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My youngest son was experiencing heel pain the other day.  He was not injured and had trouble understanding why it should hurt when nothing was wrong.  I explained that these were probably growing pains and that I had the same symptoms when I was his age.

What is a growing pain?  When our bodies stretch beyond their former limits, ligaments, bones, and muscles are placed in new configurations.  In the end, we have more strength and more stature, but during the change, our bodies object to the stress of growth.  We have to hurt to grow.

Some people are just fine ignoring the demands of life.  They are content to stay the way they are. Life has other ideas, though.  Life demands that we change to accommodate new circumstances.  We either venture into the unknown by choice or the unknown chases us down.  These pathetic and timid souls hide behind dime store novels and situation comedies on TV.  Life finds them looking blankly at the latest distraction, oblivious to the fact that Death is on its way.

Other people hate life because of what it demands.  A former friend of mine once said, “I’d sit around the house all day if someone paid me.  And don’t lie.  You would too.”  No, I wouldn’t, and it took me years to understand that he really meant it. Having made up his mind in his teens that the world owed him that, he became bitter, cynical, and contemptuous of all who prospered.  The attitude that was at least forgivable as a teen became a cancer of indignance in his later years.  It may not have killed his body yet, but it has savaged his soul, all because he would not face the pain of growth.

Our businesses, jobs, and lives are the same way.  We get into rhythms and routines that are comfortable.  We slide into our daily existence with little thought of inflicting growing pains on ourselves.  That, or we cultivate contempt for the successful. Bitterness is a sweet kind of pain, one that allows us to envy the rewards other receive and ignore the pain they endured to earn them.

As teenagers, nature imposes growth upon us.  As adults, the option is ours.  Let us always remember to hurt enough to grow and grow enough to live.

Bandicoots Gone Wild! http://ow.ly/2so7K

You gotta love popular culture.  Last week an airline flight attendant decides he has had enough and makes a grand exit from the airplane via the emergency chute.  Within hours, “Take This Job and Shove It” was replaced by “Taking the Slide” as everyman’s answer to job burnout.

I took the slide once.  My girlfriend of five years had just left for a new job in a different city.  The people I worked for were proactively stupid.  I was deeply depressed, exhausted, and forlorn.  As manager, I knew I could do absolutely nothing to help them succeed–they were hell-bent on continuing to do the things that had not worked for so many years.  I walked in that morning, talked the bookkeeper into giving me my paycheck two days early, and walked out.

I am not particularly proud of this episode.  A commitment is a commitment, and I could have at least given notice.  What strikes me in retrospect is just how bad it was.  I had no other job to go to.  I had no (read “zero”) money.  The only friend I had in town was dishonest, though I had not really admitted that to myself yet.  Yet for all the downside, I left–cold.

In the years following, I had any number of jobs I despised. One time after a mutual bitch-fest with a friend about the misery of employment, he asked me how come I always seemed to wind up with jobs I hated.  He may have been asking that question as much for himself as me, but it got right to the heart of the matter.

Why do so many of us hate our jobs?

Before I became a professor I thought that a job was that disgusting thing you did to yourself so that you could do what you really wanted to do in your off-time.  Taking the slide that one time was a pathetic substitute for genuine courage.  It was a visceral reaction to the self-loathing I had generated in my years as a greasy and worn cog in the Great Machine of Life.  It was killing me.

What happens to a human being who answers the call of the Machine rather than the call of Life?  Joseph Campbell tells us that all we need to do is observe the character of Darth Vader.  More machine than man, Vader has forsaken his true nature in order to serve the Empire.  His redemption occurs only as he chucks the Emperor to his death and realizes again what he is really made of–his version of taking the slide.

For many of us, it takes a near-death experience to become whole and true.  Mine was a period of nearly three days where daylight and darkness became almost indistinguishable.  Barely able to move physically and incapable of rational thought, I lay on my apartment couch.  When I finally regained enough energy to feel anything at all, I was terrified.  It took that much to shake me out of complacency.

And that’s really the problem, isn’t it?  Like Darth Vader, we lose an arm here and a leg there, replacing them with sophisticated mechanisms that look and function like the real thing.  But deep in our souls, we know the difference.  We can tell that we have sacrificed part of ourselves on the altar of making a living.  We loathe Monday and worship Friday, telling ourselves how happy we are to be alive two days of the week.

