Management and Politics
Understanding Congress, Episode 13, August 2, 2021
What do you think is most on my mind when I walk into a classroom ?
That’s right, very good. What the hell are we doing ?
The low-attention-spanned among us will think I don’t believe in the classroom, that the classroom is bunk.
No, I don’t think that. I think that American culture is at war with the good a classroom can do, if it’s respected as a classroom. The classroom is for facilitating deep work, so the students can level-up, can deepen their understanding of reality and can help make the world a better place, a little bit better than they found it. That’s a big job, and it REQUIRES deep work. Deep work is not optional. It’s a requirement.
Earlier this year, I suggested that understanding Congress might be an important goal for you in 2024. Do you recall that short essay ?
If not, scroll back to January and find it.
Take a look at it, then come back to this.
Or, right now, make a mental note to take a look after reading this short essay.1
In that short essay , I mentioned a podcast called Understanding Congress, put out by AEI.
As you know, Congress employs, or “employs” college students. What does Congress teach college students who work there ?
It teaches them that Deep Work is impossible, and worse, that it’s unimportant. That’s due simply to management decisions in the staffing and working conditions for Congressional offices. Those conditions are described in the 13th episode published on 2 August 2021.
Now, think about this for a short moment with me.
Why would we want to teach college students that about the kind of work that Congress does ?
The answer to the above question is, we don’t.
Why is it that way ?
The answer is simple — you never demanded it to be any other way. And your neighbor didn’t, either. And so on.
It could be changed tomorrow at 9 am , but it won’t. Because you didn’t even know about it, or worse, didn’t care.
The world is screwed up, but it doesn’t have to be. It does take a tiny bit of an attention span to notice the little things that make a big difference and quite a bit of deep work, with good mentoring, to know what to do about it in order to make the world a better place, a little bit better than we found it.
Congressional offices handle some of the most sensitive matters ever proposed from one man to another. It says yes to the overwhelm, and yes again, but it could say no , let’s think more carefully about this, make sure we aren’t making a mistake. But Congress is attuned to what you’re going to complain about. And you won’t complain about it. So things will go on as hectically, from a management perspective, as they were before, and things will get worse and worse. Overwhelmed people don’t do good, careful work. They miss basic things, and those mistakes compound on top of one another until something so bad happens you can’t undo it.
You could make me a liar by writing a handwritten letter to your representative asking him or her to take Cal Newport’s management advice seriously for their own staff, his advice in his wonderful book Deep Work.
You’d have to read the book , first, yourself before doing so with any integrity.
These are the kinds of things that make a difference. There is no other way. It’s slow, painful, and requires an attention span.
Have a nice day,
Luke, for Trp
If one doesn’t have the tiny bit of discipline to do that tiny task, why bother reading the rest of this short essay? Such an one is probably not going to be one of the few who make the world a better place, a little better than we found it—that usually takes a bit more than a tiny bit of discipline.