I’ve recently had a few conversations with people wrestling with a decision on whether to take a particular job. Here’s my list of ten questions you should ask yourself.
Hovering over all of this are two words that might seem a little morbid.
Memento Mori. Remember that you will die.
I first learned this reading Ryan Holiday’s works, especially The Obstacle is the Way, which re-introduced me to Marcus Aurelius and his Meditations. Great life reading. Anyway, it’s not morbid, it’s liberating. It means, do what matters and do what is important. And don’t waste time on the crap.
OK, the 10 questions. If all these are a ‘yes’, the job is a keeper. If not, keep looking. Life is too short for bad jobs. (look, I get families need to be supported, people have obligations, and sometimes you just need the job and the money. But don’t settle!).
1. Does the company & opportunity have a Mission?
If they have no discernible mission, or don’t tell you about it during the interview process, it’s just a job. Keep looking.
2. Are you passionate about that Mission – does it matter? mean something to you?
Life is too short to spend on jobs that don’t matter.
3. Will I learn new things in this job?
If you’re not learning, you’re not growing. If you’re not growing, you’re stagnant. And who wants that?
4. Is there a specific person I believe I can learn from?
Ideally, it will be the person that you report to – but it doesn’t have to be. Just someone you’ll have access to on a regular basis.
5. Are there people I can teach? Do I have something to give?
This is more important as your career progresses, but learning and teaching should be hand-and-glove – you should be doing both. Your satisfaction will double if you know you are making other team members better.
6. Am I doing something new, from previous roles?
This has always been a hard and fast rule for me. The next job has to have something different. A new domain, different levels of responsibility, a different functional area. Otherwise, you won’t be learning much.
7. Is this company going to be around, or am I OK if they are not?
Figure out if the company is going to work (a startup requires a different set of questions than a big company). You’re investing a good chunk of your life in it.
Are they in an industry that’s growing? Do they have something different going for them compared to their competition? Does the company have its shit together? (Note: the interview process is a good 1st test for having their shit together – if the interview process is confused, drawn out, mismanaged, indecisive, opaque, etc. – they’ll be that way after you join too…). And if you’re not sure the company is gonna make it in the long run, but everything else looks good, then go in with your eyes open and take the gamble!
8. Do I care enough about these people, this work domain, this company, to spend 5 years of my life on it?
Life’s too short to spend on things you don’t care about, or to work with assholes. Even if the pay is good. Is the chemistry good with the people you met? Will you be excited to work with them every day? You’re going to see them more than your family! Find a good fit.
9. How many “at bats” do you have?
We all only have so many jobs to take in our life. To borrow baseball language, I call these “at bats”. How many “at bats” do you have left? When I was 50, I thought, well, I have maybe 2 or 3 more jobs left – I’m not going to waste an at bat on something that doesn’t feel quite right. When you’re 22, you have more time, and more at bats to take a flyer on.
10. How does this set me up for my next job?
When I am done with this job, what will I have learned and how can that advance my career the next time? Will it open doors for bigger roles? New industries? Maybe starting my own company? Have some idea where you want to go in your life and career, and try to take jobs that help you get ready for that. (in my list of work rules, this is #16).
OK. You got through all those questions, and the answers were all solid. You’ll notice none of the questions were about money. Not an accident. It’s not because money isn’t important – it’s because you shouldn’t start there. Figure all the other stuff out, and if you’re passionate about the role, the money will figure itself out. Just remember, “you don’t get what you don’t ask for“. If you don’t like the offer, tell them you love the opportunity but you need the compensation to make sense.
LOS ANGELES, CA – MAY 06: Musician Neil Peart of the band Rush performs at the Nokia Theatre on May 6, 2008 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Jesse Grant/Getty Images)
Neil Peart died a few days ago. He was the drummer and lyricist for the band Rush (in case you didn’t know). It’s affected me more than I expected, and more than most any death I can remember that was not someone I knew personally. From my high school years on, I’ve drawn inspiration from their music, and how they lived their lives. I’ve just finished a complete listen of every studio album they did (no, not maudlin at all :)), and it’s an amazing body of work. Having trouble shaking the sadness so I thought I’d write a quick post and maybe get some of it it out of my system.
