From: Eugen Leitl (eugen@leitl.org)
Date: Thu Jan 02 2003 - 12:08:53 MST
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 02 Jan 2003 21:16:18 +0530
From: Udhay Shankar N <udhay@pobox.com>
Reply-To: silklist@lists.vipul.net
To: silklist@lists.vipul.net
Subject: [silk] What Should I Do With My Life?
It takes courage, in these cynical times, for a non-politician / non-whacko
(pardon the tautology) to use the phrase "moral imperative" while talking
about anything. I respect Po Bronson's eye for the mood of the times. A lot
of this article also resonates.
So, what do *you* want to Do With Your Life?
Udhay
http://www.fastcompany.com/online/66/mylife.html
What Should I Do With My Life?
The real meaning of success -- and how to find it
by Po Bronson
photographs by Michael Grecco
from FC issue 66, page 69
It's time to define the new era. Our faith has been shaken. We've lost
confidence in our leaders and in our institutions. Our beliefs have been
tested. We've discredited the notion that the Internet would change
everything ( and the stock market would buy us an exit strategy from the
grind ). Our expectations have been dashed. We've abandoned the idea that
work should be a 24-hour-a-day rush and that careers should be a wild
adventure. Yet we're still holding on.
We're seduced by the idea that picking up the pieces and simply tweaking
the formula will get the party started again. In spite of our best thinking
and most searing experience, our ideas about growth and success are mired
in a boom-bust mentality. Just as LBOs gave way to IPOs, the market is
primed for the next engine of wealth creation. Just as we traded in the
pinstripes and monster bonuses of the Wall Street era for T-shirts and a
piece of the action during the startup revolution, we're waiting to latch
on to the new trappings of success. ( I understand the inclination. I've
surfed from one boom to the next for most of my working life -- from my
early days as a bond trader to my most recent career as a writer tracking
the migration of my generation from Wall Street to Silicon Valley. )
There's a way out. Instead of focusing on what's next, let's get back to
what's first. The previous era of business was defined by the question,
Where's the opportunity? I'm convinced that business success in the future
starts with the question, What should I do with my life? Yes, that's right.
The most obvious and universal question on our plates as human beings is
the most urgent and pragmatic approach to sustainable success in our
organizations. People don't succeed by migrating to a "hot" industry ( one
word: dotcom ) or by adopting a particular career-guiding mantra ( remember
"horizontal careers"? ). They thrive by focusing on the question of who
they really are -- and connecting that to work that they truly love ( and,
in so doing, unleashing a productive and creative power that they never
imagined ). Companies don't grow because they represent a particular sector
or adopt the latest management approach. They win because they engage the
hearts and minds of individuals who are dedicated to answering that life
question.
This is not a new idea. But it may be the most powerfully pressing one ever
to be disrespected by the corporate world. There are far too many smart,
educated, talented people operating at quarter speed, unsure of their place
in the world, contributing far too little to the productive engine of
modern civilization. There are far too many people who look like they have
their act together but have yet to make an impact. You know who you are. It
comes down to a simple gut check: You either love what you do or you don't.
Period.
Those who are lit by that passion are the object of envy among their peers
and the subject of intense curiosity. They are the source of good ideas.
They make the extra effort. They demonstrate the commitment. They are the
ones who, day by day, will rescue this drifting ship. And they will be
rewarded. With money, sure, and responsibility, undoubtedly. But with
something even better too: the kind of satisfaction that comes with knowing
your place in the world. We are sitting on a huge potential boom in
productivity -- if we could just get the square pegs out of the round holes.
Of course, addressing the question, What should I do with my life? isn't
just a productivity issue: It's a moral imperative. It's how we hold
ourselves accountable to the opportunity we're given. Most of us are
blessed with the ultimate privilege: We get to be true to our individual
nature. Our economy is so vast that we don't have to grind it out forever
at jobs we hate. For the most part, we get to choose. That choice isn't
about a career search so much as an identity quest. Asking The Question
aspires to end the conflict between who you are and what you do. There is
nothing more brave than filtering out the chatter that tells you to be
someone you're not. There is nothing more genuine than breaking away from
the chorus to learn the sound of your own voice. Asking The Question is
nothing short of an act of courage: It requires a level of commitment and
clarity that is almost foreign to our working lives.
During the past two years, I have listened to the life stories of more than
900 people who have dared to be honest with themselves. Of those, I chose
70 to spend considerable time with in order to learn how they did it.
Complete strangers opened their lives and their homes to me. I slept on
their couches. We went running together. They cried in my arms. We traded
secrets. I met their families. I went to one's wedding. I witnessed many
critical turning points.
