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The
Power of Passionate Work
by Gregg Levoy
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I used to be a reporter for the
Cincinnati Enquirer, back in my 20's, and after working
there for a the better part of a decade, I reached a
threshold--the word in this case having a double
meaning as both a point of transition and a measurement
of my tolerance for pain.
At this threshold I began
hearing a calling to quit my job and become a freelance
writer, a decision that's not exactly designed to
reassure your parents, and one that I couldn't bring
myself to make for years anyway, though the gods were
drumming their fingers, and though I was slowly
overripening and rotting on the vine.
Like most people, however, I
will not follow a calling until the fear of doing so is
finally exceeded by the pain of not doing so, though I
am routinely appalled at how high a threshold I have for
this quality of pain. But eventually the prospect of
emotional and even financial turmoil, the disapproval of
others, and the various conniptions of change seemed
preferable to the psychological death I was experiencing
by staying put--at which point I followed a bit of
cowboy wisdom: when your horse dies, get off!
Still, like anyone who chooses
passion over security, I was plagued by the fear that
scares away sleep. And it wasn't that I finally
overcame the fear. It was that something else became
more important than the fear. I still sweated through
leaving behind a regular paycheck, medical benefits, a
pension coming in two years, the prestige of being a big
fish in a good-sized pond, and that wonderful
organizational budget that can take up the slack created
by almost any amount of individual goofing off:
clock-watching, coming in to work late and leaving
early, extra-long lunches, indiscriminate wastes of
supplies, and those sick days I came back from with a
tan. These are standard behaviors exhibited by people
who feel about their jobs the way they felt about their
senior year in high school: psychologically
out-the-door, but punching in Monday through Friday just
to collect the diploma.
The ancient Romans used to say
that the Fates lead those who will, and those who won't
they drag. My own experience has also taught me that
those who get dragged tend to put a drag on others, and
if those others are the people they work with and for,
you've got your basic lose-lose situation.
Passion and
productivity
Creating passionate, productive
and callings-inspired work and workplaces begins with
the individual, with the corpus (body) that defines the
corporation. It involves the sometimes pick-and-shovel
work of aligning or re-aligning with your passion and
sense of purpose, with your deepest values rather than
just the advertised values, and with a fit between who
you are and what you do, which I consider the best kind
of success. The more passionate you are, the more
productive--the more you desire to produce--and the
less hot condensed breath managers will need to leave on
the back of your neck.
In fact, any leap you want to
make in your professional or personal life that will
bring you this sense of alignment and aliveness is, by
definition, a calling. That calling could be to leave
your job altogether or come to it in a new way, to take
on a new role or let go of an old one, to make a
creative leap or launch a new venture or style of
leadership, or to simply make the kind of
course-correction in your life or work that will make
your life literally "come true."
And what goes for the
individual goes for the company you keep. If it is
challenging to walk your talk, to honor your mission and
your values, to reconcile your visions with your
resources, to juggle the higher calling and the bottom
line, it is exponentially more so for the corporate
body-politic of which each employee is a single cell.
But the more we as individuals
address these issues and conundrums in our lives, the
more we encourage our corporations to do the same. There
is a reason why some of the world's great myths, like
Sleeping Beauty and the Grail King, speak to the idea
that when we sleep, those around us also sleep and the
kingdom goes dormant, but when we awaken, those around
us also awaken and the kingdom flowers.
Work is merely one of the
arenas in which we play The Game--the one that the
gods are watching from their press-box atop Mount
Olympus, sipping mint juleps. It is only one of the
arenas (along with relationship, community, sports and
spirituality, among others) in which we express our
humanity, search for meaning, play out our destinies and
our dreams, contribute our energies and gifts to the
world, and spend our precious nick of time. But it is
also an arena in which we spend two-thirds of our waking
lives, most of us, and it is legitimate to love our
work! Life is a thousand times too short for us to bore
ourselves, Nietzsche said.
