Is my job, right now, to tell you what I’ve figured out, and share my wisdom?
Is my job to show you all that I don’t know, and show my openness and vulnerability?
Or is my job simply to write half of the sentence, and let you fill in the…?
Each day, every moment, a choice.
I live in a wealthy community in a wealthy country. I had, and have, a stable, supportive family and access to world-class education. I am male and I am white.
Last week, as part of my time with the Acumen India Fellows, I spent some time 135km outside of Hyderabad, in the villages surrounding the town of Kosge. We were there to understand the issue of marginalization of rural women, and to do so we spent time in villages, with women’s self-help groups, visiting schools and talking with NGOs and the police force and with doctors in public hospitals.
We split up into four groups, and as luck would have it I ended up in the village that seemed completely stuck, where little progress was being made, and where it felt like there was little hope for improvement.
A village where every single woman said that she is beaten by her husband.
A village whose women, when asked what a woman should do if she is regularly being beaten by her husband, responded, “be patient.”
A village where payment of dowrys is on the rise, and where dowry deaths still occur.
A village where girls often get married when they are 12 or 13 years old, and where it is hard to figure out if that is as terrible as it seems or if, in fact, betrothal protects a young girl from sexual predators.
A village whose public hospital, 4km away, has exactly one young doctor, in her 20s, who is on call 24/7, and no additional nursing or medical staff we could identify, working in a hospital whose annual budget, according to the doctor, was less than $2,000 a year.
Returning home from this trip, on the way back from JFK airport, I was talking to my driver who was originally from Guyana. He described life in his country simply, “If you are born rich, you will die richer. If you are born poor, no matter how smart you are and how hard you work, there’s no chance for you, you will always be poor.”
Yes, it’s true, I have the choice, each and every day, of how to live my life, of how hard to work, of what opportunities to pursue, what risks to take, and what my attitude is going to be. I have agency and to some extent I reap what I sow.
But the fundamental point is that I live in a place and a time, and I was born in a place and a time, where my actions yield results. And for far too many people, including the women we spent hours sharing stories with, talking about hardships and often laughing through the discomfort of it all, every force in the world is undermining their ability to realize even some small fraction of their human potential.
It’s so easy to hide from the realities of the world, how cruel and unfair it still is for so many people. And while it is natural to insulate ourselves from these harsh, cruel, ugly realities, it strikes me that we cross a line – the line between self-preservation and delusion – when we start telling ourselves that we deserve the lives we have.
We don’t.
We have the lives that we have, we played some small part in creating them, and it is our choice, every day, to do what seems right to us with the gifts we have been given, however big or small.
I moved last year, which was a lot of work but has ultimately been great. One of the small drawbacks of the kitchen in my new house is that there’s no good space for a microwave, so our only criterion we had when buying a microwave was that it be as small as possible. We found a suitable-looking Panasonic “Inverter” microwave on Amazon – small, a polished stainless steel look, good-enough customer reviews, inexpensive. It’s terrible.
By way of background, my favorite button on my last GE Profile microwave was the “Add 30 seconds” button. This button not only had the right increment (now that microwaves are so powerful, 30 seconds is a more relevant measure than one minute) but the “Add 30 seconds” button actually started the microwave. You hit just one button and the thing turns on.
Contrast this with my Panasonic. It has a big knob that you turn to add time, poorly solving (because it over/undershoots too easily) a problem I didn’t have in the first place. The microwave does have an “Add minute” button but it’s one in a grouping of five of tiny indistinguishable buttons, one of which is a “More/Less” button that as far as I can tell does absolutely nothing. The “Start” button is in that grouping as well, just as tiny as the rest of them. What a mess.
I’m sure the Panasonic design team doesn’t think they’ve made a terrible microwave. They’re probably proud of all the tricks their gadget can do. And I suspect that there’s a microwave power user out there who might appreciate the refinements – though I suspect it’s still poorly designed from a user experience perspective.
The interesting question of course is how Panasonic succeeded in willfully ignoring the most common use case for 95% of their users 95% of the time. Instead of stopping to figure out what they actually wanted their microwave to be good at, they chose instead to show their customers everything they could make it do.
Easy and trivial to chuckle at this sort of thing, except that this unwillingness to make real choices is everywhere, and it’s reflected in decisions big and small. It’s why most nonprofit appeals and stories are indistinguishable from one another. The message is, “we do lots of great things, we’re happy to talk to you about it, but mostly here’s a story that shows that the work we do has heart.”
Without deciding who you want to make happy, where you want to be great, you end up in an indecisive morass of nothingness.
Need proof? Look at the next five nonprofit newsletters you get in your inbox. Four of them won’t have a breath of life in them, a whiff that they were written by an actual human being with a voice and a personality. And the one out of five that actually stand out for having a real voice still will often fall in the trap of 18 ancillary links and articles and “follow us” links and job postings and donate buttons and…and…and…because we may as well put that all in there if we’re sending the thing to 10,000 people.
As usual, the team at IDEO.org shows how to get this right, and reminds us that Swiss Army Knives are good at almost nothing.
(p.s. sadly it seems that the Microwave Oven Standard UI Project never really got off the ground.)
Graduation is in the air, and I can’t help but think about students finishing their degrees and marching off to their new jobs. It’s a stressful enough time, and I suspect that even though the economy is no longer in a free fall that jobs are still hard to come by. Which makes it all the harder for students to stick it out for the jobs they really want instead of the jobs they can get.
It’s easy to pretend that the first job you take is just that, and that it’s not a first step down a path. The truth is, it is a move in one direction. It’s not an irrevocable one, but this step will make it easier to continue in one direction, harder to turn to another one.
While I was at business school, I had an offer for a job that was exactly the kind of job you go to business school to get: prestigious, it would get me a set of skills I thought I wanted, it paid well, the works.
The only thing was, I didn’t want the job. The people weren’t right, the culture wasn’t right, my motivations for considering the job weren’t right. Just thinking about accepting the job physically made my stomach tighten up. But I knew it would be a stepping stone to other things. And I knew my classmates would say I was crazy (or worse) for turning it down.
A close friend gave me some advice I’ll never forget.
She said, “A few months from now, it’s just going to be you showing up at that office. None of your classmates, none of the people who are going to tell you you’re crazy for turning it down, no one but you is going to be there. And then what?”
It’s true. It’s you, it’s your job, it’s your path, it’s your life.
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