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Posts tagged "Work"

Stefan Sagmeister: The power of time off

It’s always great to find brilliant people who understand the benefits of a Year of Nothing.

In this TED talk, renowned designer Stephan Sagmeister shares his rationale for closing down his New York studio for an entire year every seven years.

During his last sabbatical, he came to the conclusion that after a Year of Nothing:

  • His job became a calling again.
  • Over the long term, it was a financially successful exercise due to the positive impact on the quality of his work.
  • Everything his studio designed in the seven years following the Year of Nothing had originated in it.

I hope my Year of Nothing has a big impact on my next seven years of life too. And then I can go for another one. :-)

A big hat tip to @philippawhite for this one!

Posted on November 22, 2009
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The Year of Nothing, Part 2

This Year of Nothing allowed me to develop a razor-sharp sense of what I want to do next and what I want to be. Never before have I felt that I Get It as I do now.



Do not pull, do not push
And fortune will return of its own accord
And the Way will naturally come…
If you are still, you will get it,
If you are active, you will loose it.
Yang Zhu


Besides reminding me of the value of friendship, this Year of Nothing has provided me with a razor-sharp sense of self-knowledge.

Never before have I been clearer on what I want to do and what I want to be. Never before have I felt that I Get It as I do now.


Getting It

While it’s true that practicing formal Taoist meditation has helped me a lot in gaining this newfound clarity of values, the process has been simpler than that.

As soon as I stopped spending most of my waking hours doing something I didn’t find meaningful, eliminating the inherent cognitive dissonance, I started to Get It.

Not having a clear objective, nothing to achieve for a while, liberated a ton of psychic energy, and refocused it inwards.

Now I know that while I’m alive and awake, I want to do something that delivers genuine value to others — not just to myself.

I want to contribute, however humbly, to change the world for the better.


Money

An obvious question I’ve been pondering all this time is how to align my quest for meaning with the necessity of making a living out of it.

In the beginning, I was quite pessimistic about this. I was still working on the assumption that running a business was a fundamentally selfish thing.

I’ve come to the conclusion that this prejudice was in large part due to my training in Economics.

Traditional economic theory is based on the notion that people seek their narrow self interest, and that this is perfectly fine — the market’s Invisible Hand is supposed to ensure that selfish individual behavior translates into broad social gains.

But after some time I managed to break free from that prejudice.

The idea that business can be motivated by forces beyond profit is, of course, one of the hottest topics in the media today.

This Year of Nothing gave me the time to absorb the huge amounts of information available on- and offline on the subject, and to meet lots of people who have embraced the concept.

But most importantly, because I haven’t been involved with any particular business for a while, I was able to open my mind and truly ponder the validity of this idea against my previous conceptions.



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The business guidelines

Here are a few rough guidelines I’ll be following for my upcoming income-generating initiatives. Of course, I’ll be updating you on their evolution through this blog:


Affiliate information products

Since I started sharing my insights and tips about creating a lifestyle based on meaning and personal development through this blog, I’ve had some tremendously encouraging feedback from readers about the value they receive from the project.

This feedback, and the steady increase in traffic that the blog has enjoyed since its launch, made me conclude that there is room for a little “store” section where readers will be able to buy information products that I endorse.

I will only endorse products that I have found to be extremely useful and empowering during this already 1-year old journey. Eventually, I will also offer information products created by yours truly.

A store section for the blog is the most obvious way I can think of for creating a small business based on meaning and real value.


Art

Throughout this Year of Nothing I have re-connected with my passion for art.

I have had plenty of time to listen to music again. That was one of the things I missed the most in my life, and I got it back.

Through my travels, I have attended all kinds of concerts, shows and music festivals. I have been stopped in my tracks by dozens of awesome street musicians in subways and alleys, and been able to take the time to properly contemplate their performances.

I even ended up one night hanging out with Farruquito (one of Spain’s most acclaimed Flamenco dancers) and his friends at El Taxidermista bar in Barcelona until almost 6 am the next day.

I don’t know what got me more drunk: the alcohol, or the insanely powerful energy emanating from these people when they’re offstage, partying, singing and dancing for themselves. :-D

Check out some of Farruquito’s incredible moves here:

I’ve been in many museums and exhibitions. I’ve attended cinema festivals and rented tons of old movies I hadn’t had the time to watch.

This Year of Nothing allowed me to truly appreciate art as the ultimate human activity aligned with higher purpose. Art can do so much good to the world at so many levels that it’s hard to think about a more valuable human activity.

So I have come to the conclusion that I want to launch a little project related to the art business. I still don’t have much of a clue about the form it will take, but I’ll keep you posted on its progress…

And to those of you who know about my frustrated musician background: yes, I have seriously started thinking about playing an instrument again. But that’s a bit of a longer term project — I will still probably do Nothing about it until mid next year :-)


Economics

During this Year of Nothing I have also re-connected with Economics, and I have revived the excitement that I felt for the discipline back in college.