These are ordinary people. People of all ages, classes, and professions --
from a catfish farmer in Mississippi to a toxic-waste inspector in the oil
fields of Texas, from a police officer in East Los Angeles to a long-haul
trucker in Pennsylvania, from a financier in Hong Kong to a minister at a
church on the Oregon coast. These people don't have any resources or
character traits that give them an edge in pursuing their dream. Some have
succeeded; many have not. Only two have what accountants call "financial
independence." Only two are so smart that they would succeed at anything
they chose ( though having more choices makes answering The Question that
much harder ). Only one, to me, is saintly. They're just people who faced
up to it, armed with only their weaknesses, equipped with only their fears.
What I learned from them was far more powerful than what I had expected or
assumed. The first assumption to get busted was the notion that certain
jobs are inherently cool and that others are uncool. That was a big shift
for me. Throughout the 1990s, my basic philosophy was this: Work=Boring,
but Work+Speed+Risk=Cool. Speed and risk transformed the experience into
something so stimulating, so exciting, so intense, that we began to believe
that those qualities defined "good work." Now, betrayed by the reality of
economic uncertainty and global instability, we're casting about for what
really matters when it comes to work.
On my journey, I met people in bureaucratic organizations and bland
industries who were absolutely committed to their work. That commitment
sustained them through slow stretches and setbacks. They never watched the
clock, never dreaded Mondays, never worried about the years passing by.
They didn't wonder where they belonged in life. They were phenomenally
productive and confident in their value. In places unusual and unexpected,
they had found their calling, and those callings were as idiosyncratic as
each individual.
And this is where the second big insight came in: Your calling isn't
something you inherently "know," some kind of destiny. Far from it. Almost
all of the people I interviewed found their calling after great difficulty.
They had made mistakes before getting it right. For instance, the catfish
farmer used to be an investment banker, the truck driver had been an
entertainment lawyer, a chef had been an academic, and the police officer
was a Harvard MBA. Everyone discovered latent talents that weren't in their
skill sets at age 25.
Most of us don't get epiphanies. We only get a whisper -- a faint urge.
That's it. That's the call. It's up to you to do the work of discovery, to
connect it to an answer. Of course, there's never a single right answer. At
some point, it feels right enough that you choose, and the energy formerly
spent casting about is now devoted to making your choice fruitful.
This lesson in late, hard-fought discovery is good news. What it means is
that today's confused can be tomorrow's dedicated. The current difficult
climate serves as a form of reckoning. The tougher the times, the more
clarity you gain about the difference between what really matters and what
you only pretend to care about. The funny thing is that most people have
good instincts about where they belong but make poor choices and waste
productive years on the wrong work. Why we do this cuts to the heart of the
question, What should I do with my life? These wrong turns hinge on a small
number of basic assumptions that have ruled our working lives, career
choices, and ambitions for the better part of two decades. I found hardly
any consistencies in how the people I interviewed discovered what they love
to do -- the human soul resists taxonomy -- except when it came to four
misconceptions ( about money, smarts, place, and attitude ) that have
calcified into hobbling fears. These are stumbling blocks that we need to
uproot before we can find our way to where we really belong.
MONEY Doesn't Fund Dreams
Shouldn't I make money first -- to fund my dream? The notion that there's
an order to your working life is an almost classic assumption: Pay your
dues, and then tend to your dream. I expected to find numerous examples of
the truth of this path. But I didn't find any.
Sure, I found tons of rich guys who were now giving a lot away to charity
or who had bought an island. I found plenty of people who had found
something meaningful and original to do after making their money. But
that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the garden-variety
fantasy: Put your calling in a lockbox, go out and make a ton of money, and
then come back to the lockbox to pick up your calling where you left it.
It turns out that having the financial independence to walk away rarely
triggers people to do just that. The reality is, making money is such hard
work that it changes you. It takes twice as long as anyone plans for. It
requires more sacrifices than anyone expects. You become so emotionally
invested in that world -- and psychologically adapted to it -- that you
don't really want to ditch it.
I met many people who had left the money behind. But having "enough" didn't
trigger the change. It had to get personal: Something had to happen such as
divorce, the death of a parent, or the recognition that the long hours were
hurting one's children. ( One man, Don Linn, left investment banking after
he came home from a business trip and his two-year-old son didn't recognize
him. )
The ruling assumption is that money is the shortest route to freedom.
Absurdly, that strategy is cast as the "practical approach." But in truth,
the opposite is true. The shortest route to the good life involves building
the confidence that you can live happily within your means ( whatever the
means provided by the choices that are truly acceptable to you turn out to
be ). It's scary to imagine living on less. But embracing your dreams is
surprisingly liberating. Instilled with a sense of purpose, your spending
habits naturally reorganize, because you discover that you need less.