It is no coincidence that the
American Medical Association discovered some years back
that the majority of heart attacks occur around nine
o'clock on Monday mornings. This undoubtedly has
something to do with what most of us are doing around
nine o'clock on Monday mornings, which is going back to
work. Or more precisely, going back to work we don't
like, work that doesn't match our spirits, work that
can literally break your heart.
The cost of security
Unfortunately, most people
simply tune out the callings and longings they feel
rather than confront and act on them, trading
authenticity for security and settling for less. In this
sense, money costs too much. The price people are
willing to pay to have it is way too steep. It's
terribly easy to build yourself a velvet cage: the money
is great, the perks enviable (OK, so what if the only
reason you're using your medical benefits is that your
job is making you sick), the surroundings are familiar,
and the security comforting--but you end up becoming
at best a recreational user of your passion and
creativity. You lose; your company loses; the world
loses.
We're all conservatives when
it comes to change. We want to conserve the status quo.
We want to protect our investments, and the more
investments we have, and the more success, the harder it
is to let it go. So although the soul doesn't seem to
care what price we have to pay to follow our callings,
we still react to change with a reflexive flinch, the
way snails recoil at the touch. As an acquaintance of
mine once put it, "You shall know the truth and it shall make you nap."
Those who refuse their passions
and purposes in life, who are afraid of becoming what
they perhaps already are--unhappy--will not of
course experience the unrest (or the joy) that usually
accompanies the embrace of a calling. Having attempted
nothing, they haven't failed, and they can console
themselves that if none of their dreams come true, than
at least neither will their nightmares.
The rub is that the human
psyche is like the Earth--it is a closed system. There
is no "out" as in "throwing the garbage out." There
is no trash icon. Whatever energies we ignore or repress
will come up somewhere else, at the very least in our
dreams and fantasies. And the frustrations and regrets
in our lives become like tombstones, reminding us of
where someone is buried.
Remembering what we
already know
The soul is a spiritual organ
that we carry to work with us every day, and it informs
and observes every move we make. There is no ignoring
its demands with impunity. It is capable of meting out
punishments as real as any that could be meted out by a
boss. It is the ultimate BS-detector, the part of us
that absolutely knows what it knows, that knows the feel
of integrity and the feel of its absence. It is also the
part of us that sees the big picture of our lives, the
blueprint against which all our actions are compared,
and which is hardwired into each of us.
As the cells in a fertilized
human egg multiply, very early on they reach a point
when subtle indentations appear in the cell-ball, which
distinguish the head from the hindquarters (a
distinction that seems to be lost entirely on some
people). Nonetheless, if at this point you take a cell
from the head and place it down at the hindquarters, it
will migrate back up. In other words, it knows what it
is. It knows what it's supposed to become. And at some
level, so do we! The work is to remember something we
already know, at a cellular level.
I included a fellow in my book, "Callings," who described an interaction he once had with his seven-year-old daughter. She came to him one day and asked him what he did at work. He told her that he worked at the college, and his job was to teach people how to draw. He said
she looked back at him, incredulous, and said, "You mean they forget?"
A calling is an organism, a
living entity, with an animus all its own. It exerts a
centrifugal force on our lives, continually pushing out
from within. It drives us toward authenticity and
aliveness, against the tyranny of fear and inertia and
occasionally reason, and it is metered by the knocking
in our hearts that signals the hour. If we are at all
faithful to our calls, to the driving force of soul in
our lives, it will lead us to a point of decision. Here
we must decide whether to say yes or no, now or later,
ready or not. And it will keep coming back until we give
it an answer.
Saying yes to a call tends to
place us on a path that half of ourselves thinks
doesn't make a bit of sense, but the other half knows
our lives won't make sense without. We find ourselves
following the blind spiritual instinct that tells us our
lives have purpose and meaning, that this calling is
part of it, and that we must act on it despite the
temptations to back down and run for cover that will
divide even the most grimly resolute against themselves.
The Mach 1 experience
Saying yes--sometimes merely
thinking about saying yes--also tends to throw very
opposing energies into our lives. The voices of "Yes"
and "No." The voices of head and heart. And you can
count on the head to say, "Have you taken a look at
your savings account lately?" or "That's not company
policy." And you can count on the heart to ask, "Where
would the world be if all of its heroes followed the
bottom line?"
