DIY, Breaking Bad and the American Dream

a book to make your caper real

I’ve been watching Breaking Bad with my adolescent son. A poor parenting choice, some might say, but I think of it as a useful morality play. I watched the whole series years ago with my husband, and what impressed me most was the chain of events - everything that ensued from each small decision. I saw it as an opera about the wages of dishonesty, the toll of actions taken by one who feels self-righteous, and the inevitable complications of doing business with people more dangerous than yourself.

But now that I see it again, I realize it’s actually a DIY show!

Walter - hard at work!

Walter White - the protagonist, for those unfamiliar - is the Everyman Nobody. Smart, but a career failure compared to his high-flying academic peers. Living in the American Middle Class Everyhouse, son with medical needs, baby on the way and - in the pilot episode -a late-stage cancer diagnosis that threatens to kill him and/or bankrupt the family. He is truly the prisoner of circumstance, until…

He comes up with a GREAT solution that will allow him to make loads of money - tax free! - AND be his own boss.

From that decision onward, his superior brain power is put to MacGyver-ing everything from compounding crystal meth, to outsmarting sociopathic drug lords, to making a car battery from nuts and bolts and nickels and dimes. Moreover, he DIY’s his own career, yanking himself up by his bootstraps in true old-school American fashion: “started out as the mail boy and now, by gum, I’m the CEO!” that sort of thing.

Great acting: absolutely. Great writing: beyond a doubt. But I now suspect that what truly kept viewers coming back was the desire to see just how old Walt would bubblegum and duct-tape his way out of the next jam.

Sure, Walt became less and less likable, but throughout he remained the epitome of the self-made man. And at no point did he ask for permission or wait for someone to tell him what to do.

The Challenge of Being Your Own Boss

When you make a plan for yourself - something ambitious that pushes the boundaries of what you have so far been capable of achieving - you will quickly reach a point where you realize how very arbitrary it all is. You are, after all, just making it up. No one has told you what to do or provided instructions. Sure, there might be a specific skill set to learn, or an exercise routine to practice, but no one is forcing you to make it happen.

Where’s the boss?

Drill Sargent: the boss in its pure form

Some people employ coaches - they hire their own bosses. But even in that case, well, you are still the one writing the checks. A coach can provide support and encouragement, sometimes training (and you may need that), but it’s still just your idea. A musician friend of mine was once asked, “Is that a real song, or just something you made up?” Is that a real book you are writing? Are you a chef or just someone who cooks? The metric for “pro” is generally the question of whether you are earning money for what you do. The trick is to get to that point in the first place.

The boss is you. You do the research, you (where appropriate) consult the experts, you make the plan. But then… there’s the employee, the one that actually does the work. And this can get a bit tricky, because that’s you as well.

I’m very good at being my own boss - but I suck at being my own employee. I’m constantly questioning the boss’s judgement, often going off script, writing my own rules on the fly. And quitting. The boss is “just me”, after all.

The Work Book

To mitigate the arbitrary nature of “being your own boss”, boss and employee need a formal platform on which to meet and communicate. Something that they both can look at, together, agree upon and commit to. This platform is a book - the boss writes and structures it, the employee consults it and uses it to record and track their progress.

It begins with a mission statement - a clear expression of what the boss wishes to achieve. This can be adjusted when and if necessary. Next is the boss’s outline of the basic steps necessary to achieve the goal - these can also be adjusted and expanded upon as you proceed, but try to be as thorough as you can to get started.

Then the employee writes the steps down on multi-colored post it notes, and makes a portable kanban board (which I will explain in more detail in another article.)

The mundane miracle of stationary…

Finally, the boss gives the employee a set of shiny little star-shaped stickers - the type that you might have earned for doing well on a 2nd grade spelling test - and the employee uses them to record a tally of each small task completed. I suppose you could simply make check marks for this, but if you grew up in the US (elsewhere too, perhaps?) you have been pre-conditioned to equate star stickers with success, and (as they say in the business world) you can leverage that.

This may all seem like an elaborate pantomime, but point is to materialize - on paper - what would otherwise just be in your head. And, through this, formalize the roles and expectations of boss and employee, and create a record of performance and achievements. I recommend a salary as well, as it will lend a sense of legitimacy to the caper. Figure out what you can afford to pay yourself ($10 a week will do just nicely to start) and write yourself a check, and cash it - then go buy yourself a little something nice!

I imagine Walter White didn’t actually use kanban boards and star stickers - but that was, after all, fiction.