This is an extremely threatening conclusion. It suggests that the vast
majority of us aren't just putting our dreams on ice -- we're killing them.
Joe Olchefske almost lost his forever. Joe started out in life with an
interest in government. In the early 1980s, he made what seemed like a
minor compromise: When he graduated from Harvard's Kennedy School of
Government, he went into public finance. He wouldn't work in government,
he'd work with government.
Joe went on to run Piper Jaffray in Seattle. By the mid-1990s, he realized
that one little compromise had defined his life. "I didn't want to be a
high-priced midwife," he said. "I wanted to be a mother. It was never my
deal. It was my clients' deal. They were taking the risk. They were
building hospitals and bridges and freeways, not me. I envied them for that."
One night, riding up the elevator of his apartment building, Joe met newly
hired Seattle schools superintendent John Stanford. Soon after, Stanford
offered Olchefske a job as his CFO -- and partner in turning the troubled
school system around. Olchefske accepted. Stanford rallied the city around
school reform and earned the nickname Prophet of Hope. Meanwhile, Olchefske
slashed millions from the budget and bloodlessly fired principals, never
allowing his passions to interfere with his decisions. People called him
Prophet of Doom.
Then Stanford died suddenly of leukemia. It was one of the great crises in
the city's history. Who could fill this void? Certainly not the
green-eyeshade CFO. But Stanford's death transformed Olchefske. It broke
him open, and he discovered in himself a new ability to connect with people
emotionally, not just rationally. As the new superintendent, he draws on
that gift more than on his private-sector skills. He puts up with a lot of
bureaucrap, but he says that avoiding crap shouldn't be the objective in
finding the right work. The right question is, How can I find something
that moves my heart, so that the inevitable crap storm is bearable?
SMARTS Can't Answer The Question
If the lockbox fantasy is a universal and eternal stumbling block when it
comes to answering The Question, the idea that smarts and intensity are the
essential building blocks of success and satisfaction is a product of the
past decade. A set of twin misconceptions took root during the celebration
of risk and speed that was the 90s startup revolution. The first is the
idea that a smart, motivated individual with a great idea can accomplish
anything. The corollary is that work should be fun, a thrill ride full of
constant challenge and change.
Those assumptions are getting people into trouble. So what if your destiny
doesn't stalk you like a lion? Can you think your way to the answer? That's
what Lori Gottlieb thought. She considered her years as a rising television
executive in Hollywood to be a big mistake. She became successful but felt
like a fraud. So she quit and gave herself three years to analyze which
profession would engage her brain the most. She literally attacked the
question. She dug out her diaries from childhood. She took classes in
photography and figure drawing. She interviewed others who had left
Hollywood. She broke down every job by skill set and laid that over a grid
of her innate talents. She filled out every exercise in What Color Is Your
Parachute?
Eventually, she arrived at the following logic: Her big brain loved
puzzles. Who solves puzzles? Doctors solve health puzzles. Therefore,
become a doctor. She enrolled in premed classes at Pepperdine. Her
med-school applications were so persuasive that every school wanted her.
And then -- can you see where this is headed? -- Lori dropped out of
Stanford Medical School after only two and a half months. Why? She realized
that she didn't like hanging around sick people all day.
The point is, being smarter doesn't make answering The Question easier.
Using the brain to solve this problem usually only leads to answers that
make the brain happy and jobs that provide what I call "brain candy."
Intense mental stimulation. But it's just that: candy. A synthetic
substitute for other types of gratification that can be ultimately more
rewarding and enduring. As the cop in East L.A. said of his years in
management at Rockwell, "It was like cheap wood that burns too fast."
I struggled with this myself, but not until I had listened to hundreds of
others did the pattern make itself shockingly clear. What am I good at? is
the wrong starting point. People who attempt to deduce an answer usually
end up mistaking intensity for passion. To the heart, they are vastly
different. Intensity comes across as a pale busyness, while passion is
meaningful and fulfilling. A simple test: Is your choice something that
will stimulate you for a year or something that you can be passionate about
for 10 years?
This test is tougher than it seems on paper. In the past decade, the work
world has become a battleground for the struggle between the boring and the
stimulating. The emphasis on intensity has seeped into our value system. We
still cling to the idea that work should not only be challenging and
meaningful -- but also invigorating and entertaining. But really, work
should be like life: sometimes fun, sometimes moving, often frustrating,
and defined by meaningful events. Those who have found their place don't
talk about how exciting and challenging and stimulating their work is.
