Some of you may know that I used to be the vocalist in a hardcore band. It’s improper to call me a lead singer or anything like that, because when you’re in a hardcore band, you don’t sing. You do vocals. A local newspaper called Westword once said that I sounded like Henry Rollins in the act of being disemboweled, if that provides any context for you. At the time, I was very thankful for this kind of coverage but looking back I’m not sure that that’s quite how I like to hear myself described.

Anyway, if you’re not familiar with the scene, it may be helpful to provide some context. Looking back at the history of music that involves distorted guitars, first you had rock ‘n’ roll, which eventually forked off into punk rock as one of the offshoots. Punk rock was fast, angry, and typically very politically driven. One of the other offshoots was metal. Metal was a little bit more theatrical. In my mind, I always associate punk rock with kids that can’t play their instruments and metal with those that can. They’re both angry, just in different ways. Hardcore sat almost exactly in the middle of both of those genres. Hardcore was born primarily out of the punk rock movement, but it had more of a moral character to it. It took the urgency of punk rock and instead of utilizing it to rebel against a political system, it always seemed to have some sort of a moral imperative driving the urgency of the music and the message.

Within the hardcore scene, there were several other sub genres. I won’t get into all of them now, but the particular one that I was fascinated with and ordered my life around was called straight edge. Straight edge was a movement that found its rebellion positioned against the use of mind- altering substances like alcohol or drugs. It eventually broke off into other types of morality-based messages that included the rejection of sex and embraced veganism and animal rights.

There was something that drew me to this hardcore movement. I can recall reflecting upon this with our guitarist one day. We were trying to figure out what it was that was so attractive about this particular genre of music. He popped off with.”You know what I like most about it, Max? It’s just so damn urgent.”And I think he hit the nail exactly on the head. There was an imperative behind everything that we did that drove us to express it musically with the most urgency and power that we could. It was kind of amazing. And it’s kind of funny how when we all grew up, we still maintained this type of urgent tone.

Anyway, we had a fairly large following in a city that was a good eight-hour drive away from us. We really enjoyed playing there because it made us feel like rock stars. So we would go there quite frequently and we knew a bunch of the kids that came to our shows. This city in particular had a huge straight edge scene, and had earned its name of being a very militant scene as well. In other words, these kids took their straight edge oath, seriously, and they saw themselves as some sort of morality police. I took issue with this sort of militancy, but it was a very big faction within the subculture.

One evening, we played a show there and we were headlining. The energy in the room was awesome. We were happy to be there and our fans were as well. We started playing. The crowd started moving. The mosh pit started forming. Our wall of sound kept pounding. We just let loose. The urgency was there. Maybe the urgency was too much though. Because about halfway through our set all of our equipment shut off.

The club killed the power to the stage.

The lights came on.

Next thing we know police officers started parting the crowd like the Red Sea and made a beeline for the stage, followed by paramedics with a stretcher.

Some kid was laying on the floor in front of the stage, bleeding. And guess why?

He got stabbed. Stabbed at our show. Right in front of us and we didn’t notice because we were performing.

That kid got stabbed because he was smoking a cigarette.

After he was taken to the ambulance, the club just turned off the lights and turned back on the power to the stage and we started playing again. This was the wrong move. This dehumanized that kid on the way to the hospital. And I knew it and it bothered me that we were more concerned with playing a show than we were with this young man.

So I stopped the show and started yelling at the crowd. “What the f**k were you thinking? What is wrong with you guys? You stab this kid because he was smoking a cigarette? What the f**k is wrong with you????”

I almost got my ass kicked that night.

I looked into the pit area and locked eyes with a guy. Then. another. Then another. Uh oh. These weren’t just hardcore kids or fans anymore, they were real people. People with the potential for either real compassion or people with the potential to start stabbing us too. Particularly me since I was the one calling it out. The room instantly polarized into two camps. Those who felt justified in stabbing this guy and those who were concerned with him. Looking back on this now over 30 years later I’m surprised a riot didn’t break out. It could’ve gotten really out of hand. People started yelling back and because I was the guy with the microphone I could yell the loudest. It also made me the easiest target.

