[ju2tin]

I didn't like it. Rowe has a disingenuously self-deprecating speaking style, where he says again and again how much he "got wrong", but the subtext is how smart he is for realizing certain things that the rest of us supposedly haven't. And his big insight is that for every Steve Jobs, we need a bunch of workers to actually build the iPods? Wow, golly.

I also hate the verbal tic he demonstrates, which is becoming depressingly common, of saying "right" after every few sentences in a story. For example: "I was working on a crab boat, right? And this big wave comes over the side, right?" Etc. It's a lazy way of trying to psychologically condition the audience into agreeing with you without actually doing the hard rhetorical work of convincing them. Drives me nuts.

[jamesbritt]

Wow. I'm almost done watching iti right now, and didn't catch him saying 'right?' at all; maybe it happens in the earlier part, but in the last few minutes, none at all. If he's saying it, I hardly think it's meant as some subtle pysch trick.

Nor did I get the feeling that his claims of being wrong was in any way disingenuous. At worst it's a ploy to structure his talk.

Every TED talk works off the assumption that the speaker has some insight worth sharing with the audience, presumably non-obvious or non-trivial realizations, so of course he's going to try say something worth thinking about. There's nothing subtext about it; it's the whole point of being on stage.

My takeaway was not simply "for every Steve Jobs, we need a bunch of workers to actually build the iPods", but that there are a lot of seemingly oddball jobs done by happy people who did not bother to "follow their bliss", that conventional wisdom on what work might make you happy or how work should be approached might very well be wrong, and that plain old labor should not be looked down on.

[ju2tin]

I thought the notion that plain old labor can be a more fulfilling path than following your dreams was a tacked-on message designed to help him wrap up his talk. But in fact, it's a naive, perhaps even willfully misleading suggestion.

The examples Rowe used to back up this idea were unlikely mavericks who managed to turn undesirable or unremarkable jobs into fantastically successful businesses. Those people are just as rare, if not more so, as those who find success by "following their dreams".

Ordinary workers aren't millionaire entrepreneurs; they're janitors, or sewer workers, or Foxconn assembly line drones. Yet that's what "real work" looks like. And I notice Rowe isn't quitting his job as a TV show personality in favor of joining the road crews who "whistle while they work."

The best thing I can say about Rowe is that he ranks up there with Malcolm Gladwell in his ability to throw around a bunch of unrelated contentions and anecdotes and pretend to tie them all together with a facile and unsubstantiated thesis.

[alex_c]

>The best thing I can say about Rowe is that he ranks up there with Malcolm Gladwell in his ability to throw around a bunch of unrelated contentions and anecdotes and pretend to tie them all together with a facile and unsubstantiated thesis.

I think that's unfair to Rowe. He seems quite genuinely to believe two things:

1) The manual and/or menial labor required to keep society working is unfairly maligned, and this can become a problem if no one is willing to do it because it's not respected,

and

2) During his show he has met people who are perfectly happy doing these jobs, so it IS entirely possible to be happy doing them.

I agree that the message felt a bit tacked on in that talk, but it is genuine. He seems to be dedicating himself to spreading that message (see http://www.mikeroweworks.com/) - I think he tried to pick the most interesting examples he could find for this talk, which turned out to be atypical, but most of the people he meets on his show are far from millionaire entrepreneurs.

I say it's unfair to Rowe because Malcolm Gladwell's theses are more pop science for entertainment. I don't think Rowe ever claims any kind of scientific method or results - he is more campaigning for his beliefs and trying to cause what he sees as necessary change in society.

[decode]

In his video interview for Reddit, I thought Rowe came across as exceedingly genuine and self-aware of his position as actor and television personality, rather than worker. He also expounds on the things he has to say in the TED talk in a way that made me think the "lesson" was not just tacked on, but rather something he has spent a lot of time thinking about.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxudGb4VYL0

[symptic]

What Rowe is saying is that without those people, you wouldn't have the freedom to "follow your passion." I don't see why you're so critical of what he's saying.

Manual labor is rewarding. It may not scale, but my guess is you'll feel a lot better internally when you finish building that shed than when you create a feature for your web app. He is celebrating our capacity to more or less 'suck it up' in order to get a task accomplished, and the sort of character that builds in oneself.

How does this translate to something you may be working on? There are tasks with running a business that you may not particularly enjoy, but it's your job to just get it done.

Respect hose who do the work that you don't want to. Embrace then, because they have a bigger impact in your life than you seen to acknowledge.

[targz]

While I find Rowe perfectly charming and don't agree that he's disingenuous about anything in the talk I do agree in general about people being indulgent with the "right" question appended at the end of every statement. I've noticed this in many forms ("right", "yeah", "eh", "okay", etc...) for years and have basically the same analysis of it, that it conditions for agreement and is a cheap tactic, even if the speaker is relatively unconscious of it. There must be a term for it in linguistics. Going to look it up.