How to Do What
You
Love For a Living
by
D.
Patrick Miller
Published by D. Patrick Miller at Smashwords
© 2010 by D. Patrick Miller
Smashwords Edition
All Rights Reserved
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Part I:
If
You Do What You Love, Will the Money Follow?
Part II:
The
Spirit of 9 to 5
Part III:
Callings:
Finding Your Place in the World
Resources
Part
i:
If
You Do What You Love,
Will the Money Follow?
After seven years of rising through the ranks from his first job on the shipping dock, Paul has a secure managerial position at Pointless Playthings, an upscale retailer of trendy consumer goods. Although Paul and his wife Linda, a nurse, have a substantial combined income, they still have a hard time making ends meet — what with payments on the BMW, the mortgage and maintenance for their oceanview condo, and all the expensive accoutrements of their modern lifestyle. Now Linda wants to have a baby, but Paul knows they just can’t afford it. They have only a few thousand in savings.
Besides, Paul is fed up with his superior at work. He wants out. The future will only be more of the same at Pointless, but he can’t imagine any other future. In his spare moments at work, Paul has been writing rhyming couplets on his scratch pad. This doggerel is all that remains of his collegiate identity as a poet, the bard of his fraternity.
At a weekend dinner party, Paul listens disinterestedly as a couple of Linda’s New Age friends start talking about “following your bliss” and finding “right livelihood.” One of them just quit a steady job to study massage. Paul suddenly gets furious at their idealism and delivers an impromptu lecture on the “real world.”
“You have to make a living,” he says angrily. “Nobody’s going to pay you to make your dreams come true.”
“Oh no,” replies the masseuse. “I don’t agree with that at all. I think that if you do what you love, the money will follow.”
Paul grimaces and excuses himself from the conversation, but all the next week he finds that he can’t get that magic sentence out of his head: Do what you love, the money will follow. One morning he awakens with an inspired solution to his predicament at work. Without warning Linda, he abruptly quits his job and closets himself in the den all week, writing page after page of rhyming couplets. Infused with a newborn spiritual idealism, Paul has a daring plan for a bright, rewarding future.
Six months later, Paul has. . . (pick one)
(a) Signed a six-figure deal for the publication of his couplet collection, entitled Thin Volume. It’s an unheard-of advance for a book of poetry by an unknown author, and the publishing world is stunned. Paul and Linda start planning their family, and Paul buys himself a Jaguar.
(b) Crawled back to work at Pointless, cravenly accepting a position a notch below his former job. Embittered and in debt after his romantic experiment, Paul tells Linda that her New Age friends are no longer welcome in the house, and she threatens to divorce him.
(c) Taken two part-time jobs and signed up for a local writing class. After exhaustively reviewing their spending habits, Paul and Linda manage to reduce their expenses by forty percent and are able to start saving to support the family they both desire. Meanwhile, Paul has broken free of rhyming couplets in his poetry, and understands that mastering the form will be a lifelong discipline.
The scenario you find most realistic probably reflects your own assessment of the challenging premise “Do what you love, the money will follow.” In the last few decades, the traditional Western notion of “career advancement” has been profoundly altered by the importation of the Buddhist concept of “right livelihood.” An increasing number of job counselors are urging their clients to factor in personal and spiritual fulfillment when considering a career change, but for most people that means an unprecedented leap into the unknown. Often, the apparent price of fulfillment is income security — but then one hears a mystical, sirenlike call that suggests just the opposite. “Do it!” urges Michael Phillips in his classic Seven Laws of Money. “Money will come when you are doing the right thing.” But will it really? And how do you know when you’re doing what’s “right”?
Marsha
Sinetar:
She Never Said It Was Going to Be Easy
The foremost proponent of the “do what you love” philosophy is the woman who wrote the book on it: Marsha Sinetar, an organizational psychologist, writer, and former school principal who made her own career change when she could no longer ignore the “prompting from within” to find a more fulfilling way of life. As she wrote in Do What You Love, The Money Will Follow, her decision was slow in coming:
“I distracted myself with a respected career and with the inevitable promotions that came my way. I distracted myself even more successfully with an accumulation of material rewards and symbols of success. The unknown was too frightening to me. . . . I couldn’t conceive of doing what I knew I would love. My mind clung so desperately to the familiar.”