Their language invokes a different troika: meaningful, significant,
fulfilling. And they rarely ever talk about work without weaving in their
personal history.
PLACE Defines You
Every industry has a culture. And every culture is driven by a value
system. In Hollywood, where praise is given too easily and thus has been
devalued, the only honest metric is box-office receipts. So box-office
receipts are all-important. In Washington, DC, some very powerful
politicians are paid middling salaries, so power and money are not equal.
Power is measured by the size of your staff and by how many people you can
influence. In police work, you learn to be suspicious of ordinary people
driving cars and walking down the street.
One of the most common mistakes is not recognizing how these value systems
will shape you. People think that they can insulate themselves, that
they're different. They're not. The relevant question in looking at a job
is not What will I do? but Who will I become? What belief system will you
adopt, and what will take on heightened importance in your life? Because
once you're rooted in a particular system -- whether it's medicine, New
York City, Microsoft, or a startup -- it's often agonizingly difficult to
unravel yourself from its values, practices, and rewards. Your money is
good anywhere, but respect and status are only a local currency. They get
heavily discounted when taken elsewhere. If you're successful at the wrong
thing, the mix of praise and opportunity can lock you in forever.
Don Linn, the investment banker who took over the catfish farm in
Mississippi, learned this lesson the hard way. After years as a star at
PaineWebber and First Boston, he dropped out when he could no longer bring
himself to push deals on his clients that he knew wouldn't work. His life
change smacked of foolish originality: 5.5 million catfish on 1,500 water
acres. His first day, he had to clip the wings of a flock of geese. Covered
in goose shit and blood, he wondered what he had gotten himself into. But
he figured it out and grew his business into a $16 million operation with
five side businesses. More important, the work reset his moral compass. In
farming, success doesn't come at another farmer's expense. You learn to
cooperate, sharing processing plants, feed mills, and pesticide-flying
services.
Like Don, you'll be a lot happier if you aren't fighting the value system
around you. Find one that enforces a set of beliefs that you can really get
behind. There's a powerful transformative effect when you surround yourself
with like-minded people. Peer pressure is a great thing when it helps you
accomplish your goals instead of distracting you from them.
Carl Kurlander wrote the movie St. Elmo's Fire when he was 24. For years
afterward, he lived in Beverly Hills. He wanted to move back to Pittsburgh,
where he grew up, to write books, but he was always stopped by the doubt,
Would it really make any difference to write from Pittsburgh instead of
from Beverly Hills? His books went unwritten. Last year, when a looming
Hollywood writers' strike coincided with a job opening in the
creative-writing department at Pitt, he finally summoned the courage to
move. He says that being in academia is like "bathing in altruism." Under
its influence, he wrote his first book, a biography of the comic Louie
Anderson.
ATTITUDE Is the Biggest Obstacle
Environment matters, but in the end, when it comes to tackling the
question, What should I do with my life? it really is all in your head. The
first psychological stumbling block that keeps people from finding
themselves is that they feel guilty for simply taking the quest seriously.
They think that it's a self-indulgent privilege of the educated upper
class. Working-class people manage to be happy without trying to "find
themselves," or so the myth goes.
But I found that just about anybody can find this question important. It's
not just for free agents, knowledge workers, and serial entrepreneurs. I
met many working-class people who found this question essential. They might
have fewer choices, but they still care. Take Bart Handford. He went from
working the graveyard shift at a Kimberley-Clark baby-wipes plant in
Arkansas to running the Department of Agriculture's rural-development
program. He didn't do this by just pulling up his bootstraps. His
breakthrough came when his car was hit by a train, and he spent six months
in bed exploring The Question.
Probably the most debilitating obstacle to taking on The Question is the
fear that making a choice is a one-way ride, that starting down a path
means closing a door forever.
"Keeping your doors open" is a trap. It's an excuse to stay uninvolved. I
call the people who have the hardest time closing doors Phi Beta Slackers.
They hop between esteemed grad schools, fat corporate gigs, and prestigious
fellowships, looking as if they have their act together but still feeling
like observers, feeling as if they haven't come close to living up to their
potential.
Leela de Souza almost got lost in that trap. At age 15, Leela knew exactly
what she wanted to be when she grew up: a dancer. She pursued that dream,
supplementing her meager dancer's pay with work as a runway model. But she
soon began to feel that she had left her intellect behind. So, in her early
twenties, with several good years left on her legs, she took the SATs and
applied to college. She paid for a $100,000 education at the University of
Chicago with the money that she had earned from modeling and during the
next seven years made a series of seemingly smart decisions: a year in
Spain, Harvard Business School, McKinsey & Co., a White House Fellowship,
high-tech PR. But she never got any closer to making a real choice.
