Assumptions are not your friends
A gentleman of my passing acquaintance, who is a prominent local businessman, mentioned today that he was “happy to see another talent collective” in our town.
I went to substantial lengths to correct him. Which leads me to jot a few notes, and to share them with you.
Sure, yes, there’s Not An Employee, LLC, a company we formed to sell stickers. But that’s a piece of legal chaff for PayPal accounts and to give us a shared ontological framework to use as an interface with banks and Chambers of Commerce and suchlike.
No. Whatever it is, maybe an institution or collective or organization or movement—whatever we finally call it—this thing “Not An Employee” is not a consultancy, headhunting agency, subcontracting network, social club, networking infrastructure.
Not a “talent collective” or a union. Not a cooperative.
Not a coworking facility, and not coworking itself.
Not boosterism, not economic development, not merely a scam to sell stickers or present hack poetry or invoke the ancient Titans of yore. Not a cult, not a jape, not a sorry-ass quixotic windmill-tilters association.
Not even a way to change the world.
It’s a tag. That’s all it is. A tag. A complex adjective. A thing used to describe. A nonexclusive classifier.
So you are asked, What are you? And you say: I’m Not An Employee.
Tell that to me, and having thought long and hard about it I promise that I won’t assume I understand the details of what you mean. But I will suspect some of what it implies.
What are you? Not an employee. What do you do? This.
I think I’m starting to understand.
When we founded Not An Employee, we decided that we would build a new Founders’ Myth with every telling; that every face-to-face version would be measurably different. That still applies; ask any of the others around here what this thing is, what it’s for, and you’ll get a variation. Some overlaps, some differences. Some realistic but stereotyped details thrown in to make it more feasible, make it sound like it’s a general-purpose answer other folks would give as well.
They’re all different, but every one of them is the truth.
So when you tell me you’re Not An Employee, I hear you. After several months, and years before that, I think I’m starting finally to get it. A lot of people I meet every day, people with Prometheus stickers on their computers and “Better Without Bosses” badges on their lapels, I bet they’re starting to understand too.
Tell that to any of us, and we’ll suspect that you have a truly marvelous life which this margin is too narrow to contain. That you’re there, you’re in there behind your eyes, somebody watching back. Rare bird. You’re saying something important about your work, life, that it’s all complex and contingent and varies from time to time in unexpected ways.
We’ll know, more than anything, that you’ve spent a little time thinking, and have decided that the standard glib explanations just don’t work.
What do you do? What do you want? Where do you work?
Does being not an employee prohibit you from being anything else? Does it keep you from having any other tags? From being a programmer or a maid or an inventor or a mom, a gardener or a golfer or a Spaniard or a soprano?
Don’t be stupid. You are also everything else you are. It’s just a tag. A phrase that describes you. One of many.
Being a thing does not keep you from being other things. Being Not An Employee, having that tag, presenting yourself with that label, it doesn’t even keep you from being an actual employee.
If you ask me, it’s risky to assume the world is as simple as you’ve been told. Even the simple white lies you tell yourself? They’re still lies.
Every time you accept a simple explanation, you open yourself up as a tool to be used to others’ advantage. You become of use.
Now you may want to be of use. That’s a life of service, and it is admirable and honest work of its own. Many of the most blessed among us, they’ve served.
By choice. Remember that the blessed ones, they lead their lives with their eyes open. They lead regarded lives. They pay attention, and I would wager that their assumption-to-consideration ratio is really kinda low.
Not all of us choose lives of service. I haven’t, not really. And so like me you may find yourself telling somebody it’s more complicated than that; it’s not what you assume.
The more you do that, the more likely it is you’re Not An Employee.
Among other things.
Author: vaguery
Posted: Thursday, March 20th, 2008
Category: Philosophy
March 21st, 2008 at 1:24 am
[...] The Not An Employee Blog | Assumptions are not your friends (tags: not-an-employee no-substitute-for-fire) [...]
March 21st, 2008 at 8:19 pm
I’m glad you posted this, because I was wondering the same thing. Your website is frustrating for the lack of this explanation. The visitor to your site wants to know what you are trying to accomplish, what methods you employ to accomplish it, what (if anything) you want from them, and how (if at all) you intend for them to respond or behave.
March 21st, 2008 at 10:29 pm
Matt,
What is it that makes you expect an explanation? What makes you think you’re “the visitor”? What makes you think we want or intend anything (at all)?
