The Foxy Hedgehog

Richard Florida predicted that the future of American capitalism in a world with increasing middle-class production lay in our “creative class.”  As his website explains:

This “creative class” is found in a variety of fields, from engineering to theater, biotech to education, architecture to small business. Their choices have already had a huge economic impact. In the future, they will determine how the workplace is organized, what companies will prosper or go bankrupt, and even which cities will thrive or wither.

This notion has only gained momentum in recent years with the rise of the “makers movement.”  Taking on a flavor of the “creative class” and conjoining it with a growing “local” movement, you have what some call an “indie economy.”  These concepts are not necessarily points in an evolutionary process, but rather co-related growths out of the same life.

Absolutely delightful “hubs” of creativity, innovation, invention and creation are cropping up – with places like “3rd Ward” and “TechShop” where you can walk in with an idea – get some knowledge, and then have the space, resources and community to bring it to fruition – with machinery to which you would never otherwise have access to.  NASA employees who spend their days working on things dictated from on high, can have access to the same kinds of equipment with which to tinker.  The possibilities are endless.

Is this the FUTURE of the American economy? Perhaps and probably.

But here’s the thing.  As Florida notes, even if only implicitly, this creative class may present the next big idea and it may determine how the “work force is organized.”  But it will NOT replace the requisite workforce. 

American has seen the “management class” redefine our economy – through taylorist ideas – has seen the “technological class” redefine our economy through computers and the internet, and has seen the “financial class” redefine our economy through leveraging everything we do around financial products.  Yet throughout, the “creative economy,” the “managed economy” the “tech-savy economky” and even the “financial economy,” still needs roads built, and cars built, and furniture build and plumbing, and lighting and ….

Yet today, even with 9% unemployment, the skilled trades have a huge need for workers.

How is it possible that with so much unemployment we have an industry that cannot fill open positions?  Perhaps because somewherein the middle of our discussions and emphasis on the “creative” or the “financial economy” or the “next technology,” we praise advanced education – which, in realty, leads to more cubical jobs than laboratory jobs, if it offers a job at all – and deride skilled work with ones hands.

“Vocational work,” (whatever that means) is another term for “remedial.”  You only get into it as a consolation prize.  The college graduate with a sociology major who works at a Starbucks gets more street-cred from the opinion-makers than does the high-school grad who becomes a pipefitter.  This is a shame.  Not because I decry sociology.  Indeed, in an ideal work every pipefitter will have taken some classes in sociology.  But also, in an ideal work, every sociologist will have worked their butts off on a jobsite for a while and known what a calloused hand is.

I don’t write any of this to make divisions between classes or emphasize one over another.  Calloused hands should be familiar to everyone in this country.  And exposure to a solid, rounded, education should be a given for all.  But after the basics, folks should not be dissuaded from pursuing any direction (and given the resources and support to pursue it) – and once that direction is chosen, it shouldn’t be viewed as a “second-tier” option.

I’ll stop now, cause I can’t say it better than Mike Rowe (“Dirty Jobs”) in his testimony before a U.S. Senate Committee…. (click on the T.V. screen).

Perhaps, as Florida notes, the creative class will redefine the DIRECTION of our country – and I will work toward that possibility in my work! – but as this happens, we should support and ENCOURAGE the workforce that will enable that.  The work of making our day happen in the way we accustomed is noble work.  Experience doing that work is noble and psychologically invaluable even for that eventual “creative class” member who may presume to take a shaping role in our future.

Lauding, encouraging and even being the Builders and the future Builders is a necessary prerequisite to any future the “creative class” might imagine.

In a recent Republican primary debate in South Carolina, Newt Gingrich doubled-down on his suggestion that poor kids in public schools can/should be put to work as janitors and other such jobs.  The overturn of child labor laws, and the racial elements to his plan have created a robust backlash.  Something a little less covered was part of Newt’s case that “because of the unions,” NY city janitors make “absurd salaries.”  Which, by the way he concluded with “only the elites despise making money.”  Right, in the same breadth.

