Purpose Without Dogma: The Architecture of Agility
The instructor was Ken Preiser. To call Ken merely a career counselor—his primary title at the college—would be to willfully ignore the multidimensional reality of the man.
Ken was an early blueprint for the modern Renaissance worker.
He was a glassblower who manipulated molten sand into art. He was an outdoorsman and conservationist who studied the survival rates of hatchery trout. And he was a photographer who not only taught the craft but actively parlayed it into an income stream, pitching his compositions to corporate clients.
He also had taught himself blacksmithing skills and used them at the former Living History Program at the old French Fort now known as The Skä•noñh – Great Law of Peace Center.
But on this particular night, he was a teacher armed with a prop. Ken asked each student to come to the front of the room, observe the boot, and then discuss what they saw.
We analyzed the scuffed leather, the frayed laces, the deep creases born of hard labor. We talked about composition, light, and the preservation of gritty reality.
When the exercise concluded, Ken revealed the punchline: taped to the sole of the boot was a crisp five-dollar bill.
He had planned to give it to the first student who possessed the curiosity to actually pick the boot up and look underneath. Not a single one of us had done it.
We had observed the object, but we had failed to see its entirety.I took that photography class for the pure enjoyment of it, drawn to the art of capturing history and nature through deliberate design.
We had failed to investigate the unseen links.
But looking back, that boot was a particularly insightful career counseling session I ever attended.
Ken was demonstrating the absolute necessity of seeing all sides of our world—a survival skill for an economic reality that rarely advertises its hidden traps or its hidden value.
The photography lesson was simple: true composition requires you to investigate a subject from angles that others ignore. But Ken was seamlessly linking art with economic survival.
He was showing us that finding the right angle for a photograph requires the exact same scrutiny as projecting career roles or understanding the brutal reality of the job market.
You have to look underneath the boot.
This was the true lesson of Ken's five-dollar boot, and in a way, it became the foundational philosophy of my career.
When we sit across the desk from a young student—or when we stand outside the locked gates of a closed factory—we cannot just look at the surface. We need to face the harsh reality of today’s economy.
We should recognize the grit that keeps people moving and show them how to pivot when their old way of working disappears.
Years later, I found myself sitting on Ken’s side of the desk, working as a career advisor at Florida International University (FIU).
I spent my days sitting across from bright young men and women from Miami's vibrant Cuban community.
Their goal was nearly universal: earn the degree, but stay local.
Keep the family nucleus intact. It was a beautiful, culturally ingrained desire, one often validated by well-meaning professors who preferred the romanticism of the hometown over the brutal math of the market.
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| (Old boot with job stats pasted on sole metaphor.) |
But my job was to flip the boot over.
The local economy, no matter how culturally rich, rarely has the elasticity to absorb every hometown graduate over a lifetime. I had to look them in the eye and slide the occupational projections across the desk.
I had to advise them that expecting the unexpected—that markets will tank and corporations will relocate—is the baseline of survival. To thrive, they needed to expand their map.
Before I left FIU, we attempted to build this exploratory mindset into the very architecture of the university’s career website.
At the time, most of the internet was a garbled filing cabinet of static information. I had been studying web design and noticed the brilliant efficacy of the "Harry Potter model"—websites that asked you to immediately identify with a house or a character, linking external data directly to internal identity.
We engineered the FIU site to do just that, weaving course majors together with personality traits and resilience markers.
We wanted to provoke organic, self-directed curiosity.We were trying to build an 'open system.' We wanted to get rid of the 'need to know' culture and make sure all our information and tools were out in the open for everyone.
I understood the students' reluctance to enter that open system intimately.
When the massive Solvay Process soda ash plant closed in my hometown of Syracuse, my instinct was identical to the students in Miami: How do I stay comfortable in my favored city?
But the economic engine had cooled. The factory gates were locked.
To build a sustainable livelihood, I had to learn agility.
I had to leave the geographic comfort zone and synthesize the seemingly obsolete skills of my past to meet the demands of a new era.
I survived because I had learned from Ken Preiser how to strip the useful parts from an environment and leave the limiting dogma behind.
Ken taught me this not just through his polymathic hobbies, but through a specific warning.
He once told me about a colleague—a Catholic priest who had worked in the OCC counseling department.
Ken observed how this counselor’s rigid religious views often impinged upon the very openness and self-exploration the students desperately needed.
The priest operated a "closed system," filtering a student's potential through a narrow theological lens rather than exploring their natural curiosity.
