a way to focus your conscious efforts – but it’s not the same thing as setting a goal. A goal by definition creates a distinction between “here” and “there”. Goals separate us from the present moment because they presuppose a state of lack. They reference a different desired state of being.

An intention, by contrast, is a way to organize the functioning of your mind towards a purpose without reducing the qualities of your current state. The human mind can be simultaneously aware of only two or three things at most. Most of us (myself included) often find our minds wandering, scampering around the playground of what happened yesterday, or what we hope will happen tomorrow. Setting an intention is placing a statue in the playground, so that when your mind takes a break, it can look up from the sandbox or the wishing well and remember what you’ve asked it to do.

Goals are like cities: New York. If you’re NYC-bound, and you’re not there, then you’re not there. You’re somewhere else that’s less desirable. But intentions are cardinal directions. When you’re walking North, you are always going North. If you veer a little to the East and then recall your upward intention, you can adjust. Setting an intention is about organizing the mental processes that keep you present, energized and directed.

Similarly, embedded in the verb “to practice” is a whole slew of connotations that aren’t found in the verb “to work.” Practicing is playful and allows us to take chances, make mistakes and grow. Practice keeps us in the moment and helps us maintain a sense of joy, curiosity and personal satisfaction. Practicing implies forgiveness and helps us to be more honest with ourselves about our current state. It is objective research: a systematic investigation of what is possible. I bet that when we think of ourselves as practicing, we engage entirely different brain functions than when we make the assumption that we are working – and that performance is much higher as a result.

What constitutes a love-able job?

To answer this question, I first listed all the definitions I could for the word “love” – in its many uses and misuses. In doing so, I realized that the same patterns of identification and objectification that we as human beings tend towards in our personal relationships are often mirrored in the way we relate to our jobs – and indeed, to ourselves. As a jumping-off point for exploring the associations between the ways in which we love (or fail to love) our work, and the ways this can be mirrored in our personal lives, I suggest reading each passage twice; once as written, and once by substituting the word “job” with the word “relationship.”

Love is:

ownership [This job belongs to me. I've earned it. It's mine.]

consumption [I desire the attributes of this job that support my identity. It's powerful / creative / meaningful / easy / glamorous / allows me to provide / etc.]

reduction [I'm not responsible for how I feel about this job. It's something I just walked into because there wasn't anything better.]

projection [My expectations for this job are unexamined because I make the assumption that every thought I have is real and accurate and that everyone else is thinking the same things too.]

emphasizing the distance between subject and object (”self” and “other”) for the purposes of admiring or belittling [This job is perfect/horrible and I am perfect/horrible.]

sharing [I like sharing my talents and my energy with this job because when I do, I'm appreciated, and the favor is returned.]

parenthood [I am a caretaker of this job. I use my energy to support it and help it grow.]

expansion [This job pushes me to grow. I'm a better person for it, and I'm capable of so much more.]

ecstasy [My life is about catching waves. This job is a wave. I dig it.]

building [Jobs don't just happen. You have to work on them, brick by brick.]

balancing [This job meets a lot of my needs - but not all of them. I have to take care of myself, too.]

trusting [I can be myself in this job. Mistakes are learning opportunities, not sources of shame. I feel comfortable taking chances and growing into who I'm supposed to be.]

growing [This job just keeps getting better and better.]

witnessing [I'm so glad I've been here to see this job through from start to finish. I'm lucky. It's been a beautiful ride.]

How do people make decisions in this world? Some people “get a feel” for a situation and others rely heavily on tangible “evidence” before weighing their options and making a choice. But just as three separate cameras shooting the same event produce completely different photographs, people perceive the same situation in unique ways because their minds have evolved completely differently. There is no such thing as truly objective data. There are controlled experiments with minimized variables and scrutinized conditions. There are rulers and beakers and observations. But the true accuracy of that data is never, never absolute. There’s a continuum of accuracy and each one of us can decide for ourselves the point on that continuum that causes the results of any data-gathering exercise to be “good enough.” And even that determination is a personal choice and context-dependent.

So in a complex institution like a school district, where the purpose of the organization is to provide a structure that enables all students to learn at high levels –  and suddenly the scope has expanded from a typical set of corporate concerns to include a gross scarcity of resources and disparities in equity between one school and the next, not to mention antique data tracking systems and technology – the ways in which data is gathered, interpreted and utilized to make decisions becomes increasingly important. It’s hard and fast “facts” that have the ability to communicate relative importance and the results of district goals. There are, quite simply, so many different groups of people that have to be on the same page with regard to the way finances are handled and instructional programs are designed and delivered that only numbers can provide some modicum of reliability when a variety of people must agree on a specific course of action.

What an organization chooses to measure and how it creates a “metric dashboard” to keep track of progress and communicate results should be directly related to the internal processes designed to accomplish its goals. In the words of Dr. Wendy Robinson, Superintendent of Fort Wayne Community Schools in Indiana, “You better figure out what you believe in before you start measuring things.” There is no reason to use resources to measure something that has no bearing on the outcomes of an organization’s mission. Similarly, there’s no reason spend money to increase the accuracy of a set of data that doesn’t need to be that reliable as it relates to the broad picture of what the system is attempting to accomplish.

I’m convinced that any set of data is always going to be flawed to a certain extent. I’m equally sure that it’s even harder to use gut-feel-type decision strategies when decisions need to be set and implemented by more than one person. Therefore, data is essential. What, where, when, why, how and by whom that data is measured and collected should always reflect the purpose of the organization, whether it’s a school district, a car manufacturing company or a government agency. As long as we can recognize that the seemingly indelible nature of data – “It says 5, after all, so it must be 5″ – is completely dependent on other, less controllable factors for its usefulness in decision-making – such as why and how the data is being measured in the first place –  then “hard and fast numbers” are an excellent vehicle for communication and strategic planning within any organization. But in the end, it’s all a matter of the camera.