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Welcome to Stuff I Learned Yesterday. My name is Emilee O’Leary, following my senior year of college I was diagnosed with five cavities from eating too many Sour Patch Kids, and I believe that if you aren’t learning, you aren’t living. In today’s episode of Stuff I Learned Yesterday I share a lesson I learned from witnessing my dad’s work ethic.
Fun Fact
Today’s word of the day is COLOPHON: C-O-L-O-P-H-O-N. Colophon is a noun that refers to the distinctive emblem, belonging to a publisher or printer, that is placed on their products. The iconic penguin for Penguin Books is a colophon; and Random House Publishers used a simple outline of a large house as their colophon. When the two companies merged in 2013 and unveiled the new logo under the name Penguin Random House, they scrapped these images all together and moved to a text-only emblem. You can open up any book, though, and find the publisher’s colophon on one of the first pages of the book.
Theory, In Practice
I love to read, and I am an indiscriminate reader. I’ll read anything suggested to me. This isn’t to say I don’t have my preferences, or after trying something I won’t bother with it again if I didn’t find it interesting or entertaining, but my interests are broad and so I will read broadly.
Two of my favorite topics to read about are theory and philosophy, and often they come packaged together. When I first got my Kindle and didn’t want to spend money on e-books, I started picking titles from the free section, and a lot of these free books are free because they’re in the public domain, or published prior to 1923. From this collection you’ve got Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, John Stuart Mill, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Søren Kierkegaard, St. Augustine… and so on and so forth.
In many ways, philosophy and theory help me to make sense of things. Understanding behavior, why someone makes a decision or a adheres to a certain methodology, it reduces the amount of frustration I feel when I think they’re doing something wrong. A single problem might have several solutions, and we spend our lives testing various philosophies to find a way to solve problems most efficiently.
I spend way too much time, however, getting caught up in the philosophy of things. I will spend all my time reading and thinking and theorizing and very little time trying to implement the solutions I read about.
My dad was the total opposite of this, in many ways. He was all about demonstration, follow through, and hard work, which constructed a practical philosophy around work pieced together through experience. His work ethic was so extraordinary because he didn’t spend time talking about what he was doing or why he was doing it, he just did it.
I’ve been trying to nail down for a while now what exactly it was that made his style of work so effective. He quickly earned the respect of his peers through hard work, he earned the respect of his supervisors through loyalty and productivity. He didn’t draw attention to himself, and yet everyone, in the wake of his death, expressed similar, if not identical, responses to his style of work. This response indicates to me that he made a huge impact on the minds of other people without ever having to say a word directly about that thing he was demonstrating. But by acting with humility, working hard and steadily, he was able to do more for other people than any book about hard work could have done.
Even by recording this podcast, however, I am at odds with the theory my dad set forth. I’m talking about it, not doing it. And yet, I know who I am and how I learn. I learn through analysis, by breaking down generalities and learning theory. Even though I talk about things before carrying them out, it isn’t intentionally in an effort to draw attention to myself but to fully understand the context and parameters for what I need to do.
Here’s what I learned.
I’ve broken my observations of my dad’s work ethic down into three actionable steps.
1) When you find something to do, do it with everything you have. Even when it was a task that he didn’t want to be doing, my dad put everything he had into doing it well. When it was a task he didn’t know how to do, or how to do well, he’d labor over it and only occasionally ask for help. So as a sub point to this first observation, don’t be afraid to ask for help when something is holding you up! Laboring over something doesn’t mean that you can’t reduce frustrations that come from inexperience.
2) Don’t work for other people. And by this I don’t mean be an entrepreneur or start your own business… By all means if that’s what you want to do, do it. What I mean is, my dad’s work ethic largely came from Colossians 3:17 – “And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.” The work he did wasn’t for anyone else, it wasn’t even for himself; he respected his co-workers, his supervisors, his family and friends by doing what he did for the God who gave him life, and that made his passion boundless. It wasn’t tied to how much he loved his job or respected his friends. It was tied to his love for God, which grew and grew. Whether you believe in God or not, I can guarantee you that you will never be satisfied with your work if it is dependent on something that is temporal or inconsistent. Don’t work for people.
3) Work sacrificially. Think about this for a moment. Sacrificial, or sacrifice, amongst its traditional theological connotation, is concerned with the surrender of something prized for the sake of something considered as having a more pressing claim. The suffix –ly turns the adjective sacrificial into an adverb, sacrificially, which indicates a state of being. Sacrificially, then, connotes this surrender as a state of being. This has been something huge on my heart lately, because the busier I get in every day life, the more frustrated I become. It’s becoming harder to be flexible and to join fun projects my friends start because I have such little free time. Sometimes I worried that my dad worked too hard, that he pressed himself harder and harder and felt an obligation to carry out duties that could have fallen to someone else. But in the end, he dedicated his life to working sacrificially. He surrendered his own free time for the sake of helping someone else. He learned to love work for the sake of the people he blessed instead of work for work’s sake or for money’s sake.
There is a saying, often attributed to Einstein, that goes, “In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.” There’s not much point in discussing theory unless it will be put into use. Often, multiple theories will be proposed in order for a decision to be made, but then that decision follows the theory chosen.
One of the last conversations I had with my dad, and I do literally mean one of the last ones, was me discussing a theory with him. I outlined what I’d been reading, then extrapolated that into an ongoing discussion my family has been having over the last couple years. When I was done explaining everything, he asked me… “Alright, I’m not going to pretend like I understood all that… but what are you trying to get at with this theory? Does it change anything about how you live or what you believe?”
I didn’t have an answer for him, and now when I look back on the conversation I find it rather pointless. There’s no great purpose in acquiring knowledge or understanding philosophical directions unless they’re going to influence the way I live. And perhaps some people have no problem with this, but when I see the way my dad lived and the type of influence he had, his philosophy wasn’t a theoretical one, it was a practical one. And I don’t live a theoretical life, I live a practical one. I just have to remember to pull myself out of theory and live a little.
I’m Emilee O’Leary and this has been Stuff I Learned Yesterday.
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