I definitely think I can use my skills as an economist for dedicating some of my time to contribute to projects aligned with a higher purpose.

Before this Year of Nothing, whenever I read or heard someone say that quietness, idleness and meditation can be a big emotional amplifier, I used to discard it as New Age BS.

Not anymore. Somehow, a Year of Nothing hugely expanded my sensitivity towards poverty, the environment, and the myriad sustainability problems we must all deal with. It’s like I’ve developed a visceral repulsion towards them that goes beyond the rational understanding of their causes and nature. And I’ve decided that I want to deal with them indeed.

Again, this is all work in progress… stay tuned for updates in this area too.



So what do you think? Does my plan make sense to you? What are your plans for 2010 (resolution time is approaching!) in terms of aligning your business or career with a sense of meaning and higher purpose?



Posted on November 3, 2009
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Beyond flow: meaning as the key for truly fulfilling work

In a previous post we argued that an important condition for us to truly love our work is for it to allow us to regularly achieve a state of flow. But developing a truly fulfilling relationship with our work goes a long way beyond that.

This post is the final one of a series exploring what it really means to love our work. Make sure to check out the table of contents for other posts in the series.

The best way I have for illustrating why achieving flow is not enough for truly fulfilling work, comes from my own experience.

From 2000 to 2003 I worked in an industry that allowed me to travel the world 11 months per year producing special advertising sections on developing countries (so called “emerging markets”), distributed with several of the world’s most widely read business publications.

I can fairly say that besides providing me with a lifestyle of the “rich and famous”, this line of work allowed me to achieve states of flow with reasonable frequency.

The “interviews”

I was in charge of the editorial for the supplements, so I had to “interview” CEO’s and key government officials on their views about the attractiveness for business of their countries and companies.

A typical “interview” was structured as a 30-minute conversation that had to strike a delicate balance between gathering information for the copy of the supplements, and most importantly, making the interviewee say the right things that would allow my accompanying colleague — invariably an attractive, sharp, aggressive saleswoman as most people in positions of power in the developing world are still men — to construct the arguments for selling him an expensive ad in the supplement.

“So Mr. X, as you said during the interview, your company is the fastest growing luxury hospitality provider in your country today, and Europe your most important market by any measure. As you very well know, readers of Time magazine’s European edition, with which our supplement will be distributed, belong to the very elite of the European business community — people who are always on the lookout for new, exciting options for enjoying a luxurious holiday… of course, they would also surely be interested in looking into solid investment opportunities, such as the ones offered within your company’s ambitious expansion plan… so we truly feel that you should strengthen your company’s presence in our supplement beyond the editorial coverage with a full-page advertisement for 95,000 Euros. What do you think?”

Conducting these interviews was a challenging exercise. Most of our interviewees were very busy and powerful people, so we had to make the most of the precious 30 minutes they granted us. A good “interview” had the right mix of questions, making the interviewee feel intellectually challenged, admired, and entertained at the same time.

If I didn’t strike that balance, my colleague would find it significantly more difficult to sell him an ad. And the process of striking that balance was a surefire way to achieve flow.

I became totally focused on listening attentively to my interviewee’s answers, taking notes, and coming up with witty comments for sparkling the space between questions and adding flavor to the conversation. I had to pay close attention to my interlocutor’s body language to gauge his emotional state: if he was tired, bored or angry, the pressure was on. I needed to wake him up somehow, to find which buttons to press in order to put him in the right frame of mind for a sale, while still feeling he had been “interviewed” by a journalist. Seeing his mood change subtly in the right direction was exhilarating, each favorable micro-expression getting me a bit closer to signing an advertising contract, and a commission of several thousand dollars.

Hunting for virgins

There were, of course, interviewees that were being interviewed for the very first time for a special ad section, and therefore much easier to get sold on the idea — we called these interviewees “virgins”. Interviewing them was much less challenging, and less conducive to flow.

But the process of finding “virgins” in the country was an art that required lots of strategic thinking and resourcefulness, providing an alternative path towards flow. For instance, sometimes the countries we covered had been hit by several teams producing ad sections before us, and most of the large, prominent companies and government institutions were not interested in spending any more advertising money on the concept. So the name of the game was to find enough “virgins” that could be sold on a larger number of smaller ad spaces.

In our hunt for “virgins”, we scoured the countries searching for them, storming into office buildings, taking advantage of relaxed, unstructured, friendly local cultures to steal 30 minutes of the boss’s time, and walking out with a 25,000 USD ad contract from a small stock brokerage firm that didn’t make a million USD in yearly turnover. Or for that matter, from a truck-manufacturing company that had no exports, no international expansion plans, or any other minimally rational reason for advertising with us.

