by Dr. James L Miles | March 16, 2022
How creative are your problem solving skills? Thanks for indulging me but I couldn't resist sharing a tiny bit of the story about Jack Simon, the 28year old gentleman who moved into this cubicle at work, for four days, when his apartment lease was up, due to the high cost of rent in Seattle Washington.
If you search, "the man who moved into his cubicle', multiple stories about Jack Simon will come up. Yes, I laughed, was shocked, and challenged learning about this story. Most importantly from a Resilience Village perspective, I wondered about Mr. Simon’s multidimensional problem solving skills. One dimension appears to be absolutely brilliant (I’ll explain in a moment). Other dimensions appear to be in need of refinement.
First the brilliant. Mr. Simon was mainly discovered living in his cubicle at work because he posted videos on TikTok. If he had not posted the evidence of his “Homing from Work”, as I believe he called it, who knows how long he could have lived in his cubicle before being discovered. What’s brilliant about this…he assessed a very unique situation and carved out a temporary solution, for his purposes. An additional observation is that Mr. Simon used his attention grabbing ‘solution’ to promote his side hustle (making and selling adult rompers). The whole time his move into the cubicle was drawing attention, he was also gaining exposure for his adult romper business. In some of the videos, you can see him prominently modeling the rompers while projecting a message claiming ones authentic freedom of expression and right to be “me”!
Now here's the room for strategy refinement. Mr. Simon clearly chose a risky, very volatile solution to his cost of living ‘crisis’. It is completely unreasonable to expect an employer to accept or endorse employees moving into standard cubicle based work spaces. I would not consider this a way to negotiate for a pay increase or any other corporate benefit for that matter. Then, of course, I’m not Mr. Simon either 😊!
For those of us who watched the Buzzfeed video I invite us to be be slow to criticize while we are quicker to see how we can be part of the solution. No, I’m not advocating for raising funds to send to Mr. Simon. I am, however, suggesting two things. First we can learn from how Mr. Simon is expressing himself and the many messages he seems to be packing into his media attention. A message about living wages, self-determination, and the adult romper side hustle…can’t overlook that part. Second, what can we do to better prepare our young people to exercise agency in industrious, collectively beneficial ways? Another way to say this, how can we be part of the solution and more than commentators on the problem? So now you ask, what is Resilient Village doing?
The Resilient Village Youth Leadership program was designed to do three primary things:
1) Teach social-emotional coherence to youth supported by scientifically validated stress reduction, self-regulating techniques;
2) Invite the youth to use their self-regulating skills while identifying an enterprising activity they can design and launch that creates beneficial change within the community they live or attend school;
3) Create their own definition of positive personal agency, influence, and citizenship.
This program is designed to be a year long and launched within existing youth serving organizations. The Resilient Village team is exploring a private metaverse application of this youth leadership program that would be open to youth who recruit three to four friends interested in participating in the program with them. More on this version of our Resilient Leaders Youth program in 2023. We’re even hearing some adults suggesting we create an adult version of this youth leadership development experience.
I think we can learn from Mr. Jack Simon and I'm sure Mr. Simon would learn a few things from us. Personally, the romper thing is a bit beyond my personal style consciousness…at least for right now LOL!
Share some of your more creative problem solving memories!