My jaw dropped.  It was not necessarily because the point was wrong – which it is.  My astonishment, rather, was that this claim was being made by this man, from the party that defends obscene salaries as part of its platform.

Newt, of course, was just seizing an opportunity to take a jab at the unions.  Yet this seems absurd to me.  The salaries of those janitors were negotiated in an arms-length business transaction.  The janitors simply realized that in their negotiations, they were at a power disadvantage.  So, the got together, pooled some money and had experienced representatives negotiate with them.

That’s capitalism, Newt.  You hate it because many in the labor movement have defended what they do on anti-capital terms.  Be that as it may, I challenge anyone to point out how – in free market terms –  the salary of the NY Janitors negotiated with the assistance of professional negotiators is any different then the multi-million dollar salary of thousands of CEOs, negotiated by their lawyers or other representatives or athletes who pay agents or lawyers to negotiate for them. 

Those salaries are set by contract.  The cornerstone of capitalism.  Just because some companies – like certain auto companies – made risky contracts decades ago, does not change the fact that they are, in fact, contracts which were freely entered into after protracted negotiations. 

Newt doesn’t like capitalism when it benefits a school janitor.  Its fine for CEOs who make 200 times their average employee, often working less.

As I close this little rant, I’ll note that I don’t take a stance here on actual “absurd salaries.”  Indeed, my defense of the NY janitors is on capitalistic terms.  There’s more to say on that, but I often find it necessary to explain what I wasn’t saying (cause folks often impute things that aren’t there).

And on that awkward note, I’ll close.

I was on my father’s garage roof, tearing off cedar shake shingles, at 8:45am on September 11, 2001.  I was in Cleveland for the summer before my senior year in college in L.A.  My little sister came out and shouted up to me that an airplane had hit one of the World Trade Center towers in New York.

We watched together as the second plane hit.  And then the pentagon.  In shock, I suppose, I went back outside at a certain point and continued, in monotonous rhythm, to tear those shingles off the roof.  It was exceedingly hot and humid.  And the black sutt from the 100 year old shingles stuck to me, thick and black.

At every break, I would set down the pitchfork, plunk down, light a cigarette, and look up at the sky.  At one point, a plane flew over.  Later, I heard that it was United Flight 93, which had turned around near Cleveland, before its passangers heroically brought it down in Pennsylvania.

I don’t know why I didn’t stay inside, glued to the TV (though I did a fair amount of that over the next few days). I wasn’t numb.  Nor was I deep in thought.  But something ached.  It was hours later that evening when emotion finally gave way.  I sat with my mother at her kitchen table.  And she was talking, choked up.  I’m not sure how much I was hearing anything.  I just began to cry.  I had no words at first, just tears. And then I just started speaking in a stream.

I just felt so heavy.  “The cycle,” I kept saying.  It is just going to continue.  What are we doing?  There will now be wars justified and then more attacks deemed justified by those wars.  Death breeding death.  The crying overpowered any words I had then.  Just weeping.  It felt unbearable.

For many years, I have felt somewhat guilty about my visceral response to the attacks.  I have battled guilt that my tears weren’t for the specific lives lost that morning.  But nor were my tears driven by a conscious ideological leaning against war or some grand embrace of kumbya.  They were liquid and from a well I didn’t create or control.

I am not opposed to the military.  Indeed, it was my lifelong dream to attend West Point (another story for another day).  And I have since wept for those lost that day.  The first time on a midnight walk back at school a few weeks later.  And then again, a year later as I walked through “Ground Zero,” reading and reading and reading.

Perhaps it was the utter senselessness of these particular attacks – an extreme act – which laid bare, in such a raw way, the insanity of the cycle of death and violence toward one another.  Violence with a logic to it can, perhaps, make it easier to ignore the insanity and become engulfed in a world in which it is assumed a part and thus the conversations begin with violence as an unexamined premise.  The bald insanity of this attack challenged that premise, exposed its falsity in a way that couldn’t be ignored, no matter how hard we tried. 