The euphoria of achieving success under these circumstances, totally against the odds, was intoxicating, even if all it took to sell these companies were a couple of very basic questions and a very simple sales technique: nod at whatever the interviewee says, and take copious notes even if what you’re really writing is the grocery shopping list — when well executed, even Tom Peters can fall for this!

Yet another strategy that required a great dose of cunning networking ability and relationship management was figuring out which minister or other powerful political figure could give a call to any of the large companies of the country for exhorting, or even ordering them to advertise with us. We would interview the minister, and they would almost always get free exposure in the ad section in exchange for the “magical phone call”. When we succeeded at this, the euphoria was comparable to signing an ad contract, as this significantly increased the odds of actually signing one with the company at the other side of the minister’s phone line.

From economic hit man to espresso entrepreneur

So what can possibly be wrong with a business that gives you the opportunity to become an expert of sorts in persuasion techniques, earn good money and other perks in the process, and on top of everything, to access a state of flow on a regular basis?

Of course, it’s the fact that this business lacked a meaningful purpose beyond earning as much money as possible for myself.

I reached a point where I just couldn’t believe that neither the companies that sponsored our editorial products nor the countries that we covered were getting anything close to fair value from these products as marketing tools. I couldn’t understand how I was selling people on something I would never do myself if I were one of the CEO’s we “interviewed”. But somehow I managed to rationalize the whole thing. At the end of the day, I was just being a “good salesman,” judging by the selling-ice-to-Eskimos standard — a standard that is pervasively embraced by many businesses in free market economies. If you need any evidence on this, just look around you. The world is in the midst of its worse financial crisis in a century thanks to it.

I had become a sort of small-scale “economic hit man,” an expert on selling ideas and “projects” to people on the belief that they were doing something good for their companies and countries, regardless of whether this was true. But to be sure, in the great majority of cases the sale wouldn’t go through unless the man at the other side of the table had some self-interested reason, however bizarre, to sign the contract.

In the Middle East, most CEO’s simply felt flattered and proud that sophisticated western media people were apparently so thrilled to be promoting their country. And due to the gargantuan size of the marketing budget of large companies in the region, they saw doing business with us as a harmless gesture of gratitude.

But in many other cases, more bizarre motivations were present: wanting to advertise in the ad section simply because competitors or other important people in the country had done so; appearing as patriotic and socially responsible in the eyes of government officials who were supporting the ad section; the need to spend money for exhausting advertising budgets and avoid financial cuts in the next year due to incapacity to use the funds; bragging about the financial strength of the company, about the interviewee’s capacity to sign big contracts on the spot, or simply being so carried away, so drunk on the egomaniacal high produced by answering so many questions strategically aimed at making him talk about his executive super-human abilities — or the nationalistic pride produced by talking for 30 straight minutes about the grandiose “economic potential” of his country — that all his capacity for a rational evaluation of our offer was effectively suppressed.

In the last stage of my career in the special ad section industry I quit freelancing for larger media groups and established my own small media company with a friend and colleague. We did put all our heart and soul in delivering ten times better value than the competition. This wasn’t difficult to do due to the appalling quality that many of our large competitors’ ad sections deteriorated to over the years due to their extreme mentality of extracting as much money as possible from advertisers at the lowest cost. We were producing 60-page, well written and decently researched magazines for a country at the same cost that our competitors would produce a 6-page ad section (it has to be said though that the magazines and newspapers we distributed our magazines with were less influential and had a smaller readership than our larger competitors).

But the nature of the business severely constrained the editorial quality of our magazines — we just couldn’t afford to be as objective as we would have liked to about a country when its government and key companies were paying us to promote their image abroad. And when you’re covering a country like, for example, the United Arab Emirates, you inevitably end up biasing your coverage towards the 7-star hotels and luxury spas, and away from the labor camps and problems with environmental sustainability.

This added a whole new dimension to the moral dilemma of the business beyond the value delivered to stakeholders. What was the broader impact of promoting a country’s positive developments without openly addressing its problematic issues, which sometimes actually were much larger in scope and importance than the former? In many cases, what these countries needed was more international pressure, not international promotion.

These were the kind of questions I couldn’t give a satisfactory answer to, and that ended up killing all my motivation to continue in the industry. There was no amount of money, fun, excitement, or for that matter, flow, that could compensate for the fact that I was spending most of my time and energy in an enterprise that didn’t deliver any meaningful value to others.

Back in 2003 I took a break from the country-promotion business and set up a small Argentine-themed cafe in Barcelona, Spain (the city was my base for several years) in association with a friend from childhood. Setting up that business was a blessing. I remember how good it felt to work towards providing others with a truly valuable experience. It all seemed so spontaneous and natural: an espresso and a pastry in an uplifting, cozy environment, for a fair price. A simple conversation with the customer. An exchange of smiles. No strings attached, no need to pitch anybody for anything. It might be debatable whether working behind a bar serving coffee 12 hours a day can provide you with anything that you can properly call flow, but the experience was perhaps even more satisfying than that — specially for someone who had been working without any sense of higher purpose for so long.