Anyway they were different. And inspiring. Whenever I get down or feeling like I’m not making progress, there’s a Rush song to get me moving again. Neil was fond of quoting Bob Dylan:
“The highest purpose of art is to inspire. What else can you do for anyone but inspire them?”
Well done, Neil.
And the older I get, the more I appreciate artists who continue to innovate as they age, raise their game, do not give in to the dying of the light (Robert Plant comes to mind as well). These guys were (and are) the musicians’s musicians – complete virtuosos, and ever so humble. And at the heart of their music was Neil – the lyricist and the driving beat.
You can read elsewhere about Neil’s life, but he suffered unimaginable personal tragedy, but managed to claw himself back to life, and to continue performing and creating, and finding a new personal life. That he died of brain cancer at 67 just isn’t fair. But he knew, and wrote often, about how life isn’t fair.
Not to be morbid, but none of us know how long we have.
One of Neil’s mantras was, “What is the most excellent thing I can do today?”.
Find someone and something you care about, and commit yourself to them. Say no to the things that don’t matter. There’s not a moment to waste.
2019 was a good year for reading. If you’ve been reading the blog, you know I went to Iceland this year (trip report). I read a lot of Icelandic stuff in preparation (my reading list here), so I won’t recount that. Other big themes for the year: lots of Social Reading, using my app Bookship; the usual dose of spy novels and some literary fiction; and lastly comfort food, in the form of old favorites and Jack Reacher books.
Bookship continues to enable a lot of social reading for me. With various friends I read Henry V, Justine (I love Lawrence Durrell!), Following the Equator by Mark Twain, The Hound of the Baskervilles and Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs (who once lived about a mile from my house!). I also re-read Dan Simmon’s Hyperion with my family, which was good fun! The book club I am in read some fun stuff as well, including Unfamiliar Fishes, a fascinating history of post-contact Hawaii, Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood, The Power by Naomi Alderman, and the rather disappointing Life After Google by George Gilder.
Reading Henry V with my friend Thomas was a high point of the year for me. It’s the first Shakespeare I can remember reading (I’m sure I read Romeo & Juliet in high school, but I don’t remember it). Learning to flow with Shakespeare’s language, stopping occasionally for a dictionary check, but usually just going with the flow, was good fun. We used that reading as a jumping-off point to explore Salic Law (kidding, sort of, it’s a plot point), the history of the battle of Agincourt, where a heavily outnumbered English force (estimates vary, but commonly reported as 6000 English against roughly 30,000 French), destroyed the French force, the English Longbow being the decisive factor. We also explored the various theatrical renditions of Henry V (Olivier, Branagh, et. al.). I also re-read Bernard Cornwell’s wonderful book Agincourt, a nice fictional complement. Henry V is the source of a number of quotes you may know, yet not know whence they came:
“Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more!” “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers” “The game’s afoot!” (you may have thought, as I did, this originated with Sherlock Holmes) “Oh for a muse of fire”
and my personal favorite, delivered best by Branagh.
I was not angry since I came to France! (watch it here)
Kenneth Branagh delivers the goods.
Inspired somewhat by Traveling the Equator, Mark Twain’s travelogue of the Pacific and Asia, I tackled Max Adams’ In the Land of the Giants, an historical travelogue of Dark Ages Britain. Very interesting, although extremely dense in history and place names, so I had to read in increments, on-and-off for most of the year.
On the more serious side, I read some truly outstanding novels this year. The most memorable of them, Norwegian by Night, is actually not entirely serious. In fact it’s the funniest book I’ve read in a long long time.
