What Work? - Part 1
Where will you find truly meaningful work?
“Here’s my question.”
While my friend primarily called to check in on how I was doing, he also had a follow up question on last week’s post.
“How do I figure out what my task is?”
The question came in response to the line:
When it comes to work, your task is to do what you’re wired to do in a way that enhances the well-being of the broader community.
But how do you sort out what you’re wired to do?
Possible Paths To Meaningful Work
I’ve heard an array of advice on this question over the years. Things like:
follow your passion,
identify the intersection of your passion and what the world needs, or
the intersection of your passion, what the world needs, and what you’re good at.
In other words, it all boils down to some level of, “Do what you love.”
As an option that goes in an entirely different direction, over the weekend a friend suggested I read, The Obstacle Is the Way by Ryan Holiday.
Holiday centers his philosophy on Stoicism, a Greek philosophy that focuses on the practice of virtue, especially when life is difficult.
On the surface, that sounds great, but in practice, it often fails. For example:
Marcus Aurelius raised Commodus. Chris Rock tells us that if you’re the father to a little girl, your one job is to keep her off the pole. If you’re a father to a little boy, your one job is to not raise a Commodus.
Seneca preached virtue but lived lavishly, frequently wrote about his own inability to practice what he taught, and served the tyrant Nero even to the point of taking his own life at Nero’s command.
Much like you see many preachers with a moral focus falling into moral failure, so the Stoics who pursue virtue often live lives that are something less than virtuous.
I argue that’s because both focus on lives of discipline and control, which also means a life of resisting and rejecting some of what stirs inside you. As the adage goes, what you resist persists … and often grows. It’s a concept beautifully illustrated in the children’s book, “There’s No Such Thing As A Dragon:”
For reasons I will expand on shortly, avoiding the dragon also moves you further away from a calling than towards it.
Interestingly enough, ChatGPT gave me a more substantive set of questions (although that might be because of my query history on the program):
What energizes you? What kinds of tasks or topics give you life rather than drain it? Think back on moments where you felt alive, focused, or deeply satisfied. Even small glimpses matter.
What do people come to you for? What do others naturally trust you with—advice, support, creativity, problem-solving? Sometimes your unique value shows up most clearly in how you show up for others.
What pain have you lived through? Often our deepest work comes from our own woundedness or healing. What have you overcome or are still working through that might become a gift to others?
What would you do if money wasn’t the issue? If basic needs were covered, where would you naturally direct your time and energy?
What tension are you willing to endure? Every kind of work comes with friction. What type of struggle feels worth it to you? That can point to your real calling.
And if we’re moving towards a more substantive sense of vocation, I think this takes us in the right direction, especially when we think about the pain we’ve lived through and what we’re willing to endure.
To that end, I want to bring us back to the work of Bill Plotkin.
A Plotkin Recap
When I brought up Plotkin before, I focused on his book, Wild Mind: A Field Guide to the Human Psyche. It basically unpacks this map and tells you how to use it:
In it is are some of the best resources I’ve found on understanding ourselves and how to go on a journey of what Plotkin would call healing and wholeing, which is the first stage on the path to discovering your calling. Essentially, this stage gives you the resources you need for the journey ahead. It prepares you for the rest of the adventure.
However, Plotkin offers another map, one broken down in the book, Nature and the Human Soul. This one, focuses on the stages of human development:
On this map, knowing your work (not just your job, but your calling), shows up in stage 5 and is described as “embodying soul in culture,” which makes sense given that the phase is described as early adulthood.
However, if you look at the centers of gravity, the things our lives orbit around, very few of us get past the peer group, sex, and society which is the task of early adolescence. In fact, that’s exactly where our society invites us to be.
That is the social contract we’ve been operating under for the past 45 years. We put our heads down and work diligently and in exchange we get some spending cash and cheap shit from China. That in turn allows us to keep up with all the right shows and games, buy some toys, have fun with friends, consume all the porn we desire, and anything else that makes us “good Americans.”
But all this distraction is exactly what keeps us from stepping into the next stage of development, where the center of gravity moves from peers, sex, and society to the underworld … which includes our dragons (who are often our shadow selves), our wounded children (including conformists), loyal soldiers, escapists and addicts.
So essentially, America culture aims to distract us from what some call the second half of life.
So as you heal and whole, you find yourself stepping into the underworld. It sets you off on the journey of soul initiation (also a Plotkin title). It is here where you encounter soul, where you discover your calling.
More on that in the next post.