It was as if the cringingly heartbreaking acts that would ensue in response to those attacks – and then the reactions to those acts – were all present with me – perhaps not in their facts, but in their painful essence.  I felt flashes of overzealous reactionaries and their overbroad xenophobia and theo-phobia.  And the crazed fanatical populism which would ensue from reaction to those phobias. 

I don’t want to editorialize too much with 10 years of subsequent contemplation.  At the time, I frankly just wanted to be alone.  I just wanted to go away from you all.  I just felt so heavy and sick.

The thing is, I couldn’t leave my parents house.  And I couldn’t help but talk to my friends.  It was as if my whole being knew what it needed better than my raw emotion.  My head wanted to make a b-line for the door.  But my body knew it needed comfort and healing, and so it put me with loved ones over my own objection.  I don’t know what specifically got healed through that.  Or what “sense” was made through conversations.  But perhaps, we were each in our own personal fox-hole, starring out at a war that offered no answers and defied reason at the asking.  And so the only assurance was that there was company in that hole.

A lot has changed in the last ten years.  That part hasn’t.

I love nighttime, when the world is asleep and my mind wakes, buzzing and galavanting, unshackled by distraction and sound-tracked by the crickets in heat.

Such a “free” state is not inherently healthy, to be sure.  Nighttime used to be, for me, a slightly darker time – still “free” and roaming – but marked by angst.  Not angst in the black-wearing-mohawke-and-eye-shadow type angst of youth.  But rather “angst” in the way meant by Soren Kierkegaard: that unique feeling known only to free human beings who, in being free constantly fears, ever so viscerally, he is failing his responsibilities to God.

Freedom and responsiveness to God are not mutually exclusive.  Indeed, they are one and the same.

There is a law to freedom, to ensure freedom.  “Unfettered” does not equal freedom, for “unfettered,” at a certain point, is swept away by other external sources and I find myself subject to a “flow” or a “habit” or worse.  Slavery comes disguised as freedom.  To maintain freedom, there is a natural restraint.

And therein, worlds open.

I find it more difficult to be responsive in the midst of days.  Or rather, I cannot help but be responsive to everything, and thus nothing.  At night, now, there is less momentum and reaction.  I can embrace a simple beginning and being and thereby respond to God into freedom…. And it is adventure among the crickets!

There’s a fellow in my backyard who took over his family’s manufacturing plant and reinvented it to be a company that hires, invests in, and then TRUSTS its employees to see the whole picture – to dare to think differently – to reexamine the assumed:

This has been a big transformation for Thogus. It used to be companies would come to them and say: “we need 20,000 switches made, can you do it?” And, Thogus would quote a price and make them. It was a volume business. Then, at the end of 2008, Matt Hlavin took over the company from his late mother.

“Worst time to take over a manufacturing company,” he says. “The economy is in shambles. The stock market is crashing. Banks are a mess.”

But Hlavin saw this as a time to reinvent the company. Volume was no longer the answer. It was now about skill and technology. Hlavin cut half Thogus’s staff. Those remaining were deemed on board with the company’s mission, and were given ten percent pay hikes. He invested $5 million in new equipment.  But most importantly, the jobs changed.

“We hired our first engineer right out of school,” Hlavin says as he walks around the factory floor. “James was a plastics processing engineer. I brought him in to be the first of my new engineering team.”

In just two years, Thogus went from having no engineers on staff to 15. Instead of just making whatever part a client wants, Thogus now helps design the product. The engineers range from biomedical to civil. Hlavin sees the company now as more of a full service consultant.

His website narrative is nothing short of perfect:

Don’t be afraid to pronounce it: “TO-GUS.”
The H may be silent, but it still packs a powerful punch. 

At Thogus, we hone ideas.

We thrive on the hardest projects, the ones that keep us up at night, restlessly tinkering toward an elegant, cost-effective solution.

I would love to see more of this.  But, alas, few in today’s climate are so forward-thinking. 