By the grace of God, nobody pulled out any more weapons. I said my piece. They said theirs. Well, we didn’t say it exactly, we yelled it. The point is, we got to the point where we realized we couldn’t resolve anything at a club without violence and we all recognized that we had two choices. We could either just shut it down and go home or we could finish out the set. We finished out the set.

I don’t remember much about the eight hour drive home the next day. But I do know that it was somber.

I thought about that night many times throughout the course of my life. I’ve thought about our guitarists’ observation that hardcore music was just so damn urgent. I didn’t know what the difference was between the urgency that drove our music and the urgency that drove that kid to stab someone just for smoking a cigarette. I’ll never know what was going through his head and I’m not sure that I understand what was going through mine either back in those days.

With 30 years of reflection under my belt, I do know this. They weren’t too far off from each other. The feelings of urgency were the same. They were just pointed in different directions. One was pointed at a purpose and one was pointed at a moral code. One was an open hand and the other a fist clutching a knife.

I’m willing to bet that not a single person in that room that night still calls himself straight edge. We all grew up. But what was it that brought us there together that night anyway? For some of us, the urgency that hard-core provided was nebulous, but it came from some sort of yearning for freedom. It was open ended. For the other half of the room, straight edge was a box or a framework or a cage. It was a fixed ideology. And that kid smoking a cigarette was outside of the cage. Looking back now, I realized something. The cigarette smoking kid had the most freedom out of anybody in that entire room. He was expressing his freedom and standing on top of all the cages we had built for ourselves.

God bless you, man,

wherever you are now.

Peace to you,

Max

I was an early tech adopter. Back when PDA’s were a thing, I used to run an entire factory floor from one. I would spend a lot of time trying to optimize my workflow and thought it was amazing that I could do everything from a mobile device. Back in those days you had to use software that you installed from a CD-ROM to sync your offline mobile device to the Outlook servers. My mobile Excel file was pretty ding-dang impressive.

Until that one day.

The sync software wouldn’t sync. At all. I tried and tried to get it to work. Re-installed the software (again- from a CD-ROM!). An entire day’s worth of production data on some stupid-ass device that was stuck in an infinite loop. And even though there was no production data, there was still production happening. Production was producing alright- it kept cranking along with no direction while my infuriating spinner kept spinning.

I knew what I had to do. I was terrified. I had a lot of time and energy invested already. I had already scheduled the production floor. If I could. just. get. it.. off… the…. device. But the machines kept pounding. The production kept producing. The piles kept piling. The next shift was coming. I had to do it. I had to make the decision.

I had to go-

Analog.

I had gotten so used to a stylus that I forgot what an ink pen was. I may as well have been drawing on cave walls with pieces of charcoal. But the Good Lord was smiling on me that day, because the pen that I happened to pick up was a Pilot G2. 1.0 millimeter tip. Black ink. Transparent barrel. And yes, I was writing on a cheap yellow legal pad, but the workflow in my brain was now a deep black gel perfectly dispensed from the tip of that pen and flowing onto the fibrous yellow of that legal paper.

It was painstaking but I manually copied every job from that tiny little screen onto my legal pad. The factory was built for speed, and the operators were really good at driving at top speed, but if they were headed in the wrong direction, it would end in disaster. I had to point them in the right direction.

So now I had a legal pad full of job numbers and quantities and time broken down into 0.6 hour increments (in a production environment we measure time in tenths of an hour). But I was missing tape. I needed tape. Where the hell is the tape? “Hey man, do you have some tape? Sure, duct tape works.” Any port will do in a storm.

So now the whole night shift had their schedule posted on their production monitors on pages ripped from a legal pad with my chicken scratch handwriting, stuck there with duct tape. Duct tape. At least the G2 had a nice flow to it and the ink looked pretty damn good.

