Welcome to the newest incarnation of The Gumption Blog. I figure since I’ve been personally attached to this particular word for so long (I registered the domain in 1995), I should probably post something about what “gumption” means to me.
A quote from Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance where I originally became interested in the word:
I like the word “gumption” because it’s so homely and so forlorn and so out of style it looks as if it needs a friend and isn’t likely to reject anyone who comes along. It’s an old Scottish word, once used a lot by pioneers, but which, like “kin,” seems to have all but dropped out of use. I like it also because it describes exactly what happens to someone who connects with Quality. He gets filled with gumption.
The Greeks called it enthousiasmos, the root of “enthusiasm,” which means literally “filled with theos,” or God, or Quality. [...]
A person filled with gumption doesn’t sit around dissipating and stewing about things. He’s at the front of the train of his own awareness, watching to see what’s up the track and meeting it when it comes. That’s gumption.
I’ve got lots more to say about gumption, but that’s a good starting point.
I recently left my job as a Software Architect at a large health insurance company mainly because it was draining all my gumption. Not just gumption for my job, but my entire life’s gumption was being sucked away. For years I had been trying to work on my own hobby software projects, but night after night and weekend after weekend, I just couldn’t bring myself to work on them. The lack of Quality in my day job drained any enthusiasm I had for the rest of my life.
That’s why my wife decided that I needed to leave. So, we tightened our budget, payed off most of our debts, and I quit on March 9th, 2007. I don’t think I’ve been able to stop smiling since.
I had been planning on re-launching my blog on March 12th so that my friends and ex-coworkers could see what I was up to, but I found myself plagued with too much gumption. That is, I’ve spent most of my time actually coding! Every time I’d remember that I needed to blog about what I was doing, I’d be in the middle of some new functionality and just couldn’t bring myself to stop and install wordpress. So, to everyone I had promised this blog to, I apologize for the delay.
And don’t give me a hard time about the default wordpress look and feel. It’s on my list! Today I had wordpress gumption. CSS gumption is a whole other ballgame 
For those of you that have been patiently hitting gumption.com and getting 404 after 404, here’s the project I’ve been working on to learn the awesome pythonic web-application framework, django (don’t worry, much more on that in future posts).
Essentially, it’s an online catalog of my music collection. Yes, I know it’s plain. Remember, CSS gumption?
Tags: gumption
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Thomas,
Let me be the first to add my voice to the gumption blog!
Your first entry stuck a chord with me, and I am utterly confident that you understand where I am coming from. I think that there are many of us that can (sadly) relate to the draining of our precious bodily gumption on a daily basis. Heeding the mind numbing battle cry of More Work, Make Less begins to take it’s mental, physical, and spiritual toll after a period of time.
I refuse to be a disposable asset.
The real question is one of terminal velocity. That is to say, the key to real success is understanding when you have reached the point in your career at which the laws of corporate physics will prevent you from moving any faster. I know that speed is different for all of us but you know intuitively when you reach it. I am close. Keeping track of your progress has helped to push me ever so much closer.
For that I owe you a debt of gratitude.
Daryl
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Hello!
Very Interesting post! Thank you for such interesting resource!
PS: Sorry for my bad english, I’v just started to learn this language
See you!
Your, Raiul Baztepo -
Yes I remember gumption from my readings and rereadings of “Zen”. Refocused on this word last week. A guy in the management development program where I work focused on the leadership competency “passion for XXX” (not material where I work, but Pirsig wrote some user manuals for that company a long long time ago).
He was puzzled about the topic and we discussed freely and we concluded that being passionate about something requires you to understand it and connect with it regularly. I can be passionate for golf but not for curling, so to say. We concluded that “passion” in this sense actually would better translate to gumption, as when you like your work you can be passionate about it and you get more energy out of it than you put into it (and as you’re passionate you put lots of energy into it anyway!).
For managers it becomes interesting as a competency as the challenge is to fill your employees with passion for the business. Then Pirsig comes back to help us out with all the gumption traps & how to avoid them….
Surely I am preferring the carrot over the stick.Has anybody been working on this college material on gumption that Pirsig envisioned? Is this the right platform to blog on encountered gumption traps and how you worked them?
Here is a start: whether you’re an employee or a manager, we all get our challenges in our daily work. We need to cope with them to keep either our bosses or customers happy. But they are gumption absorbers. If you did what they ask you, you “just” did what was requested (and they will let you know that they didn’t expect anything less).
Try putting 70% only in this and reserve the other 30% for the topics that you put for yourself as your ambition in the business you’re in. You will get something done, satisfy yourself, get gumption out of it and most likely your bosses or customers will be happily surprised and praise you for your productivity…. It’s all a win-win…Happy to receive feedback on these thoughts.
Cheers, Jaap.
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