Bumping It Up

Just because of who I am, I tend to confront problems by seeing what has to be done, putting my head down, and just getting on with it. It's probably the residual British in me--just get on with it and don't make a fuss, as my mum used to say.

I used to believe this grim sense of determination was how I made my way through a doctoral program while teaching full time and keeping up my end of family life. I just kept plodding until I was there. The race, in this case, nopt going to the swift, who may have won the initial prizes, but to the steady and persistent.

From the vantage point now of an approaching birthday, however, things seem more complex and in some ways more poignant. I find myself asking sbout human motivation and how the impact of a single life is to measured.

When I was in the president's office at the University of Hawaii, one of the regents told me to advise my workaholic boss to take more care of himself. "Institutions have no memory and no gratitude," he told me. Many people would agree with him, and it's almsot a truism to repeat the observation that no one on their deathbed wishes they had spent more time at work. Yet I'm not at all sure that my boss would or could have agreed with him.

The reasons why people behave as they do are myriad and complex, which makes me wonder whether the behavioral research really has the universal application with which it is presented to us. I'm not sure my boss would have been happy kicking back at that time of his life. He was in a drive to succeed mode, building a university legacy. He needed to accomplish great things (which he did) and he had the family and staff around him to support him. Whether the university remembered what he did was immaterial. He had an intrinsic drive to achieve that he measured by his own standards. In other words, he was in control empowered by what he needed to do at that time in his life.

It seems to me that we have constantly shifting needs and reward structures throughout our lives. Those who later regret their efforts at work might have confused their need for respect with the trappings of their career. As King Lear was to find out, "a dog's obeyed in office." Once they left the job, there was no basis for their public authority. But that doesn't mean what they did in their career was unimportant; it just means that the validation of their career did not last for a lifetime and they are stuck in a rut.

It reminds me of the old public relations mantra that when faced with a media blowup (frequent in a university president's office), a good response was to "bump it up a level." For example, when faced with a protest march on the president's residence, talk to the media about freedom of speech. Politicians do this all the time, except they also manage to drop in something about this being a great country.

Bumping it up is probably a good idea when it comes to human motivation. The most profitable question is not necessarily "Am I identifying too much with my work?" but "How is the work I do at this moment and the way I do it an important part of my progress as a human being?" Not "How important am I?" but "How important is this experience in my life?"

For some reason, I must have needed to plod my way to that advanced degree, possibly involving some element of competition. It must have fulfilled an intrinsic need because once I had earned the doctorate, only my assistant ever used doctor in front of my name. Whatever part of me was stirred by earning the degree apparently had been satisfied by completing it.

As I read him, John Milton was dealing with the need for self-examination and self-validation when he talked about the need to test our "virtues": "I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat."

Perhaps that's what we are all here for: to place ourselves out there in the race for the immoratal garland, whatever that may be for us.