Love What You Do!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© May 27, 2014

There is no true and more abiding happiness than the knowledge that one is free to go on doing, day by day, the best work one can do, in the kind one likes best, and that this work is absorbed by a steady market and thus supports one’s own life.  Perhaps freedom is reserved for the man who lives by his own work and in that work does what he wants to do.

R. G. Collingwood (1889-1943), English philosopher and historian

The most important marriage in life, and the one that so often is chosen more by accident than design, is one’s life work.  Yet, what one does one becomes.

Work provides identity as much as it provides a means of sustenance.  It can either be love made visible or the darkest kind of self-enslavement.

“Man must work,“ writes 19th century American clergyman Henry Giles,  “but he may work grudgingly or gratefully; he may work as a man, or as a machine.  There is no work so rude that he may not exalt it; no work so impassive that he may not breathe a soul into it; no work so dull that he may not enliven it.”

Eric Hoffer, the longshoreman turned philosopher, loved manual labor because monotonous routine gave him ample time to think.  He never worked without a small notebook in his pocket and a small pencil.  An idea would spring into his mind, and he would jot down a couple of words to expand on later in the comfort of a lunch break, the sun beating down on his brow and his happy hand dancing across the page.  This is how he came to write his stunningly successful The True Believer (1969), a book that caught the attention and fascination of CBS Nightly News commentator Eric Severide.

 Severide conducted a series of television interviews with Hoffer, resulting in the author becoming a national celebrity and financially secure writer.  Did he quit his day job of working on the dock?  Not on a bet.  He told a reporter, who found it remarkable that a man with no formal education could write so profoundly.

“I can do that,” Hoffer confessed, “because my work on the dock is so impersonal.  My mind is not taxed.  I have the passion and energy to learn.”  His work blessed him and he blessed his work with many of his books still in print.  He once wrote a piece for the Sunday Parade magazine in which he celebrated the glory of routine manual labor.

Hoffer, an immigrant, blind at six with his sight not restored until he was nineteen, discovered a love for the printed word, not in a classroom, but in the public library, a place accessible to everyone.  He looked for the largest book with the smallest print, he says, with no clear understanding what he had chosen.  It was a book of essays by the French essayist Michel de Montaigne (1533 – 1593).  He delighted in the taste of Montaigne’s words, his skeptical philosophy, and the rhythm of his mind.

This book opened his mind to view the world differently, not as he had, or thought he would prefer, but as he found it.  A reporter asked, “What is your system for generating ideas?”  Hoffer chuckled, having become used to others wanting a simple formula for him to explain his sudden fame.  He confessed politely that he had no system that his ideas came to him eclectically, like reading while standing on a corner surprised by some interesting author that might pass by.  We are all enriched today for the attention he gave that corner.

Not every worker is a writer, but every reader is a worker.  James Hillman, author of The Soul’s Code (1996), believes everyone without exception has a vocation.  We associate vocations with the religious, but Hillman insists we all have vocations.  It is in discovering and working on our vocation that we realize the true essence of our character, as well as our separate and unique individualism.

A person can be sullied, paradoxically, by too much or the wrong kind of formal education.  Novelist Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. noted his wife could have been a distinguished novelist but for having taken too many writing courses.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt once quipped to Interior Secretary Harold Ickes about Lyndon Johnson, then a twenty-eight-year-old congressman from Texas with a teacher college education, “You know, Harold, that’s the kind of uninhibited young pro I might have been as a young man if I hadn’t gone to Harvard.”   Johnson, of course, went on to become President of the United States in his own right.

It is so easy to put on hold what we would dream of becoming only to miss the rich experiences we have along the way.  So often a person looks back over a long life, and sees those wonderful times he had, but never appreciated, because he was too busy looking ahead.  More likely he saw those times as drudgery because they were things he had to do, not realizing they were making him into the person he would become.  Emerson writes:

There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better or worse as his portion; that though the wide universe if full of good, no kernel or nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.

The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.  Not for nothing one face, one character, one fact, makes much impression on him, and another none.  This sculpture in the memory is not without pre-established harmony.

The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify of that particular ray.  We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents.  It may be safely trusted as proportionate and of good issues, so it be faithfully imparted, but God will not have his work made manifest by cowards.

