That’s Not In My Job Description

“If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Do what you love! Follow your passion! If you do what you love, then the money will come! This is the common refrain from positive thinking personal development gurus who want you to be your “best” self and live a life of “meaning.” But, are they right? Should you pack up your desk, grab the goldfish a la Jerry McGuire and set sail towards your “dream job?” I say, “HELL NO.”

We as a culture have become infatuated with the jobs that we do. When we meet people at networking events, the first thing that we ask them is, “What do you do?” Nevermind the fact that I may be a psychopathic kitten killer, I just told you that I am an attorney, so the first thing that probably thought was, “That’s a ‘good’ job. He must be a ‘good’ enough person.” Somehow our vocation has become the bedrock of our identity. I don’t like it.

Things were not always this way. During the height of the Industrial Revolution, most people were moving from farms and small towns to factories in big cities . Universal education and public schools were just arriving on the scene. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, most human beings did a job in exchange for money or some other good that helped them survive. Farmers farmed. Carpenters built houses. Etc. Etc. I imagine that there were few conversations between a corn farmer and a carpenter surrounding their “dream job”. You did your job and you got on with your life. LIFE. You remember life, right? That thing that we try and squeeze in after work, between conference calls and before off-site retreats. In fact, for most of human history we humans worked for six months (or 3 days per week) and we STOPPED. We could eat, spend time with our family, read, travel. LIVE.

Then something happened. Businesses reached a point where supply neared demand for most of the things we “needed” and moved their attention to the task of supplying our endless wants. Consumerism was born. We were convinced to work longer hours to be able to afford “things” that were going to make life easier and us happier. Except they didn’t make us happier (not THAT much happier at least). The arms race to consume has us working longer and longer hours to make more money. This money in turn is used to buy things to make us happy because we don’t have the time to engage in experiences that make us happy. Some of the things we “own” take years (even decades) to pay off. Thus, many of us find ourselves working years to pay for things we thought would make us more happy than they actually did.

And so the hours pile up. Since the job takes up so much time, we do what humans do: we give meaning to the job. To justify the fact that we spend our most productive hours in an office under florescent light, we search for the job that that will provide fulfilment. Purpose. Passion. We’ve proven to ourselves that we prepared to work the obscene hours in our “nightmare” job, so would clearly sacrifice those hours for the “dream” job.

Unfortunately, in most jobs there is no meaning in them. At least not the meaning you’re looking for. The job is just a job. If you think about it intuitively, it makes total sense. Most of the tasks people do for money (their jobs) require a monetary incentive for them to continue to engage in that activity. Pressing metals or typing memos as it turns out is no one’s “dream.” We are paid to do our jobs because under normal circumstances that is not what we would choose to do with our time.

What about those who tell us to follow our passions and that the money will come? They are making the huge assumption that there is some economic work out there that is supposed to be your life’s work. What if that just isn’t true? What if your passion is not profitable? What if people are not willing to pay you a living wage for your passion? Why must your passions pay anyway? Isn’t the main point of following your passion to make you happy? What if that has nothing to do with supply and demand curves?

The second problematic element of our search for the “dream” or “passion” job is all too human. Human beings are creatures of exposure. Wonder why kids in the “hood” want to play sports, sing, or become doctors or lawyers? One word: Television. All of those professions are beamed to them on the television. I call this the “Career Fair Effect.” If anyone has ever been to a college career fair you know the drill. You print your resume, troll through booths of employers, hear their spiel and decide, “I am more of an X industry woman than a Y industry.” You have conformed your talents and personality to the options that you feel are available to you. You are limited not by the actual options available, but by what you know exists.

What do I suggest as a replacement for the search for the “dream” job? The Dream Life. First, decouple your life’s work from your economic work. This takes the pressure off your job. Now what pays your rent doesn’t have to be the holy grail. Whew. Second, experiment. Expand your knowledge of what’s out there. This includes the various jobs that exist and interesting activities that one may find a passion. All jobs are not created equal and you may well have a crappy job and need to exchange it for a less crappy job. That’s fine now that we are not expecting miracles. Next, we need to identify relationships and activities that are important to us and make us feel guilty about dedicating too much of our lives to our work.Guilt and excitement mixed together can be powerful. We now have a reason to get the hell out of the office. This is key. Finally, we determine how happy the “stuff” that we trade hours working for make us. Be brutally honest. If we divide our salaries by the hours we work and compare that to the things we buy with our money, we have determined how much something is worth to us with respect to our most important asset: time. Once we stop buying and get rid of stuff that is not worth our time, we can free up time to pursue the activities that truly bring us joy. The job is now placed in perspective and is viewed as the benefactor for our lives, not our lives themselves.

