On Build for Tomorrow

This book is worth it if you can get past the first part, which is a bit of a slog. Build for Tomorrow is a self-help career book by Jason Feifer, editor in chief of Entrepreneur, and like a lot of recent books it’s about navigating change. Feifer breaks major change into four stages:

• Panic — the moment of “oh my God, what’s happening?”
• Adaptation — learning to adjust to the change.
• New Normal — when we acclimate to the transformation taking place.
• Wouldn’t Go Back — the end state, when we’re so comfortable in the new circumstances that we wouldn’t return to the old.

The problem, as I said, is the “Panic” section. Most of it goes to stories of enormous change — the Bubonic plague, the arrival of the phonograph and radio — and Feifer downplays them: oh, they were bad for a moment, or for particular sectors, but look at all the good that came out of them. Would you want to go back to pre-plague Europe, knowing the plague dislodged the feudal system? Back before industrialization, knowing we now live in a state of perpetual overdevelopment? We’re meant to nod and agree that now is better. But these transformations took decades, sometimes centuries. The people who actually lived through the plague or through industrialization hardly reaped the benefits — those were ages of untold suffering, and the benefits accrued to those who came later.

The parallel is to the automation of most of the economy, and we have no idea when a new equilibrium will arrive — a century from now, or perhaps never. It’s very likely, essentially guaranteed, that automation will create new kinds of labor even as it wreaks havoc on the old, but rather than dwell on the cost, Feifer pushes us to look down the line at the opportunity and ask how to adapt.

His sections on “adaptation” and the “new normal” are, in fact, very good. There are a lot of useful pointers, and the one that stuck with me is his emphasis on why we do what we do. What we do is going to change. If I define myself merely as an “academic,” a “project manager,” or even a “physician,” I might find myself out of a job in a few years. More important than the what is the how — the skills I use, the way I accomplish my goals — except that the how changes too, and the shredding of today’s hows is precisely what’s decimating the whats and reshaping the global economy. Which leaves the one question: why do we do what we do? Picture a house: the what is the decoration, the how is the scaffolding, and the why is the foundation. Hold on to the why and you can weather any storm; fixate on the what and the how and you risk obsolescence, whether from a larger upheaval or a plain old identity crisis.

After reading, I took time to peel back my own layers. What do I do? I’ve been a university instructor, a researcher, a program coordinator at an academic research center, a substitute teacher. The through line is that all of it placed me in education and mentoring; my how is teaching, coaching, guiding. But why is the work meaningful to me? I reflected on my most meaningful work, and all of it turned on a student or a colleague having something click into place in a way that excited them — that sense of sheer possibility, of wonder and curiosity, of seeing how things might be otherwise. The realization was sobering, because I love that moment so much. The greatest compliment anyone can pay me is that they’ve never thought about something that way before.

A few weeks ago I was leading a high school class through Shakespeare’s sonnets. I was filling in for the regular instructor, so the students didn’t know my strengths, and they were laboring over lines that were simply illegible to them — the obstacle wasn’t the themes or content but the lexicon and syntax. One student asked whether I was good with poetry, and I told her I was. She asked for help, so I had her read the poem aloud with me, line by line, saying what she thought it meant, and with a few small nudges it fell into place; suddenly she appreciated a work she’d treated as an adversary, and it actually moved her. After that a few other students asked too, and I coached them through, with no different a reception.

I left energized and fulfilled — this is why I went into education in the first place. It made me see that I’d lost sight, for a long time, of why I loved it. Higher education can be a cynical place; graduate students are trained more in critique than in constructive creation, and that leaves its mark on education at large. But it doesn’t have to be that way. I can make a difference here, whatever form the education work takes — training, learning and development, higher-ed administration, teaching, mentoring. That feeling is why I get up in the morning, and it’s why I lose myself in my books: the sense of possibility and awe that understanding brings is not to be understated.

If nothing else, this book was a crucial piece in helping me make sense of that part of myself. The what and the how no longer matter so much; I can adjust the techniques and the titles as long as I know I can help others reach that clarity, and if I need to I’ll pick up new skills, reposition, and move on. And that, dear reader, is what Build for Tomorrow is about. Stick through the techno-utopianism of the first quarter and I think you’ll find it as rewarding as I did.