Things That Matter Most

Things That Matter Most

Job Definitions

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What do you do?

I absolutely loathe this question. Not because it’s difficult to answer, or because I’m unwilling to discuss my job or my work with strangers at parties. I hate this question because of the way people answer it.

I work for … as a …

It’s become common place for people to define what they do with their lives in terms of which company employs them or the title printed on their business cards. When friends introduce me, it’s often along the lines of, “meet Eric, he’s a developer” or an engineer or a coder.

That’s not me, though. My role in my job is not the limit to who I am.

Tekton

For the past year I’ve been writing code for a Portland-area startup called Tozny. It’s a fantastic team, agile in the sense of both how we manage projects and in how quickly we can turn new concepts into reality. It’s a great place to be, and I have the luxury of being able to define my own title.

I choose to call myself a “Tekton.” This is an ancient Greek term that was used to describe an artisan, craftsman, or builder. It’s also the noun that was used to describe the profession of Jesus Christ (and is traditionally translated “carpenter” in the English Bible).

It’s a perfect way to describe me for many reasons.

Professionally

I do write code. My friends aren’t making a mistake when they introduce me as a developer. Unfortunately, there are many categories of software developers – some focus just on putting out lines of code, others collect languages and frameworks like trophies and never move beyond an intermediate level in any particular direction. I think of myself in a different category – when it comes to code, I focus on craftsmanship.

First and foremost, I ensure I get the job done. Beyond that, I hold myself to a very high standard in terms of documentation, code quality, and deliverables. Even when I’m working on a personal project, I ask a few other developers in a private Slack team to review my code before checking it off as “complete.”

I also focus a great deal on understanding all of the tools available to me. I don’t need to be an expert in every language or framework, nor do I need to have a working understanding of them. I just need to know what’s available and the situations in which each tool excels so I can make the best decision possible for which tool to use – even if that means referring a client to another developer.

Recreationally

I also do a fair amount of artisan work on the side. I enjoy cooking a great deal and experiment with my own recipes as time (and my family’s appetite) allows. It’s exciting to make easy dishes like scrambled eggs or French toast on weekends. It’s even more rewarding to slow cook bourbon-glazed pork or invest the time required to make tiramisu from scratch.

I also spend time working on everything from electronics to private code projects to custom furniture. These projects give me a break from my day job but still allow me to spend myself in the creation of something new.

Personally

In a world where outsiders rush to apply labels to everyone and everything, regardless of how well they fit, it’s important to understand who you are and why that identity is important to you. I personally find my identity based on certain priorities in my life.

First, I am a follower of Christ.

Second, I am a husband.

Third, I am (soon going to be) a father.

These three lenses are the most important to everything I do, how I relate to those around me, and how I do my job – whatever that job may be.

The next lens, however, is my chosen descriptor of who I am, what I am, and why I was put on this planet. I am a creator. I am a maker. I am a craftsman, artisan, and builder. I am a Tekton.

This title describes what I do: I make things, both for a living and for private self actualization.

This title describes how I do what I do: I always put my best foot forward and aim to improve daily at my craft.

This title describes why I do what I do: Both Jesus and his adoptive father were tektons. It was the family trade. As a follower of Christ, I see myself as being adopted into his family as well and want to be a part of that trade. Beyond that, God himself is a creator, a builder, and an artisan. There is no better way for me to draw nearer to him than to follow in his footsteps and create as well.

The biggest advantage of this title, and the fact that so few are familiar with the term, is that my business card gives me the opportunity to explain me at a deeper level when I introduce myself to people.

What do you do?

I still hate the question … but having an answer that truly fits me is more rewarding than I ever could have imagined.

I call myself a ‘Tekton.’ It’s an ancient Greek term that was used to describe the profession of Christ. It means ‘craftsman, artisan, or builder’ and is how I define myself. I write code for a paycheck, but I create things for a living.

How do you define yourself?

Community Support

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Mike 1 was one of the smallest Scouts I’d ever seen. He was skinny, a little short for his age, and approached every conversation with a demure attitude that betrayed his real thirst for involvement in the group.