You are not your job. You are you. Your time is precious. It is your responsibility to ensure that the totality of your life makes you happy. For most of us, a job allows us to live. The life that the job affords us is totally up to us. If that life sucks, change it. NOW!

*P.S. Writing this blog is something I am passionate about. I don’t earn a dime for this. If you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to work so I can afford to post some more. 🙂

When Life Gets Hectic by My Supercharged Life

My Super Charged Life is our feature today, where they talk about a question we’ve all had: how do you stick to your goals when your life gets busy?

Author Jeff gives 4 points on how to still achieve your goals when things are hectic.  His first two points are so powerful that if you just focused on those two, you’d be way ahead of the game: Focus, and Do The Big Rocks First.

By “Focus” he means you don’t have time to focus on a ton of goals, but that you need to focus on the one or two most important things that are going to make the biggest difference in your life.  In “Do the Big Rocks First” he’s saying that you have to get out of bed and do your most important things at the beginning of the day.  Have you ever noticed how when you put things off until later in the day, they end up getting put off until tomorrow?  Yeah, that’s why.

In my opinion, getting busy acts like triage for your goals.  Life is doing you a favor when things get hectic; busyness forces you to recognize what things are simply “nice to have” and what things are critical to your biggest desires in life.  Being busy means you have no time for things that are not directly between where you are and where you ultimately want to be.

The biggest point is that you simply cannot allow a busy life to mean you stop aiming for your goals.  Making excuses about how busy you are now only sets you up for making excuses about what you “could have done” years down the line.  If you’re like most people, things never really get less busy – you only have more obligations, more interests, more things pulling you in different directions.  You may never be less busy than you are now.  In a few years when things are even more hectic, you’ll look back on today and wish you’d taken advantage of all the free time you didn’t realize you had.

Jeff explains in more detail here.

Get Good At Getting Good

How do you get to be good at something?  The obvious answer: it depends what you want to get good at. I used to believe that too.

When we first started our mastermind group, we were setting way too many goals.  Every two weeks we would get together and each of us would lay out 5 or 6 ambitious goals we were going to accomplish in the next two weeks.  Our success rate was under 50%.  And we couldn’t figure it out.  Not being able to reach all of our goals was a tough blow for a group of overacheivers.

It didn’t take long to figure out that we were trying to do way too much.  Trying to be good at too many things means you’ll end up not being great at anything.

The other thing we recognized was that even though we all had completely different goals, the same tips, tricks and principles applied evenly to all of us.  No matter what you’re trying to be good at, it helps to:
– Start small
– Focus on just one goal
– Wake up early
– Exercise
– Seek out mentors
and a whole host of other things were all transferable no matter what it was we were trying to accomplish.

All of this is leading up to a piece of wisdom I got from an unexpected source: Joe Rogan.

Yes, the former host of Fear Factor said something that stuck in my brain the other night while I was watching MMA fighting on TV.  He was talking about how a fighter who was a world class wrestler became a world class grappler, striker, and all around mixed martial artist.

“Once you learn how to get good at any one thing, you understand what it takes to be good at anything.”

Popular culture embraces the idea of the prodigy, the kid who is so naturally talented at it, that she was just born to run/play violin/do physics/program computers.  Not true.  Malcolm Gladwell showed in Outliers that those “prodigies” are almost always the combination of some decent amount of talent mixed with an insane amount of practice and dedication and opportunity and timing.  Turns out, these kids have the ability to generally be great, and it just so happens that the opportunity presented itself for them to be great at the thing they’re now known for.

Gladwell goes on in his book to talk about what it takes to become an “outlier”:  10,000 hours of practice at something.  And with that revelation comes the next paralyzing problem.  What do you choose to become great at?  For those of us who are reluctant to commit to Friday night plans on Wednesday, how do you commit to something for the next 10 years?  It’s such a terrifying proposition to pick something that will become your life that it’s easier just not to start.  What if you pick the wrong thing?  You certainly don’t want to waste the next 5 years trying to become great at something just to realize that you hate it, or it doesn’t fulfill you, or anything else that would scare you off of a 10 year commitment.

Here is the stress-relieving solution.  It doesn’t matter what you try to be great at.  You can just try to get great at something.  Turns out, what you need to learn is not how to get good a playing violin or programming computers.  You need to learn how to get good at getting good.

What you really need to learn is not getting good at playing the violin specifically; you need to learn what kind of dedication and practice it takes to get good at something.  You can really just jump into anything.  Realize that you’ll be force to start slowly.  Recognize that the second time you try something you’ll be worlds better than the first try.  The third try may be a little better than the second, and the fourth may show even slighter improvement over the third.  Realize that you’ll probably be better off getting in a pattern of doing it every day in small amounts than practicing all day long at something once per month.