These are not challenges. But they are more or less the point. I think sometimes we expect a story to be complete before we hear it. That’s a modern folly. Most stories, historically speaking, aren’t ready before they’re told. Some aren’t even fully conceived.
I’m glad you posted a comment. But why here, when you imply the other posts have been oblique? What does the visitor expect? An answer? A narrative? Some polished solution? Some aqua regis to dissolve their problems, about which they can express summary approval or dismissal? Those are all things I tend to see in other places. Maybe we have to look there to find them.
I’m thinking sometimes the visitor is wanting what he’s used to.
We don’t have much more of that left around here. Seems to be less all the time.
March 24th, 2008 at 8:34 am
I don’t think visitors are expecting what they are used to. I think they are expecting the opposite of what they’re used to. And the reason they’re expecting it is that you have set up expectations. You’ve done that on purpose, as far as I can tell, whether toward some as yet unexplained end or “to sell stickers.” But given the oblique explanation, I now suspect you’re simply erstwhile students of philosophy or economics or people with nothing else to do. You’re “not an employee” in the sense of that guy in Office Space. And at least he’s funny.
Follow through is what they’re expecting. That all this build up leads to something. They don’t know what it is, but it is not “nothing.” And that’s what you seem to have here.
March 24th, 2008 at 10:27 am
We’ll need to work on that, then.
By saying people expect what they’re “used to”, I think I’m talking about “polished story” and “completeness” and “solutions” — more or less what you’re pointing out is missing, Dan. As far as I can tell, people are used to Googling something they want to address their question, looking at the top hits, and picking the one that answers it. They expect Google to be their oracle.
But I don’t think we can say that we set that expectation up. We have ill-formed ideas. We have intuitions and a sense that something could be done, but not what.
And we keep running into people that say more or less the same thing. So, practically speaking, all we’re presented with by the world is a growing group of people. Diverse ones. They seem to share unfulfilled needs in their worklives, and some have found some solutions that may or may not generalize to other people’s lives. I can’t offer advice on how to be an Important Consultant, because most of these folks don’t want to be one (and maybe I don’t want to, either). Laura could spend a dozen posts describing how she did the graphic design for the site and why, but most of us are not graphic designers. We could set ourselves down and investigate the quotations and epigrams Brian has collected, but as you suspect we might end up as mere dilettantes in a book club.
What ties us together is not our domain, not our approach, not our attitudes, not even our toolkits. I guess it’s a realization that we’re enjoying our individual worklives better working “together”, sometimes in the same space and sometimes in the same online networks. Not sharing an office, but overlapping.
And I think if you asked we would all say that we perceive that advantage–whatever that positive edge is–has something to do with being thoughtful and undermining our own assumptions about working relationships, contracts, marketing, community and support. Being erstwhile philosophers and economists about it. Actually thinking and working it through, together, even before any of us has decided what the Right Answer is.
Also before any of us has decided what the right question is.
You want the end result, to follow through with what people who come here expect. We haven’t got it; we don’t even have what we expect, yet. Something better. If it seems that we lack it here, then that’s more a success than a failure as far as I’m concerned.
What do you want, Dan? Do you want us to tell you when we’ve found an answer? When we’ve got what you’re expecting?
What are you expecting? Lists are useful.
March 30th, 2008 at 2:18 pm
[...] to Willam Tozier’s paean to generalists, to distraction, to following your nose; see also the Not An Employee blog.) It’s probably time again to think about what is right for me, though. And to reread the [...]
June 27th, 2008 at 6:18 am
When a website is as highly-polished as this one, what I expect is a call to action. Not necessarily to enact a solution or arrive at a firm conclusion, but to participate in that process. From the web, I have come to expect participation in finding solutions and reaching goals. For instance, collect people’s stories of obstacles to being Not An Employee, and their stories of overcoming those obstacles, or just re-framing so the obstacles are just a misperception.
There are two basic reasons I feel a need for bosses.
One reason is to solve problems of how to make an income, which thus far I have consistently failed to solve without bosses. But if I strike on a solution to that, so long as it isn’t just as boring as cubicle work, I’ll leave the cubicle world forever. One great thing about this blog would be to collect resources toward how to get clients or an audience, and all the other bits of “how to be your own boss” that school doesn’t teach you when teaching you how to practice a skill.
