Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

He says, “Be still, and know that I am God;
    I will be exalted among the nations,
    I will be exalted in the earth.”

• Psalm 46:10

The Lord is in his holy temple;
    let all the earth be silent before him.

• Habakkuk 2:20

“Listen to this, Job;
    stop and consider God’s wonders.

• Job 37:14

“Pausing is not sluggish repose. Pausing is also movement.  It is inward movement of the heart.  To pause is to deepen oneself in inwardness.  But to go on and on is to go straight into the abyss of superficiality.”

• Søren Kierkegaard, Provocations (from Thoughts that Radically Cure)

I wish I had a manager that I reported to that understood such wonders as pondering and pausing.  The company would have been much more profitable.

I cannot tell you how many times a supervisor, often a supervisor that I did not even work for, would come up to me and say to stop daydreaming and get to work.

What I was doing was trying to figure out how to solve a major issue with what was being done.  I was often asked to be part of a “think tank” operation because my ideas that were outside the box got the design engineer in the mode of making a hybrid of my idea that he thought would work.  It was still his design, but I simply knocked a few holes in his box where he could invent something better – or move from something not working to something that had a chance to work.

But when I was developing new training material, I was constantly trying to take a complex concept and give a real-world example.  “Real world” as in something that dealt with automobiles, trucks, home repairs, or even cooking something on the stove.  There complex problem was “real world,” but there were too many moving parts.  I had to create some analogy like heating a bottle of baby formula at two in the morning.

The baby formula problem was a pet project of one of my professors in college.  We had to write a computer program that would optimize heating baby formula.  The concept was to take a bottle of baby formula and place it in a pot of water and then place the pot on a stove eye.  What setting do you use on the stove eye?  How much water do you put in the pot?  How much formula do you put in the bottle?  Easy, right?  By the time you have done all the calculations, your spouse has heated enough baby formula for fifty children.  But the point of the exercise was to visualize a real-world problem and “solve” it.

I remember discussing the concept of gas pressure.  I had an illustration about putting air in a car tire, but when I went to India where only the managers could afford a car, the engineers spending hours of their day on the bus, I had to change the illustration on the fly to a bicycle tire, different pressure and different units of measure.  I think they used Pascals (1 psi is equal to 6.9 Kilopascals, roughly).  You had to be knowledgeable and flexible and sensitive to the customer.

But back to the boss who was not really my boss.  He would yell at me to get back to work.  I would grab a pad of paper and start doodling.  He had no idea how I did what I did, so he would make some comment about me not goofing off anymore and walk away.  I wondered when this happened two or three times in one day if I could draw a voodoo doll and poke holes in it with a penpoint and see if he noticed.  He would probably just say something about not goofing off and walk away as usual.

The point that Kierkegaard is making is twofold.  Creativity cannot be “drive” oriented.  You cannot pressure someone or overwork someone to gain greater creative productivity.  You often get less productivity.  Sometimes no productivity at all.  And the result is far from creative, usually a copy of what you did before, even when what you did before did not work.  But the slave driver was happy, even though he was not my boss.

Since I mentioned twofold, the other issue is the spiritual issue.  We need to be still and know that God is God.  We need to await God’s guidance.  And when in creative mode, we must remember that God is infinitely more creative than we are, and a good look at what God created can be a catalyst in creating something ourselves.  You know, that thinking outside the box stuff.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.