Like most Phi Beta Slackers, she was cursed with tremendous ability and
infinite choices. Figuring out what to do with her life was constantly on
her mind. But then she figured something else out: Her need to look
brilliant was what was keeping her from truly answering The Question. When
she let go of that, she was able to shift gears from asking "What do I do
next?" to making strides toward answering "To what can I devote my life?"
Asking What Should I Do With My Life? is the modern, secular version of the
great timeless questions about our identity. Asking The Question aspires to
end the conflict between who you are and what you do. Answering The
Question is the way to protect yourself from being lathed into someone
you're not. What is freedom for if not the chance to define for yourself
who you are?
I have spent the better part of the past two years in the company of people
who have dared to confront where they belong. They didn't always find an
ultimate answer, but taking the question seriously helped get them closer.
We are all writing the story of our own life. It's not a story of conquest.
It's a story of discovery. Through trial and error, we learn what gifts we
have to offer the world and are pushed to greater recognition about what we
really need. The Big Bold Leap turns out to be only the first step.
Sidebar: One Size Does Not Fit All
Two different answers to one ultimate question
Organization Man Of the 900 people who I talked to, only one has had the
same employer for his entire adult life. His name is Russell Carpenter,
he's 35, and he's an aerospace engineer at NASA Goddard. We can all learn
from him. Russell began working at NASA during college. In exchange for his
summers, they paid for his tuition and, later, financed his PhD. Russell is
a GS-14, stuck to government pay scales. The money is okay, but it's never
the reason to stay. He's building a guidance system for the newest type of
satellite.
The halls and offices at NASA are quiet. These engineers are content with
slowly pushing toward a solution. Which I took as Extractable Lesson number
one: time frame. At NASA, Russell has found an intermediate time frame
where he can accomplish the high-minded objectives that his division is
charged with, but he's not under absurd pressure to do it all in 90 days.
Aerospace engineers are obsessed with redundancy and backup systems.
Russell knows that metals give, that gears slip, and that motors overheat,
and he plans for that in his designs. Not everything has to go right in
order for it to work. And that way of thinking shows up in every aspect of
his life, including how he achieves his ambitions. Which I took as
Extractable Lesson number two: His backup plans do not lead to different
destinations, such as "If I don't get into business school, I'll be a
schoolteacher." His backup plans lead to the same destination, and if he
has to arrive late by a back road, that's fine.
Later, Russell and I went to a baseball game, which clued me in to
Extractable Lesson number three: Russell doesn't let himself get burned
out. He doesn't think it's a big deal that he's only had one employer. His
method is his secret, but it's no secret.
"So what do you do?" For five years, Marcela Widrig had a dream job that
compensated her well, let her live in Barcelona, and paid for her frequent
travel throughout Southern Europe. She sold modems for a big modem
manufacturer. Modems were her means to her ends: money, travel, human
connection.
When her company moved her to San Francisco, she suffered culture shock.
The Internet was destroying everything that she loved about sales. The new
ethos was speed. Get the deal done in a day! Don't even fly -- email makes
it so easy! The human contact was gone.
The worst part was constantly being asked The Inevitable Cocktail-Party
Question: "What do you do?" Marcela had been away long enough to have
forgotten about this disgusting American custom. She found it degrading and
reductive and mercenary. I too used to think that The Inevitable
Cocktail-Party Question was a scourge on our society. But I'm starting to
see that it is really about freedom to choose. A status system has evolved
that values being unique and true even more than it values being
financially successful.
In other words, if you don't like The Inevitable Cocktail-Party Question,
maybe it's partly because you don't like your answer.
Marcela no longer liked her answer. She endured migraines and insomnia.
After flying all the way to Hong Kong for a meeting that didn't even last
one hour, she vowed, "I cannot sell one more modem." But she didn't quit
for two more years. On her vacations, she flew to Switzerland to train in a
school for deep-tissue massage. It was her way to move toward genuine human
contact. The day she returned from one of her Switzerland trips, the modem
company went under, and she was forced into her new life.
It took her about a year to drop the business-suit persona and truly
embrace her new profession. The Inevitable Cocktail-Party Question no
longer bothers her. "I do body work," she says. "I love what I do, and I
think that comes across."
Po Bronson is the author of three best-selling books. This article is
adapted from his new book, What Should I Do with My Life? The True Story of
People Who Answered the Ultimate Question ( Random House, January 2003 ).
Contact him by email ( pobronson@pobronson.com ).
-- Tough times demand tough talk demand tough hearts demand tough songs demand...(Rush, _Force Ten_)
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