The second obstacle is that, so far as I know, you either have bosses, clients, or an audience. I don’t know about audiences, but in my experience, clients are consistently worse than bosses, without any of the responsibility that bosses take.
I see you changed your “About” page since I last visited. It’s much better.
June 27th, 2008 at 9:54 am
Several threads in one. It gets all overlappy. There are a surprising number of cultural assumptions at play in this particular call and response, and I admit that I find it interesting.
First, on expectations (once more): What makes you think there is no call to action here? As I asked Dan above, what right have we to wait until whatever ideas we’re husbanding become fully formed, “polished”, edited and made into consumable goods of broad appeal?
We have stickers for that.
Other people are writing books, and making a living selling those books and coworking facilities and the whole indypreneur/antipreneur/polypreneur lifestyle.
You invoke “polish”. What’s that, exactly? A demonstration of technical design expertise, or a kind of “inauthenticity” when there’s no “message” behind it? I imagine Chesterton, GS Lee, Milton, and (maybe) even George Lucas would feel there was content and therefore an arguable “message” in their works, so I’m not sure you can make a case that it’s absent in extracts.
You ask for a “call to action”. What right have we to be passive and silent, like an audience for our own content, waiting for a gleam of sloganicious koanic brilliance to take us all by storm and convince of the obvious truth of something-or-other? What right have we to ape everybody else, or to fall into trite aphorisms of received wisdom? Where’s the value in that?
And while we’re on value: you and Dan have pointed out this site’s apparent inutility.
See, it seems to me that whenever one encounters something that appears useless, or ill-made, or incomplete, one is presented with a series of choices.
What do you want? If it’s not here, and yet everything seems “polished” in a way that makes you expect it, then what is it about human nature that drives you to assume a mistake has been made on our side of the screen?
Maybe it’s all just a poorly-executed joke. That ever come to mind? Many find solace in that explanation of the world.
A lot of people, most people even, faced with enigmatic things they don’t understand, dismiss them and move on. Life being short, work being hard, and the economics of attention and the costs of discourse and insight being what they are. All that stuff is expensive and hard. Thinking, talking, discussing, finding, paying attention, engaging, participating. Hard, slow, and boring.
On that note, can I suggest a quick side-trip into WIlliam Byers’s How Mathematicians Think. Or Gerald Stanley Lee’s The Lost Art of Reading if you prefer. Either might do, in a pinch.
Now, onward:
Who the hell told you we thought society doesn’t need bosses, or that any of us here imagine “all people” would be better off without them? That’s lunacy, and I’ll thwack the person who said it explicitly. Indeed, we say explicitly we’re not against bosses, and that one can be employed and still be Not an Employee.
So I’m not sure what website you’re reading, but it ain’t any of our stuff.
Bosses have money, and as it happens they are also people. Almost all people these days need money. So it’s pretty damned obvious that of course there should be bosses, somewhere out there, giving money to people who need it. That right there, with minor variation, is a core design pattern for economic life in the world.
We’re not an organization. We’re not a union. We’re not consultants, or organizers, or authors. If in the course of your life you should encounter a person who does answer all your questions, then (not to put too fine a point on it) either they or you are an idiot. Maybe both.
If you want simple and succinct solutions and rabble-rousing clear-seeming calls to action, go see the guys at Not An MBA. They are all over the straight answer and the useful link, and they’ve got their finger on the TOC for the book of Alexandrian Design Patterns for Sustainable Worklife. They’re doing a fine job bringing together all the threads other people have been discovering in the last ten (110? 3010?) years or so. They’re developing a nice clear message, which luckily is sounding less like “We can do it! Yeah! Stick it to the Man with Collaboration and a New Book!”
Those guys got all the focus, and bring to bear clarity enough for most, and if you watch them over time you can see they’re learning things we’ve suspected for a while around here but just not bothered to share.
You want to use community and helpful list-making to save the world? Go see Dave Pollard and his surprisingly vast communitarian conspiracy over at How to Save the World. He’s smart, he’s full of dialog and thoughtful commentary. It’s good stuff. Go participate. It’s a whole fully-formed community, just sitting there waiting to be joined.
We’re not writing a book here. Shop around.
See: Either you see the dichotomy clearly, or you don’t. There’s no middle ground. Right?