It is amazing that in the 21st century, a turn-of-the-20th century business model predominates.  Taylorism, in some for or fashion, dominates most business models even 100 years after its creating.  Charles Taylor, in the peak of the industrial age, proposed essentially that companies break down their production line into its component parts and then have employees perform “line” tasks.  A given employee was not to look at the “whole,” but rather peak efficiency with his/her part.  This was a cornerstone of the efficiency and prosperity of American Industry in the early 20th century (though I will not get into, here, the plight of the average “Taylorist” worker). 

Today, this model persists in nearly every industry.  Indeed, even in academia, graduate students are funnelled into narrower and narrower specializations until their vocabularly is unintelligible to the average person.  Richard Posner highlights this academic phenomina well in “Public Intellectuals: A study of decline.“  When I dove into Linguistics, taking graduate courses as an undergrad, I was ectatic to tell people that it wasn’t about studying language, per se, but rather, it was the very study of the mind, how our minds processed thought, with language simply being the best data we have to conduct that study.  Yet, a parousal of any graduate dissertaion yielded breathtaking analyses of “wh-movement” and “garden-path” sentences.  Harumph.

Today, the Taylorist model shows up not only in manufacturing, for which it was tailored, (mmmm…..hommmm-ooo-nym. doh!), but also in the service industry – most strikingly in hospitals.  The modern version of Taylorism can be found in management techniques such as “Six Sigma” – an efficiency model and process devised by cell-phone manufacterors.  It still boggles my mind that someone, one day, determined that a model fashioned for manufacturing could be “effective” in a service industry.  And not just any service industry, but HOSPITALS!!!

When people lose sight of people – that is, the WHOLE of the experience and service enterprise – there is no trajectory by down.  Don’t get me wrong, the efficiency models may well increase profits in the shorter term (don’t count on more than a few year, before your new reputation catches up to you).  But long-term, it is a recipe for terrible service and thus, a terrible service business.

Home Depot is an interesting case study:  the founder’s invested in their employees.  They weren’t just any retailer.  Their employees had a well-developed knowledge-base and premier customer service:  the employees were entrepreneurs – and treated as such.  By investing in the front line, they produced life-long customers (even if, on a given day, the employee talked the customer into a cheaper solution to the DIY-problem).  These customers, if life-long, spend on average $80,000 over a life-time.  EACH customer.

When the founders retired, the Board brought in a manufacturing CEO – Bob Nardelli of GE.  He did what manufacturing does – he cut overhead, increased efficiencies (which meant leaner labor costs, less employee investment, less employees per customer).  To be sure, his approach was “successful” IN THE SHORT TERM (there’s truly lovely article, if read with dramatic irony, in Business Week which praised Nardelli’s HD “military” business…. less than a year before a fateful Board meeting….). In time, the company’s market share plummited and Lowe’s, who had since adopted the model of the HD founder’s, was surging…  The Wharton school of business has a decent review.

A year ago, I was negotiating with a Hospital that had a dismil satisfaction rate with its Emergency Room.  So, it set about a “transformaion” of the ER.  To be sure, part of the need for the transformation was budgetary, as well as quality concerns.  I don’t need to get into the specifics to point out that cutting staffing per hour wasn’t going to get anywhere near changing quality (at least not for the better).  But 10 meetings later (with each meeting lasting 1-2 hours, with at least 3 $80K + administrators attending each), we “came up with” a plan to reduce staffing (it was undoubtedly dictated from “home office”).  Six Sigma in a health care facility!  All I could keep trying to hammer home was “empower your experienced nurses to assess and make recommendations,” to which the response was always, “Sure, so long as it breeds results next week AND saves ther requisite dollar amount.”

We don’t trust people to be thoughtful.  Thus we never empower people – even the skilled, educated, experienced – to look at the whole and take a shot at re-working the norm.

In today’s economy, this is a tradegy for long-term economic growth (from a capitalistic perspective) and for our culture, ever-the-more compartmentalized and sterile.

I hate ending a post so dismally, so I’m adding this line. Go Thogus!

Its true.  I have caked sawdust in my nose.  I won’t recount the cleaning episode that will ensue in a few moments.

