The Obama Experience

Last week, I was selected from a pool of 1.2 million LinkedIn users to attend a Town Hall meeting with President Obama. It was a strange and awesome experience, the full reasoning for which I can only estimate. What follows is my attempt at explaining.

On Monday, September 19 I received an email from a LinkedIn employee announcing that they were hosting a panel discussion on “economic opportunity” and asking if I would like to join. They were interested in me particularly because they saw that in recent years I had switched careers from a field that was shrinking (journalism) to one that was expanding (market research). If I was interested in attending, I was asked to briefly summarize my career history as well as my perspective on the current employment crisis. I did so.

The following day, LinkedIn reached out to me saying that they liked my responses and that they had some exciting news. The panel discussion to which they were inviting me was in fact a town hall meeting with President Obama. They asked if I was available the following Monday, September 26, and if so, what question I would ask the President.

At this point I was in a state of disbelief, but on the off chance it might be real—and might be the opportunity of a lifetime—I composed a question based on my experience shifting careers. I am of the mindset that education is the key to discovering new job opportunities—not only in the academic sense of learning new skills—but also in educating oneself on the opportunities available and how one can reconfigure their skill set to match. The original question went something like this:

What can federal government do in conjunction with US citizens to provide or promote education amongst adults interested in shifting careers? Is there something that can be done to raise awareness of the opportunities available to adults who are facing career changes?

Later that day, a lady from LinkedIn wrote to me and asked if we could talk on the phone. I was in the short list of people selected to ask the President a question. We chatted a little bit about this and that—mostly I think to verify that I wasn’t a nut case—and then she asked for some more personal information. Since I was in the running to be in the same room as the President, she needed to do a background check, see if I had a criminal history, verify my legal standing, etc. Wow, I thought, this is getting pretty serious. But she seemed nice and very sincere. I checked the whole thing out online and various sources confirmed that the President was supposed to be holding a town hall meeting in Palo Alto the following Monday in conjunction with LinkedIn. So I complied.

Two days later, I opened my email and quiver of fear/anxiety/excitement ran through my spine. I had been selected to attend the event! My question was in the top 6 of 8 to be asked.

I arrived at the Four Seasons Palo Alto Sunday evening half expecting someone to pop out from around the corner with a video camera saying that the whole thing had been a practical joke--but that never happened. Instead I met with a group of equally shocked/jazzed participants flown in from all over the country. Some were out of work, some were underemployed, some were veterans looking for career training, and some had successfully made a transition to a new career, like myself. We chatted together in a state of shocked disbelief. The LinkedIn team then helped us rehearse our questions for the President. After some revisions and a suggestion to add a little personal history to give my question context, I ended up with this:

Good Morning, Mr. President. Three years ago, I found myself out of work. Being unable to find gainful employment in my chosen field, which was journalism, I sought and landed a job in a field about which I knew little previously, but for which my skills and training were well suited—market research.

I have great faith in the American people’s ability to adapt—as long as we are empowered with the knowledge of burgeoning opportunities and career fields.

Is there a way the federal government can provide or promote education for adults looking to change careers—especially those who find the fields they’ve been trained for are either saturated or evaporating?

The morning of September 26, we were shuttled to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. After going through airport-level security, we were admitted to an auditorium filled with LinkedIn employees, LinkedIn members such as myself, and a few random Silicon Valley luminaries (including this guy, who apparently was one of the original employees at Google). The head of the Secret Service for the event gave us a briefing.

“You can stand and sit as much as you want,” he said, “but do not leave your seat. I repeat—do not leave your seat. If you forget, someone will be there to remind you.”

Once we were all seated and locked in, the nerves really kicked in. The anticipation was palpable. Background music was playing over the PA system and between each song there were long, pregnant pauses when the entire crowd involuntarily silenced. The collective bated breath of 100 people generated a crazy energy in the crowd. It was almost as though someone had set a spell on everyone, and all we could do was look at each other incredulously and shake our heads. The spell would finally be broken when someone dropped a camera or the next song started or whathaveyou, and we giggled at our own nervousness.

After a good hour of waiting in our seats, the CEO of LinkedIn came in, gave his speech, and introduced the President. The erupted in cheers—partially because we were glad to see the guest of honor and partially because the tension of his arrival had finally been released.

Seeing Obama in person is extraordinary. He is a fantastic performer. Poised, well spoken, unflappable—in addition to handsome and very well dressed—Obama made a fantastic impression. It was one of the best performances I’ve ever seen, in or out of a theater. He is a commanding orator, and when he speaks, its difficult not to stop everything and listen. It’s no wonder he’s the President—he’s a very, very likable person. When you think about it—that’s what politics is, really. People have problems of all sizes. They have questions, worries, concerns, fears. What’s going to happen to my family? What’s going to happen to my town, my job, my health, my country? The President is someone who is trained to answer all those questions—and Obama does it with style. You walk away feeling like, “everything’s going to be fine. He’s in charge.” Needless to say, I was impressed.

In the end, I didn’t get to ask my question. They told us from the start that depending on the length of the President’s answers, he might not get to all of us. Nevertheless, while answering someone else’s question, he did address my topic. He stated that Americans need to adapt to the present job climate, and that there were education opportunities the government would be endorsing. He promoted the American Jobs Act, which he recently put to Congress, which (if passed) includes mandates for “innovative job training” and incentives for companies to hire long-term unemployed workers, amongst a host of other statutes.

I might not have had the chance to “speak” with the President directly, but I was at least in the same room with him. That was enough for me. It was an amazing experience and one I’ll never forget.