When I eventually went back to the country-promotion industry in mid 2005, those days of espresso, spontaneity and sincerity kept haunting me until the end. That is, until that day in October 2008 when I decided to quit the country-promotion business for good.

Making sense of life looking backwards

After going through all this, I gained a very sharp sense of clarity on what’s important for work to be truly rewarding and fulfilling. In a way, I feel that having worked in such an extreme industry as the country-promotion business was exactly what I needed to learn about the importance of meaning in whatever activity one chooses to pursue.

Actually, looking back at the whole process, I can’t help but seeing it as a form of mystical experience that I was meant to live and that has changed much more than my perspective on work — I can fairly say I am now a new person. And although I can almost see many of you grinning with cynicism at this claim, specially many of you who are very close to me and know how cynical I used to be myself about anything resembling a “mystical experience,” I’ll let it all out and give you all the details of my journey in an upcoming post.

Posted on September 2, 2009
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If you need to “have fun” at work, you probably don’t love it

Having fun at work is an art that we all should try to master because, well, having fun is great by its own merit. It’s an obvious way of increasing our overall happiness and health.

This post is part of a series exploring what it really means to love our work. Make sure to check out the table of contents for other posts in the series.

Having fun at work is an art that we all should try to master because, well, having fun is great by its own merit. It’s an obvious way of increasing our overall happiness and health.

Having fun at work also makes us more productive. The better our sense of humor and that of our colleagues, the better able to handle stress and more creative we’ll become.

Working in any of these seriously cool workplaces will not only be more fun, but will surely enhance our performance. There is some evidence according to which even the pastime of surfing the web at work, so dreaded by employers, can actually increase productivity.

Smiling more often, taking breaks, and doing things differently, can have a positive impact on our ability to have fun at work, and become better at it.

But we should never confuse the concept of cleverly using fun for productivity, and thinking that having fun at work is the same as loving our work.

I’m sure that stand-up comedians must have much more “fun” at work than opera singers, if we measure that for the overall lightness, laughter, flexibility, relaxation and improvisation that impregnates the atmosphere of their performances.

But if we would ask both kinds of artists why they love what they do, they would both tell us that it’s mostly about two things.

The first would be that their work allows them to achieve a state of flow.

The second, and most important, is the sense of meaning they derive from their work, which in both cases would be quite similar, and common to almost all forms of art: self-expression, giving an aesthetically rewarding experience to their audiences, delivering an important sociopolitical message, etc.

As Jay Sankey puts it in his Zen and the Art of Stand-up Commedy, “In this suspicious and often ‘edited for television’ world, the challenging comments of the stand-up comic make him a type of outspoken philosopher, an anarchist dreamer, even a kind of social hero.”

In my next post we will elaborate on the crucial importance of meaning for work to truly contribute to our happiness, and the ways in which the idea of meaning relates to flow.

Posted on June 3, 2009
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What does it mean to love our work? Hint: It’s not about success (Part II)

One of the conditions for work to contribute genuinely to happiness is that we enjoy, in a very particular way, to practice — doing the work itself.

This post is part of a series exploring what it really means to love our work. Make sure to check out the table of contents for other posts in the series.

Success as excellence. Being excellent at our work won’t necessarily contribute to our happiness. The world is filled of excellent pianists, engineers, cooks, lawyers and doctors who have managed to work hard and achieve excellence despite not loving their careers at all.

To the usual conformist reasons that people use to force themselves into work they don’t love, being excellent at it can add to the social pressure contributing to choke the motivation for quitting.

As I will argue below, one of the conditions for work to contribute genuinely to happiness is that we enjoy, in a very particular way, to practice — doing the work itself. And usually people who enjoy practicing achieve high levels of excellence, because they joyously get by with the insane number of hours of practice necessary for it.

One of the reasons why people usually love practicing and become excellent at what they do is that their work is well aligned with their natural strengths and talents. But again, excellence comes about as a byproduct of them simply enjoying the work they do.

Truly excellent people usually are very humble and seem to not care much about their position of excellence. They seem to know deep down that excellence is defined by comparing their performance to others, and therefore can only deliver a similar sort of superficial satisfaction to that provided by prestige.

Wanting to become excellent in our work can be a powerful motivator, but when we focus too much on it, we can shoot ourselves in the foot. Mindfulness is a great mental state for becoming productively engaged with work. And it’s hard to be mindful at the work at hand if we’re obsessed with becoming excellent.

Becoming obsessed with excellence can lead to perfectionism and other forms of self-sabotage that can kill our joy for work and motivation altogether.

Success per se Regardless of whether we define success as high income, prestige, security or excellence, work cannot genuinely contribute to our happiness if we think of it as a means to achieve an external goal.

The euphoria of success, even during the biggest achievements, is transitory. It will last a few days at most. Most of our time at work is spent making progress towards a goal.

