1.4 Orbiting the Giant Hairball.  

Two Miniscule Coffee Stains on a Stone Coaster as Viewed Through My Microscope, filtered.

We are talking about, thinking about, and settings goals regarding work in our life, our life’s work. So far, we have mused about calling, enforcing, intersecting, and now, orbiting. 

In the ’90s, someone loaned me a copy of Orbiting the Giant Hairball by Gordon MacKenzie and said: YOU should read this.* And I didn’t, for three months. And then I did. I read it AND I looked at the pictures. Since then, I have been through numerous copies which I have often shared with others. It’s like a doctor’s prescription for dealing with systems and bureaucracies in life and at work. In summary, it suggests that organizations are like hairballs. They start with one simple strand, and slowly over time, the strands multiply. They then become giant hairballs of such size that they have their own gravitational pull, like planets. The art of working with hairballs is to learn how to orbit. You have to stay close enough to the hairball planet to reap its benefits — not too close to get sucked in, yet far enough away to avoid spinning off into space. 

A giant hairball is dangerous. But we need giant hairballs. The individual needs the collective. The entrepreneur needs the bureaucratic corporation. Hairballs are both a horror and a help. 

These entities are all around us, unavoidable. Examples are schools, governments, hospitals, employers, phone companies, churches, internet providers, etcetera. (It is ironic that this is being written on Coronation Day.) They all have their own vortexes. But we need the gravity of something bigger than ourselves. 

I fear that some people have given up on their calling, their work, because they had an experience of being pulled down by gravity, leading to a crash landing. Or conversely, they have found a sweet spot to orbit in, and never make the slight adjustment of the 2% principle of gradualism that gently takes them out of orbit to new galaxies. There is a wisdom in learning how to orbit, and a deeper wisdom in seeing the window of opportunity, when it manifests itself, to chart a new course, outside of orbit. 

Said Coaster.

*That copy of Orbiting came from Kathleen G. When I moved to Stratford, I met a guy, Mark D, who had read it. I thought, 'Stratford is going to be an interesting place.'