Definitely more serious is James Salter, whose writing I love deeply. Solo Faces is a literary exploration wrapped inside a mountain climbing adventure novel. Not unlike, although not quite the equal of, Wind, Sand and Stars. But close. Light Years is the heartbreaking story of a disintegrating marriage. One of my favorite passages (which is not bleak as is the rest of the novel).
“I think I’d like a martini,” Viri said. He drank one, icy cold, in a gleaming glass. It was like a change in the weather. The pitcher held another, potent, clear. “How do you make them so cold?” he asked. “Well, you happen to have commanded the drink which is, in my opinion, the one true test. You have to have the right ingredients— and also you keep the gin in the freezer.”
The Narrow Road to the Deep North is another grim masterpiece, the harrowing experience of Australian prisoners of war building the Burma Railway during WWII. City of Crows is an atmospheric medieval tale by Chris Womersly, well worth the read. Transcription is WWII-era historical fiction from Kate Atkinson. I found it good, but not great; some of her other works are likely better starting points. Out of left field, I found a copy of Miské’s novel Arab Jazz, a unique murder mystery set in the Arab section of Paris. As The Guardian says, “Arab Jazz is a genre novel in the same way that Pulp Fiction is a genre film – superseding the form even as it pays homage”.
Spy Stuff.
You know I love a good spy novel. This year I read a number of good (although perhaps not great) spy novels. The exception to the “great” are the few John Le Carré books that I read. Joseph Kanon’s Leaving Berlin was very atmospheric and good fun; but I felt it covered territory that Alan Furst has already covered quite extensively. Warlight, by Michael Ondaatje was equally atmospheric, but felt confused and rambling; I couldn’t quite figure out the point of the book. I did a healthy dose of “thriller” spy novels in the form of Olen Steinhauer’s Nearest Exit, The Cairo Affair, and Liberation Movements. All solid efforts but not perhaps rising to the best of his work or thrillers in general. Mick Herron’s The List, a novella, had me laughing til the scotch came out of my nose.
Comfort food
Bookish “comfort food” is what I call it when you are tired and want to read, and just get a great story without the effort of absorbing something new. It can be a book you’ve already read, or an easy read where you love what’s happening but you kind of already know where it’s going (looking at you Lee Child). A number of this year’s spy novels were comfort food: one of my favorite books of all time, Tim Power’s Declare, a crazy quilt of a novel including spies, Djinn (the supernatural kind), Kim Philby, Lawrence of Arabia, Mt. Ararat, Saharan adventures, Nazis and the Cold War. And with a plausible historical storyline behind it. John Le Carré’s Call for the Dead, and Smiley’s People, Alan Furst’s Blood of Victory, Lee Child’s Make Me, Past Tense, and The Christmas Scorpion. For about the nth time I re-read Tolkien’s The Two Towers, my favorite of the three books, and William Gibson’s Count Zero, voodoo-inspired science fiction featuring world-weary, middle-aged mercenary Turner, one of my favorite of Gibson’s characters.
what’s on deck
I am just finishing Smile of the Wolf (https://www.viking2917.com/smile-of-the-wolf-review), the last of my Iceland books, and wow. It’s like a time machine to 10th century Iceland. If that sounds even mildly interesting, read this book. The first half is utterly immersive.
We’re traveling to Greece and Rome late this year, so I expect to be doing a lot of relevant reading. Thinking about Mary Beard’s SPQR, Emily Wilson’s Odyssey, probably some Mary Renault to get me started. My book club has just started The Left Hand of Darkness, which I have not read since high school, so I’m looking forward to revisiting that.
I traveled to Iceland last year, read a bunch of stuff, and found a few books while I was there. Top of that stack was Smile of the Wolf, by Tim Leach.
