My Core Values
Learned through sometimes painful experience
I started developing my core values a good thirty years before I even heard the term. Some of the earliest have served me the best. I offer them free of charge because, well, they didn’t cost me anything, so why be greedy?
These are not absolute; sometimes you have to break rules for a greater good. And some are internal. I never put, “We don’t work with assholes” on my business cards.
Don’t lie. This, my first self-discovered and internalized rule, wasn’t a moral choice; I didn’t hear the ninth Commandment and decide bearing false witness was going to send me straight to hell — apparently the afterlife residence of choice for politicians. It was pragmatic. I learned that lying takes a lot of work. You have to keep track of your stories, and build on them to keep some lies going. Get it wrong and the whole house of cards comes down around you. I decided it was easier to take the consequences of telling the truth.
One night my parents had out-of-town friends visiting, and I was in bed when my mother opened the door to let one of them see me. My parents were parsimonious when it came to compliments, so when I overheard her telling the visitor that I always told the truth it felt a little like Christmas morning.
Don’t fight. I was small for my age, and didn’t usually fare well when a situation came to blows. I didn’t mind some physical pain, but looking someone else in the eyes with intent to inflict pain really bothered me. I opted for situational awareness, humor, and a quick wit to avoid fights, which were commonplace in the rural high school I attended.
Do unto others. Obviously not my own creation, but when I learned about the Golden Rule it made a lot of sense, if only for the pragmatic aspect of not wanting to have unwanted stuff done unto me.
Self-employment comprised the bulk of my work life. It attracted me because I was born without the gene that tolerates incompetence and arrogance. I needed to work where what mattered was what you accomplished, not whose ass you kissed. This gene was fully activated by the trust issues came home with me in Vietnam-related PTS.
Don’t work with assholes. They are usually easy to spot, but even those who conceal their assholery can be picked up with asshole radar, aka intuition or the gut. Ignore it at your own risk. When my asshole detector lit up I would say I didn’t have any openings to work with them, no matter how desperately I needed the income.
This is the first core value I adopted as a self-employed person; it was late in arriving. I had put up with way more crap than necessary in my first ten years of running businesses on my own. The rule became entrenched after I had to take a particularly toxic client to small claims court. I won, but the lesson was the real victory.
Get Markwflint’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Don’t get mad. Get paid. This sprang out of frustration with a YMCA newsletter client. I wrote and edited the editorial content and did the pre-print production. I submitted the finished articles for approval/changes before production, made the requested corrections and submitted the camera-ready pages for final approval. Inevitably they would come back with a crap ton of copy changes, which are known in the trade as Author’s Alterations (AAs). A few of these are no big deal, but when you spend several hours rewriting copy that had already been approved it gets under your skin, and stays there way too long
I told the client that the AAs were taking too much time, so I was going to bill them individually. He said okay, but was shocked at the next invoice, because the AA charge was more than the rest of the production. “Well,” I told him, “You know how to eliminate that cost.”
He continued making AAs, and I continued to smile when I cashed the check. I applied this rule from that point forward.
Avoid Hiring. When I was running three weekly newspapers I had a staff of around twenty-five people. I had a lot of good employees. I also had a few not so good ones; they took a lot of time to manage and in a few cases made for sleepless nights. Firing was a difficult process, even though I liked to frame it as giving them a chance to succeed elsewhere.
After I began my own consulting business I hired freelancers. My approach to hiring had always been to pay at the upper end of the market and expect quality work. (The reporters I had on my weeklies earned more than reporters on the daily in our area.)
I was surprised to see how many allegedly professional writers couldn’t craft a decent sentence. I would pay them for their work, but not use them for future projects. No sleepless nights.
Keep learning. I have never completely mastered a skill. I doubt if anybody does. There is always room for improvement. After you reach a certain level, those improvements are smaller, but they add up. Mastery in any area becomes a matter of learning the nuances.
Some of my best learning moments come from questions asked by people who have neither experience nor education in the area. They don’t know what not to ask, and that can uncover some precious gems.
I can take someone out on a hike and teach them the basics of sustainable trail design in a couple of hours. They can then design a trail that is eighty percent sustainable. (I actually measured this on a number of social — illegally built — trails, and found it to be a consistent ratio.)
My objective on every trail was one hundred percent sustainability. Nature being what she is, achieving one hundred percent is a unicorn. Well, almost. I co-designed one trail, a mile long, that has zero erosion. I have hit upwards of ninety percent on the five hundred plus miles of trails I have designed.
If you are a land manager and you have a hundred miles of trail that require ongoing tread maintenance for three or four miles, that’s a pretty small maintenance burden. Twenty miles is a whole different budget item. And legacy trails on national forests may have a much higher percentage of annual maintenance requirements — usually not met because our priorities fund bombs and weapons, with only scattered crumbs for recreation.
What are your unwritten and written core values? Feel free to share them in the comments. I may be old, but I still like to learn.
