TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Charles Murray comments on Ayn Rand:

That’s a heroic vision of a blue-collar worker doing his job. There are many others. Critics often accuse Rand of portraying a few geniuses as the only people worth valuing. That’s not what I took away from her. I saw her celebrating people who did their work well and condemning people who settled for less, in great endeavors or small; celebrating those who took responsibility for their lives, and condemning those who did not. That sounded right to me in 1960 and still sounds right in 2010.

That’s what I love about Rand’s novels. The Fountainhead was the first time in my life I read someone who saw work as not only something positive, but something to be passionate about and celebrated. Until that point, every book I read or movie I watched portrayed work as a necessary but painful and hated part of life that we do to allow us to do what we love–leisure.

Rand rejected this. In her novels, work does not need to be separate from what we enjoy doing. Rather, work should be something we are proud of and pour our lives into, because we are creating or doing something beneficial. That is profoundly important on an individual level. This idea is very freeing–work does not need to be a lifetime of suffering, but can be a driver of our own happiness and well being. We no longer have decades of boring, monotonous, meaningless work, but decades of creating something meaningful and doing our absolute best work. A lifetime of contribution.

This is important for how society functions, too. If a society’s dominant conception of work is that it is suffering and only a means of receiving money, then people will approach it as such. They won’t choose careers that they find personally meaningful and interesting, and they won’t do their absolute best work. They’ll choose the most “lucrative” career and they will do the minimum level of work to receive their pay, so they can maximize time doing what they actually like doing (which we’ve been convinced is “leisure”–e.g., doing nothing). The result is a lack of creativity (because people aren’t choosing careers they actually love), and a culture of mediocrity (because people have no personal investment in their work).

Worse, because people only look at work as a means of being paid, they will look at others who have greater success than them with anger and jealousy. Those who are more successful than them are competitors with them for the limited amount of pay available, and they are getting more than them. This mindset justifies getting ahead of the more successful (or potentially more successful) by any means necessary. Sabotaging others and office politics spring from this.

But if your work is your passion, and you take pride in it, then other people’s success isn’t a threat to you nor something to be jealous of. It’s an inspiration, because they are someone who–like you–cares a lot about what they are doing, and they have seen success as a result. This makes for a society where people engage each other positively and by their successes, rather than through anger and jealousy.

That’s what I loved about Rand’s novels. They gave a glimpse of a world based on a celebration of success and work, where people engage each other through their successes. That is a world much more healthy, respectful and inspirational than the one we live in.