Each chip whittled off the shapeless granite of one’s being eventually produces a divine sculpture in the tradition of Michelangelo, as each seemingly insignificant job contributes to one’s ultimate character and completeness.  Emerson warns:

A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise shall give him no peace.  It is a deliverance which does not deliver.  In the attempt his genius deserts him; no muse befriends, no invention, no hope.

A person is what a person does, not eventually, but now.  Whatever the job, be it part-time to assist in financing oneself through college, or a second job to add necessary income to the family budget, if it is done in love, it will blossom in kind.  Conversely, if it is belittled as many part-time jobs are, it will scorch the soul and produce venom and contempt.

How others see one’s work is as visible as a framed picture.  A person came to me who was fired from a part-time job, a jewelry store in a shopping mall.  She claimed the job was a no-brainer.

“I worked my ass off for this moron and this is what I get for this” adding the ethnic slur, kike under her breath to describe the owner.

“That’s it?” I asked.

“What’s it?” she replied, confused.

“That term you just used that you didn’t think I heard.  That is why you got fired.”

Self-righteously, she waved her cigarette in the air as if it were holy incense, saying each word with measured distinction. “I never said that word once to a living soul in that place.”

“You didn’t have to, the owner sensed it, and that was enough.”

She folded her arms across her chest.  “Your attitude was showing just as much as that sweater you’re wearing shows off your figure.

“You insulted his dignity, and quite frankly, you deserved what you got.”

I would like to report she learned from this experience, but unhappily, she did not.  She has wandered through life like a tumbleweed blowing hither and yon while blaming the wind and everything else for her misfortune except herself.

Love and work are mutually inclusive.  Kahlil Gibran calls work “love made visible.”  Together, love and work embody a synchronicity that merge work and play into one.  Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak turned their love of gadgets into making video games.  They didn’t stop there.  They went on to set the world on its head by bringing out the personal computer, “Mac,” and creating Apple, Inc.

They taught us a lesson about ourselves in doing so.  They exposed the fact that companies can become mind-blinded just as readily as the individual can lock stepping to a debilitating routine.  Once a set formula freezes a company or individual in a frame, it is nearly impossible to grasp opportunities although they exist right under our feet.

This happened to Xerox.  The lab people at Xerox created essentially the computer that Apple, Inc. would eventually market.  Xerox engineers were unable to convince senior management that personal computer was a marketable idea.  Xerox has never fully recovered from this faux pas.

So often in this competitive world, where compare and compete psychology dominate, companies are blinded from fully appreciating their assets, which are not found in P&L statements, but in the ingenuity of their people.

They are imprisoned in the corporate cage of old beliefs and practices, old attitudes and procedures, taking comfort in the absurdity, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!  As author William L. Livingston IV notes in his book Friends in High Places (1990), such companies maintain a strategy of ready, fire, aim!

There is nothing plain or simple about a job or career.  Animosity, although thought concealed, sticks out like an ugly blemish on the skin, as was the case with the jewelry clerk.

Attitude is always in full view.  Without a word spoken, nonverbal indicators leave no doubt.  President Roosevelt spotted a comer in Lyndon Johnson, and he was proven right.

The mentor senses potential in the neophyte.  It could be something remembered of his own earlier self, or in the case of Roosevelt a melancholy regret.  It is alleged that President John Fitzgerald Kennedy once confessed that if he could change three things, it would be his parents, his religion and his wife.  History reveals Kennedy wasn’t much of a mentor, as he never could distance himself from these conflicting intimacies, compounding the problem surrounding himself with like-minded nepotistic thinkers.   

Mentoring isn’t the romantic ideal it is thought to be, but a projection of the doer's visualization of the unfinished novice in terms of the doer's own struggle. 

What the mentor sees in the tenderfoot is neither showing nor hidden, neither a false self nor a true one.  It is the mature perspective of a doer against the possibilities of an emerging one.  Reality is the work performed at the moment.  Promise is just that, promise.  What Roosevelt saw in the clumsy, crude, amoral and aggressive Lyndon Johnson was a side of himself he kept hidden from his gentrified roots.

A mentor perceives the folds of complexity, the topsy-turvy implications that are truth unexplored that the unfinished doesn't know exist.