I am awash in woodworking projects.  The present project is a library for a small private school in Cleveland – Birchwood School  (there is no other school in Cleveland that parallels it, so check it out) – being completed in three phases (phase one – two walls of bookcases; phase two – a wall of inset “nooks” for reading; phase three – a wall of carrols).  Here’s rough model of the first two phases:

The "nook" wall is on the right, in grey. As you can see, there are two curved wide "platform" steps, where the kids will lounge on pillows and bean bags, while the teacher reads from the nook...

Phase 1 is complete:

 All of the face frames are cherry.  If you’ll notice in the corner, there is a “checkout desk” complete with a little drawer (dovetailed, of course) featuring a little handle carved out of plum wood.  So, its a fruity desk.

I’m working on phase two (will post pictures as progress develops).  The next project is a double-pedestal extension dining room table.  It will be made out of 6/4″ black walnut, with very curly cherry accents.  The monumental task on this project is mastering the wood movement and allowing for it in the design.  Most furniture makers would opt immediately for veneer on a project like this…

Black Walnut Double Pedestal Dining Table, with Curly Cherry inlay

 At the end of a long day like today, I can’t tell which is more endearing to a woodworker:  the sawdust caked in the nose, or the equilibrium-destruction that comes from hours of laquering…  Feel free to debate.

A story that does not need editorializing:

One year and one month ago, I signed a contract on behalf of the union for which I was working representing the employees at Huron Hospital (part of the Cleveland Clinic system).  It was a solid contract, given the economic times and the fact that is was in East Cleveland – 2% raise, increase to pension….  But the Hospital was losing between 7-13 million a year on the facility.  95% of the East Cleveland population either had no insurance or non-private insurance.  The outmigration from the City had been catastrophic.  This is an irrelevant point, however, as I will point out as we continue.

A few months later, the Clinic annouced that it would be closing the Level 2 Trauma Center at Huron Hospital, as they were opening a$150 million emergency and trauma center at Hillcrest Hospital in Mayfield Heights (25 minutes away by the fastest ambulance).  The community, including the Cleveland Mayor and the District Congresswoman, was in an uproar.  Even the Cleveland EMT services was astounded.  Apparently, not even the Cleveland EMT, which was respondible for a vast majority of the transport of trauma patients, knew of this planned move.  The community couldn’t believe that the trauma center was being moved from the epicenter of trauma cases in the city, particularly gunshot wounds etc…  The added drive time meant death, literally. Cleveland’s poorest (and black) population was getting the shaft for a fancy facility in the suburbs.

I went to the Cleveland City Council meeting in late October 2010 to hear Toby Cosgrove and his team justify its decision.  Everyone was irate about the trauma closure, but was also concerned that the Clinic would close the entire facility.  Toby assured everyone that the Hospital would remain open.  According the David Bronson – the Clinic’s President of Regional Hospitals – the closure of the trauma center was needed and the concerns about long transports of trauma victims were overblown :   the Emergency room at Huron wasn’t closing, so trauma patients from the area would still be stabalized at Huron and then moved to the Hillcrest (or Metro) trauma center.

The other emphazied point was the Hillcrest was being turned into a “specialty” center, as was all other Hospitals in the system.  “Community Hospitals” with a full range of services were no part of the business model.  Each Hosptial in the system had to have a specialty, where the professional staff treated the same range of issues and thus developed a specialized knowledge, producing the best care for such issues.

Ironically, these two points, hammered home as the Clinics twin pillars of defense, were facially problematic for Huron Hospital.

First, as the trauma victims of East Cleveland or Glenville being stabilzed at Huron’s emergency room before being transported to Hillcrest – it wasn’t going to happen.  First, The Cleveland EMS protocol does not permit them to transport a trauma victim to a non-trauma facility.  Someone could be shot at the doorstep of Huron and their protocol would require transport straight to Metro.  Which brings up another flaw: in the 80,000+ trauma cases the Cleveland EMS transported in Cleveland or East Cleveland in the past year, less than 10 were transported to Hillcrest.  Given its distance, and the EMS’s own problems with staffing, they simply couldn’t afford to have staff out of the field that long.  Of course, this “protocol issue” could be remedied in talks – but it should be noted that the Clinic annouced this plan before even speaking the EMS.

