Few things sicken me more than corporate jargon. I know a few corporate-to-the bone types. They’re most comfortable in khakis and use terms like “execute the spend” when they’re talking about buying something. They’re just despicable, revolting individuals. I have it on competent authority that they are deathly afraid of being exposed as actual human beings and count on their daily embrace with Satan to see them through. Nevertheless, there is a term they use that I have found surprisingly relevant to my own life: core competency.

A company’s core competency is a thing that it does well, that sets it apart from other companies and bolsters the expandability of their business. Something like that. In my own life, I’ve reduced the term to mean the things that I do well that are not a burden to me while I do them. I do a number of things well. Many people do. I make music, play several instruments, I write, I communicate, I engineer and produce audio recordings. I truly enjoy these things. One test I use to determine my own core competencies, as it were, is whether or not I lose track of time while engaging in those activities and whether the loss of that time matters to me.

So far this year I’ve eliminated certain things from my life that did not represent a core competency for me. The first was my checkbook database. A few years ago, I created a database in Access that I used to track my checking account transactions and later, those of my savings account. I created it because I thought my requirements for such a program were small and did not warrant the purchase of an off-the-shelf application for that purpose. I struggled with my little software design idea and through my infamous tenacity, I built something that worked. My skills in programming are what an actual software developer would consider comic at best, but I bent the thing to my will and haven’t kept a written checkbook register since.

I never could get the reconcile part to be easy. It always required a certain amount of data massage to get the downloaded stuff from my bank into my program. I always managed to make it work, but it was always a black sinkhole of time. Finding errors was even harder. At the end of 2008, I decided that I didn’t want to be a software developer. I didn’t have to be a software developer. It wasn’t a core competency. I should just forget it. I could buy a program to do this stuff and spend my time doing something else. So that’s what I did.

Up until this week, I was playing keyboards for my friend’s cover band. He’s an old friend of mine and when he needed someone to replace his keyboard player, I wanted very much to help him out. I thought that at the same time I could increase my keyboard skills. I did both, but very recently I noticed that my other musical priorities were being neglected. Those that were far more dear to me. I started spending so much time learning songs and programming my synthesizer to get the sounds right that I was overwhelmed and (hint hint) really noticing the hours that were passing as I worked. Could I program my synth and copy records? You bet. Did my own music get pushed back? Yes. The alarm started to sound. Playing in a cover band is not my core competency. Making records is. With a heavy heart, I told my friend that I couldn’t continue with the band. That was hard, but I feel like I’m back on track and have my musical priorities more in order. I’m now devoted completely to original music, which is where I must be.

I find that I apply the same core competency reasoning to even the smallest events in my life. I got an eye exam this week. As I was waiting for the doctor to come in to the examination room, I wondered what it must be like to be a doctor. I thought of the studying and the challenges. I was always a great student and enjoy the challenge of learning something new. Would I be up to that?

I noticed a poster on the wall that featured detailed illustrations of the anatomy of the human eye. There were callouts all over it, pointing out more detail than I ever knew existed. My first instinct was to absorb as much of it as I could. If this stuff was knowable, why then shouldn’t I know it? This is an old, ridiculous habit of mine. In some respects, the tendency has gotten me to where I am today. This time though, I surprised myself when I got the distinct feeling that I wasn’t enjoying learning about the eye at all. I just wanted to see better and I needed an eye exam to get new glasses. Knowing about the eye wasn’t important to me at all. I turned away from the poster and started to think about getting back to my studio.
Could I learn all about the eye? Sure. Is it beyond my understanding? Absolutely not. But medicine is not my core competency. I looked at my watch a bunch of times while I waited for that doctor. She took a long time and it bothered me. The poster wasn’t helping me to forget about it.

It was such a feeling of relief when I decided that I didn’t have to absorb that entire eye poster while I waited. This probably sounds absurd, but this is actually how I think. I’m constantly putting myself to the test. Can I be better, smarter or more skilled?

Over the last 8 years or so, I’ve learned the most important test questions of all. Can I be happier? Could I be more miserable? I think those questions take priority over everything. I find that by constantly examining my core competencies and sticking to what I do well and enjoy the most, I can more often answer No and Yes.

Imagine strolling along Water Street on a blustery February day. A man in a threadbare blue suit is talking very loudly on a Blackberry phone trying to make a dinner reservation for tonight, Valentine’s Day. He blocks the sidewalk standing on the line for a cart selling street meat. He notices no one but himself.

“What’s it gonna take for you to give me a table tonight? Oh you’ve gotta be kidding me…”

He pulls a wad of cash out of his pocket to pay and is unaware of the linted Post-It note that drops onto the sidewalk and blows across the cap of your shoe.