Not even rock stars have the privilege of enjoying constant euphoria at their work. Seriously. Look carefully at your favorite one while performing live and you’ll notice that even during the pieces that transmit incredibly electrifying emotion to the crowd, they seem to be quite cool and collected.

For work to contribute significantly to our happiness it has to provide us with a reward that is both more immediate and more continuous over time than the euphoria of success.

The feeling that we must aim for at work is what psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow”.

Flow is the feeling of being totally immersed in an activity, being engaged to the point that it seems to be no effort involved in the activity whatsoever. Time flies by. We are “in the zone”.

Csikszentmihalyi’s seminal studies found that people achieve flow when they perform activities that are challenging, yet closely matched to their abilities.

That’s the most important reason for being clear about our strengths. Flow comes about as a result of using our natural talents and abilities, so it feels like an empowering expression of our true selves.

Also, the subtly energizing flashes of gratification (even brief moments of euphoria) that come with every step in the right direction towards reaching a goal will be much more frequent when we are working in harmony with our natural strengths.

And the cherry on top is that it will be much easier to achieve big goals and success if our work allows us to flow on a regular basis.

In my next post I’ll contrast the feeling of flow to the notion of “having fun at work.”

Posted on May 29, 2009
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What does it mean to love our work? Hint: It’s not about success (Part I)

More often than not, we fool ourselves into thinking that we love our work because we are successful at it.

This post is part of a series exploring what it really means to love our work. Make sure to check out the table of contents for other posts in the series.

More often than not, we fool ourselves into thinking that we love our work because we are successful at it.

A basic problem with this is that we usually think of success as equivalent to a set of socially-conditioned values that aren’t conducive to happiness.

The conventional concept of success is equivalent to one, or a combination of the following ideas:

Success as high income. If common sense and introspection were not enough, we count with an overwhelming amount of evidence from economics and psychology confirming that beyond levels of abject poverty, higher levels of income don’t translate into higher levels of happiness.

This is why work that generates high income isn’t the same thing as work we love, and therefore not a necessary ingredient for happiness.

Success as prestige. We tend to identify success with prestige — our capacity to impress others and the feeling of recognition that comes with it.

Part of the frustration people feel with trying to impress others, is that it’s so difficult to accomplish it by, well, trying. Emotionally intelligent people are very good at spotting deliberate attempts to impress them, and are easily put off by people who do that.

That’s why prestige usually comes as a by-product of a high income, an impressive job title or other things that we pursue more directly.

But invariably, prestige doesn’t bring real happiness. All it can provide us with is a temporary endocrine rush that far from satisfying us in any sense, triggers an addictive craving for more.

In his book The Happiness Hypothesis, psychologist Jonathan Haidt points out that unfortunately, we’re biologically wired by natural selection to seek prestige as it does indeed help us to amass resources at the expense of others — and during prehistorical times, this usually meant higher probabilities of survival.

Part of the art of happiness is, therefore, learning to control our natural impulse for seeking prestige, and not letting ourselves be fooled into work that doesn’t contribute to happiness because of it.

Success as “security.” Another idea closely associated with being successful at work is the sense of “security” that we obtain from a predictable source of income. This is more a case of employees who earn salaries and work for large corporations that supposedly can assure long term survival of their jobs.

Beyond the point of whether there can truly be much predictability of income for employees in modern economies characterized by enormous amounts of change, “security” is at least a problematic indicator of how work contributes to happiness.

There is no doubt that some degree of continuity in our work is necessary for satisfactorily seeing our efforts come to fruition, but beyond that, “security” mostly becomes an excuse for being stuck in work that we don’t love — or that we hate.

When people claim they love the “security” their jobs or businesses give them, what they usually really mean is that they don’t believe themselves to be able to both generate a “sufficiently large” income, and love their work.

This “sufficiently large” income is most of times determined by a set of false, socially-imposed beliefs about how buying things contributes to our happiness (see “Success as high income” above).

Also, when people conform to work they don’t love for a long enough period of time they become disconnected from their genuine convictions and interests to a point where they feel clueless about which line of work they would love.

And while the most important step towards breaking this state of cluelessness would be to quit their current jobs or leave the businesses they’re involved with, a false sense of “security” makes the decision to quit less attractive.

Working for “security” is very different to loving our work.

In my next post, I’ll explore the misconceptions around the idea of working for achieving success in the form of excellence, and the problem with the general idea of focusing on success altogether as a motivation for work.

Posted on May 25, 2009
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What does it mean to love our work?

This is the first of a series of posts that will give a clear, concrete answer to the question of what it really means to love our work.

The most direct answer to this question is that we love our work when it contributes to our happiness.

But this answer needs clarification and concreteness — the ideas of love and happiness are too broad, and there are too many misconceptions around them.

This is the first of a series of posts that will explore these misconceptions to give a clear, concrete answer to the question of what it really means to love our work.