Kjaran, a wandering skald (a bard), and Gunnar, a retired Viking raider who has made his home in Iceland, encounter a “ghost”, with fatal consequences. The outcome of that start a feud that drives the entire novel. The early part of the book is so transporting. I’m there, in Iceland, in the 10th century. So well done. Here’s the first paragraph:
In the distant lands where men worship the White Christ, I have heard that a ghost is not such a dangerous thing. They are creatures of no substance, who may wail and howl but cannot hurt a man. But in my country, the people are warriors even in death. Our ghosts are not shadow and air, but walk- ing flesh. They wield their weapons with as much strength as they did in life, and more bravely, for they have nothing left to fear. And so, when we heard that Hrapp Osmundsson had crawled from his grave and begun to wander his lands at night, no man in the Salmon River Valley would leave his house after dark without a good blade at his side and a shield on his arm.
The early parts of Smile of the Wolf capture the grim beauty that is both the Icelandic terrain and the pagan northern world view. It mirrors the classic Icelandic sagas in many ways, but where the saga characters are usually pretty opaque, we get inside the heads of the characters and get a detail and color the sagas don’t provide, yet the cadence and speaking voices can be suitably terse or blunt.
The narrative and the prose really work for me. The initial scenes with the “ghost”, and events that follow, are magic. The gradual progression of the resulting feud, leading up to the critical inflection point in the novel, has the same fatalistic unfolding of the sagas.
Eventually, one of the characters is Outlawed, which in medieval Iceland meant any man could kill you – so outlaws either left Iceland, or lived in desolate areas no one came to. I loved the Outlaw sequence. Many of the sagas feature people being outlawed, but none that I have read really explore what that means to the individual beyond being constantly on one’s guard to avoid being killed. I thought Leach added a lot of color, with the cave, the farming, the thieving, the cold, the rough medicine (for example, having your fingers amputated).
Many of the sagas (and Smile of the Wolf) feel like American Westerns to me. And of course what’s more Old West than Outlaws? But it feels an interesting difference to me. The American Outlaws feel as though they have chosen their life, and being an Outlaw means one places oneself outside the law. It feels an active, individual choice in a way – I Choose to disobey the law. In the sagas, being an Outlaw is in a way not about choosing to disobey laws, it is that society places you outside the law, the laws do not protect you. You are outside the law, and can be killed. But society is doing it to you, rather than you doing it to society (a fewrelated articles on being an Outlaw in Iceland, if your interests run that way.)
I also found very interesting the treatment of Christianity in the latter half of the book, and the inner life that might lead a pagan who follows the old gods to convert. Again, many books have explored the intersection of the Viking world with Christianity, but usually Christians are portrayed as pious, meek, and not necessarily fierce in battle, and the conversion process has always felt like it was just words, for convenience or under duress. The priest Thorvaldur who joins their Outlaw band is just a fierce a Viking as anyone. And the Christian God of SotW is not the God of love and mercy, that God is the God of Revenge, and feels like a bit like just another god. (also interesting: the Christian God and the White Christ seem pretty conflated in Kjaran’s head….). The Last Kingdom, by Bernard Cornwell (or the TV show), and the relationship between Uhtred and Alfred is an interesting comparison.
I'm still grappling with the ending.
Kjaran’s unwillingness to kill the child Sumardil rings true to me. But the final Holmgang, I’m not sure…the mythic/heroic symmetry of it appeals. But would that character really have done that? Not sure… The phrase from the book, “easier to kill a man than to bury him”, comes to mind – it seems many novelists feel a need to kill their main character, rather than let them live their life out and explore what that might mean. (I’m thinking also of my reading of James Salter’s wonderful The Hunters, for example).
I read SotW with a friend on my social reading app, Bookship. They found parts of the book less convincing than I, and wished that some of the characters had been more explored – which I can’t argue with – they are fascinating people, some more explored than others. But in the large, I found the book transporting, and perhaps the best modern capture of the spirit and worldview that is the Icelandic sagas.
Pretty much since high school, I’ve had what W. H. Auden called “The Northern Thing”, a fascination with Vikings, Scandinavia, and their conflicting views on Fate (everything is predetermined) and Free Will (you must fight to death, and never give up, even as your fate is predetermined) (and do see Auden’s translation of the Elder Edda mentioned below!).