I think of Ken's warning often, particularly when observing the socio-economic experiments attempting to revive the modern Rust Belt.
A 2026 piece in The New Yorker highlighted the College of St. Joseph the Worker in Steubenville, Ohio. In a town devastated by the loss of the steel mills, this institution is attempting a localized resurrection.
They are trading tuition for student labor, putting chop saws and hammers in the hands of young people to renovate abandoned downtown buildings.
There is a fantastic, undeniable appeal to this.
Look at it through the lens of psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of "Flow"—the deep, psychological satisfaction of being entirely absorbed in a challenging task.
Academia has long ignored the blue-collar dignity found in the geometry of a perfectly cut board or the quiet hum of a plumb line.
These young people are escaping the digital void and finding true Flow in the physical world.
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| (Illustration image of Flow state related elements/characteristics.) |
But there is a dangerous sleight of hand at play in Steubenville. It is a closed system.
It attempts to solve modern economic decay by retreating into pre-modern ideology, marrying the building trades to a deeply traditionalist Catholic theology.From a career development perspective, tying your economic survival to a closed, dogmatic institution—particularly one reeling from a historical trail of ethical bankruptcies—is a big risk.
Closed systems, like Ken’s priest colleague, demand adherence and restrict outside information.
You cannot train a workforce for the unpredictable, globalized realities of the 21st century by building an ideological wall around them.
When the wall inevitably crumbles, or the local market dries up, the worker is left stranded, lacking the tools to adapt.
If staying in a religious bubble isn't the answer, how do we support blue-collar workers who just want to learn a craft? We have to find a way to celebrate their skills without tying those skills to a religious agenda.
We can look back to Ernest Solvay himself—the very man whose chemical process built the plant in my hometown.
Faced with the massive societal fallout of the industrial revolution, Solvay did not build religious enclaves to insulate his workers.
He utilized a concept called "social energetism." He applied neutral, scientific rigor to societal problems, funding institutes of sociology and physiology.
Solvay’s approach mirrors a study Ken Preiser co-authored with the local Trout Unlimited group. Local hatcheries had a tradition of releasing hatchery trout early in the season.
But Ken and his team looked at the data and realized the March waters were still too cold; the hatchery trout were dying.
They advocated for a later release date, adapting to the environmental reality rather than blindly following tradition.
Solvay did the same with human capital. He believed human labor was an energy to be optimized rationally, adapting to reality for the benefit of everyone.
This was an early version of how we think about Human Resources today. He argued that workers are the most important part of the production line—not just tools to be used up.
By using hard data and science, he showed that respecting a worker's contribution was the only way to build a sustainable future. He didn't just want to make goods; he wanted to make sure the people making them were valued fairly. He built an open system.
This methodology highlights Solvay's preference for the scientific method over theological or political dogma.
While contemporaries often viewed social reform through a moral or religious lens, Solvay approached it as "Social Physics," treating social friction and poverty as energy waste to be engineered out of the system.
Rather than building religious enclaves, he funded institutes of sociology and physiology to prioritize neutral, empirical inquiry.
It was a stark contrast to the "closed systems" of his era, which filtered human potential through narrow theological constraints.
To survive today, the modern worker must internalize that open system. Instead of relying on a church, a corporation, or an ideology to hand down a lifelong purpose, a worker must cultivate their own internal compass.
Here, the principles of the New Thought movement, championed by philosophers like Ernest Holmes, offer a vital resource.
Holmes taught that the individual's directed consciousness—not an external authority—is the primary engine of reality.
True empowerment comes from self-determination.
The survivors of this economy are the Linkatarians. They are the ones who walk into a room, look at the battered old work boot on the table, and have the relentless curiosity to turn it over.
They take the valuable pieces from everyone they meet—the practicality of the counselor, the flow of the chop saw, the science of the environment, the art of the photograph—and forge their own path.
The ultimate duty of an educator, a community leader, or a society is not to herd people into an ideological safe space. It is to equip them with the unvarnished data, a respect for scientific reality, and the organic curiosity to pilot their own vessels in open water.
Sources & Further Reading:
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. 1990.
Green, Emma. "Saving a Lost Generation of Young Men—with Chop Saws." The New Yorker, April 17, 2026.
Priest, Kenneth, and Iroquois Chapter of Trout Unlimited. An Analysis of Early Spring Hatchery Trout Releases and Their Impact on Wild Trout Populations in Onondaga County. Unpublished report, Trout Unlimited, circa 1995.
Solvay, Ernest. Social Energetism.