pantsfarm

Today when I was browsing through the NYT Sunday Magazine online, I read this article The Case for Working With Your Hands.

“A manager has to make many decisions for which he is accountable. Unlike an entrepreneur with his own business, however, his decisions can be reversed at any time by someone higher up the food chain (and there is always someone higher up the food chain). It’s important for your career that these reversals not look like defeats, and more generally you have to spend a lot of time managing what others think of you. Survival depends on a crucial insight: you can’t back down from an argument that you initially made in straightforward language, with moral conviction, without seeming to lose your integrity. So managers learn the art of provisional thinking and feeling, expressed in corporate doublespeak, and cultivate a lack of commitment to their own actions. Nothing is set in concrete the way it is when you are, for example, pouring concrete.”

I haven’t actually finished reading it yet, but I wanted to copy this quote somewhere. I’ve never read “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” but I kind of wonder what it is about motorcycles that attracts philosophy post-grads from the University of Chicago.