Rethinking Work – Value Vs Achievement

I’ve listened to bits and pieces of Clay Shirky before but listening to his entire talk made me think in a practical way about the impact of large numbers of connections and the fact that having more numbers of things increases these connections exponentially. The thing I think we need to be careful of is that we are using our numbers and our connections for. Ap calculus tutor on the http://www.onlinetutorforme.com/ap-calculus-tutor/ choose your personal ap calculus tutor. I’m starting to think this idea of ‘value’ will become more tangible and measurable than money, maybe our currency will change over time, certainly sites suggest this might be the case.

Now I don’t care much about money I’m not an economist or anything like that but I do care about what people in my world care about. And obviously a shift in economics is going to have an impact on our education, social lives and the way we draw meaning from our lives. In trying to understand this idea I have explored lots of different angles

The Wikinomics playbook talks about the shift towards a paradigm where ‘the goals is a refined idea… not an idea beaten into consensus!’. I think a focus on the abstract concept of money is part of the problem and that is why we end up with inferior stuff all the time. We all know this that because the deadline, profit, money has to happen we put all the really good ideas on hold and let them go bad, and most of what we do is inefficient and generally bad for long term growth. Now this seems to effect us both indvidually and in business.

The current world is a world of goals and achievement, they are how we decide if we’re doing the right thing. Goals and achievement seem to be the wrong language for our new world. They suggest that something is over at a point. But it is never over and usually this prevents us as workers from doing a good job or learners from learning new things. It makes us fear anything that will take us off the path of achievement and goals. But if in the world we are moving into they lose value what will they be replaced by? I think it will be a much stronger sense of true value and the processes that are influential in ensuring this. Thinking about things in those terms makes articles such as this one, the standard look at your outcomes the create action plans etc.. a bit hard to swallow for me.

So my thoughts on the ‘value’ of work have intesected with a couple of articles I have read recently about the growth mindset and being ‘Open To Growth‘ and that this helps us feel connected to others and at the same time achieve more and feel more valued for our achievements because we’re not competing and always feeling bad that someone is doing better. Whichever way we look at it these ideas of value, achievement, growth and worth all mean that the way we approach our everyday work needs to change.

It almost needs us to reverse our thinking:

We need to take value from the things we do now

We need to thinking long-term as a way to create more value in the things we do now in the future.

I know this seems to be a bit of a fuzzy kind of idea but it’s one I hope to develop through my work and study. For now at a practical level the important thing for me personally is that each day I am doing things that I believe contribute to the whole and that also provide value in and of themselves.

This usually means each day I spend some time working on products that are useful to others (videos, lesson plans, blogs), I spend some time reviewing what other people are doing and I spend some time documenting (through videos or blogs) the process I go through to achieve a product.

Each of these activities leads me in slightly different directions but they all end up contributing to each other. Slowly I’m begining to get to the point where I can do much more in much less time and I like the things I work on a lot more.

If anyone has any really good resources for planning for constant value rather than achievement I’d love to read them.