I got to know Mike pretty well after he joined the Scout Troop. He loved playing with Legos. He thought Magic cards were a wasted of time. He was afraid of getting lost in the woods and always carried his grandpa’s old compass. Mike was a very fun kid; he was complex in his interests and, once he opened up, one of the most endearing people you’d ever meet.

As we got closer and closer to summer camp, though, he started to skip Troop meetings. We’d announce that meal planning would happen the next week and not see him for two. We’d start planning tent partners, and he’d sneak out the door with his parents and head home. When we passed around the final sign up sheet for attendees I saw him tear up as he passed the envelope to the next boy.

That week was the Troop Committee meeting when all of the adult leaders gathered together to plan the next month of activities. The first item on the agenda: “scholarships” for Scouts to attend summer camp.

Seriously, it’s only $200. If someone is asking for a hand-out like that, they really shouldn’t be going to camp.

The monotonous conversation continued for another fifteen minutes with just about every leader echoing the same sentiment. Boys who couldn’t otherwise afford to attend camp should work harder to fund raise. We already provided them with candy and popcorn and wreathes to sell. They could collect cans. They could mow lawns. Anyone asking for extra help from the Troop was lazy and didn’t deserve it.

Mike’s dad just lost his job, and his mom’s been unemployed and disabled for the past year. He got his uniform from Goodwill. All of the money he raised from Troop fundraisers went to pay for his annual dues. Without a sponsorship, he won’t be coming to camp with us.

As everyone had piled on with the talk of lazy Scouts or absentee parents, they overlooked a very important fact: not everyone’s story is the same.

Websites and Blogging

I came across a very similar story today on Facebook:

Can someone please explain the thought process behind someone using a crowd funding campaign to pay for them to blog?

The sentiment in response to this question was remarkably similar to that of the Scout leaders in the earlier story:

  • Poor work ethic
  • “Get rich quick” expectations
  • Mocking the concept entirely

All of these responses reflect the same mistake as the earlier story as well: not everyone’s situation is the same.

Not everyone has the technical know-how to build a site. 2 Not everyone has the freedom to write what they want when they want, either. A writer friend of mine gave up her dream of writing because she had to work 80+ hours a week just to provide for her kids. Taking time out to build a blog/audience from scratch was not an option.

Others are in a position where writing will put them (or their families) in professional or personal danger. Moving forward without some sort of backing is inadvisable in many of these circumstances.

A crowd-funding campaign, however, does two things for the fundraiser:

  1. It gives them a financial cushion to protect from the potential impact of their endeavor being a failure. Not every blog can grow to provide a reliable income. Many are true labors of love with revenues that barely – if at all – cover the cost of the domain. 3
  2. It helps gauge whether or not a market exists for a particular idea or product, again helping to minimize the risk of the endeavor being a failure.

Why do people create crowdfunding campaigns for their blogs? For the same reason people ask for money to help create a project, sponsor attendance of a conference, pay off a burdensome debt, cover the costs of a memorial service, or attend Boy Scout summer camp.

You don’t have to understand why someone wants your help living their dream. Just recognize that, if you’re already living yours, you might just have been in a better place to get there; their road might be harder to walk.

Notes:

  1. Obviously not his real name … ↩
  2. If the end goal is to monetize the site, utilizing a free hosting platform is likely not an option. ↩
  3. I explicitly omit advertising on this site as part of my personal campaign to help clean up the crappy state of the web. I accept donations through Gratipay that used to cover $7/week. That covers the domain, my CDN, and part of the services that make this site go. But $364/year comes nowhere close to being a sustainable income. ↩

Gardening and God

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After an incredible week with my team, I was told I needed to take the weekend and “not work” for a change. Honestly, it took me a while to figure out exactly what this meant for my schedule. For the first time in a while, I had a few days with no deadlines and several projects sitting on the back burner just waiting for me to take a look.

But “not work” was the instruction of the day, and I decided to follow it.

