A Father's Wisdom

I

The Wisdom Part

I suppose all good fathers have wisdom. Mine certainly did. And, on occasion, he shared it with me.

In this article, I want to pass along to you a rather large piece of it, which I hope you'll find useful. Don't be deceived by its brevity. I've found it good advice for life in general, and for one's working life in particular. But it requires mastication, some humour, and a dash of self-effacement. All Delphic mumbles usually do. I hope it resonates. Here it is:

• Work hard.
• Tell the truth.
• Support your people.

Nothing fancy. Nothing grandiose. A work-life bumper sticker.

There are better mantras, I'm sure. LinkedIn is filled with them, from patient Job to passionate Jobs. My dad's dime store version probably wouldn't make it very far in a business journal's editing room, or as a slide for training corporate managers. He never intended it for anyone else anyway.

Perhaps that's why I find it sticks: because it wasn't fashioned as an edict. Or an epiphany. Real world mess; real world method. I've never encountered a code or set of values quite like it. I've never found anything easier to understand or more widely applicable.

Simple not being the same thing as simplistic, however, I've also never encountered one that's harder to master.

Its components constitute, for me, a kind of moral compass. They instruct and inspire. They're not a map. And they don't combine as readily as I'd sometimes like. They can be frustrating. I tussle with them like best friends at recess. Sometimes I lose.

Unerringly, they suit my purpose.

Career is not something I think much about. What to do with a career is a whole other ballgame. What, and who, is it for? The great Canadian comic, Red Green, grasps the nettle: if not handsome, one should at least be found handy. It's more radical than you think (although, for some of us, handsome was never much of an option in the first place).

More to the point, I want my professional choices to help me live with myself. I want them to serve others and to combine with their exertions into sums greater than our paltry, independent parts. Not strength in numbers exactly; more like strength of purpose.

But patient zero is always family, those who hold the only mirror in which I volunteer to be fixed. Success is one thing; inner peace, the real business. One's a desire, outside your control; the other one is a destination, with you at the helm. Not to be sloppy, but I want my choices, and the values I espouse in making them, to shape my better self. It is, I think, the surest route to collateral happiness: paying forward, paying outward, without expectation of return.

Whenever I've found it truly difficult to meet my dad's standards for any length of time, I've always known something was horribly, combustibly wrong. Understanding this has been liberating. It helps in tracing one's limits, ethical as much as practical.

It helps in mitigating disappointments too, in routinizing the notion that failure is opportunity, not insult: a moment for growth, not recrimination - the opening to make amends. "I'm sorry" is the hardest phrase in the language. "It's my fault" runs a close second. I'm rather practised at both. There is - I hate to burst your bubble - no dignity in self-awareness!

My father wasn't a scholar or a social influencer, a CEO or an industry leader. He wasn't a professional of any sort. I'm pretty sure he had no inkling that he was wise at all, in any measure.

He was a good and humble man, a lifelong labourer with a Grade 4 education. He grew up on a small farm, the eldest of 21 children, and left school to work for the family at around age nine. For years, he rode a horse to work. He mastered carpentry without math, and life without literacy.

My dad, the unlikeliest of gurus.

II

The Context Part

All philosophies have context. This one is briefer than most.

My father told me his 'philosophy' (my word, not his) almost exactly as I've written it above, in a moment of personal crisis for him. The three bullet points are not my distillation or summary. I'm not his biographer. I'm just his son. They are his own description, in his own words, of a way to work, or what - in grander language today - we might call a 'working culture', a notion at which, of course, he would have scoffed.

The small company where he worked had just gone on strike. The work force was non-unionized. The company, which he loved, had just had a change of management. The men had loved the old owner, who was stepping down, but were less enamoured of the new one, the old owner's son.

I don't recall the issues, or who was right or wrong. Perhaps everyone; perhaps no one. The company's previous incarnation had been very successful; the new one would become even more so, and still is. The leadership of both would become locally famous. What I'm passing on to you isn't grounded in labour rights, or managerial clairvoyance. It is grounded in one man's response to change, and the fear that came with it.

I remember clearly my father, as a strike captain, being interviewed on the evening news. I was both shocked and thrilled. My mother was terrified that he'd lose his job. She was proud too. We all were.

When he came home the night of the interview, I asked him what the whole thing was about. He said he didn't know, that he couldn't understand it himself, and that new management seemed disrespectful of the workers, those who'd made the company. He felt deceived. It wasn't right, he said. Such a fine company. He was emotional, which was rare. He was not cracking jokes about it either, which was even rarer.

