The juicy connection between love songs, delight, and the daily grind.
Many gears have come to a halt lately, but inwardly I feel the same go-go-go as before; the sense that time is on a short fuse and my plans are moving on white waters; that I must be paddling ahead, learning, improving, optimizing, mastering some habit, or else be thrown overboard and I don’t know what.
I get tired of that feeling. Tired of the buzz. The hustle. The cramp of the city. It makes me dream about some cold patch of turf in Wyoming where wolves howl at night. As an antidote to the rush I’ve been dipping into poetry again – reading slowly and deliberately and crossing my fingers for a thought or an image that can pull me back center.
The other day I came across a good one called Serenade by the poet Billy Collins. It’s a playful piece in which the poet-narrator imagines himself a misfit serenader to the town beauty. Unlike the other boys who huddle under the window of their damsel and woo with ‘bean shaped guitars’, this poet declares he will be
“the strange one,
the pale eccentric
who wears the same clothes every day,
the one at the train station
carrying the black case
shaped like nothing you have seen before.”
This is a common motif in Collins; the quirky victor, the unsung suitor. Here again we have it at length, and to great effect. But what I want to call attention to is a stirring section square in the middle of the text. It’s like a hinge holding it all together:
Every morning I will walk the corridor
to the music room
lined with the fierce portraits of my ancestors
knowing there is nothing like practice
to devour the hours of life –
I keep returning to that line, “knowing there is nothing like practice / to devour the hours of life –“. It echoes an idea I wrote about before – that practice develops purpose – but it goes deeper. It suggests that the best kind of practice, the kind that devours the hours of life and finally brings us a sense of worthwhileness and contentment, is one that expresses itself in love; specifically, in the form of a serenade, a love song.
Delight and work
I’ve been thinking of this line as it relates to work. Unless we are composers and artists I doubt many of us think of our work as musical, much less as a kind of serenade that we sing by performing our duties, but- sentimental notions aside, I think there is salt in the idea. The point being that when we serenade we sing for someone. That someone is the object of the song. Which is to say that beyond displaying mere technical mastery or developing one’s repertoire for its own sake, the song exists for the benefit of the listener. To capture their attention. To win their affection. To move them to response. And finally to delight them. Delight therefore, far from being a delicate or ornamental feature of the work, becomes the work itself.
But we often overlook this important virtue. I’ve been wondering why that is, and how, if given a second look, it might refresh our vision of work.
Delight is in the detail
One reason we miss delight is because it’s an inherently tedious and costly endeavor. It’s costly because it implies a standard of excellence that surpasses the usual call of duty. Anyone who doubts this has never seen the obsessive and painstaking care with which a young man, smitten by his date, will chain himself to a kitchen to cook some exotic meal the name of which he can’t even pronounce.
That doesn’t mean delight is limited to Romantic moves. I recently read the story of a famous law professor who was giving a lecture in Moscow. He wore his favorite overcoat to the lecture, but the inside lining was tattered so he decided to leave it at coat check. Upon finishing his talk he picked it up, put it on and left. On the way back he reached inside the coat and realized that the inside lining, which was coming undone, had been restored. It had been resewed by the woman at coat check. She had done it for him, for nothing. The professor was so struck by the kindness that every time he wore his coat he remembered what she did. Ironically, many years hence he forgot about the topic of the lecture he gave, but he never forgot that woman.
In my experience, wherever you find admiration, or genuine care for someone else, you will likely see this phenomenon at play. You may see it between the medical student and the veteran doctor. The mentee and the mentor. The player and the coach. The novice and the abbot. The art student and the art teacher. The consultant and the client. Two friends. Or a hundred other combinations. The effect is always the same: one brings their best work forward, without counting the cost. Their goal is not simply to fulfill a requirement, or complete the job, or get a pat on the back — but to express themselves through their work; to make their work a gift to the other.
A slippery term
The other challenge with delight is that it’s a slippery word. Is it a skill or an attitude? If it’s a skill, it doesn’t fit snugly into hard skills or soft skills. My guess is that many people who hear the term ‘delightful work’ will invariably imagine someone who is “extra-smiley” or exceedingly helpful, like a cosmetic salesperson at Nordstrom during Christmas time. But that’s not what I mean. Delight is not a mannerism- a superficial pleasantness to be put on and off for the sake of customer service. Nor is it a vague corporate value- a large, overarching mission. I’m sure many companies and organizations delight their customers in a way. They may even have the numbers and reviews and graphs to prove it. But I’m speaking here of something individual. A personal effort. And it is rarer in my experience to meet workers who embody and strive for delight in their work, and who persevere in it.
