From Hot Air to Second Wind

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From Hot Air to Second Wind
by Erik Jay

I hear it all the time: "How did you get into writing these crazy columns, anyway?"

Truth be told, I used to hear it only once in a great while when I started my own weekly commentary last year, an e-mail essay that through creative accretion morphed into my webzine, "WHAT NEXT? The Journal of Contentious Persiflage"; I started hearing it a bit more when a few of the larger, louder web journals began carrying some of my flammable and inflammatory musings to a larger, louder audience; and now, having reached a crescendo with this regular "Culture Shock" feature at this big-time slam-bang web event known as The American Partisan, I hear it all the time.

"Where do you get this stuff? How did your brain come to work like this?"

Like most writers, I've been writing since... well... since I could write! And I was raised in a patriotic household, let's call it, where Flag Day meant something and July 4th REALLY meant something! So, from an early age, I was both writing and thinking right. But what happened to bring all of the disparate influences together in the right blender? And how did I leave the business world -- into which I had retreated while running away from God, His plan, and the creative gifts He'd graciously bestowed on me -- and resume my assigned task of communicating a positive message of hope and renewal and liberty through words and images and music?

Okay, then. Take a deep breath. Ready?

By the early 1980's, after thrashing about in a few different careers -- insurance agent, financial planner, permanent student, part-time deadbeat -- I found myself working for a Silicon Valley computer supplies distributor. The branch I worked at was supposedly the flagship of a $100 million fleet, which led me to conclude that the other tubs were probably not even seaworthy. The general manager was a balding yuppie adulterer with the absolute worst taste in co-defendants, who never convinced anyone to respect him, though he tried long and hard. He was a shallow snot-nose punk kid pushing forty begging for a fat lip. I suppose he read a Tom Peters book or some other in-search-of-superlatives management manifesto and became even more insufferable than he was born.

This was my first management role model.

In support of a sales contest during a fall-winter holiday stretch, I became a "team captain" charged with exhorting my squad to more phone orders, cash collections, same-day shipping, etc. I tried to get into the spirit of the event. I followed my starchy boss's directives, and played it fairly straight the first few weeks -- until I realized that the contest itself was insignificant compared to what I was discovering about myself and my relations with others.

What I was learning about human beings I had either missed or ignored before. I discovered that exhortation was not motivation; that pride and enthusiasm are instilled, not inserted, into people; that all the one-minute maxims in the world don't make a manager, mentor, or leader; and that the stress of competition must be relieved by a little fun.

People are bundles of balancing acts, emotional and rational, spiritual and physical. I learned this, as I learned all my lessons about how to lead and motivate, the way any effective learning is done -- by making mistakes. My initial mistake was following someone who didn't know where he was going; in doing so, I committed a second grievous error, which was taking on someone else's demeanor. I had removed from my team captain persona the gregariousness and mirth that make me who I am, as if those traits were inappropriate in leadership.

I was becoming one guy on the job, another guy everywhere else. After about a month of looking at meeting rooms full of unhappy harried faces, I stumbled upon a realization that would make me a congruent person for the home-stretch of the contest: I recognized that I had better relationships off the job, when I was "me", than on the job, when I was one of "them". I seized on this revelation like a stick shift and slammed it into overdrive.

To this point, I had been holding meetings and occasionally passing out some memos with sales figures, contest updates, bumpersticker boosterisms -- standard corporate fare. Armed with my new, enlightened outlook, I decided to make the sales-contest memos more entertaining -- more "me".

In the last five weeks of the contest, I cranked out about 150 "entertaining" memos; that's right, four or five a day. Now, calling these productions memos is both too little and too much definition; some were undisguised, unadorned comic strips or short stories. What made them memos in any Websterian sense was that they had the words "Date", "To", "From", and "Subject" somewhere, usually near the top of the first page.

And so I distributed my parodies, plays, and perorations; fraudulent celebrity interviews and fake book reviews; drawings, clippings, and doodles; jokes, insults, rumors, and limericks. Within days I had the happiest team in the contest. They contributed ideas, took copies home for friends, showered me with compliments; I was getting to know them, and they were getting to know me.

But by the end of the sales contest, I had learned another important lesson: Stay balanced.

You see, I was too busy making people laugh to concentrate on sales goals and contest rules. I forgot that the idea was for me to motivate the team to better results. The pendulum had swung too far in the other direction, and got stuck.

We lost the contest.

The Big Lesson for me was that balance is essential to a successful life. I knew enough to try to spice up the dreary, empty-hype grind of a branch sales contest; but I didn't know when to stop with the spice. I couldn't seem to find a balance between steady sweaty effort and stress-relieving humor.

The Big Lesson sank in. I left the computer supply biz; within a year I was writing and publishing an agonizingly precious humor mag called "Pedantic Monthly"; a couple of years after that, having joined the new Macintosh "desktop publishing revolution", I was flying back to Boston to help some folks bring their national political bi-weekly to that new platform; and now, another decade later, I've got my hands full running production for a magazine publisher, consulting, composing and performing original music, and writing essays, rants, and raves just for you.

There is a direct line from those silly sales-contest memos to the recollection of them that you are reading now. They changed my life.

Writing was too serious an undertaking for me to squander my talent on corporate memoranda. But being a philologic pack-rat has its advantages -- especially when it's close to deadline and I need even more verbiage than I've already crammed into whatever weighty piece I'm producing. Having produced about three pounds of quixotic and querulous memos way back when, now all I have to do to alleviate writer's block is reach into that bulging Pendaflex folder of fustian and flippancy, and transform yesterday's hot air into today's second wind.

Ah, the benefits of recycling!