And you know what? No one cared. Not one person so much as blinked an eye. Because they didn’t care how the schedule was posted, they just needed something to point them in the right direction and they were off to the races.

How’s your software working for you these days? Where’s the infuriating spinning circle in your life? Chances are your smartphone has pissed you off at least once this week.

Take an inventory of your digital workflow. Find that one thing that just keeps happening and just keeps driving you crazy. Is there a way to take it analog?

Sometimes duct tape and a G2 is all you need.

Peace to you,

Max

“Why are you doing that? You can’t want it more than they do. Just stop already.”

My wife Jess asked me that question, and I had no answer.

Someone very close to me was going through a rough time. I was helping them through it in the best way I could; by offering my support and love and care and resources. On the phone with them, texting them, checking up on them, following up with them.

I was laying myself out there. I was a martyr for them.

Sounds great, right? Except for one huge blind spot that I wasn’t able to see until Jess smacked me in the face with my fake martyrdom:

This person couldn’t care less.

They were happy to take the help. Who wouldn’t be? The problem was they just consumed it. They didn’t do anything with it.

Jess forced me to come to the realization that I, Max Michieli, Helper Of All, was not in fact, helping this person.

I was enabling them.

Damn.

Hard truth exposed. Which, of course, means a pattern was exposed along with it. Which, of course, means I had to look back on my entire life and see where else this pattern showed up. Which, of course, was pretty much everywhere.

One time stands out to me, because it was the first time I ever fired anyone.

I had just been placed in charge of a department that was brand new to me. In the spirit of Being A Great Boss, I immediately implemented an “open door” policy. My new employees had direct access to me any time they wanted it. And they wanted it a lot.

One employee in particular took the opportunity to chat several times a day. These chats usually took the form of complaining. This person clearly had a lot of interpersonal issues and wanted to clear the air. All. The. Time.

I tried my best to listen. I tried my best to help. I tried my best to offer solutions. I gave fantastic advice. From little hacks, to systems improvements, to complete departmental overhauls. It took a lot of energy to keep this up.

Little by little, I realized that this person was not implementing anything I was suggesting. So I naturally started suggesting more stuff.

This didn’t work either. In fact, this employee seemed to get along worse with their coworkers the more I tried to help. Their performance on the job got worse too; they started missing simple things that they had been doing well for years. The systems didn’t improve either, they seemed to be running just as they had before. It got so bad I was forced to terminate their employment.

After they were gone, I went to their desk to prepare it for the next person. And that’s when I found them.

The stickies.

The bottom of this person’s keyboard was completely covered in sticky notes.

And on these stickies were all of the information they had been hoarding for the past fifteen years.

Things that should have been in the system but were intentionally kept for themselves.

I realized this person was trying to protect their job by making sure that no one else could do it without going through them first.

They intentionally made themselves the bottleneck. And fooled me for an entire year before I finally caught on.

Reflecting on this, Jess’s words rang in my ears: “Why are you doing that? You can’t want it more than they do. Just stop already.”

I wanted this person to change more than they did. They wanted to stay right where they were. And you know what? So did I. Because, by me thinking I was honoring their dignity, giving them advice, and basically carrying their burden, I was denying them the opportunity to carry it themselves. In a way, it was condescending. Because I set myself up to be their savior. But they didn’t need it, didn’t want it, and actively worked against it.

And by me trying to remove their bottleneck, I exposed the true bottleneck:

Me.

By jumping in where I shouldn’t, I made a fundamental error of leadership: erosion of trust. I was demonstrating lack of trust in this employee. A better way to handle it would have been to hold them accountable. This way they would have had an opportunity to earn trust, and vice-versa.

Now I had to ask myself the question: why did I do this?

This is a great question. The painful answer is: because I cared more about how I looked than doing the job right.

I did not want to write that last line. It is embarrassing to admit. But it is true.

Now, how in the world did I come to believe something so diabolical?