The second point is the more interesting one.  Huron Hosptial had exactly one specialty:  trauma.  Other than that, it was pretty much a general service “community hospital.”  The Cleveland Clinic, whose business model “has no place for the general service community hospital,” had closed the ONE specialty that Huron had.  After the closure, what was left was a “general service community hospital.”  Of course they were going to close the facility!!!  The top administration, including Mr. Cosgrove, insisted – to Mayors, Congresspersons and Senators, that it would not be closed. 

They are tearing down Huron Road Hospital in the next few months.  It is ove 130 years old…

Back to the $13 million a year losses at Huron.  So what?  The Cleveland Clinic Foundation is a non-profit institution.  What percent of their earning is $13 million?  How much do they save per year in taxes by being a non-profit?  At Huron, $13 million was about a 7% loss.  What percent is that across the whole Cleveland Clinic System?  I would be suprised if it was more that .25%.  How does that compare with their “profit” (not called profit because it is put back into expansion)?  The Clinic claims each facility should be self-sustaining, at yet when in negotiations at one of the three unionized facilities, the Clinic uses the wages of other facilities as an argument against wage increases.  Which is it?  Is each facility autonomous or is it an entire system?

The Clinic is building a $30 million “Medical Home” on an adjacent lot to the old Huron Hospital.  It will treat and educate on preventable/manageable diseases like diabetes.  It is not a general service facility and it certainly will not treat trauma.  The land for this building was given to the Clinic by the city of East Cleveland.  Of course, that was before the Clinic announced its closure of the trauma center and long before it announced it would close Huron Hospital entirely.

The new facility will have very nice heating in the rooms.  I know: I just installed the radiant heat panels.

So, I was browsing the internets for information about sleep cycles and alpha waves (for an invention idea that I’ve had for YEARS that I was going to make millions on… description to follow this ramble) and I came across this cite describing a new device which purports to allow technological devices – such as your iPad – to read your brain waves.  This fellow here is using the “force” to levetate a ball:

While the technology is real, this photo makes it seem like a gimic, since this kid comes right out of central casting for a 1950s advertisement.

The maker’s of this incredible technology assure us consumers that the machine only reads brain activity, but does not transmit any signals.  That’s reassuring.  We know this how? 

Okay, so my invention is as follows.  You know how you can get a good night’s sleep – say, 7 hours – and still feel groggy?  This often happens when you awaken in the middle of a sleep cycle.  What if there was a machine that could awaken you at your lightest and most awake stage of sleep? It would then be possible to sleep LESS but have MORE energy and alertness!  Such a thing would revolutionize the working, waking world!  So, long ago (some ten years now), I read up and discovered your brain emits alpha waves when it is in your lightest stage of sleep.  So, you’d just have to set your alarm to the minimum amount of sleep you want (say, 6 hours) and then the machine wakes you up during the first significant reading of alpha waves subsequent to that minimum.

Brilliant.  Gonna make millions.

Except that, as I discovered in my browsing the internets just moments ago, someone‘s already invented this machine, which works with your iPhone and is already making my millions. Harumph.

I am constantly having ideas like this.  I just never pull any triggers.  There’s a name for such people, mostly unkind names.  I’m going to get one of those brain readers so that, at least, people can think I can levetate a ping-pong ball…

A college dormmate of John Muir’s recounts the naturalist’s eclectic inventions, particularly the alarm clocks, which occupied his dormatory room:

“The very appreciative article by Ray Stannard Baker, in your June 6 number [of Outlook Magazine, 1903], on the great California naturalist, John Muir, reminds me so vividly of my own short acquaintance with the unique character that I am tempted to share with your readers the reminiscence….