We don’t know who we are until someone tells us.  That is the important role of the mentor.  No one gets to where they want to go, alone.  Everyone needs help.  But the help is often rejected because it is ill conceived or falsely perceived.  Either the would-be-mentor is too timid or too bold, too circumspect or too subtle in the offering of help.  It is not easy to be a mentor.  On the other hand, exposure is crucial to the neophyte.

The tenderfoot works to attract attention to himself where influence resides.  Lyndon Johnson’s “uninhibited” style got the attention of the patrician President Roosevelt and paved his way to becoming a legislator in the US Congress of some distinction.

There was this colleague of mine at university who had a passion for farming.  He came from an Iowa farm family of nine generations.  His father, seeing conglomerates swallowing up independent farms in the district, was determined to save his son from this humiliation by seeing that he became a professional man. To please his father, he studied hard, got fair if not impressive grades, but his heart was always in farming.

One night in a college bull session, I said, “Mark, farming is your father’s vocation.  You talk of farming like it was a hobby.  Don’t you see the difference?”  Meekly, apologetically, in a little boy’s voice although twenty, he said, “Why can’t it be both?”  Why not indeed?

My friend stayed in school and took a law degree.  I wonder how happily so.  Many, such as Bill Gates, Steven Jobs and Stephen Wozniak, turned the love of tinkering into a springboard to fabulous careers.  Jobs and Gates were college drop outs with the courage to pursue their avocation and turn them into vocations.  They did this as pioneers before the potential for the pc and software was known.  With tinkerers, serendipity is always in the air.

When International Business Machine offered Gates a contract loaded with constraints, he did not hesitate to sign.  “Big Blue,” however, failed to see the potential of this new technology.  So, IBM didn’t tie Gates down to licensing agreements.

Thanks to the IBM contract, Gates and his associates had the capital to create Microsoft, Inc., purchased the rights to what would become MSDOS and conceive Microsoft Windows.  The rest is history.  Like Xerox, IBM was blindsided by its failure to visualize cutting edge technology on the horizon.

One’s avocation can indeed become one’s vocation if one is not limited by facts.  Eric Hoffer writes:

The war on the present is usually a war on facts.  Facts are the toys of men who live and die at leisure.  They who are engrossed in the rapid realization of an extravagant hope tend to view facts as something base and unclean.  Facts are counterrevolutionary.

People, then, who pursue their avocation as vocation are rebels with a cause, a cause perhaps not too clear in their minds, but a cause certainly not blinded by fear or facts.

Think how the personal computer left giant IBM in the dust, a dust that has not yet settled, as “Big Blue” is still struggling to match the pace of the Steve Jobs and Bill Gates of the world.

IBM, as with General Motors, was obsessed with facts: balance sheets; P&L statements; stock prices; customer preference.  IBM failed to see the future in the personal computer.  GM failed to see the future in the compact car until Europe, South Korea and South East Asia came to dominate that market

GM is still in love with the SUB and large trucks that increasingly resemble military tanks.  Consider this in the face of escalating crude oil prices.  These block-like gas guzzling cars and trucks still roll off the assembly line despite the current price of crude oil well over $100 a barrel.

Nor has GM made much of a concession in its car design to the narrow streets of Europe and Asia.  Surveys show Americans prefer “big” machines even as the American marketplace for “big” continues to shrink.  Facts.

It is facts that blind and confine, but not for rebels.  The giants are in a reactionary mode; the rebels in attack mode.  Young Davids are striking down Goliaths nearly every day.  And why?  They are not locked in to a system where departure from the norm is locked out.  

No longer is the knee jerk reaction justified, “I have to make a living.”  Nor is it necessary to pretend that the marriage of love and work are not negotiable.  Anyone can have a love affair with what they do.  All it takes is the courage to make pertinent choices.  There is little excuse for taking a job because the benefits are too good to pass up.

Corporate welfare is shrinking and will continue to do so.  Entitlements, which have never been tied to performance, are a luxury companies can no longer afford.  Nor is there much point in basing what you do on what other people think.  Even if their opinions are important to you, they don’t have to take residence in your head.

Save your energy, and in the process save your mind as well.  In terms of the job market, you have literally landed in paradise.  Never has there been greater diversity, mobility, opportunity and flexibility in the job market than now.