I’m not sure precisely where it started, but it was somewhere at the intersection of Tolkien, Dungeons & Dragons, and the teenage male fascination with death and destruction. That led to a college flirtation with becoming a medieval studies major (I read Old Norse and Old English for a brief time), before succumbing eventually (and probably for the better) to Mathematics and Computer Graphics.
This year I had a chance to travel to Iceland, the land of Fire and Ice, and the home of the medieval sagas I loved even as a teenager (ok I was kinda “not like the other kids”). Iceland also happens to be the home of Jolabokaflod, the “Yule Book Flood”, the tradition of giving books as gifts for Christmas. My kind of holiday (read about my trip here).
In preparation for my trip, I wanted to re-read some of my old favorites, as well as a new books that would give me context and re-kindle my interests in all things Norse. Myths, Sagas and some recent fiction, here’s what I read, plus a few promising books I found while I was there.
The Myths.
Snorri Sturluson is largely responsible for much of what we today think of as Norse mythology. Blond Valkyries carrying the fallen in battle to Valhalla, the one-eyed Odin and Thor’s Hammer. Sturluson wrote three of the northern world’s medieval masterpieces, the Prose (younger) Edda, the Heimskringla (the history of the Kings of Norway), and Egill’s Saga (one of the classic Icelandic sagas). (btw Egill was quite the asshole, see this hilarious recap on the Grapevine, a great Icelandic website). The Prose Edda is not to be confused with the Elder Edda, which, for maximal confusion, was NOT written by Sturluson. The Prose Edda, originally written as a treatise on poetry-writing (and to gain favor with a young King Hakon of Norway), is one of the main sources for much of what we know of Viking mythology, containing tales of Odin, Thor, Loki, and other gods.
Now, Sturluson, in addition to being a writer, was, as we might say today, an “operator”. Cunning, powerful, legalistic, and always looking out for himself. As you can imagine he did not come to a good end. All of this and more is captured in Nancy Marie Brown’s masterful Song of the Vikings, which tells Snorri’s tale alongside the Norse tales he captured (or created, your call).
We think of Norse mythology as ancient and anonymous. But in fact, most of the stories we know about Odin, Thor, Loki, and the other gods of Scandinavia were written by the 13th-century Icelandic chieftain Snorri Sturluson. Notice I said “written” and not “written down.”
The Elder Edda (not written by Snorri) contains a collection of mythical writings from old Norse mythology. My favorite is the Havamal, (“the sayings of the High One”), purported to be the pithy sayings of Odin. This is the home of cheery thoughts such as
“Praise not the day until evening has come, a woman until she is burnt, a sword until it is tried, a maiden until she is married, ice until it has been crossed, beer until it has been drunk.”
(In case you are wondering about that “burnt” bit, legend has it that the Vikings chieftains sometimes had their wives burned/buried/cremated along with them).
The Sagas
The sagas are the treasure of Icelandic literature. Written in the middle ages, most of the anonymously, they vary from mythological adventure stories to quasi-historical extended family sagas, and are sometimes referred to as the first prose (non-poetic) novels. Here’s a few of my favorites I (re-)read:
Hrolf Kraki’s Saga. A retelling/reconstruction by Poul Anderson. This is a classic grim Viking tale, “brothers to the death”, “defiance in the face of fate”, “blood & treasure” mythological saga. A bit hard to find these days, but look a bit online for a used copy. (And if you love this, go for Anderson’s The Broken Sword right afterwards).
Njal’s Saga is essentially Iceland’s Iliad. It tells the story of a spiraling series of conflicts that result in fifty year blood feud between Njal and various of his enemies. Like the Iliad, Njal’s saga can be quite gory (including Njal’s family being burnt alive in their house), and is something of a meditation on vengeance and its effects. It also offers insight into medieval Iceland’s byzantine legal system (one of the world’s first), and the workings of the Althing, the world’s first parliament, which occurred annually at Thingvellir, which we visited.