"What was right?", I remember asking him. Perhaps there was a dramatic silence as he pondered this, but I don't recall it. We never had soap opera moments quite like that, but I may create one here, for when my autobiography is profiled by Oprah. I just remember him sipping tea, from a saucer (which was his way), and talking to me as he stared out the kitchen window.

"I only know one way to work," he answered. "You work hard. You tell the truth. And you support your people."

I had more questions after this. He obliged with more answers. He said he thought that working "right" was becoming harder, that no one seemed interested in a fair day's wage for a fair day's labour. He said the boys were divided. A few were hard core; others could not afford even a few days off work. He liked them all. Agreed with them all. It was mostly awful to see his mind in tumult.

It was the subject of conversation all evening, and of more talk for days to come. That night, I remember him speaking with my mother in the bedroom until late. I fell asleep listening to them. In the morning, he went back to the picket line.

I have no recollection of how the strike ended. He did not lose his job. He did not come to hate his employer. He worked every subsequent day as, I suspect, he'd worked his first: nose to the grindstone, heart on his sleeve. He was still working there some years later when he died of a massive heart attack, at the wheel of his pickup truck. He was parked outside a grocery store, where he'd stopped for a few things on the way to get my mother after her evening shift as a store clerk.

To the best of my knowledge, I was the last one to see him alive. He told me he loved me as my buddies and me all piled noisily out of the house on the way to a high school dance. Just like that, he was gone. He'd been 57. He was buried on November 11, Remembrance Day.

He's been remembered every moment since.

III

The Hard Part

It would be nice if life's little lessons marched into your parlour in top hat and tails and danced a little jig. Alas, they never do. Even the seemingly simplest can be inscrutable.

Worse, to toss in a favourite family saying, "there're none so deaf as them that won't listen." Even if we received by special post the Dummies' Guide to Wisdom, who's to say we'd crack the spine? Audience is everything, or - to quote Pogo's twist on Oliver Hazard Perry: "I have met the enemy and he is us!"

My father's advice, and the dolt to whom he gave it, are no different. Alone, each part is difficult. Combined, they're daunting. But daunting is good. Daunting is doable.

To close, then, some annotations on our theme: a user's guide to a stranger's guidance.

On working hard

I don't wrestle with this, in principle. Perhaps you don't either. It's a bit of a family trait, actually: doggedness dipped in insolence coughing up tenacity. Not effectiveness, mind. And not efficiency, lord knows. Just tenacity.

But where to direct one's energy, with whom, and to what result? Choosing the work can be harder than actually doing it, and so 'working hard' is less personal, less idiosyncratic than at first glance it appears. The world is filled with furry pigs on treadmills, dashing eternally nowhere.

There's a programmatic aspect to this, then: situational awareness, mental acuity, comparative analysis. Hard work as the handmaiden to distilled intelligence. Or effort alone, divided by judgement, and both in perpetual motion.

Worse, perhaps, and infinitely less manageable, is the adult realization that not everyone, everywhere, values hard work at all. Doubly so if one's own sweat equity exposes, embarrasses, or otherwise emphasizes the uncommitted or, selon vous, the incapable.

I was punished once for the youthful indiscretion of filling warehouse orders for toilet seats and sinks a bit too quickly, at least in the opinion of older co-workers, less enamoured of alacrity. Banished by the walking boss to the outer yard, in mid-winter, stacking metal pipe for hours at a time, half-frozen in the slush and snow, one ponders tiny mysteries. What had pride in elbow grease thus wrought? Tell me again about that race the stupid swift are allegedly winning?

Subtleties abound. You might not suffer fools lightly, but neither will they you. And foolishness isn't a visible state, or a measurable delta. Mind your manners. I've been the village idiot, and trust me: you're the last one to know.

It isn't always nefarious, or injurious. Sometimes the limit is just plain prudence.

Pitching in can be anathema to figuring out - the good as arsenic to the wise. There were hints of this in my dad's discomfiture with change. There are veins of it in me. Perhaps a mother lode. We are, in harsh degree, hostages to self.

And yet, the core injunction remains, not far removed from the old saw about belief in luck: the harder you work, the more of it you'll likely have. How analog! How true.

There's a gut check every day, all these years since, irrespective of cause or crisis: a weighing of input against outcome, knowledge against exertion. The memory of a kitchen table and a middle-aged man slurping tea from a saucer, half lost in thought, is never far. Have I puzzled well enough, or planned? Searched? Perspired? Listened? Was this my best? Would it have been his? The answers can prick. But, just often enough, don't.