Instead of coding, I got up early on Saturday morning and spent some time in the garden instead. Seeing the marked change in my vegetables from last weekend to this was wonderful. The lettuce is just about ready to become a salad. The carrots are beginning to take off. The radishes – some were actually ready to eat! The garlic is growing like a weed. The tomatoes, though still small, are finally starting to come into their own.

And the weeds apparently realized I was out of town and started to multiply, too.

I spent half my Saturday morning on my hands and knees pulling up tiny weed seedlings to keep them from taking over my garden. I then turned my attention to the stone walkway and started pulling out other seedlings poking through the cracks.

Then I saw something remarkable. It seems a beautiful and small violet has taken root in between the stones in the center of my walkway. Not only that, it chose this weekend to bloom!

Unfortunately, it chose to make its home literally in the middle of the path between the back yard and the front. All foot traffic will pass over it. Every time I move the yard debris bin, it will be on that path. If you were going to be a flower and pick where to seed, this would be the worst possible location.

I tried my hardest to loosen the plant so I could move it, but the attempt completely destroyed what was a beautiful flower. If only it had planted itself somewhere else …

Immobility

Whenever I garden, I think back to some of the imagery around gardening in the Bible. One of God’s first acts after creating the Earth was to plant a garden – and He created man specifically to help him tend that garden.

Jesus’ parables often involve gardening. A gardener sows seeds only to have the enemy sow weeds among them in the night. Seeds fall on the path, among thorns, and on good soil. The Lord is a gardener who prunes the branches of a vine in order that they should produce fruit.

It’s difficult to be working among creation and not think of the creator.

It’s also difficult to miss the lesson behind a beautiful flower growing in the wrong location. The flower was, of course, perfect. It was straight, healthy, had at least three gorgeous blossoms on it, but it was dead center in the middle of a path. The exact wrong place for it to be in this particular garden.

I did everything I could do to relocate the flower, but its roots were deep and my attempts to move it to where it was supposed to be were painful – even to the point of death. Had the flower’s seed just blown a few feet more … Had the flower’s roots been shallower and easier to relocate …

How often are we like that flower? How often do we settle deep roots in the exact wrong location in God’s garden? How often are we so resistant to his gentle guidance to the right location that we experience pain and destruction in our lives?

How often do we stand in the wrong city, the wrong college, the wrong job, the wrong relationships, the wrong habits and argue that God still loves us despite our resistance to go where He wants us to go? We could be the most beautiful flower in the garden, but growing up in the center of the path will lead only to pain as the Gardener, gentle as He is, tries to uproot us and put us where we belong.

The violet in my garden didn’t make it. Will we?

Workaholics Anonymous

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I admit, I’m a bit of a workaholic.

I find something I enjoy and, like a dog with a bone, I don’t let go. I hack on code late into the night. I wake up early (ok, I don’t really go to sleep) and start hacking again before breakfast. I invest extra effort in making sure the project I’m working on is both stunning and built to a high standard of quality.

And I get paid to do it.

Unfortunately, the way I work isn’t necessarily healthy. I frequently spend more hours in a day “working” than I actually log as work hours. 1 As a result, while I often bill far more than my 40 hours for a week, I’m usually putting in even more time than that. It’s great because I get things done. It’s awful because I do so at considerable personal expense.

The Cost of Failure

Once, I was told “if you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life.” I’m very proud that I’ve found a job where I get to do what I love every day. Unfortunately, tying my income to one of the things I love doing the most has some negative consequences.

When coding was a hobby, getting stuck on a problem was frustrating. I’d stay up all night chewing on a problem and, sometimes, realize that I was just completely incapable of solving it. I’d take a few days off the hobby project, shelve some code, and move on to something else.

If I failed at a hobby, I was able to shrug things off and move on.

When my hobby became my job, though, everything changed. I still work on similar problems. I still get stuck on issues that should be solvable. I still work late into the night trying to figure out issues. 2 Sometimes, though thankfully it’s rare, I come across a problem I’m completely incapable of solving.