Modern Mythology

Humans are meaning seeking creatures. It is an undeniable human characteristic. Against all the chaotic and depressing evidence to the contrary, we seek out meaning and are on personal quests to fill our lives with some degree of purpose. It may seem foolish sometimes, but it is an unquestionably human drive. One of the key ways that this impulse is manifested is through mythology.

Mythology isn’t something that happened in the past; some ancient, misaligned quasi-religious belief. Mythology may be based in the past, and many times is based on a historical event or figure, but what defines a functional, relevant myth is that it is something that we are experiencing over and over again in our daily lives. It’s an occurrence that has been liberated from a particular time period and has been brought into our contemporary lives.

Take for example Jesus. Jesus was a historical figure that lived and was killed around 30 c.e. He had devotees and influence over a set number of people who believe that he died and rose from the dead. This is historical fact. But it wasn’t until years after his death that people like St. Paul began to mythologize the figure of Jesus. St. Paul had very little concern for the particulars of Jesus’ teachings or the events of his life—at least, he mentions them very little in his writings. Rather, he was concerned with the mystery of Jesus—especially regarding his death and resurrection. Paul wanted to bring this character out of the past and into the present. He succeeded, and Jesus has become an enduring mythological figure, someone that Christians experience on a daily basis now, in the 21^st century. They experience him through both ritual (studying scripture, going to church, taking the Eurcharist) and through action (leading a life according to Jesus’ teachings). Thus, Jesus has become a spiritual reality. His death and resurrection happened once, and now, it happens over and over again.

In the past, things were no different. Myths allowed our ancestors to relate to their surroundings, and to the forces that they believed sacred. It allowed them to experience divinity. The gods were all around them and they saw their handiwork daily. To them, the gods were inseparable from love, passion, anger, storms, the sea, and the quiet beauty of nature. Myths lifted them out of this mundane existence and gave them the ability to see the world with new eyes. Myths addressed timeless truths, fears, desires, and pointed them in the direction of a life more richly endowed.

Freud and Jung had an interesting take on Roman and Greek mythology. They looked at these gods and likened them to facets of our personalities. They proposed that these characters were archetypes from the collective unconscious, and the tales they existed within embodied universal truths that were universally relatable. Freud and Jung then went one step further and posed the question—could not these gods be the emotions and feelings that we experience on a daily basis? Perhaps Mars, the god of war was simply another way of understanding aggression, and so when the Romans spoke of him, they simply referred to a person being consumed with rage. Perhaps by personifying this emotion, it helped the ancient Greeks understand themselves and how they related to the universe around them, just as the mythology of Jesus helps modern Christians participate in the divine.

Can it not be said that a human is a microcosm of the entire universe, composed of the same basic stuff in different quantities? As above, so below.

James Allen and Willy Wonka

Happy New Year! After a recent reading of James Allen’s short but powerful treatise, “As a Man Thinketh” I watched the 1971 version of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and discovered a striking resemblance. Simply put, the fictional character Willy Wonka (both in Roald Dahl’s original book and as Wonka was personified by Gene Wilder in ‘71) lives by a life philosophy that very much mirrors that of James Allen’s. Take for example the lyrics to Willy Wonka’s first song in the film:

If you want to view paradise
Simply look around and do it
Anything you want, just do it
Want to change the world…
There’s nothing to it.
There is no life I know
That compares with pure imagination
Living there, you’ll be free
If you truly wish to be.

What a marvelous way to view the world. What a magnificent and open minded sentiment—to believe that nothing truly holds us down, nothing holds us back from what we wish to achieve aside from our own minds. This is precisely what James Allen writes about in “As a Man Thinketh.” And so it is.

A woman is nothing more and nothing less than the whole summation of her thoughts. While she cannot always control the events that occupy her mind, she can control the way she reacts to them. A person’s circumstances reveal the true nature of their thoughts and is an immediate manifestation of his or her thoughts.

“Men think that thought can be kept secret,” James Allen writes, “but it can not. Thought quickly crystallizes into habit, which materializes as circumstance... Bestial thoughts crystallize into wanton drunkenness and sensuality…[while] thoughts of courage, self-reliance and decision crystallize into circumstances of success, plenty, and freedom.”

Does this not make perfect sense? We are attracted to that which we dream, and will always move toward that dream until we manifests our destiny. We MUST become our dreams. We must. It is our destiny—just as long as we remember that it is not easy, and that failure is a necessary station on the road to success. We must not be discouraged by disappointment, by cynical thoughts, or by the doubts and fears that invade us at every turn. These types of thoughts must be rigorously excluded for they serve no need whatsoever.

So why then does the world seem so full of doubts and fears? Indeed, at every stop along the tour of Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, nay sayers jump at him with cynical thoughts and aspersions, claiming that their own eyes deceived them somehow. It was only through an immense feat of will power that Wonka was able to achieve all that he dreamed. Perhaps the finest manifestion of this idea is the final utterance of the movie.

You know what happened to the boy who got everything he ever wished for, don’t you, Charlie? He lived happily ever after.

So few movies are imbued with such a palpable sense of magic, of possibility, of wonder. So few actually foster that sense that anything could happen if you wish for it badly enough; if you truly believe it can happen and that you are capable of it.

And what a wonderful thing to inspire! I wish there were more messages like that in the world. God knows there are more than enough messages to the contrary, telling us we’re not good enough, we’re not smart enough, we’re not thin enough, or pretty enough, or lucky enough to achieve the things we hold so dearly in our hearts.

"Cherish your visions, cherish your ideals. Cherish the music that stirs in your heart, the beauty that forms in your mind, the loveliness that drapes your purest thoughts. For out of them will grow all delightful conditions, all heavenly environment; of these if you but remain true to them, your world will at last be built."

Could not these very lines be spoken by James Allen or Willy Wonka?