Grettir’s Saga. One of the last of the great Icelandic sagas. Grettir’s Saga is a mix of the historical (Grettir’s father escapes from Harald Fairhair, the King of Denmark), to the mythological/fantastic: Grettir’s doom is set when he fights the draugr (an undead zombie) Glam, who, as Grettir is killing him, curses Grettir to become unlucky and weak, which leads to his eventually becoming an outlaw, and to his death. Grettir’s saga has striking parallels with Beowulf, with Glam standing in for Grendel. Good fun, if you like that sort of thing.
Sometimes reading the old stuff can be a bit of a grind. So I mixed in some modern stuff, some of it with an historical/saga angle, some not.
One of Iceland’s more famous authors is Yrsa Sigurðardóttir. I read her Last Rituals, wherein a young German student with a dark interest in the Icelandic sagas and magic is found murdered, with strange symbols carved into him. A procedural murder mystery, I enjoyed it but found myself wanting a bit more depth in characters and in Icelandic backstory. Still I was reading in translation so some of that may be the translation. In this vein, but more enjoyable for me, was:
Where the Shadows Lie by Michael Ridpath. Boston, Iceland, Tolkien…pretty much hits all my highlights. A fun Icelandic romp. A Boston detective with Icelandic heritage heads to Iceland and ends up investigating a murder involving J.R.R. Tolkien and a lost Icelandic saga. My kind of book…
Also in a similar vein, although I did not get to it (yet!) is The Flatey Enigma by Arnar Ingolfsson.
Lastly I read some modern Icelandic fiction, without the saga backdrop. Sjón might be Iceland’s most famous writer, both for his works and for his collaborations with Björk. The Blue Fox is poetical fairy tale about a Reverend hunting a blue fox, intermixed in a tantalizing way with the story of an abandoned child, apparently with Down’s Syndrome. Lyrical, bleak and mysterious, it’s also a quick read.
Likely Iceland’s most commercially successful novelist is Arnaldur Indriðason, author of the Inspector Erlendur series, the first of which is Jar City. I re-read Silence of the Grave, the 2nd in the series – a brutal, yet fascinating mystery. It explores domestic violence, the tension between countryside and city Icelanders, between Icelanders and the British & Americans, and drugs and the dark side of Reykjavik. Of particular interest to me was the exploration of the post-WWII presence of the Americans and the tensions and grievances it created. (As an aside, and not meant as any insult, but Iceland is perhaps the most “Americanized” of the European countries I have been to, and I got a sense for how that might have happened from this book).
Books I found
Books are a big part of Icelandic culture (they are one of the most literate countries). And they have some great bookstores….and yet… books are $%!@ expensive in Iceland. A small paperback usually runs about $26! So, haunting a few bookstores, I found some really interesting books….that I decided to get when I was back in the states. :).
Smile of the Wolf looks really interesting. Essentially a modern fiction novel wrapped in the skin of a medieval Icelandic saga. Fish Have No Feet, from Booker International nominated Jon Kalman Steffanson, offers a unique insight into modern Iceland and the ways in which it has been shaped by outside influences. If you want some dark humor and Icelandic slacker culture in a modern setting, try 101 Reykjavik (the name of this book, as well as the main area of Reykjavik, as well as a movie made from the book). Be warned: it sounds like it’s not for everyone.
But Iceland is! Everyone seems to speak English there, so (assuming you speak English), it’s an easy place to visit, and it has a rich literary history as well as a rich actual history. Enjoy!
(P.S. In between starting and finishing this post, I read the first few chapters of Smile of the Wolf. Wow. If anything I wrote here sounds interesting to you, start with Smile of the Wolf. Bracing like a shot of the “Black Death” the Icelanders are found of drinking.)