Often people tell me they hate their jobs.  When asked what they would prefer to do, they confess they have no idea.

An unexamined life is not worth living.

When people tell me, they can’t wait to retire, I ask them what they plan to do in retirement.  They invariably answer with the inanity, “I plan to travel.”  You can only travel so much.  So I ask, when you get traveling out of your system, what then?  They look at me with a puzzled expression.  It is clear they haven’t thought about that.  Then to stir the pot a little more, I ask, “What have you dreamed of doing if you only had the chance?”  It would seem they are even afraid to dream.

Someone asked my wife one day, “How do you feel about Jim sitting around reading and writing all day? Doesn’t that get on your nerves?”  My beautiful Betty replied, “I would prefer that to having him sit in front of television all day drinking beer and eating chips.”

As a personal aside, I retired the first time at 35 after completing an executive assignment for a chemical company in South Africa.  I had seen apartheid up close and personal, executive corruption and malfeasance, and the insensitivity of my religion to a changing world, and decided to take a “time out.”  I never gave a thought to whether I could afford it or not.  I knew it was what I had to do.

With a wife and four young children to support, and modest savings, I did little else for two years than read books, write and publish one (Confident Selling 1971), along with several articles for newspapers and magazines.

When I was nearly broke, I went back to school full time, year around for six years to earn my master’s and doctor’s degrees in social, industrial and organizational psychology, keeping the family together at an uncertain socioeconomic level by consulting on the side.

This economic departure from affluence to mere subsistence was a shock to the family, especially my eldest son who was not yet a teenager.  His resentment was carried into his mature years, but it did not stop him from earning a six-figure income doing what he has always loved to do and done best, the playing and teaching of tennis.  The others, less resentful, managed to find their way as well, but not all, however, doing what they loved.

I share this personal aside, knowing some will flinch when attempting to fathom the audacity of my conduct.   Not only has it worked for me, but I believe it can work for others.  I express this belief in my writing, which is cut from the same cloth as my empirical experience, or counter intuitive to conventional thinking.  .

One should feel no guilt for doing and being what makes one happy and productive.  It is a way of staying out of the cage of convention where misery is the common complaint.

Two things are required:

You are not afraid to be free or to love what you do, not afraid to enjoy work as if it were play.

You have the will and courage to make appropriate choices, not on the basis of what others consider "right choices" for you, but choices consistent with the content of your character and talent.

Before you can please others you must first please yourself.  Unfortunately, we are not programmed to seek self-contentment, yet that is the way we function best.  Too often we unwittingly assume the role of the victim and take residence in our cage, then blame others for the confinement.

Self-regard comes with the currency of joy, not with the bankruptcy of resentment.

It is much easier to be miserable at work resenting the company for not providing the desired satisfaction than to realize you are the company.  If you don’t feel you are the company, you are in the wrong company.  The company and job are blameless.

In point of fact, you are never going to have the independence, control, flexibility or potential earning power working for someone else.  There is a limit to what a company can provide.

That said if you are in school, stay in school, and get your degree.  The pay gap between college graduates and everyone else reached a record high in 2013 based on the analysis of Labor Department Statistics by the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, DC.  Americans with four-year college degrees made on average, 98 percent more an hour in 2013 than people without a degree.  Although a college education can cost as much as $500,000, without a college degree will cost a person about $500,000 in lost earnings.  So, from a zero sum perspective, college is relatively free to the holder of the degree. 

On the other hand, despite all the hype to the contrary, most companies do a fair and equitable job paying for performance in what has been a fifteen year disappointing economic climate with rising inequality among those with and without college degrees.  For my younger readers, the decision not to attend college for fear it's a bad deal is an economically irrational decision given these statistics. 

Employers typically get a bad rap for not hiring, not investing, not expanding.  Start a business and be an employer for a short while, and you will understand how difficult it is to stay in business, and what a crap shoot it can be reading the economic tea leaves wrong.

A company can only do so much for its workers. A more important job is for workers to invest in themselves, which increases their capabilities to ride the economic roller coaster that the economy can sometimes prove to be.  Companies no longer have the wherewithal to assume the role of surrogate parent to workers that they did during the booming period (1950-1980).  Entitlements and union contracts put them in a corporate cage of which they still have not escaped.