In other words, spend your time just figuring out what it takes to get good.  Once you have the experience of getting good at something under your belt, you have a world of things to choose to get good at.  I’d much rather know how to be great at anything than just be a prodigy at violin.

Tony Schwartz on Taking Back Your Attention

I have a confession.  I am a digital addict.  I love my MacBook, my iPad and my iPhone – and not just in the “I’m collecting gadgets cause it looks cool” kinda way – I use them all the time.  To excess, some would say.

It’s not platform specific, either.  I still ooh and aah over the latest android devices, was a “Crackberry” addict before I got my first iPhone, and secretly lust over both the Blackberry Playbook and the HP Touchpad although neither are even out yet.  I have absolutely no idea what I would do without Gmail, Google Docs, Google Reader, Google Finance, and I may be one of 12 people on the planet that actually uses Google Buzz.

I have completely forgotten what people did to procrastinate before we had internet on our work computers.  I’ve got it bad.

This is exactly why I think Tony Schwartz from Harvard Business Review is talking about me personally when he wrote:

“Staying singly focused on a task in this digital era is like trying to resist eating while sitting in a bakery as cookies, pies, cakes and tarts emerge fresh and fragrant from the oven. There’s a reason Cinnabon points its air vents out into the corridors at airports.”

Mmmm… Cinnabons… wait – what was I talking about?

See, this is why I use Pomodoros, to force myself to focus on a task at hand and edge out any distractions.  There is also a biological reason why it’s so easy to stop working and check Facebook for the 8th time during the day:

“We now know, for example, that it’s more immediately exciting to flit from subject to subject than it is to stay concentrated on one thing at time. We’re gluttons for novelty. That’s because the thrill of the new activates dopamine, the neurotransmitter in our brains associated with pleasure.”

In other words, refreshing your Facebook news feed is crack.  I knew it.

So how do we focus our attention back to the things that really matter?  Tony answer this question with several suggestions for minimizing distractions and making sure the important stuff gets done.  Love this one:

Start small. Attention operates like a muscle. Subject it to stress — but not too much stress — and over time your attention will get stronger. What’s your current limit for truly focused concentration? Build it up in increments. And don’t go past 90 minutes without a break. That’s the time to let your attention wander.

Sounds familiar.  Read the rest here.

Love Is Not A Noun

Love is not a noun. Love is a verb.

My grandparents were married for 55 years, before my grandfather Wesley started to die.  It was a tough time for my Grandma, Bessie Lee. For half a century they shared a life, a bed, and the creation of 8 children. His death was slow and painful. He was a strong man, who made his living knee deep in blood at a meat packing plant. On his day off he worked odd jobs and raised cattle. When he retired he bought a 99-acre farm with money he saved and still spent his days toiling. He was a father, and husband par excellence. And he loved my grandmother. It was not a hallmark love. He was not filled with kind words and greeting card poems. He did not express himself with huge gifts or fancy trips. Yet, he taught me how to love.

He taught me love is not a feeling. At least not when it matters. Love is not what you say. Love is not long letters or mushy greetings. Love is a verb. Love is what you do.

When my grandparents first married my grandfather asked my grandmother what she dreamed about. My grandmother, a stern and simple woman told him of a place she remembered once from her childhood. At the house of one of the wealthy men that her mother cleaned for their was a lake, and a short distance away from the lake there was a gazebo where the lady of the house would drink her tea and sit and enjoy the splendors of her wealth. That image sat with my grandmother and my granddad made a promise, “One day I will make your dream come true.”

They spent the next few decades following the path of their time. Wesley spent his days covered in pig blood and literally brought home the bacon.  Bessie Lee was a homemaker, who raised her children to be responsible and worldly.  They scrimped and they saved and they fought and they laughed and they worked and before they knew it they were old people.

My granddad used his savings to buy a huge piece of land and with my dad he set about building his own house.

My grandmother was happy, and she had all but forgotten about Wesley’s promise so many years before.

But my grandfather was not one to forget.  A month before they were set to move into the home where they would spend the rest of their years, my grandfather leased a backhoe.

He went out into the field outside the house he had nearly finished building and he kept his promise to my grandmother.

He dug her a lake.

With wood left over from building the frame of the house, he built her a gazebo.

My grandmother told me that she could never remember my granddad telling her that he loved her. But when she saw this gazebo and lake; the manifestation of her dream, she knew every day, without question, she was loved.

When is the last time you dug a lake?

For your wife, or your husband, or your girlfriend?

When is the last time you build a gazebo?

For yourself?

We spend an awful amount of time talking about our hopes and dreams and feelings. We listen to songs that speak about how much we love each other. But we forget far too often that love is not measured in words. Love is an act of service. Love is an action. Love is a verb.

To love is to do.