Tag: Sovereign Professional

Work

Old School – Nicholas Bate

What is it about “old school”? It sounds like it should be an insult, but it almost never is. Old School is professional, it’s standards, it’s a lot of things we’ve been told before (as children?) but somehow most of us have forgotten.

I’ve just finished Nicholas Bate’s latest Compact Guide, Old School: Future-proof yourself, and it is excellent. An easy, fast, first-read but a guide you’ll come back to time and time again.

Of course (because it chimes so readily with “old school”), there are plenty of Stoic principles within, but there’s lots more, too.

Now, I wish I’d purchased the full series.

Check it (or them) out on Amazon, here.

Work

50 – Now What? – The Liminal Coach

Over on LinkedIn, a friend and former Microsoft colleague, Jamie Rawlings, hosted an interesting discussion on the “uncomfortable by design” life stage of middlescence – a time for “grace and space”. Along with fellow, former Softie Charbel Fakhoury he talks about the stage of life when thoughts turn from “What do I do?” to “Who am I, now?” with all the accompanying restlessness and sense of dissatisfaction. It’s a fascinating, 45-minute chat which, hopefully, you can view, here.

Jamie now has the delightful title of The Liminal Coach. You may find him wandering along shorelines, the edges of dark forests, or indeed on the marches of middlescence.

I’ve always loved the concept of liminal space – “between or belonging to two different places, states, etc.” as the Cambridge Dictionary has it – standing on the threshold of a different place. It can be the ocean shoreline or the edge of a dark forest. In literature there’s often a boundary – The Wall in Game of Thrones or in Neil Gaiman’s Stardust. The Hedge in The Fellowship of the Ring (at the beginning of chapter 6) sticks in my mind. Despite the small strangenesses already encountered by the hobbits, it is the hedge, and the old forest beyond, that really marks the transition to a different world beyond the cosy Shire. Maybe Platform 9 3/4, King’s Cross Station is a liminal space. In China Miéville’s strange novel The City & The City, everywhere feels liminal.

Sometimes, liminal is between two states – land and sea, life and death, familiar and strange – and sometimes it’s between points in time.

St Dunstan in the East Church Garden, St Dunstan’s Hill, London

Photos: Andrew Munro

Echoes through time

Echoes through time: If you want peace…

Si vis pacem, para bellum.

If you want peace, prepare for war.

Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus, De Re Militari (4th or 5th century AD)

Obviously, this is a horribly pertinent hindsight for the UK and western Europe right now, but it’s also very relevant for we sovereign professionals. If you want a peaceful life and career, you need to make preparation for hard times and adversity: savings, of course, but also mental resilience, tenacity, a warm network of contacts, alternative – if less lucrative – sources of income.

Para bellum.

Photo by British Library on Unsplash

Work

Don’t panic! Don’t predict!

Nicholas Bate at Hunter Gatherer 21C offers some perspective on AI.

We either wildly overestimate the short-term impact of new technologies (remember when blockchain was going to replace every institution within five years?) or we catastrophically underestimate their long-term consequences. Nobody building the early internet imagined it would reshape elections, create trillion-dollar companies, or leave millions of people psychologically dependent on dopamine hits from their phones.

Read and reflect, here.

Photo by Ksenia Yakovleva on Unsplash

Freelancing, Work

Innovation eating freelancers’ lunch?

Here’s an insightful post from Seth Godin: Freelancer Empathy.

The opportunity isn’t to race to the bottom…

The goal is to be the first choice for people who couldn’t imagine doing it themselves, simply because their work is too important or your work is too good for them to ignore.

It’s much too easy to blame generative AI. It’s harder to prove why you’re better.

Read the full post, here.

Photo by Pablo Merchán Montes on Unsplash

Presence & Presentation

The qualities of decent, cultured people – Anton Chekhov

Firstly, a huge hat-tip to Rob Firchau at The Hammock Papers for this delicious rabbit hole.

Rob quotes part of a letter from Chekhov to his older, artist (and dissolute) brother in which he upbraids him on his behaviour. It includes the Latin, veritas magis amicitiae, from which my pitiful command of the language extracted “truth” and “friend(ship?)” and maybe possibly “magic” … which seemed unlikely.

Therefore, from the first chamber of the burrow, I can report the phrase comes from “Amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas” which, attributed to Aristotle, literally means, “Plato is my friend, but truth is a greater/better friend.” Effectively, truth is greater, or more important, than friendship.

Deeper down the rabbit hole (over at The Marginalian, which I hadn’t visited in ages), I find a fuller rendering of Chekhov’s letter where he lists the eight qualities of “cultured” or decent people. Check them out in full, well worth reading, but in summary:

  1. They respect human personality, and therefore they are always kind, gentle, polite, and ready to [accommodate] others.
  2. They have sympathy not for beggars and cats alone. Their heart aches for what the eye does not see… They sit up at night in order to help P., to pay for brothers at the University, and to buy clothes for their mother.
  3. They respect the property of others, and therefore pay their debts.
  4. They are sincere, and dread lying like fire. They don’t lie even in small things. A lie is insulting to the listener and puts him in a lower position in the eyes of the speaker. …Out of respect for other people’s ears they more often keep silent than talk.
  5. They do not disparage themselves to rouse compassion.
  6. They have no shallow vanity. They do not care for such false diamonds as knowing celebrities…
  7. If they have a talent they respect it. They sacrifice to it rest, women, wine, vanity… They are proud of their talent… Besides, they are fastidious.
  8. They develop the aesthetic feeling in themselves. They cannot go to sleep in their clothes, see cracks full of bugs on the walls, breathe bad air, walk on a floor that has been spat upon, cook their meals over an oil stove.

Signing off, Chekhov tells his brother, “You must drop your vanity, you are not a child.”

Heroes of the Sovereign Professional

The rightful lord of his own person – Steven Pressfield

Steven Pressfield’s latest post for Writing Wednesday’s draws on Pericles’ Funeral Oration (from 431 BC), to give us this description:

I declare that Athens is the school of Greece. Moreover, I declare that each and every one of our citizens, in all the manifold aspects of his life, can be truly called the rightful lord of his own person and to act in this way, moreover, with unsurpassed quality and grace.

It comes from Rex Warner’s translation of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian Wars.

When I think about what “sovereign professional” really means, it’s this: being and acting as the rightful lord of our own person. Yes, that’s about freelancers and independents of all flavours, but it’s also about every individual however employed.

It’s a powerful and informative post, but it also draws on an older post from Steven that covers the oration in greater detail, here.

Both are worth reading and also, if you didn’t know, Steven has written extensively on the war between Athens and Sparta (as well as on Alexander the Great). If you only know his War of Art, you should definitely check out his historical novels. Gates of Fire, about the battle of Thermopylae, is required reading at West Point and Annapolis and for all officers in the U.S. Marine Corps.

Image: By Copy after Kresilas – Marie-Lan Nguyen, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2497199

Freelancing

Be more spice – Seth’s Blog

A tasty perspective from Seth Godin’s blog:

The best, freshest spices still taste like the spice that’s on the label, but they taste more like themselves.

That’s what successful brands and freelancers do as well. They relentlessly do the work to act more like themselves.

Read the post, here …and decide what you taste like.

Photo by Anju Ravindranath on Unsplash