One part of you wants to
awaken, one part wants to sleep. One part wants to
follow the call, the other wants to run like hell.
Courage is joined at the hip with anxiety. I've heard
it said, however, that heroism (or heroinism) can be
redefined for the modern age as the ability to tolerate
paradox. To hold two competing forces inside us at the
same time and still retain the ability to function. To
allow our souls to become boxing rings and still hang
onto our marbles.
In the movie "The Right
Stuff," there is a scene in which the pilot Chuck
Yeager is attempting to break the sound barrier for the
first time, and just before he hits that illustrious
Mach 1 (roughly 750 miles per hour), the plane starts
shaking and shuddering and threatening to break apart.
Then suddenly at Mach 1 he breaks through and
experiences a glorious silence, and a perfectly smooth
ride. There is something of a Mach 1 experience in any
attempt at a breakthrough. There is resistance, shaking
and shuddering, and it's not opposed to the
breakthrough; it's part of it. But it takes a resilient
"corpus" and a resilient "corporation" to encourage
and harness this chain-reaction, which begins as soon as
someone follows a calling, as soon as someone says yes
to passion and soul.
Without the shuddering, though,
there is no growth. A chemist named Ilya Prigogine
demonstrated that in a theory that won him the Nobel
Prize. He showed that " the capacity to be shaken up"
is, ironically, the key to growth, and that any
system--whether at the molecular level, or the
chemical, physical, social, psychological or
spiritual--that is protected from disturbance is also
protected from change and becomes stagnant.
"I'd rather be
sailing"
I used to do a lot of stone
sculpting, and when you want to find out whether a stone
is "true," you bang on it with a hammer. If it gives
off a dull tone, it means the stone has faults running
through it that will crack it apart when you work on it.
But if it gives off a clear ring, one that hangs in the
air for a moment, it means the stone is true, has
integrity, and most importantly will hold up under
repeated blows.
That is the same information we
want about our visions and ventures and callings. We
want to know that they're going to hold up under
repeated blows, and among the best ways to determine
this is simply to bang on them, and listen. To take them
out, or rather down from the abstract into the physical,
and let them get banged on by the mortal world. Let the
fear and resistance come, let people have their say, let
the chaos blow through, because disturbance = growth,
because moving and shaking go together, and because
chaos is part of the creative process.
In the central creation story
in Western cosmology--the Bible--Chaos with a
capital C is described as simply the condition of the
Earth before it was formed. In other words, Chaos
precedes Creation. We deny ourselves one, we deny
ourselves the other.
Ultimately, none of us want
bumper stickers on our cars that say, "I'd rather be
sailing," or "The worst day fishing is better than the
best day working." We want to do what we'd rather be
doing. We want our lives--and the work to which we are
devoting our lives--to catch fire and burn blue, not
smolder. We want to feel called, not just driven. We
want work to be a channel through which we express our
passion and vitality, not a chin-up bar we have to pull
ourselves up to every morning. And we want success to be
a way we feel, not just a thing we achieve.
To do this, we must incorporate
into our lives and our work the understand that hidden
deep in the clockworks of the human heart is the
beneficent fear of living life, as Henry Miller once put
it, without ever leaving the birdcage, and that this
fear can be the beginning of great things. Outside the
cage, there is life in all its toothsome grandeur, all
the spill and stomp and shout of it, all the come and go
of it, all of it waiting for us to act on the one hand,
and on the other hand rushing down the hourglass.
Gregg Levoy, author of
"Callings: Finding and Following an Authentic
Life" (Random House)--a selection of the
Book-of-the-Month Club, Quality Paperback Books and
One Spirit Book Club--has written about callings for
the New York Times Magazine, Washington Post,
Psychology Today, and others. As a fulltime speaker
and seminar leader in the business, educational and
human-potential arenas, he travels extensively
offering Callings workshops and lectures. He can be
reached via email at
callings@gregglevoy.com,
or by phone at 520-760-1231. His website is
www.gregglevoy.com.
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