Here are all the other posts in the series:

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Working long hours can kill you… or resurrect you!

The talk about working long hours is overwhelmingly negative, but this assumes that people don’t love their work.

I just googled the phrase “working long hours” and almost fell off my chair.

The overwhelming majority of results state that working long hours will kill you: it causes heart disease, damages brain function, increases the risk of dementia, increases pregnancy hazard, destroys families, etc…

Where’s the love?

The hidden assumption behind these horrible google results is that people don’t love their work. Otherwise, spending long hours at it would contribute to their health and happiness instead of killing them.

Working long hours is the only surefire path for getting better at anything. It’s essential to the kind of exceptional, excellent performance that allows people to achieve great things.

In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell estimates that unless one puts up with 10,000 (ten thousand!) hours of practice, there’s no way to become excellent at anything.

And people who manage to comply with the 10,000-hour rule are invariably in love with what they do: they would certainly die in the attempt otherwise!

These people’s motivation is not only in achieving the level of exceptional excellence they aim for — they love the practicing per se.

Gladwell’s book encourages us to reconcile with working long hours as the enabler of excellence that makes us flourish, one of the keys that makes life worth living — not a sure cause of death.

Of course, too much of a good thing can also be damaging. It’s important to not become a workaholic even if we love our work.

But the bottom line is clear: struggle and damaging stress is caused by people spending most of their waking hours doing something they don’t find fulfilling and meaningful — something they don’t love.

Zombies

People who don’t love their work and keep doing it can be classified into two categories: zombies and conformists.

Zombies don’t even realize they don’t love their work — or worse still, that they hate it.

They have internalized a ton of socially imposed reasons for sticking to work they don’t love (status, a “secure” source of income, family or peers’ opinions on “honorable” or “real” work, etc.) to such a point that they have subconsciously assumed that apathy and boredom are simply inevitable qualities of work.

Zombies are so disconnected from their true passions that they firmly believe they just don’t have a vocation, calling or life-purpose. They simply can’t fathom any alternative work they would love.

So in a way, zombies can only be half-killed by long hours of soul-crushing work: they’re half-dead in the first place :-D .

Towards resurrection

The very first step for a zombie to come out of the world of the living dead, is to realize they don’t love their work but are sticking to it for all the wrong, socially-conditioned reasons — to become aware of their conformism.

I recently posted an essay that explains a process for becoming aware of conformism, braking away from it, and discovering the work we love. I’ll summarize its key points here, but after reading this post, I highly recommend you to read the essay too.

To become aware of your conformism, you need to answer a simple question:

If you had no need to generate income and you wouldn’t obtain any sense of status, prestige or approval from friends and family from your current work… would you still do it?

If your answer is positive, congratulations. You’re on the path towards true happiness.

If your answer is negative… congratulations too! You’ve just realized you’re a conformist — which isn’t good at all, but it’s certainly better than being a zombie :-) .

Confusion and fear

Waking up from zombie-state brings about quite a complex feeling.

In a way, it’s refreshing and uplifting. But it also starts a swirl of tormenting internal conflicts. Our egos find it hard to accept that we have settled for a zombie existence for so many months, years, or decades.

Besides beating ourselves up through the workings of our ego, we feel a stark form of fear due to the uncertainty about what to do next, if we were to step away from our current line of work.

As I said before, zombies are so disconnected from their passions that even after waking up, they usually can’t figure out what they would rather be doing with their lives.

Taking the plunge

If you have just woken up from zombie-state and become aware of your conformism, I urge you to take the plunge and quit the work you don’t love once and for all.

Quitting the work you don’t love is the single most important step in discovering the work you love.

Quitting the work you don’t love is the most direct way of solving the problem of breaking away from conformism and finding the work you love.

The reason for this is that human brains hate contradictions between beliefs and behaviors — what psychologists call “cognitive dissonance”.

Because working in what we don’t love and realizing it’s not a good thing causes cognitive dissonance, our brains will quickly come up with all sorts of rationalizations for eliminating the contradiction:

“Maybe our work is not so bad after all? Shouldn’t we be grateful to at least have a job with so many people living in the streets? The pay is actually quite good… maybe I should just wait for a while?”

Once our inner chatter starts whispering these questions, it’s hard to not listen.

Besides rationalizing the status quo, our brains will effectively block us from perceiving any clear opportunities for alternative lines of fulfilling work. This would worsen the belief-behavior contradiction.

But by quitting the work you don’t love, you cleanly and definitively cancel the contradiction.

In my previous essay on this subject, I tell my own story of how it all “started to come back”, how I “remembered” all my long-forgotten passions as soon as I took the liberating step of quitting the work I didn’t love during late 2008.

And working insanely long hours in the things I love, which include this blog, has been exactly the opposite of death for me: when compared to the days I worked many less hours in something I didn’t love, it feels like the purest form of resurrection.