Honey,

You know I love you, right? Cool. Just go with that and I’ll let you know if it ever changes.

Regards,
Dick

No. That never happened. But I think it could.

Even I buy greeting cards. It can be nice when giving a gift to tack on a card for good measure. Because of where I spend some of my days, I end up buying cards most often at this store in Lower Manhattan, about 2 blocks from the Stock Exchange. Lately I’ve come to wonder if the merchandising at Hallmark stores speaks directly to the presumed customer base. I wonder about that because the cards being sold to men in Lower Manhattan completely suck. If my theory is sound, it follows that the men in that locale must also suck.

Last month I found exactly one (1) acceptable birthday card for my wife. The reason literally every other card in the place was no good was because they started with lines like, “I’m no good with words but…” or “Honey, I know don’t always say it but…” From my perspective, they may as well have read, “Darling, I’m a jackass. I have the emotional maturity that I had in junior high and half the communications skills…”

I couldn’t find a one that didn’t conflict in some way with what I consider to be cornerstones of a solid relationship. I couldn’t buy any of those cards because they would never ring true with my wife. We work hard to communicate and to keep our relationship strong and healthy. In the financial district, that effort must be defined as the timely presentation of a seemingly appropriate greeting card.

Another cultural clue amid the racks of glitter-covered poems for the emotionally inept was in the “From Child” section. There were plenty of cute cards from child to Daddy. Mothers buy plenty of those. Do you know how many cards were from child to Mommy? 0. None. Not even some that sucked. You have to figure that in a New York shop, space is at a premium, so no one would stock anything that had no hope of selling.

Like I have in so many other places in the Financial District, I felt that I did not belong.

What exactly passes for affection in the world of testosterone, money-grubbing and anti-beauty? I’m proud to say that I have no idea. Isn’t it odd that educated people, who make up the bulk of the work force in Lower Manhattan, could be so completely ignorant of their own feelings and so emotionally crippled?

I think many of them just do what they think they’re supposed to do and live the way they think they’re supposed to live with the values they think they’re supposed to have. With no cultural impetus to do so, it’s possible that they haven’t really considered these things at all and decided for themselves. Their children are apt to grow up the same way.

That’s the real gift in being alive, deciding how you want to live, how you feel, who and what you love. Those things make us who we are. Why would you ever pass on that? I never could.

I don’t know what it’s like to be unskilled with language. I don’t how you could say “I love you” to your wife only infrequently. From another perspective, what kind of a woman would want to be with a man like that? Maybe one with a father like that. Nevertheless, not my kind of woman.

I’m through with reading those cards. It only upsets me. I’m going right to the “Blank” section from now on. :~)

I don’t use Apple products. I got an iPod Shuffle with my new guitar a couple of years ago and it was a black hole of time trying to get the thing to work right. The slowing effects of iTunes on my computer and the way it reached into my local music collection to determine what music to sell me when I connected was too much to bear. I got a Creative, which though flawed, enabled me to drag files without a clunky interface program and not indulge the Apple profit motives.

I don’t know what it is about that company. I can’t decide whether they are in the technology business, the fashion business or the music business. The gadgets are technology, but it’s far hipper to have them than anything else. Then there’s iTunes, sadly the largest online retailer of music. With all of the power and arrogance they enjoy with that position, I think avoiding them like a major record label would go a long way toward saving your soul from eternal damnation.

Here’s the latest thing…

Starting this week users can buy 8 million tracks on iTunes without DRM. (The copy protection headache that iPod users always bitch about.) By the end of the quarter, all of them will be DRM-free. It seems that now you’ll be able to do whatever you want with the music you buy from iTunes. DRM never really prevented people from doing anything they didn’t want to do, but I wondered how Apple would turn this into a revenue stream. No corporation does anything without thinking they can make a ton of money from it. The very next paragraph of the story I read answered me. I laughed out loud:

“The DRM-free music will be in the iTunes Plus format, which is a higher-quality 256 Kbps AAC encoding. Users have the option of upgrading their current library to the higher-quality, DRM-free format for 30 cents a song.”

Who in the iTunes community gives a leaping goddamn about high quality encoding?

This sounds very much like the scheme the major record labels employed when the CD came out. They claimed that CDs provided superior quality compared to cassettes and records (which they did), but they used that angle to re-sell their back catalog of recordings to the same people! It didn’t cost them anything but manufacturing. Perhaps recognizing some competition from Amazon and eMusic (who only encode at a measly 192kbps), iTunes is stepping up. But as always, there’s something more in it for them.

If we only buy independent music, we don’t have to buy from anyone but the artist or independent label. Every independent artist and label should have a direct download store on their website. I do. It’s really a beautiful thing.

I don’t buy anything from Apple. It makes me feel better about myself.

This image is definitely owned by Apple.