Success

What I Want from My Life

A Matter of Definition
For most of my conscious life, I have wanted to know, to pursue ideas, to achieve something significant and lasting, and to write. All these desires interrelate, weaving together. Whether actual accomplishment followed plagues me. Life satisfies me in its modicum of compromises at far greater measure than imagined in my romantic youth. I have become bourgeois in habit, a likely good citizen, but not with the original creativity once craved to the point of idiosyncrasy.

Neither do I feel I accomplished much in my 40-year profession in library and information services. I know I developed my skills and understanding and used them to give pertinent and reliable public service as a reference librarian and library director as well as learning direction and coaching in librarianship when an undergraduate and graduate instructor and professor. Yet, I always felt myself to be the principal beneficiary of what I experienced and learned.

As a library consultant and grant administrator, I was never in alignment with the prevailing assumptions and practices of my colleagues. Although I thought I played a pivotal role in the development of library services, I now view that nothing from those days lasts in the way I then envisioned it.

As a result, any hope for success has become a matter of personal satisfaction as though I now return to the romantic idea of egoism that had so captivated me when I was a teenager and college student. Ideals still command my attention, and if I am to achieve any measure of success, I must to be faithful to them: the best in art, equality in life, learning as our vocation, the work in life of making the ideal into the real. Thus far in my ideational world, I am not satisfied that I have done my part to further any of these matters.

What remains for me to do in my latter years? I do not care for wealth, fame, notice or recognition. I crave conversation that transcends the phatic but find it rare if not impossible. I seek thinking that is rational, reflective, self-critical and discerning but find it not only rare, self-justifying at best, a slave to emotion at worst, but seemingly smothering amidst the distractions of contemporary life. I find enjoyment and the reassurance of human competence in the endeavors of my creative forbearers and cumulative heritage of the past in the arts, in philosophy and science, in the expansion of knowledge and the ceaseless quest for it, and in the potentials of the human brain and mind.

Success for me is to make the most of my situation and opportunities according to my highest values.

What in Life Is Most Important?
I want to gain understanding and share it.
I want to do something good, worthwhile, and basic.
I want to leave something lasting at the end of my life.

Ten instances when I felt the most competent, confident, connected, and joyous:
Dates are approximate. In areas marked *, I served multiple roles as researcher, consultant, facilitator, author, editor, and publisher.
1. 1968 – Development of a methodology for teaching reference services based upon real questions, a core of 100 most frequently useful resources, and the practice of question negotiation to the accurate and efficient satisfaction of the questioner.
2. 1969 – “Lyman Beecher and the Lane Seminary Controversy,” a research paper submitted in the course on Puritanism in the graduate program on American intellectual history at the University of Iowa.
3. 1980 - Completion of the novel Phaeton Flight, the story of Frederic Hanreid, an information professional, and Prince Henry Cadly (afterwards Henry II) set in early 39th century Loria.
4. 1984 – Completion of the novel The Rodi. Vodar (afterwards Vodarodi I) discovers his unique place in the history of the Seidonese people; he becomes in his early twenties the founder of Loria, 3000.
5.* 1988 – Completion of background and issues papers for the Minnesota Governor’s Pre-White House Conference on Library and Information Services.
6.* 1997 – Development of the criteria and application process for awarding Minnesota technology grants to library systems.
7.* 1998 – Development of the Long Range Plan and application process for federal Library Services and Technology Act funds.
8.* 1999 – Development of the document on the recommended approach to and procedures for the establishment of co-located public and school library services.
9. 2002-2006 – Service as Administrative Assistant to the State Board of the American Association of University Women – Minnesota under two state presidents.
10. 2007 – Completion of the story “Inheritance.” Louisa Enders at 13 years travels with her two very different grandmothers and learns her actual ancestry as an American, the same summer WWI begins. Intended as Chapter 1 of Progress about the life of small town public librarian through the 20th century.