But moving on – failing at the task – means I’ve spent hours of client/company billable work on a project/problem/product that won’t ship or will eventually ship but at a much higher cost than expected. I can’t just lick my wounds and move on.

If I fail in my job, I’ve failed my team.

The idea of letting someone down is my own personal hell. It’s the one thing that can, in an instant, take the best moment of a day and turn it into the worst of my life. Unfortunately, the risk of experiencing this moment is the one I shoulder by turning my hobby into my job.

Find Your Happy

Coding makes me happy. Solving problems makes me happy. Building things that impress and inspire makes me happy. But I can’t limit my happiness to that one thing. The source of my happiness in life can’t just be the work I do in my job.

I admit I spend far too many hours at a computer writing code; I do this because the code I write makes me happy. But it can’t be the only thing, otherwise the code that fails, falls flat, or simply doesn’t pan out to a shippable project continues to eat at my life and suck more joy out of my existence.

I’m working daily to rediscover the other parts of my life that bring me happiness and working to define my mood, self worth, and identity by them rather than just my job. This includes family, friends, the outdoors, other hobbies, and the like. They’re just as important to my long-term well-being as my job – perhaps even more so.

How do you define your happiness? How diverse is that definition? Who controls it?

Notes:

  1. Sometimes, when I’m stuck on a particularly difficult problem I take a walk to the park to help internalize and digest the issue. This is refreshing for me as it gives me a change of scenery and some fresh air. Usually, I return to my desk with some sort of a solution or at least an idea of the right track; it’s just always felt odd to bill for “time walking to the park to clear my head.”

    I know. I’m doing it wrong. ↩

  2. Working on a server configuration issue this past week led directly to my coding until 2am because I couldn’t sleep until I fixed a bug. A good thing, this is not. ↩

If Today Were Your Last …

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Would you be sitting here, reading my blog? Would you even be at your computer in the first place?

Or would you be spending time with family and friends? Would you be polishing off that last item on your bucket list? Would you be taking a few minutes to write a letter to a long lost acquaintance or a word of advice to a youthful relative?

Throughout life, we’re given ample opportunity to reflect on the blessings around us. The relationships we’ve built, the personal items we’ve acquired, the experiences we’ve lived. It’s amazing the richness of life we possess when we truly take a minute to look back.

Every achievement we can reflect on with joy. Every challenge we’ve faced and by living still, overcome. Every friend or relative who has entered and touched our story.

These situations are not rare, yet the number of times we take a moment to truly reflect on what they offer us are.

Understanding the ways in which you’re blessed help pave the way for how you can, in turn, be a blessing to others. Your story can help educate members of the next generation. Your skills can be passed down. Your history can provide guidance – both instructive and cautionary – to those who follow.

But it depends entirely on you. On how much you’re willing to share. On how much you’re willing to invest in those who come after you.

Christmas is a celebration of second chances. It’s the celebration of the day the Word of God was made flesh and entered a sinful world in order to redeem it and give us all a second chance at salvation. The story is a wonderful one, and reflecting on it annually gives us the opportunity to look at where else we’re given a second chance.

You have a second chance to approach your job with an enhanced attitude of appreciation and gratitude. You have a second chance to mend a relationship with a long lost friend or an estranged relative. You have a second chance to evaluate your life’s overall trajectory and make mid-course adjustments.

Christmas is a blessing that gives us the chance to reflect on and appreciate our manifold blessings. The day after Christmas gives us a second chance to look at our lives through new eyes and better answer the question: if today were your last day, how would you spend it?

Would it be a day well spent?

Mired in Mystery

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The world around us is full of mysterious things and mysterious experiences. Miracles in every sense of the world – not merely things that happen and confuse attempts at explanation. Miracles are things that happen when the only other explanation is so complex that it’s unreasonable.

I’ve witnessed very few miracles in my life, but each is precious to me.