What are your experiences with, and views on the process of gathering the courage to quit work you don’t love? What are they on finding work you love, and joyfully spending an insane amount of hours on it?

If you liked this post, make sure to check out the non-conformism and love-oriented work resource round-up.

Posted on May 15, 2009
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Non-conformism and love-oriented work resource round-up

This post is a resource round-up of what I consider the very best material on non-conformism and love-oriented work — two fundamental themes of this blog.

What follows is a resource round-up of what I consider the very best material on non-conformism and love-oriented work — two fundamental themes of this blog.

One caveat: many of the authors referenced here assume that you can follow their advice even before quitting the work you don’t love. Suffice it to say that you already know my opinion on this.

The final decision is up to you. As blogger, world-traveler and champion non-conformist Chris Guillebeau would say — you are your own guru!

Please leave your suggestions about other useful resources on these subjects in the comments section!

And make sure to touch base every once in a while — I’ll be updating this post with new resources often.

Blog posts

  • Tolerance is Resistance to Love by Steve Pavlina. This article generalizes the motto “it’s impossible to discover work we love unless we quit the work we don’t love” — “You won’t be able to attract what you want while you’re still tolerating what you don’t want. You have to say ‘I quit’ first.”
  • Also from the Pavlina arsenal, learn how to discover your life purpose in about 20 minutes.
  • World-traveler and champion non-conformist Chris Guillebeau’s manifesto, A Brief Guide to World Domination is a little gem. It will inspire, motivate and guide you in the process of living your life according to your true beliefs and passions, and using them to change the world for the better.
  • This post by Zen Habits’ Leo Babauta combines his typically fresh insight on five things you need to know about discovering work you love with a link to Steve Jobs’ June 2005 Commencement address at Stanford University, which is a classic on its own right.
  • Freedom of itch, an essay by yours truly on becoming aware of our conformist behavior, breaking away from it and finding the work we love. It narrates my personal story while going through this process during late 2008.
  • Colleen Wainwright, a.k.a. “the communicatrix”, gave birth to the briefest, funniest, wittiest dirty little song for reminding us of the importance of hard work as a road to greatness. And this story is specially inspiring and soothing for dealing with the internal turmoil that inevitably comes with life-changing decisions, such as quitting work we don’t love. Thank you Colleen, you are definitely the Virgo guide to my universe!
  • According to blogger and new media uber-guru Chris Garrett, there is a questions we should all ask ourselves in order to find the work we love: What is so natural to you that it is like breathing?
  • Here is Pamela Slims’ view on the top excuses people have for not starting their own business. Again, I don’t think you can discover the work you love by simply doing the exercise of visiting a library that she proposes without first quitting the work you don’t love, but otherwise I love her perspective on these issues. Make sure you take a peak at the excerpts of her book, it looks great.
  • Discovering your natural talents and strengths is a crucial steps towards discovering work you love. This strengths test from the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania is a great way to start.
  • Umair Haque’s Awesomeness Manifesto puts love-oriented work as one of the pillars for what he sees as the next business revolution that will see the concept of innovation become obsolete.
  • Hugh Macleod’s manifesto, The Hughtrain, is chuck-full of insight about the radical value-transformation needed for a company to become “totally frickin’ amazing.” I particularly like the notion of “expressive capital,” which takes us far beyond “emotional capital”: “Our products make it easier for the end user to find and/or express meaning, narrative, metaphor, purpose, explanation and relevance in his/her own life than our competitor’s products.”

Books

  • Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell. The book is great not only due to the 10,000-hour rule insight, but also for how it elucidates the intricate and often unpredictable ways in which people in our lives and institutions shape our probabilities of becoming excellent at anything.
  • Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert. This book builds on psychology, cognitive neuroscience, philosophy and behavioral economics to construct a simple and powerful message: an essential part of our human nature is to be utterly clueless about what makes us truly happy — which is why we often struggle with finding work we love. And the most important tool in elucidating this fundamental quandary is through meaningful relationships with people who can help us in the process, more than our imagination or introspection. Therein lies the double-edged role of others in our quest for happiness: if we follow what they say is best for us in a conformist way, we’ll end up in misery. But if we build the right relationships, then our fellow human beings are the single most important element in discovering what makes life worth living.
  • The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt is a great introduction to positive psychology and happiness research in general. The notion of loving our work as a condition for happiness is central to the book.
  • Marcus Buckingham’s book Now, Discover Your Strengths is my favorite book on the subject. Buckingham is one of the few corporate consultants that I truly admire.
  • Daniel Pink’s The Adventures of Johnny Bunko summarizes in a few pages the golden rules for structuring a career aligned with work you will truly love… all in Manga comic book format!
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Freedom of itch

During the last few years, I was engaged in business that I didn’t consider meaningful. More recently, I’ve been freely acknowledging my soulful itches, and indulging in scratching them thoroughly — I’m into freedom of itch.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about a concept of freedom that I find particularly appealing: the capacity to employ my time and energy in pursuing the goals that I’m most passionate for.