Five people I most admire, and whose traits I aspire to have:
1. William Shakespeare, 1564-1616. No one is superior to Shakespeare in the revealing poetry of language; even his “minor” plays are major to me. He never disappoints but grows with every renewed experience of his work.
2. Gordon Sween, 1911-1980. My father, who led a seemingly ordinary life, has become an exemplar for me due to his self-directed learning, rationality, sense of discipline, family loyalty, and exercise of responsibility.
3. Frederic Bolton, dates unknown. Dr. Bolton was one of my religion professors at St. Olaf College. A student of Reinhold Niebuhr at Princeton, Bolton influenced me with his thoughtful and rigorous approach to Christianity and Christian theology while being honestly critical, but kind and encouraging to a youngster struggling to come to grips with the intellectus quarens fidem (understanding seeking faith) issue.
4. Ursula K. Le Guin, born 1929. No contemporary author has written so elegantly and meaningfully for me and my interests in as consistent and beautifully articulate a fashion as has Le Guin. I rejoice that I once heard her in person when she said in reference to The Dispossessed, “I want everyone arguing and discussing over the meaning of what I wrote,” or words to that effect.
5. Patricia Anne Worringer Sween, born 1939. Patty continually impresses me with her understanding of other people, her generosity, and her evenness of temper in dealing with all whom she encounters.

Ranking of ten value areas:
At my stage of development, 70 years old this year in a life of reflection considering what lasts and what transpires, value areas do not mean what they meant to me at earlier stages. I cannot rank them first to last (1 – 10) appropriate to my current stage and for other various reasons; instead, I group them.
A. Faith in a higher power. This area is by theological definition of ultimate concern, yet faith, being the work of God in us, exists without my wanting, willing, or working for it. Ranking here perpetuates a falsity.
B. The areas harder to attain are all of equal high importance to me: Fulfilling relationships, individual accomplishments, making a difference in the lives of others, and legacy (understood as leaving something significant and lasting).
C. The lesser areas cluster to the bottom.
7. Health I seem to have by virtue of inheritance and caution; that is, I am lucky and careful. I do not obsess over my health and know that I will die, probably after a long time, probably soon.
8. Wealth, since I am comfortable with enough already.
9. Fame I regard as shallow and transitory.
10. Fun I regard as even more shallow and insubstantial in the ultimate scheme of things.

My plans for success in 2010:
I will attend more intentionally to how I spend my time on my primary ambitions. I will track my time and quantify it in regards to a schedule I currently regard as ideal in order to hold myself more accountable in aiming for greater success than I have had and thereby attain my chosen ends.

My ideal schedule of a 16-hour waking day has the following areas in priority order. I will try to sleep eight hours out of every 24 even though that is not often the case.
1. Major writing – 4 hours. This year I will finish the first draft of At Last, I Depart. In this novel, Lady Frivovla of Allonor grows from an innocent devotion to her sense of duty into a self-directing and successful champion of her own life. She becomes in time the consort of Vodarodi II King Loria and the progenitor of all the following monarchs for its ensuing thousand-year history.
2. Study/Pre-writing – 3 hours. This year I will do the work necessary to establish the bases necessary for two controversial equity issues: one is the ministry of same-gender couples in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and the other concerns mission-based membership in the American Association of University Women.
3. Reading – 3 hours. I will read to completion more novels and other books than I finished in 2009.
4. Organization – 2 hours. I will gain a “house cleaning” and orderly control of my book collection and other files and prepare for the likeliness of moving to a different dwelling and possibly different city.
5. Miscellaneous – 4 hours. These four hours are the elastic cushion for all the routine and irregular instances of life that one must do or are more difficult to anticipate and control.

Note: I assume that most weekends and holidays fall outside the ideal schedule since these days are more interruptible because they invite both travel and interaction with others, chiefly family.

____
I am indebted to Dr. Daniel G. Amen, Magnificent Mind at Any Age (2008), especially chapter 10, “Make Your Own Miracles,” for guidance in thinking through this issue.

For retrieval of my posts with greater relevance, logic and precision than Google has yet to provide, see CeptsFormIndex for specific index links.

I welcome all comments to blog articles. For personal comments to me, send to rogdesk@charter.net.

© Copyright 2010 by Roger Sween.

Retirement?

28 August 2000

Dear Lynn,

Thank you for asking about my retirement so I can think about these things some more. You know, I do not like the idea of retirement and do not use the word. I tell people I have not retired, but that “I quit employment.” They go blank, so it is better to tell them “I am a freelance writer.”

A friend told me one time, a few years ago, that on the average, a writer in the United States earns $1900 a year. I don’t know what this means. Possibly, there are an awful lot of people scribbling away, and they bring down the average; or, the business of earning one’s living by the pen is fraught with difficulty. I believe both to be true, but especially the latter.

Although modern society supports a large segment of its society whose medium is reading, writing and thinking, and who pays them for it, my own experience is that it is not an easy thing to get into. One has to be focused and willing to sacrifice to get there. Biographies of artists, scientists, authors – intellectuals in general – are stories of drudgery and struggle against the odds. Rare are the fortunate few who have places already made for them: more typical are the poets I’ve met who grumble that they support themselves at temp jobs while they squeeze out a few drops of poetry which may ultimately earn them a very few dollars.