What is it that you really want out of life?  Are you doing the work you were born to do or showing up every weekday, well, just because.  There are thousands of ways to make a living doing what you love.  You may choose not to quit your job now.  You may never quit your job.  But you sure as hell can start to fill that gap between your true self and your machine self.  Find your calling and live.

Pete Seeger and Lee Hays wrote the song “If I Had a Hammer.”  If you remember it, you probably heard the Peter. Paul, and Mary version.  Like many songs of the era, it calls for “love between my brothers and my sisters.”  At the risk of sounding like an ogre, I would like to suggest that if you really love your brothers and your sisters, hammering is not the best way to help them.  If hammering is all you do, you will get little but tendinitis.

Swinging a hammer allows one person to produce little.  In fact, you would be lucky to feed yourself, much less any of your brothers and sisters.  There is nothing wrong with physical work.  I did my share of it on the farm and never really minded it.  Being on the business end of a hammer was part of the collection of menial tasks we more or less had to do now and again.  Even then I realized, though, that it was not my physical efforts alone that produced food for a significant number of others, but my efforts combined with technology.  Say, a combine.

A combine is a wondrous piece of machinery.  Instructively, it replaced the sickle, the second of two symbols in Communist propaganda.  By integrating the brain work of thousands of engineers, a combine can do in a day what thousands of sickle-wielding peasants could not do in a week.   Bless Peter, Paul, and Mary, but the reality is not groups of happy people linked arm-in-arm in solidarity, but near-ghosts crippled by years of back-breaking labor.

As you build a business, you may have to do the swinging at first.  That’s fine, as long as you don’t do it the rest of your life.  Use your mind to figure out how to build a combine or a mechanized hammer. Create ways to employ other people who at this stage can only swing a hammer or sling a sickle.  Working at less than your mental potential is a travesty.  Ring your bell for your brains, not your back.

Yesterday, I met with a young man at my local coffee hangout.  A week before, he had overheard someone say I was an entrepreneurship professor and asked to meet me.  I rarely turn down a request like that, so there we were, he with his Mountain Dew and me with my coffee.

Within five minutes, it was clear that he had not asked to meet me to get advice, but to recruit me for a multi-level business–one you would recognize.  (Pause for groans.)  Having adjusted my schedule to accommodate him, I was not happy.  But, he appeared to have a sincere desire to help himself and his family, so as he drew lines and circles on a legal pad, I ran through in my mind the ways I might help him.  I told him bluntly that I was not interested in being a distributor, but that I could help him succeed if he were willing to listen.

The first question I asked him was, “So, how well have you done in your first two months?”  Turns out he had talked to “three or four” prospects, including me.  Ouch.  I realized that he was headed for some serious failure at that rate.  Next I asked if he had another source of income.  He did–a part-time minimum wage job.  Ouch number two.  At the rate he was going, poverty would remain a central part of his life for the foreseeable future.  To top it all off, his presentation was worse than weak.  No wonder no one had signed up.

For the next thirty minutes, I showed him that in order to recruit the 75 people he needed to pay his bills, he would have to talk to at least 20 people a week, hoping to get one to sign up.  I showed him that doing so would realistically require 15-20 hours of focused, difficult work.  I don’t know whether the lesson really sank in, but I left thinking that I had at least introduced him to reality.

The moral of the story?  We often hear pitches about ways to supplement our income.  Emotionally, that is intoxicating.  Who among us has never asked whether what we make at work is going to be enough to survive in retirement or put a child through college?  Who wouldn’t want more income?  (Careful.  People who say they don’t want any more money would lie about other things too.)  The problem is that we stop there, with the idea of making more money.  There are a host of good reasons to supplement your current income with a business.  And multi-level marketing might just be your cup of tea.  But please don’t kid yourself.  No matter how many circles and lines they show you on paper, the only sales you make will come dearly.  Do the math and then ask yourself, “Am I really committed to this?”  If the answer is yes, give it your all.  If the answer is maybe, save yourself the trouble.

Jobs created by start ups have lasting impact: http://ow.ly/2lsng

But Where Does New Money Go? http://ow.ly/2e8vE

But Where Does New Money Go? http://ow.ly/2e8vE

Terry on E-How: http://ow.ly/2d36n

Weathering the Storm: http://ow.ly/2cR4o