Delight, as it occurs to me, is akin to “taking pride“- as in “he or she takes pride in their work.” Someone who delights in their work inevitably takes pride in it because it’s been done well. They’re willing to stand by it. And they’re glad to share it with others because it reflects the care with which it was done. Unfortunately this phrase does have its linguistic limitations. We associate it with blue collar trades and manual labor jobs where the finished product is visible, or ‘inspectable’. We don’t talk about CEOs taking pride in their work. Or consultants. Or customer service representatives. Or scientists.
Here is one more illustration to convey what I’m getting at. Awhile ago I wrote a short story about two friends who own a moving company. Over time these friends learn the tricks of their trade and begin to build a good reputation. Their business grows because they begin to care for the people they’re serving. They become more attentive and precise. They stop hurrying from job to job, throwing furniture around. They slow down. They get on each other’s case when the job’s done poorly. At the same time, their friendship grows. Their work, instead of being an activity that gets them through the day, becomes the ‘soil’ of their relationship; it becomes a source of accountability and trust; it reinforces and reflects the quality of their friendship. Delighting in their work, they change for the better. As I put it in the story, “they became the quality of their work.“
Finding the face of our work
Reflecting on these terms, the question that naturally arises is: How do we then bring delight into our work? How do we summon ourselves to serenade?
Delight begins with seeing people anew. When we lose sight of the people we’re serving we undermine our ability to delight. I mean this literally and figuratively. Many of us work in jobs where it’s easy to lose the face of those we work with and for. We stop seeing the person and start seeing the client, the customer, the boss, the coworker. Of course these aren’t pejorative terms. All I mean is that it’s easy to lose step with people, especially people we interact with often. We become desensitized and disenchanted with the ‘usual crowd’. Our relationships become routinized. I call this empathy fatigue. It’s the observation that over time people get tired of other people. Their compassion wanes. They focus on themselves and they stop paying attention.
So what do you do? Narrow your sights.
Pick one person in your day and work on their behalf. It may be someone you like, or someone you don’t like. It may be someone you know, or someone you don’t know. Work as though it contributed to their well being. Dan and Chip Heath, the brothers and authors behind the excellent book Made to Stick, refer to this as the Mother Theresa effect. It’s a shift of attention and intention which makes the goal of one’s work concrete and selfless. Mother Theresa, who served the poorest of the poor in million-person slums, was often asked by reporters how she hoped to alleviate poverty in the face of insurmountable odds. She replied, to paraphrase, ‘If I think of the crowd, I can’t act. If I think of one, I can act.’
We may not be Mother Theresa, but all of us can infuse our work with delight by making it more personal. I’ve found this narrowing principle to be a reliable source of encouragement in my own work. Many times, blocked at a sentence, unable to write, unwilling to think, feeling the words ooze out on the page like cold stew, I’ve said to myself: who could I write this for? I fish up some friendly face and I think ‘Now let me try and write this for them’. Not only has this exercise helped me connect my act of writing with the act of reading, it’s helped me put off airs and just write humanly, personally, intimately. The end product doesn’t always come off, but often that simple change of attention is enough to get me back on the right foot.
The author, John Maxwell, has another related perspective which I like. He says that there are two people who walk into the room: ‘Here I am’ people, and ‘There you are’ people. ‘Here I am’ people are attention getters. They draw the spotlight on themselves. ‘There you are’ people are attention givers. They shine the spotlight on others.
Delight is about becoming a ‘there you are’ person.
To borrow Maxwell’s language, delighting is a way of “adding value” to people; not by giving them something they did not have before, but by discovering and highlighting the value that was there from the beginning.
In conclusion
Bringing this topic back to its beginning, I maintain there is power in serenading. To serenade is to delight, and to delight is to seek the good in others. Delight itself can’t compensate for shoddy workmanship or hackneyed skill. It fails as merely a pretty face. But added to mastery and proficiency, it is an inestimable gift.
When we delight we break out of the narrow walls of self and attach a face to the work we do. This is an important reminder. Having been thumped over the head with the platitude ‘love what you do’ or ‘love your work’, we’ve forgotten that love is personal. It’s interpersonal. A company can’t love you. An inbox can’t love you. A project can’t love you, nor can you love it.
When we delight we remember that our work is for someone and not merely for itself. If we are cooks, we cook for John. If we write, we write for Jane. If we cobble boots, we remember who’s stomping and make the best damn boots ever.
Whatever our trade, let’s make it delightful.
show & tell 