Eventually Sinetar did opt to leave not only her comfortable career, but her whole lifestyle as well. She relocated from Los Angeles to a rural community in northern California, where she writes and runs a small private practice in corporate mediation and change management. Subsequent books she has written clearly echo her own life-altering changes: Ordinary People as Monks and Mystics and Elegant Choices, Healing Choices, among others.
When I happened across Sinetar’s book, the title caught my eye and pushed one of my most sensitive buttons. As a writer who had struggled for years to focus my talent and earn a living from it, I found Sinetar’s title unrealistic and galling. But her text — which previews the stages of psychological and spiritual growth along the way to finding fulfilling employment — proved helpful and inspiring. For me, it was the beginning of a more conscious and intensive study of the path to “right livelihood” in 20th-century capitalist America. “Do what you love, the money will follow” may be less of a natural law than a mantra, a spiritual cue urging people to begin the daunting task of unifying their personal, political, and spiritual ideals with their work and their sources of income.
Sinetar admits that the slogan lends itself to misinterpretation and identifies three common misunderstandings of her message:
1. Desire for a quick answer. “The question I’m always hearing,” says Sinetar, “is ‘How do I do it? Tell me now!’ But the heart of right livelihood is taking the time to do things well, honoring the task, and not worrying so much about the fruits of your labor. This is a very difficult concept for Westerners, because we’ve been schooled to believe that our innate worth is indicated by our bankroll.”
2. Misjudgment of talents. “People often don’t realize what their real talents are or don’t have enough practical experience in what they want to undertake. The best example is that of the writer. It takes a long time to build up the necessary skill, reputation, and track record to make it. But people want to have the money rolling in right away.”
3. Not knowing how much is enough. “Some people know what would be good for them to do, but they’re ill-prepared for the economic realities of their new profession. A secure, high-paying job may have become thankless — but switching to something that’s personally fulfilling while failing to sustain their accustomed lifestyle can be too much sacrifice for some.”
The core of Sinetar’s message is that the decision to pursue fulfilling work must have a spiritual rather than economic inspiration. Thus the money “follows” in more ways than one; it cannot serve as a first priority. “Right livelihood implies a long-term commitment that’s not necessarily going to be easy,” Sinetar cautions. “A weathering and cultivation of the human being takes place over the long haul. Maybe we haven’t found the right teacher, maybe we’re not being completely honest with ourselves, and maybe we just want something for nothing. Letting go of all this is part of our spiritual homework.”
Sinetar also stresses that doing what you love is not necessarily synonymous with doing what you feel like doing. “Doing what you love means doing what you respect,” she remarks, “doing what’s in accord with your highest values, what brings up your self-esteem and elevates you morally. Doing what you feel like doing may mean sleeping late, eating popcorn, and watching TV. Right livelihood implies mastery, and mastery doesn’t come by caving in when the going gets tough. It comes from repeating the task, even when it’s dull, or from working when it’s beautiful outside and you’d rather play.”
Yet for those who are not sure what their right livelihood might be, Sinetar suggests taking a look at the things they do now for recreation. “People who don’t know what they really want to do probably haven’t looked at what they really enjoy, what engages all their enthusiasm and assertion. People who are active and assertive tend to know what they want. Not knowing is linked to not telling ourselves what we want. It seems quite possible to me that people who don’t know what they would love to do are in a depressed state.”
For people who know they are depressed — because of their current job, that is — Sinetar has a challenging prescription. “The way out of that situation is to learn how to love what you do right now, by putting care, attention, and service into the present. Then you will invite the next natural step of your development. This is a very different process from quitting one job to find a better position or more money elsewhere. . .
“This is especially true for people who are angry about what they have to do, because of the tendency to project the same anger and resentment onto the next choice of what to do. It’s bad karma; you’ll pick up the same energy you had before. It’s very similar to the repeating pattern of intimate relationships. If you continue to blame a former spouse, parent, or child for the problems of a relationship, you’re not learning anything. The same thing is true of work. We stand a better chance of getting ‘off the treadmill’ if we change our own patterns while we’re still on it.”