Muir told us that, at one boarding place, he had connected with the clock a device that would throw the cap off a fluid lamp, strike a match, and light the lamp at the same moment that the bed fell so that he need not rise in the dark. One day he came in and announced to my roommates and myself that he had fixed his alarm so that it would waken him on pleasant, sunshiny mornings, but would allow him to sleep if it should be rainy or cloudy. Of course we were eager to see the phenomenon, and followed him to his room for the disclosure. He had detached the little cord from he clock, and carried it through staples in the floor and up over the sill of the window, which faced the east. Where it crossed the stone still outside it was replaced by a thread, under which at a convenient spot, he had rubbed powdered charcoal. Above this he had fixed a hand magnifier, or sun class at such an angle and focus that when the sun rose it would burn the thread in two, and thus trip his bed and awaken him!. If the morning were cloudy no such event would occur, and he could finish his morning nap in peace.

Financial stringency and then war service prevented my return to the University, and I never say my young Scotch classmate after that term closed. During the years which have elapsed the query often crossed my mind, “what ever became of John Muir?” I expected to hear of him as a great inventor or mechanical expert and although the similarity in name of the Western scientist who discovered the Muir Glacier attracted my attention, I never really suspected the identity until I ran across a biographical hint in a magazine article, three years ago, which I now find absolutely confirmed in Mr. Baker’s article.

HARVEY REID
Maquoketa, Iowa.

What is it about this man who redefined our very relation to the natural world around us that he could also be such a prolific inventor?  What is it about this man who, just years before routinely running madly and without apparent purpose after deer through woods, reinvented factory operations for efficiency at a wheel factory?  On that note, how is it that the founder of the Sierra Club also worked in and even helped build sawmills?

It is not simply that he was exceptionally multi-talented (or hypocrytical).  No.  There exist many such people today, who are very successful, to be sure, but are neither so manifestly successful at such a diversity of endeavors nor as paradigm-shifting in their work as Muir. 

And that is the point about Muir.  It is fascinating unto itself that he was so intriguing in so many different directions.  But moreso, his work was also deep and dynamic – pardigm-shifting, indeed.  Which raises the question of whether there is a connection between this diversity of study and the depth of impact in a final chosen endeavor.  That is, does a breadth of study/experience/talent breed a creativity in one’s in-depth pursuits?  Today’s paradigm shapes “experts” by focusing them early and intensely – as specifically as possible.  Depth and focus – not breadth – is today’s recipe for “expertise.”  True enough.  But “expert” is not necessarily the “break-through” thinker.  It may well be the case that any “break-through” thinker must be an “expert” first, but expertise – particularly focused and Taylorized study – does not breed ingenuity.

So it is perhaps his breadth of experience and study which enabled him to be so dynamic and view-shifting in his final chosen focus on naturalism.  But perhaps it is something else entirely.

Muir didn’t make a “point” of diverse study, as if he saw the value in breadth of study.  Instead, it seems to me, that he just simply “dove in” whereever he was, in whatever context.  He engaged with life right around him.  EVERYTHING fascinated him and so he spent time looking at it, analyzing it – perhaps REimagining it to function differently, to be more efficient, to achieve fuller results.  He indulged curiosity.  The curious, inspective fellow who immersed himself in a factory job, becoming a part of it, taking ownership over his experience in it (even if he was only their, initially, to make money) – is the SAME fellow who would set out in the early dawn from the Valley and return only when the thread of his curiosity broke by external circumstances.

This wide-eyed and absorbing approach to life, it seems to me, is the SOUL of the eventual successes in creating new paradigms through natural brilliance, talent and knowledge.  Such things are but tools.  Only if animated by this completely innocent and naive curiousity are new worlds created by such tools. 

Where is this kind of curiousity today?  We know so much.  We utilize talent and knowledge as lever points or trophies, rather than as tools of engagement with life around us.  We seize on the surface manifestations and dogma’s (naturalists can’t possibly work in a sawmill) and loose sight of the animating force that enable such profound thought and work to foster a better world.  We fixate on “things” – even intangile ones like “the cause” or our professional status.  And we miss the soul of them, the spirit which makes seeming contradictions flow seemlessly.

What ever happened to John Muir?