Because I did not know who I was.

Not for lack of trying. I was- and still am- trying to figure this out daily. But I was ignoring my Interior Life and felt justified in doing so, because I was so busy. And then externalizing this lack of self reflection and trying to cover it up by projecting the image I wanted the world to see.

I had to stop. So I did. Not overnight. Not even completely. But I slowly started paying attention to my Interior Life and making it a priority. I started treating it like coffee and just made it a part of my daily wake up ritual. Coffee and contemplation. It works for me.

Twenty five years later, it’s just a part of life now. Sometimes I forget to prioritize it. Strike that. Sometimes I choose to deprioritize it. But that always comes back to bite me. So I try not to do that. And it helps me remember who I am and where I should be going. I can trust the decisions I make and carry my own workload. Which means I recognize that others can do the same. That honors their dignity and reveals mine.

How about you? Are you carrying someone else’s obligations out of guilt, or pride, or some silly reason you still haven’t figured out yet? If so, I invite you to contemplation along with your coffee or tea or orange juice. Put their obligations aside and focus on carrying yours. Watch what happens. You just may see something in them- and you- that you have never seen before.

Peace to you,

Max

It was heavy.

It was inert.

It was dragged to Florence intended for a great statue, but the stone was difficult to manage. Two different sculptors tried to carve it, but they gave up and left it in a cathedral yard, exposed to the rain and wind for thirty-five years.

It was considered a ruined object.

Then, a 26-year-old named Michelangelo walked into the yard. He didn’t see an abandoned rock; he saw something else entirely. He picked up the tools he had forged with his own hands, and for two years he chipped away everything that wasn’t the statue. The young Michelangelo freed a man from the stone. He named him David. And when he finally stepped away, the world didn’t just see a piece of art.

They saw magnificence.

They saw that he had liberated a Subject from an Object.

Four hundred years later, another young man walked into a quarry. It was 1940, and Poland was under Nazi occupation.

This man wasn’t an artist; he was a laborer trying to avoid deportation. He spent his days swinging a sledgehammer in the freezing cold, splitting limestone. He watched the men around him – good men – get broken by the work. He saw how the crushing weight of the “output” threatened to turn them into objects, too.

He felt that the stones had the power to crush the sculptors.

In the dust of that quarry, a philosophy began to form in his mind. A philosophy founded in a six-thousand-year-old tradition, but revealed for a modern world that had invented new ways of oppression.

Forty years later, he shared that philosophy with the world.

The man was Karol Wojtyła.

The philosophy was called Laborem Exercens – “On Human Work.”

And he published it under his new name: Pope John Paul II.

In it, he wrote these words:

“Toil is something that is universally known, for it is universally experienced. It is familiar to those doing physical work under sometimes exceptionally laborious conditions. It is familiar not only to agricultural workers, who spend long days working the land, which sometimes ‘bears thorns and thistles’, but also to those who work in mines and quarries, to steel-workers at their blast-furnaces, to those who work in builders’ yards and in construction work, often in danger of injury or death.

It is likewise familiar to those at an intellectual workbench; to scientists; to those who bear the burden of grave responsibility for decisions that will have a vast impact on society. It is familiar to doctors and nurses, who spend days and nights at their patients’ bedside. It is familiar to women, who, sometimes without proper recognition on the part of society and even of their own families, bear the daily burden and responsibility for their homes and the upbringing of their children. It is familiar to all workers and, since work is a universal calling, it is familiar to everyone.

And yet, in spite of all this toil – perhaps, in a sense, because of it – work is a good thing for man. [...] It is not only good in the sense that it is useful or something to enjoy; it is also good as being something worthy, that is to say, something that corresponds to man’s dignity, that expresses this dignity and increases it. [...] Work is a good thing for man – a good thing for his humanity – because through work man not only transforms nature, adapting it to his own needs, but he also achieves fulfilment as a human being and indeed, in a sense, becomes ‘more a human being’.” (Pope John Paul II, Laborem Exercens [Encyclical Letter on Human Work] (Vatican City, September 14, 1981), sec. 9, https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_14091981_laborem-exercens.html.)