Nancy
Anderson:
Facing the Lies that Bind Us
Nancy Anderson is a career counselor and the author of Work With Passion who agrees wholeheartedly with Sinetar’s strategy for exiting an unsatisfying work situation. “I tell people to start working harder where they are, immediately, tomorrow. Increase your performance by at least 25 percent. That way you will propel yourself to the top.” The other essential element for finding your way to fulfilling work is being truthful. “I make an absolute equation of meaningful work with truthfulness. Many people wanting to change their work in order to achieve conventional goals of status or more money are really looking for a lie that works better.”
Anderson changed her counseling approach when she realized she was having too many repeat customers. “I started work in 1976, and my book came about as a result of not getting to the bottom of my clients’ problems. I was good at preparing people for interviews and helping them get new jobs. At the time, that seemed to be success. But the next thing I knew, people were coming back to me because they didn’t like the jobs they got.”
Now when people come to her for advice, Anderson asks them to examine the meaning of their current problems at work. “If they’re in conflict with a boss or coworkers or the work itself, they first have to understand what the situation is telling them about themselves. It’s not just something to escape, it’s something to analyze.”
From experience, Anderson has learned the meaning of some universal complaints — like boredom on the job. “Boredom is really the effort spent masking feelings that are uncomfortable, like anger, rage, or jealousy. As soon as you say what you really think, the boredom ends. What I say to clients often makes them angry with me, because I point to their lies and say, ‘Look!’ That’s not what they want to hear. But if people experience their work has draining or dull, it’s because they’re lying about something. It doesn’t make any difference what you’re doing at work if you’re telling the truth.”
Anderson also feels that a major block for many people in finding meaningful work is a lack of understanding of what it will demand. “By and large, people just don’t know what hard work is — certainly not in the sense that an inspired writer or artist knows what hard work is. We live in a free market where mediocrity can be too easily rewarded. But that doesn’t turn mediocrity into excellence. I don’t try to convince anyone to go the extra lengths that work with passion requires. I’m not any help to people who are looking for an easy way out of unsatisfactory employment…. My observation of successful people shows me that it usually takes them about five years of dedication to their right livelihood for full achievement, full recompense.”
Joe
Dominguez:
A Radical Route to “Enoughness”
Joe Dominguez is a resident of Seattle who grew up in Harlem and landed a job on Wall Street in 1960, when he was broke and in debt. In 1969, at the age of 31, he resigned his paid employment and has not had a “job” since.
“Using only the money from my salary —
no speculations, no killings on the market, nothing but paychecks —
I had established a safe, steady income, adequate for my needs, for
the rest of my life,” Dominguez writes. “Since that time I have
not accepted money for anything
I do.”
One thing Dominguez has been doing over the past twenty years is disseminating his alternative approach to financial security via an audiotape seminar entitled “Transforming Your Relationship with Money & Achieving Financial Independence” (later published in book form as Your Money or Your Life). The so-called “FI program” taught by Dominguez and his partner Vicki Robin does a startling end run around the idea of “do what you love, the money will follow.”
“It’s a very nice theory,” Dominguez muses, “but I haven’t met too many people for whom it’s true.” In a nutshell, Dominguez encourages his students to separate their money from their work by establishing a permanent income sufficient for their living expenses from the interest accrued by buying safe, predictable, long-term debt instruments — preferably US Treasury Bonds. How do they amass a sufficient investment (anywhere from several thousand to several hundred thousand dollars, depending on lifestyle)? By saving their money for an average of five years from “the highest paid employment they can find without compromising their integrity or their health,” says Robin. How do they save enough money in a relatively short time? By learning just how little they can live on, as they gradually free themselves from the notion that money buys fulfillment of any kind. Then they are free to pursue the fulfillment that Dominguez and Robin feel is real and lasting: service to others uninhibited by financial concerns.
Therein lies the spiritual impetus of a plan that seems obsessed, at first hearing, with the tracking of cash flow. In styles that both harangues and entertains, Dominguez challenges his listeners to examine carefully the assumptions about money, work, and happiness that they were raised with, and begin to a careful investigation of how well their spending habits align with their highest aspirations. The goal is frankly subversive.