A company today must stay lean and mean or it goes into bankruptcy.  A prudent company recognizes the pivotal change in the distribution of power and control and deals with it proactively.  The irony is that this costs companies far less than huge entitlements did in the past.  Knowledge workers want to contribute, but too often their brainpower is ignored and they revert to passive behaviors.  If will and power are an individual affair, so are dreams.

Several years ago, I was having dinner in Amsterdam with my European executive colleagues.  The conversation got around to our “dream job.”  There were five of us, all in comfortable economic circumstances with solid educations in technology, but not one of us in our dream job.

One wanted to be a farmer, even though he had never farmed in his life, another wanted to be a large newspaper editor, yet had never published an article, a third wanted to be a radio personality but had no media experience, a fourth wanted to be a general, but had never been in the military, and then there was me, who wanted to be a writer.

Before joining this company, I had had one book published and a score of articles in trade journals.  While with this company, I had written more than a dozen monographs, and was working on a book, which would become WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS (1991). 

What we dream is often as incredulous to our conscious mind as those obsessed with retirement, and thinking only of “traveling.”  Dreams rarely materialize into real experience, but they can become preoccupations.  As such, they encounter no risks or pain, no failure or disappointment, nor do they require any preparation or engagement.  In my case, I was working the problem treating my work as a laboratory for my writing.  For me, dreaming was the other side of reality.

Dreamers can confuse need with want, as need touches the soul and want only the appetite.  Need and want are worlds apart.  We need an automobile for transportation but we want a $150,000 golden buggy.  As basic as this is, many confuse the two.

If you could imagine work as an expression of happiness, everything else might look quite differently.  Happiness husbands our energy, which is always spiraling down.  German philosopher Martin Heidegger puts it plainly: As soon as you are born, you are old enough to die. 

Imagine the freedom this realization provides.  You appreciate every moment.  You have no time for being petty, vengeful, or self-pitying.  You are open to all possibilities.

You don’t wait for circumstances to be just right, you take charge!  You invest in the future by doing what is fulfilling in the present.  You realize life is short, and failure is life’s greatest teacher.  Failure is a wake-up call to the sleepwalker who marvels, once awake, that he is on the threshold of success.

Abraham Lincoln had so many failures that books are devoted exclusively to them.  Something within, however, kept him on task.  He didn’t let his lack of formal education hinder him; his failure in business; his failure to be elected to the US Senate, his failure to keep the nation whole once elected president leading to the Civil War, his failure to keep his favorite son alive, and his failure in marriage to provide his family with a sanctuary of tranquility. 

He however persevered.  When his generals failed him; when members of his cabinet talked derisively behind his back, when his wife became a yoke around his neck, when the war was going badly, he kept true to his role demands.  He was forgiving and understanding and had no time to carry a grudge.  Yet, he was a melancholy man subject to fits of depression.  Perfection is not parent to a cause, but its child.  He understood this and kept to his appointed task of healing the nation.

Power and will as Schopenhauer has shown is confrontational, conflicting, and contradicting.  Lincoln, despite his mild manner, had a despotic will.  He took command on the battlefield when his generals postured but failed to engage the enemy.  He relieved popular General George Brinton McClellan of his command and gave it to a reputed drunk, General Ulysses S. Grant.  He knew Grant was a soldier with a will to victory often at any cost, which was kindred to his spirit.    

Power and will defy convention and the expected and go against the grain of established practices.  You cannot read of Lincoln’s presidency without appreciating his constant thinking outside the box, or the magnitude of draconian measures taken to assure final and absolute victory, demonstrated in General Ulysses S. Grant's bloody campaign and General William Tecumseh Sherman's “March to the Sea.”

Without Lincoln's hard choices as president, we would not be the nation we are today.  Hard choices rise out of the will to power in the crucible of confrontation, conflict and contradiction, having little to do with harmony's way.

Choices define us.  It can be no other way.  We cannot be namby-pamby about our choices, and expect our will to prevail. Nor can we be all things to others and expect to be true to ourselves.  We cannot worry about how decisions will rest with others if they are not right with us.  Choices may be conflicting with others, but that is all right as long as they are not conflicting with who, what and where we are.

Find love in some kind of work and you will find love in life.  What could be more compelling and a greater reward?

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