It is no oppressive shadow. More like sunlight.

On telling the truth

For good or ill, I'm not the chap you ask for advice about your tie or the quality of your essay. The shotgun's always loaded, with shells to spare. The modifier "to a fault" has been used in my general direction, not always kindly, I fear, plus the barb "linear", with a painful, gendered spin. Ouch, to such hurtful honesty or, as Homer said (Simpson, not the other one): "stupid irony!"

Truth has an annoying caveat emptor quality. It can betray tact. It garrottes the occasional acquaintanceship. There isn't a 'right time' for some things. There is forever a 'wrong time' for others. Well-intentioned advice can read as criticism, or insult. If everyone is mad, is anyone listening? At that point, what matter if you're right? No one likes a big mouth, regardless of what's coming out of it.

Truth isn't foolproof either, so purple tongues slip out. Or is it in? There's a chasm between what we believe to be true and what, objectively (or perceptually), is. Ignorance, arrogance, and the hubris of believing our own press makes the gap bigger. Humility, curiosity, and the intestinal fortitude of an open mind shrink it back. There's no formula. It's just always there, a trip hazard for the soul. Colleagues, managers, friends, and the incalculable kevlar of real leadership keep us from doing face plants on the hour.

Don't despair. Truth generally keeps the lies straight and the memory clear. This was Lincoln's quip, was it not? That "no man has a good enough memory to be a successful liar"? He may have spoken too soon, given the throb of current events, but I suspect he would have enjoyed tea with my dad. What else is there save one's word?

And still, this one's harder than mere effort alone. I suspect my father knew it well enough to drive home the point, even lacking the answer. What really was true, in his particular predicament? Where lay the lies? The liars? It comes, none of it, with Coles Notes.

I marvel at this insight, and think ever more highly of him with time.

On supporting your people

Here's closer to the rub: who are these "people" exactly, and what do they need? Did he even know? Do you?

I ask a trick question at interviews sometimes. "In this job, who do you think you work for?" Responses vary, but self-contemplation often predominates, as in "my discipline", "my work", "my comfort zone". It is astonishing what some people claim they'll resign over before they get the job. God bless their confidence! It's less wrong than insufficient, and less insufficient than disappointing.

Responsibilities ripple outward. Expectations crash the other way. They swirl about, hopelessly commingled. You paddle there with the tools you came with: sensitivity, wit, judgement, patience, character. With luck, mostly the latter, which is wicked hard to teach.

My father felt them all, I think, that evening, in his chair. Not one right choice, but several; not one risk of insult, but dozens. No one pleased entirely. No one forgiven. No one accountable.

And yet, there was something to steer by: the drive to help, the urge to do, the determination to be better. Is empathy the right word? I'm sure he couldn't have spelled it. But it filled him. In ways, I think, it defined him.

"Integrity" and "ethics" officers now roam the land. I suppose it's better. I fear it masks the opposite: layers of systemic insulation demonstrating little save how insensate we've all become. "Am I my brother's keeper?" Yes. You always were. Not everyone gets the memo. And, now that you know, what's your action plan?

Hitchens argues that courage only matters if the stakes are high, and you act anyway. Supporting your people is like that. Deliberate vulnerability? It's a tall order. And sacrificial, if taken to extremes. I don't recommend it, but dues are dues. Still interested? Sign here.

It doesn't have to be war and peace, high finance or human rights. It just has to be hard. It has to matter. It has to cost much, or everything. All limbs, if you shimmy out far enough on them to save the neighbour's cat, will break. If it were easy, why would we be talking?

At my father's funeral, the church was full. People spilled out into the building entrances on either side of the pews, and into the baptismal area, where more chairs were brought out. Cars filled the lot and lined the street in both directions. People crowded along the walls past the confessional boxes and the stations of the cross. We left through a gauntlet of hands, tears, and hugs. They bore witness.

He was buried in a driving rain, beneath a sea of umbrellas. A nobody. And a king.

"Work hard. Tell the truth. Support your people."

A father's wisdom. Please use... wisely.

_______________________________________

The views expressed in this essay are mine alone. Thank you for reading them. And good luck in your own endeavours. I normally post on LinkedIn under #helpfulhistory, and always try to respond to comments or suggestions. Feel free to share your inspirations too. There is no copyright on hope. Have a lovely day.