As mentioned in a previous article Click here, you can make a living in three positive ways in regards to society: maintain the world, improve it or offer alternatives to it. You need to have read that article to fully understand this one. It doesn’t take long to do.This article explores how the IMI (imagination, maintenance and innovation) perspective applies to the specifics of work and how it can give clarity to your working life.
How traditional jobs fit in
Here’s a listing of typical jobs and how each fits into this perspective.
Shelf-stacker – Keeps the world running as it is
Lawyer – Keeps the world running as it is
Doctor – Keeps the world running as it is
Medical Researcher – Improves the world
Novelist – Creates alternative to the world
Estate Agent – Keeps the world running as it is
High School Teacher – Potential to innovate but mostly restrained by syllabus to keep the world running as it is
Stand-up Comedian – Creates alternative to the world
Librarian – Keeps the world running as it is
Film Director – Creates alternative to the world
Personal Trainer – Improves the world and/or keeps the world running as it is
Actor – Creates alternative to the world
A stand-up comedian creates an alternative to the world?
Yep, even when he’s making you laugh through voicing his observations of the world. This is because a comedian makes you focus on what he is saying or doing to the point that you mentally leave your surroundings, and thoughts about your surroundings, and laugh. It’s the same escapism as in reading a book or watching a film – it’s just subtler. Thus he ‘creates an alternative’ to the world – taking you out of it for a time to focus on the abstraction of his thoughts.
The same is true of an actor as his or her individual interpretation and performance of his or her character facilitates the audience’s escape from the real world into the play/film/TV show.
A doctor keeps the world running as it is? But a personal trainer can do that and/or improve it?
Yep, a doctor is the most important ‘keeping the world running’ profession there is. A doctor restores people as close to decent health as medical science allows him. His job is to perform procedures which medical researchers have come up with. Those researchers improve the world by making it possible for doctors to treat patients better – so they can recover faster and to a fuller degree. A doctor’s job is just to restore people to what they were.
A personal trainer, on the other hand, can work to make people of normal health gain above normal health. She can play a small part in improving the world by improving the physical well-being of her clients. She can also help people who have put on a lot of weight burn it off, in which case she, like a doctor, restores things to normal.
What about jobs that just support imagination or innovation, like a Hollywood cameraman or a proof reader for a fiction publisher?
Venture Capitalist – Can support innovation if he or she chooses by funding an innovative business
Games Tester – Supports imagination
Hollywood Cameraman – Supports imagination
Proof Reader for a fiction publisher – Supports imagination
Agent for academic writers – Can support innovation depending on the works of her clients
How does a Games Tester support imagination?
A games tester plays through builds of a game in development and reports on the bugs he finds so that the game programmers can locate and correct them. It’s low status, low paid semi-grunt work (he says in a totally objective way having spent over 300 hours of his life on Harry Potter 5).
But ultimately the job supports imagination. Millions of people worldwide have been more able to escape into the world of HP through the latest game in the series because my former colleagues and I nearly dislocated our arms casting spells with Wii controllers.
It’s jarring to come across a bug in a game you’re playing and it can thrust you back into reality when you were previously contentedly immersed in the game. Thanks to those patient, observant and foul-mouthed people (try listening to the daily swear count in a room of 48 guys and you’ll know what I mean) there are far fewer bugs in the game than there would have been if Electronic Arts hadn’t recruited any testers.
A cameraman supports the director’s imaginative vision. A proof reader does the same job as a games tester, only for books instead. An agent for academic writers supports innovation if the works she is trying to sell are innovative.
How awareness of what your job requires can make you better at it or prompt you to move on to something you’d prefer.
Using the framework of the IMI perspective dealt with in the previous article Click here and the further explanations in this article you can determine which of your tasks in your job are in innovation, imagination and maintenance.
Once you’ve done this (especially paying attention to your primary task) you’ll find out what you’re really doing for humanity – and that alone may be surprising. And it can also make you do your job differently.
If you’re a journalist, then what does your job entail? Imagining, innovating or maintaining? I’d say it’s any of those three depending on the field you choose to work in and what you want to achieve through your job.
You want to inform your audience, right? Why? What do you want to inform them on? A music journalist and a news journalist do the same job but to different ends. A music journalist supports imagination. A news journalist supports innovation.
What about a gossip journalist? I’m tempted to say those people aren’t contributing any value to society at all Click here for related article but even I understand that their jobs support imagination as readers are whisked from their own ordinary lives to the unusual ones of celebrities.
So what’s more important for a gossip journalist, objective unbiased language or sensationalist language? It has to be the latter. Gossip journalism is as much about entertainment as TV soap operas.
To be a good gossip journalist or a good music journalist you have to charge your language with bias and emotion while keeping within the journalistic framework of facts and authorial invisibility.
Personally I feel if you want to entertain people you’re better off in a job that is clearer about that intent – write for TV shows like Desperate Housewives or Nip/Tuck, or even just shift to becoming a columnist rather than a reporter, they’re all very similar jobs and I think they’re better for entertaining people, for creating alternatives to the world.
I reckon many journalists like to feel they’re playing their small part in changing the world. In fact all they’re doing is supporting innovation by telling people with innovative jobs (academics, politicians, social entrepreneurs etc) what’s going on in the world. And even then journalists are only supporting innovation when they’re reporting on the real news – reporting on anything else supports imagination or maintenance.
I’m not knocking the value of journalists’ work – it’s just useful for us all if we understand that the entire industry supports innovation at best. At worst, well…have you ever read The Sun?
If you’re a doctor and you lecture your patients on how they should be leading healthier lifestyles maybe you should shut up or choose another career.
Harsh? Absolutely, but doctors would do well (i.e. be less frustrated and/or disillusioned) to understand that their jobs are to restore the equilibrium, not to a make a better one. You want to change the world? Then become a medical researcher, a personal trainer, a health journalist, a health entrepreneur (think Anita Roddick) – but not a doctor. If you’re a doctor and a patient indicates that hr or she wants advice on how to improve his or her physical well-being by all means give it, but recognise that it’s not your job to do that.
If you’re a doctor you help people back on their feet after they’ve fallen over – once they’re back on their feet they leave the surgery.
How about lawyers? I once read a cautionary note in a careers book that said barristers can become disillusioned by their professions once the training is over and the job begins.
Well, sure, that’s true if you’re naive enough to take the bar exam believing you’ll contribute positively to society as a lawyer.
Lawyers, when doing their jobs properly, keep the world going as it is. A barrister argues as best he can in court for his client’s case using the evidence he has. There’s nothing noble or good about that – at best (at its very best) it just ensures the court system works properly.
Think about your own job. If there’s a job you’d like to do think about that one too. How do they fit into the IMI perspective? What does the perspective tell you about what you’re meant to do in those jobs and how you can do them better?
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