About twenty years later, I was in a men’s group and we studied Wojtyła’s work. That document changed the trajectory of my life. I was inspired. I knew I needed to somehow weave this philosophy into my daily life. Laborem Exercens was sitting in the back of my mind as I grew my career and stepped into fatherhood.

This was because Laborem Exercens gave me a vocabulary for something I felt intuitively but couldn’t articulate: the distinction between the objective and the subjective dimensions of work. Here’s what I came to understand:

The objective dimension refers to the output. It’s the technology, the tools, the capital, and the profit.

The subjective dimension is the internal reality. It’s the person doing the work.

Wojtyła’s central thesis was pretty simple: Work is for man, not man for work.

The world has historically rejected this premise. It became especially clear in the Industrial Revolution when machines started to blur the lines between the output and the person. We are not immune now, either. It seems we actually prefer to invert the proper order of work, because we jump at emails and text messages and flirt with 32 open apps and honestly think we are being productive. We brag about our “flexibility”. But our partners don’t care. They really don’t. They just get lonelier and lonelier and hope that we would just come to bed for once without them asking. We happily bought the lie, but deep down inside we know the nasty, dirty truth – we are just middle managers of our own digital existence. And we hate ourselves for it.

We have allowed the tools (the objective) to dominate the person (the subjective).

The stones in our quarries continue to crush us. No wonder we need therapy just to deal with work. Think Like a Director™ is what I created to help us avoid getting crushed.

Which begs the question: what does it mean to Think Like a Director?

Let’s start with society’s obsession with titles. We believe that a “Director” is more important than a “Manager” because of their rank in the hierarchy.

In the Think Like a Director framework, the term “Director” does not refer to a job title on a business card. It refers to the inherent state of the human person.

You are a Director because you possess an intellect and a will.

You are a Director because you were made to govern your faculties, not to be governed by your tools.

This dignity is inherent.

It isn’t earned by a promotion.

It can’t be lost if you lose your job.

It’s yours to keep.

It follows then that Directorship is not something to strive for. It is something to operate from.

The great lie of the modern workplace is that our work gives us value. We actually believe that if we produce enough, we will matter. We treat work as if it bestows dignity upon us.

This is backward.

Your dignity is already complete.

Therefore, work does not bestow dignity; it reveals it.

So now, we can understand work as an epiphany of the person. It’s a mechanism by which we make the internal reality of our personhood visible to the world.

That is a very abstract concept. It’s ethereal. But it’s worthwhile to unfold its meaning a bit, because it is the crux of a true understanding of what work should be. Because, believe it or not, work is an existential reality. So let’s ask ourselves some existential questions.

Have you ever felt that you had something to offer that no one will ever understand? Have you ever yearned to just be seen? That if the world just knew the real you that you wouldn’t have to pretend anymore? Wished that you could just be free?

That’s what we are talking about here. There’s something missing in our workplaces today. And that something is freedom. But we keep looking for freedom in the wrong places, because we think we can buy our way to freedom somehow, and that the currency we buy it with is our time, and effort, and sweat, and productivity, and output. We see freedom as a reward for hard work, so we work and work and work in the hopes that one day we can sit on a beach somewhere and drink drinks with little umbrellas in them. But that’s not the way freedom works. Freedom is free. And it is found entirely within your internal posture, which we will later call your Interior Life.

But, that doesn’t mean you get to stop working. What it really means is that, if you operate from a place of Interior Freedom, your work is the primary expression of your freedom.

Reliance on your inherent dignity isn’t an excuse for laziness, it’s precisely the opposite.

Because our dignity is inherent – and because we are the sculptors, and not the stone – we are compelled to create.

Output doesn’t equal dignity. Dignity necessitates output.

We become who we are by doing who we are.

