There are a few videos that I watch once a year, for inspiration and insight. One of them is a TED talk by Mike Rowe. The title is Learning from Dirty Jobs, but I always think of it as ‘that talk about how maybe safety is actually Job Three’.
Anyway, I got my yearly reminder for it today, and in light of recent events surrounding the COVID-19 virus, it seemed like a good time to share it.
It’s a great talk, and I encourage you to watch the whole thing, but if you’re short on time, here are the relevant highlights.
- At about 13:00, he asks: ‘What if OSHA got it all wrong? What if it’s actually safety third?’ And he goes on to discuss something we were already forgetting long before COVID arrived on the scene: that valuing safety is very different than obsessing over it. The latter turns on its head everything we’ve learned about how to live. It’s a lesson that a lot of people need to learn just now.
- At about 15:15, he says: ‘We’ve declared war on work, as a society.’ Again, he’s discussing the pre-COVID world, but when you listen to what he says in the context of how various jobs have been declared essential or non-essential, it becomes clear that many of our present political and economic troubles are just a case of chickens coming home to roost.
- At about 6:45, he cites Aristotle’s definition of a tragedy: ‘That moment when a hero comes face to face with his true identity.’ Now, I’m not suggesting that His Excellency is a hero, in any but the dramatic sense of that word. But I think that what we’ve been witnessing for the last several months is exactly that: Chris Sununu finding out who he really is — which, unfortunately for the rest of us, is a Soviet-style autocrat who, by his own admission, values absolutely nothing more than his own safety and electability.
Anyway, watch the whole talk. He crams a lot of important ideas into his allotted twenty minutes. Then set up a reminder, in your digital or paper calendar, to watch it again in a year.
