Finding your passion at work
And other myths
The LinkedIn mandarins offer you two ways to manage disliking your job. One is to find your mission, or ‘passion’, and the other is to pay attention to your ‘work/life balance’. If you hate your job, you find something that seems more worth doing, in other words, or you plan on working less. Read closely, both of these turn out to be management Esperanto for ‘We concede that we’re not the same as our jobs’. Reasonably enough, neither strategy ever works for very long.
I spoke the other day of the ‘false self’, vocabulary given to us by Richard Rohr, and this ego-driven conceptualisation of work is that, or part of it. It's not what we are. I said that this false self isn’t actually a bad thing, as ‘false’ may connote. The person you’ve built yourself to be, and most of the time that’s about work, is not evil, nor is it in some way deceptive. It’s functional, and for what it is, it's reasonable. But it is a contrivance. So is the job landscape – LinkedIn included – in general. Organised work is a cooperative exchange of time for food, pretty much, and we’ve all got to eat. Work also mints prestige, if you do it better than other people do; it offers bonuses, as a kind of superiority system. Some work is Better than other work. And so you cooperate.
The living part of you is bigger than even the best of work arrangements, though. It’s more enduring, it’s more complex, and it’s more authentic than the limited artificiality of the workplace. It’s your true self, and it is indeed truer.
How should your true self, whatever it is, relate to your Jobsworthian false self? Well, Paul of Tarsus spoke of the first half of his life, when he was still Saul, the international business contractor to the Roman army and the vigilante enforcer of religious orthodoxy, as a time of misery, grand and exalted as that life was. And then he wasn’t like that. When he was pushed out of his comfort zone (you can read about it in Acts 9), he found, eventually, joy. He said, to his surprise, he was given the secret of real happiness, and it wasn't work. What was it? In his words, he discovered that his identity was – and always had been – in someone bigger, truer, and more everlasting than his LinkedIn job profile ever could have been. His contemporaries perceived this in him, too. His very jailers venerated him, and the fractious and growing church listened to him closely for guidance. These were people who had reviled his old self.
In this new life he talked about work, once only. His perspective on that had changed too. He said the purpose of working was simply to have something to share. I’ll talk in another post about working as self-reliance, a virtue that many of us think is in the Bible – but isn’t. It was simply to have something to share. Paul didn’t stop working, though he did change what he did for a living. More to the point, he put work, and the ego-driven construct that it is, into perspective.
Preach ;-)