Wojtyła’s philosophy of work changed my life. It’s rooted deeply in my faith. But early in my career, as I moved up the ranks in corporate operations, I faced a tension: How do I take this truth about human dignity and actually live it out on a manufacturing floor without proselytizing? How do I apply a theological framework in a secular environment that has its own set of values which may be different from mine?

I had to distill the theology into an operating system that the corporate world couldn’t reject, because the output was undeniable. Think Like a Director is the result. I didn’t build this framework because I am a philosopher – because I’m not one – and I didn’t build it from an ivory tower, because I don’t have one. I built it because I have a ton of work to do, a ton of kids to raise, relationships to nurture, and sanity to preserve.

Now, you don’t need to adopt ancient Roman Pagan theology to learn discipline from Marcus Aurelius. You also don’t need to adopt Roman Catholic theology to recognize the value of Wojtyła’s philosophy on human work. The dignity of the human person is inherent to everyone, no matter what your belief system is, simply by virtue of the fact that you are a human.

Think Like a Director is designed to rewire your mind around your own inherent dignity. It does this by providing a new approach to your day. This approach is built on the premise that work reveals your personhood.

It’s super simple. It may even seem too simple. That’s because the key to understanding your freedom isn’t to add a bunch more stuff onto your plate. It’s to strip things out until you are left with the essence of who you are. It’s liberating yourself from endless hacks and tips and tricks and keyboard shortcuts and templates and books to read and systems to implement. That stuff exists because it’s way easier to sell. But- you can’t buy freedom, because freedom is free. It can’t be monetized. You have to experience it. Which is more like jumping naked into a lake than going to the shopping mall.

You do this by subtraction, not multiplication. Yeah, you still have complexity in your life and work. The difference is that complexity is not where you start. You start with simplicity so you can clearly direct your time and attention. Then you go as deep as you need to, and as complex as the work requires. You take a deep breath before you jump in the deep end, so that you can swim further than you could before.

You don’t allow the stones in your Quarry the power to crush you before you even start the sculpture.

OK. How? How do you even start? Good question.

Here is the premise of this entire Field Manual. We will unpack each one of these things throughout the manual, but the flow goes like this:

* You’re a Director.

* So is everybody else.

* So, don’t treat yourself like a means to an end. Ever.

* Also, don’t treat anyone else like a means to an end. Ever.

* In philosophical terms, not treating a person as a means to an end is called The Personalist Norm. Keep that term in the forefront of your mind.

* Directorship doesn’t mean managing, it means directing.

* You direct your work and your life by embracing the Personalist Norm and setting a direction from there.

* This starts with your internal posture, which is governed by your Interior Life.

* Your Interior Life can be defined as a deliberate orientation of yourself towards Truth.

* You manifest your internal posture in the way you approach your day, and how you use the tools at your disposal to orient yourself and set a direction.

* You carve out time for silence and your Interior Life by subtracting things that don’t really matter.

* Embracing reflection and silence allows you to listen.

* Listening allows you to grow in your Interior Life and live into the Personalist Norm.

* Which in turn means you don’t treat yourself like a means to an end, or others like a means to an end, which means when others treat you like a means to an end, you know why they would do such a thing, which is either because they don’t understand the Personalist Norm or they choose to ignore it, which means either you have an opportunity to help them or the freedom to reject their attempts to control you, which means you have experienced a certain level of Interior Freedom, which means you now:

* Think Like a Director.

Then, once you have the mindset of the Director, you can do all the productivity stuff. All the complex inner workings of your job and family life, using as many software platforms as you need to and implementing as many hacks as you feel are necessary. But my hunch is that when you get into the right headspace, you won’t need hacks anymore, because you already hacked away at the biggest thing keeping you from being effective. Which is your belief that your work gave you value. You will know that your value drives your work.

You will have rejected the lie.

You’ll become who you are.

What do you say? Are you ready to start?

It is time to unveil your dignity.

It’s time to show up.

Fully alive.