My Concept of Longevity is Heavily Skewed
The things I do, I do for a long time. I’ve been in a side project of Heiruspecs for 15 years. I started the band Heiruspecs with Felix in 1997. Ergo, I’ve been in a high school band for 24 years. It throws everything off. Q: “How long have you been with your wife?” A: About 42% as long of a time as I’ve played the song 5ves at concerts.
Minnesota is also a complicated place to deal with longevity. Some people stay in the same jobs here for 20+ years. According to basically everyone I’ve talked to from coastal cities, that’s just unheard of, that isn’t how people build careers there. My thoughts on longevity tonight aren’t so much about how long you should stay in a job. It’s that desire to have a bit of a mission statement for what you’re going to do at a spot that I want to talk about.
When I had just started really grinding hard on Trivia Mafia LLC with Chuck Terhark in 2009/2010, nothing made me feel more like a boss than reading the Corner Office Column in the New York Times. I’d be reading it on my daddy’s subscription (and still do) and thinking about what it will be like when I run a huge ass company. Most of those interviews are just management porn. The column is filled with “answers” like “how do you change the culture? it starts in the fibers, in the very infrastructure that powers the decisions you guide from the C-suite”. The subject of the interview is wearing a tightly tailored suit and gesturing in a way that accentuates their elbows (that’s for the young people), or it’s a head shot and something like a moustache or unfashionable glasses tell us that they are old-school. It’s hilariously useless stuff, even for people at that C-suite level. The column is mainly designed to be read by idiots like I was in 2010.
Nowadays, I am tangentially involved in a company that I think has an excellent culture. I am 50% owner of Trivia Mafia LLC and I can comfortably say that our employees have generally good feelings about how the company is run, feel comfortable bringing up the the things that upset them and anticipate being treated fairly throughout the course of their time at Trivia Mafia. I can’t claim a lot of credit for this continuing to be true, but I can claim some credit for it being true in the first place. Chuck, the other owner, and I have a decade long history of putting being true, fair and considerate ahead of short gains and generally of running a company in a fashion that is smart in the long run. The one full-time employee we have, Brenna Proczko, is really talented and very good at making the principles and attitudes of Trivia Mafia LLC easily exportable to new employees and clients who have less knowledge of what we are all about.
Back to me reading The Corner Office back in the early 2010s. I did come across one interview where the woman criticized the culture of people coming to jobs for a year and a half and then sailing for greener pastures. Specifically she made this explanation that the first year and a half on the job in the grand scheme is the orientation. Where are the bathrooms? Which bathroom do people use for number twos? How do you get reimbursed? What do we do for a holiday party? How do we structure events? In that first year and a half you are getting the answers to those questions. Her pitch was as follows: once you know where everyone shits, stick around for awhile and change some things. Move on after you’ve tried to execute the change that you believe the place deserves. The pitch was that you have a duty to a place, after you learn your way around, do something good for the place. We can all spend a lot of time feeling like we work for our bosses because. . .shit, we do. Our bosses have the biggest say in deciding if we continue to work for whatever place employs us. Writing this column made me realize we have a duty to our institutions that is somewhat independent of our bosses. If you see a lane to make where you work better, stronger, provide a better service et cetera, you have a duty to make that happen, as long as it doesn’t endanger your livelihood.
So what do you do for a place once you know where the bathrooms are? What do you for a place when you feel acclimated, comfortable and ready to rock? I think the main key at that juncture is figuring out your ambition for changing a place. Some gigs, you might have a role where you possess very little without power to change, so you nibble around the corners. At other spots, you can make a big impact with minimal friction. I think this is relatively easy to understand for companies you didn’t start.
This whole logic gets a lot harder to navigate when it is all about a company or a band you started. . .right? What do I want to change about Heiruspecs? What do I want to change about Trivia Mafia? I have real answers to both, but they are muddied by the fact that every mess I want to clean up at those organizations is in some obvious fashion my fault. It’s different with a spot like MPR/APMG. Fresh sets of eyes walk into our orbit at my day-job on a monthly basis. These individuals kick the tires, see where we’re going. They ask questions that weren’t obvious to us, they point out the inefficiencies that seem mandatory to us. But you can’t just kick the tires. Some of the most impressive people I’ve worked with at MPR have left pretty fast. Frankly, they’ve often left for completely logical reasons; great opportunity for them or for a spouse elsewhere. But we can’t just kick the tires to greatness (goddammit that’s my pull quote when I’m wearing the sensible glasses and answering questions in the NYT Corner Office in year 2037). I’ve been at MPR for about seven years in some remotely professional capacity. My ability to change the culture, to bend the arc the way I personally feel it should be is certainly dulled by the fact that I am not remotely in management. There is no one in the business of bending the culture at MPR who have me on their short list to do that bending. But what matters for me is I can see the slow progress. It’s not front page stuff, but I feel MPR has made modest changing in what I think is the right direction and I have been a part of those changes.
Longevity and legacy. With COVID, with your 40s, with kids, your mortality creeps into your thoughts a bit more. I want to be really proud of the work I’ve done on Planet Earth. I also want to be proud of the energy I’ve offered my spouse, my kids, my block, my community. I don’t want to have moved from company to company every year and a half and feel like I never sunk my teeth in and changed a company, turned a page. I feel really great about the music I’ve laid down with Heiruspecs, but I don’t know what is next for me in the musical realm. My life has moved to some extend in slightly constructed half decades of focus:
Ages 20-25 - Heiruspecs
Ages 25-30 - McNally Smith College of Music/Trivia Mafia
Ages 30-35 - Dessa/Trivia Mafia
Ages 35-40 - MPR
It’s oblong, but that’s the arc I’ve got going. I’m trying to figure out how to take that step and see 40-45, 45-50 et cetera actively being about MPR. A longer arc than I’ve offered any project in my life. Q: How long have you been at MPR? A: About 125% as long as I was in Heiruspecs.
How do I stay engaged? How do I stay hungry? How do I stay longetive. That is my new Corner Office word for channeling the spirit of longevity in a society that doesn’t value. Eager to learn, focused on improving my craft, not looking for greener pastures to the detriment of the field I’m in. It’s easy to stagnate, it’s also forgivable to stagnate in the midst of trying to raise kids at the same time. I’m realizing that I need to actively sort out where I’m putting my energy, how I’m pushing myself. What can I bring myself and my energy that will result in more good down the road for everyone and more happiness for me right the f now?