Unending Pizza

I wrote before about the miraculous experience we had at the Portland Rescue Mission one night while serving pizza. We knew only 12 pizzas were delivered – not nearly enough to feed our 200+ guests. The guys in the kitchen started making some macaroni and cheese, but none of us were confident we’d have enough food to feed everyone.

Worse still, the weather brought in more guests than usual – we were looking at a crowd upwards of 300 people.

Somewhat miraculously, though, the pizzas kept coming. We quickly polished off the 12 boxes of pizza we’d seen delivered. Then we found another box of pizza warming in the oven. Then another box. Then another.

We fed every guest. We covered seconds. We fed the residents. We fed the volunteers. We still had leftovers.

No one knew where the extra food came from, but we were all gracious for having it. Truly an amazing night.

The Dream Job

Unlike most of my friends, I never had a part-time job while I was in high school. My “job” was school itself. To that end, I challenged myself my senior year by taking 6 advanced placement courses and adding a 7th period for band.

I studied hard, but as graduation grew closer – and it became more apparent just how much college (and books) was going to cost me – I realized I was at a disadvantage. My friends all had summer jobs lined up. I didn’t.

I started filling out applications everywhere I could. I applied to every store at the mall, the movie theater, every fast-food chain in the area, the grocery store, the video rental store, everywhere. I even applied to work with my dad for the summer, something that should have been a given; I didn’t even get an interview.

After the third time even McDonalds refused to hire me, I realized I was in a bad spot. I sat down at the family computer and filled out a form on Monster.com, desperate for anything at this point. Then I stopped, closed my eyes, and prayed for a job.

The phone rang.

“Can I please speak to Eric Mann?”

“This is Eric.”

“Hi, this is Scott from Camp Cooper. Your younger brother’s working with us this summer, and it came to me that you might be interested in joining us, too. Basically, we need people. Do you want a job?”

I accepted over the phone and started as the Archery Instructor at Camp Cooper two days later. It began four seasons of what has been the most challenging, enriching, and fulfilling job I’ve had in my entire life.

Making Connections

My introduction to college wasn’t the smoothest of rides. I started in the marching band, hoping to hold on to at least one hobby/sport/activity from high school to ease the transition.

Unfortunately, the first day of band camp was set up specifically to humiliate former section leaders and drum majors to put us in our “rightful place” as obedient underclassmen. No matter what we did or how willingly we followed even the most insane of directions, we were forced to run extra miles, do extra pushups, and rehearse late into the night.

It was so stressful I couldn’t eat or sleep at all. I quit before the end of the week.

This left me living on campus, alone, a full week before other students would arrive. I was a bit stressed out. Luckily, the university was holding an info day for student groups that Saturday. I pinned the flyer to my mini fridge and looked forward to finding a way to meet other people on campus.

Saturday came and I trekked to the student union, hoping to avoid my former bandmates and their judging looks. Eerily, the union was empty. None of the clubs seemed to be there – save one.

Two people were sitting at a table arguing about whether or not they’d missed the event. I walked up and introduced myself, learning for the first time about Chi Alpha and making my first friends on campus.

It turned out, the event was really on Sunday but somehow both Chia Alpha and I received misprinted flyers that said it was on Saturday. I helped them pack their brochures and signs back into the van, then we all went out to lunch to laugh at the confusion.

I was an active member of Chi Alpha for the next two years. We had weekly Bible studies and worship services. I went on retreats with the group. I got to know a lot of people through the organization, and it’s one of the primary forces I credit with helping me get through college.

Had we not both received misprinted flyers, there’s no chance I would have ever found Chi Alpha, let alone become involved with the group for so long.

All Around Us

There is much about the world that is unexplained – not all of it is miraculous, often the unexplained is just a lack in our understanding of this place we call home. But sometimes, events conspire in such a way as to present seemingly impossible circumstances and coincidences.

Like more than enough food to feed a crowd of hungry people.

Or an unsolicited job offer from an unexpected source at a moment of need.

Or a friend and mentor when one is so desperately needed.

You don’t have to look too far to find answered prayers and miracles all around. You just have to be willing to look.