I'm a Gleek, oh yes I am and maybe you are too. Okay, maybe you're not a fan of the show "GLEE", maybe you never even heard of it but you still might be a Gleek in some weird way. When you consider your school days there are always those few kids that stand out as something special. There are those kids that everyone jockeys to get near, they're attractive, they might be athletic or smart, everyone wants to flutter near their flame.
And then there was the rest of us. We sang in glee club or choir, we marched in marching bands or played in jazz band or stage band or whatever your school called it. We joined the debate club and focused on our arguments to win against the rival debate team. We auditioned for the school musical and we painted sets and sewed costumes. If we were lucky we did those things and still garnered a nod now and then from one of the annointed ones.
Ahhh, school days.
Adulthood levels the playing field a LOT. Adulthood allows us to be our true selves, embrace our not so inner geek. I remember several years ago going to see a favorite singer/songwriter in concert, she had recently turned 40 and she was wearing little red, sparkly ballet flats and said that turning 40 gave her the permission to wear little red, sparkly ballet flats whenever she felt like it. It made me wonder why we didn't give ourselves that permission sooner, I guess some people do.
I gave myself permission to let my geek flag fly when I was fairly young. For me it wasn't about being a geek so much as it was about liking what I liked and not being afraid of it. I liked to read, loved everything about it, the solitude, the magic created on the page, the portability of it (I could read outside enjoying the Summer sun or warm and toasty under my bed covers), I just loved to read from a very young age. That wasn't really "cool" but I didn't back down.
I liked things like glee club and choir and the school musical and I wasn't going to pretend I didn't. That's what GLEE seems to be putting out there, it's encouraging people to let their geek flags fly.
How do the popular kids become the popular kids? They aren't always the best looking or even the nicest, in many cases they're pretty damn mean. So few are the "chosen ones" but so many have so much going for them.
In my 50's I realize that most of my friends were also geeks in school. I didn't go to school with anyone I'm now friends with but I know from whence we came quite well. I wouldn't want any other group of friends. I hang with adults who still love music and theater and art and who crave that in their lives. My friends all classify themselves as "readers", every last one of them including the heart-of-gold bartender who has not had the most fabulous life, she's a reader.
My husband works with people of all ages in a creative field and one of the girls in her 20's is a GLEEK. She moved far away from home to a more urban area to take this job. She's had some days when she's wanted to just go "home" but she hasn't. I'm older than her mom (ugh, I can't even think of that) but we have our GLEE. We giggle and talk about it and argue the nuances of different song choices and scenes, we have the common ground of geekdom to hold us together.
I hope that GLEE lasts a long time, or at least a couple of seasons and I hope that it encourages everyone to let their geek flag fly. I hope the cool kids see how cool it is to be yourself and not care about being a Cheerio or getting a slushy in the face. Life's too short to not be yourself as much as possible.
It seems off topic to write this doesn't it? I mean a lot of this blog speaks to the corporate games people play so where oh where does letting your geek flag fly fit in? It speaks to how desperately we still play the games we learned when we entered school. We learned to try to fit in, to play well with others, not to stand out in a bad way. Standing out in a "bad way" though doesn't mean beating people up it often means standing out at all, don't draw attention to yourself. Do a good job but don't rock the boat. Don't tip the scales. Don't be a tattler (even if you could help things out). Who do you have to go and talk to in a corporation? Your boss? What if your boss is the problem? HR? They are there to protect the company and the managers. It's true, don't kid yourself friends, they talk a good game about employee relations but in most cases they are going to do what they need to do to support the company and the managers.
In most cases an innovative idea would be treated as a threat. What would you say to the president or CEO of your company if you could? Imagine you won the lottery and could just walk away. You didn't need any other job so you didn't have to worry about a job reference you could just let 'er rip. Would you tell them they were out of touch with the day-to-day business? Would you have viable suggestions to do things differently or would you give them a pat on the back and say "great job"?
I don't pretend to want the job of CEO or President of a company. I can't imagine why anyone would want those jobs, I really can't. I think you'd have to be amazingly narcissitic to want that much reflected back on yourself. I'm having trouble being CEO of my own life no less CEO of something with thousands of people depending on me to make the right decision and that's just it. We operate in an environment that is afraid to celebrate failure.
We're told from a very young age to learn from our mistakes but as we get older the primary teaching is that if you make a mistake you'd better not admit it. We learn CYA (cover your ass) from an early age and we work to perfect that skill over time. Imagine if we practiced what we preached though. Imagine if we told people to learn from their mistakes and then actually allowed them to admit to their mistakes...and what they learned from them. Maybe if we exercised this habit we would not have large corporations packed full of mediocre middle managers because they are the safest and the best skilled at CYA. I would love to be able to admit my mistakes to management and let us both learn from them but that would just put my job on the line and give them an out when they fired me so I can't do it. I would love for my bosses to admit to their mistakes and ask for input on how to come back from those mistakes but that would mean that a person in a leadership position would need to show a flaw and that might result in their downfall.
In our quest for perfection we have created a grossly imperfect design and that is disconcerting. In one of my Master's Degree classes (Hi Dr. Linda ... if you stop by again) we are following "The Quest for the Holy Grail" as it deals with sin, redemption, human flaws and heavenly aid but in our day-to-day world this type of quest would be frowned upon. What if I told my bosses that every bit of my work was a piece of my quest to lead a better life, a fuller life, a more productive life and not all of it was going to work right the first time I tried it? What if I asked for forgiveness for mistakes? As I ponder these thoughts I'm stunned and saddened when I think of what we are losing out on in our jobs by not being allowed to perform this way. Certainly repeated failures would have to have consequences but I think that we'd find more success than failure in this model.
What if you had to admit one failure everyday to yourself, could you do it and would you learn from it or would you say, "eh, that's a failure I can live with" (which might be okay,too)? What would your failure be today? Did you make a mistake this morning? A lot of life gurus tell us to give ourselves positive affirmation, look in the mirror and tell ourselves how smart or beautiful we are but what about looking in the mirror and telling ourselves how flawed we are? Maybe voicing it would be the beginning of paving a new road to walk down in our life.
If a company were to hire me as a consultant the first thing I'd discuss with them is how they handle employee mistakes.
To err is human, isn't it?
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