We are a society of extremes: a small percentage produce best sellers and movie scripts that go for millions. The vast majority are on the margins. I’ve marveled that the typical press run is 1200 to 3,000 copies, the same as it was in the infancy of printing, five hundred years ago. The main difference is that now there is a larger volume of published titles and in more areas of specificity.

My own path is that though I wanted to be a writer and be paid for thinking, I made choices that meant I was soon involved in other obligations that made the free-lancing life too risky. Raising children and paying mortgages seems to override a lot of independence, creativity, and the time required to be productive. And, of course, we humans occupy a range of different personality types. I find myself unable to dash off anything but have to think about a topic or question for a long time and do a lot of re-writing before I gain satisfaction with what I have done. Only then, can I set aside my self-criticism and with some ease go public.

Instead of freelancing as I might have wished, I occupied myself with several years of mulling my thoughts and experimenting with ideas under the promise that by planning-ahead I would some day come to the position to do what I always wanted to do. That day has come. I’m subsidizing my own future. Whether I ever earn anything by reading, writing and thinking is no longer important for me – I don’t have to – reading deeply, thinking critically and writing creatively are the important things. Still, nothing is automatic, and the last months have taught me the value of routine, forethought and self-discipline.

Perhaps, all I’ve said is too idiosyncratic. Plenty of people are busy reviewing books, writing essays and magazine articles, consulting, and doing the other profitable things that revolve around reading, writing and thinking. I’m glad to have had a library career, where I was always close to intellectual work, to the emergence and flow of new ideas and means of expressing them. That’s where I had a chance to develop my learning and thinking skills. Even though my everyday life for close to forty years was not always what I exactly wanted, I felt I was on the right track.

I still do.

Take care,

Roger

Background

Concepts and Concept Formation

Updated 10 February 2009.

Where do we get our ideas? How do we test and develop those ideas? How do we share them? What effect do ideas have; that is, what difference do they make?

These questions have stirred me for a long time. Mother took me to the public library at an early age, and Dad read aloud to us four children. These routines made me a dedicated reader from childhood, a habit I have not yet abandoned. Reading and other experiences led me to bouts of imagination and questioning. No doubt early discovery of myths and legends led me to wonder and speculate. I asked questions that Dad answered, ‘There is no way to answer that.’ In his 70s, he asked me similar open-ended question. When still young, I had learned to ponder, a trait typical of the very mature, who have lived through considerable history.

Though my first choice of profession was to be some kind of scientist, perhaps a chemist, I was never very good at the messy sciences. I would rather read about biology, chemistry and physics than do them. I read Gods, Graves and Scholars (1951) when I was twelve years old, and suddenly archaeology appealed to me. The possibility of discovering the long-lost past excited my imagination. Subsequently, history, historical novels, and biography preoccupied me. By the time I reached sixteen years, I knew I wanted to be a historian. I majored in history at college, but the environment that I studied in turned me into a philosopher. Why am I as I am? Why are things as they are?

In time, the possibilities of employment forced on me a practicality. History jobs were few. I had taken a library education minor as work insurance, and that choice began my career in the information field for most of the next forty years. By the time I became a university librarian and library educator in my twenties, I saw that my real work was in adult learning. I identified myself as a lifetime learner; my first responsibilities provided for and fostered other people’s continuous learning.

My life as a reader provoked another thread, attention to writing. The Kudor Preference Test (9th grade?) showed that the interests I favored aligned most closely with authors or real estate agents. Another person in the class had the same results. Go figure! Sure enough, I have been scribbling bits and pieces for years, trying novels, poetry and essays. During the years I was a state-level library consultant, I wrote several extensive reports, planning documents, curriculums and policy pieces. I am quick to respond to issues with letters to the newspaper and more extensive commentaries.

For several years, efforts to narrow my attention have focused on the following major interests:
concept-formation
informed conversation for community building and public participation
information-seeking behavior
information policy
philosophy of adult learning
self-directed learning
role of books, reading, libraries in learning

In short, how do ideas originate, become adopted, evolve, and spread?

Thus concepts, their formation and examination are the subject of this blog.

For additional information on Roger Sween, see also the 5-part series of posts "Discovering My Personality Type." They are: My INTJ (1), My LifeKey (2), My Learning (3), My Thinking (4), My Solo (5)

© 2009 by Roger Sween.