During the last few years I was engaged in a particularly time-consuming business that wasn’t aligned with anything I considered truly meaningful. Worse still, after so much work without clear purpose, I had become apathetic and confused as to what I really wanted to do next. When I finally stepped out of the busines, and took some time to rest and recharge my batteries, It all started coming back.

I “remembered” many of my truly cherished goals that I had neglected for so long, and became aware of new ones — I wanted to write, to cultivate my body and mind, to expand the number and quality of my genuine connections to others.

The certainty of my conviction and my desire to pursue such goals were so intense that they almost had a physical feel to them. It was as if each goal corresponded to a particular “itch” that I was unable to feel until then. And just like the slight discomfort of a physical itch automatically prompts us to scratch, each of these meaningful goals gave me an immediate rush of motivation to pursue it.

So I can fairly say that these days I’m very much into freely acknowledging my soulful itches, and indulging in scratching them thoroughly — I’m very much into freedom of itch.

Of course, I’m not talking about anything new. Going after what we are passionate about is at the core of our notion of happiness — at least for us living in the Western hemisphere of the world. But approaching the subject as a fundamental freedom that we must exercise can provide further insights about this age-old truism.

Exercising our freedom of itch entails two fundamental steps.

Step 1 – Becoming aware of our conformism and breaking away from it

Modern consumption societies in theory enshrine individuality, free will, and the pursuit of what we consider most important in life. Furthermore, those of us living in these societies enjoy historically unprecedented abundance of resources we can use for self-realization: wealth, fundamental political and social rights, and access to technology that can make the “4-hour-work-week” a reality.

But accepting that our fate is fundamentally in our own hands as opposed to those of God, the lord or the state, terrifies us. It implies taking unusual risks and assuming full responsibility for the outcome. By conforming, we uncritically adopt other people’s opinion of how to live a “normal” life, less risky and more consistent with “realistic” goals and aspirations. This provides us with a strong, albeit false sense of security.

The process by which we adopt a conformist stance is not a conscious decision. Conformism acts subtly and subconsciously, pushing us gently and gradually away from pursuing the daring goals aligned with our true passions and beliefs. With enough time, conformism disconnects us from our genuine purposes, and we end up becoming apathetic and confused for no apparent reason. We simply wake up one morning with a deep feeling of dissatisfaction despite our good jobs, our material possessions, our fit physiques, our families and all the other things that “normal” people “want” — and we can’t figure out why.

The common reaction to this new state of discontent is to look again for an evasive solution: from shopping therapy to gluttony, from cigarettes to alcohol, from Prozac to ecstasy, from compulsive TV watching and web surfing to sex adiction… we are never short of options to dampen the anxiety rooted in the most fundamental of modern contradictions.

The definitive, yet not simple solution, is of course to realize that we are pray to conformism and take action to break free from it — not to increase the narcotic cocktail that compounds our comfortable numbness.

Work and love

There are two critical areas of our lives that when not aligned with our true passions and beliefs become fertile grounds for soul-crushing apathy and confusion — work and love.

By work I mean the goal-oriented activity or activities that occupy most of your waking hours. Make an honest assessment of how your work contributes to your overall happiness and personal growth. Do you enjoy your work to the point that you would still do it for no pay, sense of status, prestige or approval from friends and family? If your answer is negative, you surely need to make changes in this area.

You don’t have to quit your job or shut down your business right away. Talk to your boss about re-arranging your responsibilities in a way that are more aligned with your talents and your passions, or apply for a different job within your organization where you can achieve this.

If you are a business owner, hire more staff to take care of the the most time-consuming functions of your company that aren’t of your interest, or outsource them. But if these options are not feasible, realize that you have to walk away at some point — the sooner the better.

By love, I mean all the areas of your life that imply interpersonal relationships — not only romance. Make an inventory of the most important people in your life and take a hard look at how you relate to each of them. Again, the key point to look at here is whether you genuinely want to have these people in your life or you feel attached to them due to prejudiced, socially conditioned notions of personal worth.

Make it your policy to relate to people that make a genuine contribution to your personal growth. This doesn’t mean you should relate only to self-help gurus, or that your interactions with people should all resemble a mutual life-coaching session. If someone has a great sense of humor and you have a blast hanging out with them, keep them in your “friends list”.

But you’ll realize that you spend a great deal of time with people that you tolerate only because of family ties, the antiquity of your relationship, or your perception of them as valuable in terms of social status, wealth, or other vain, prejudiced conception of personal worth.

Another useful perspective to look for when evaluating your current relationships, is how much you give the people in your life compared to what you take from them. Always aim for giving more than you take.

If you find yourself receiving much more than you give in a relationship, it could mean that you need to work on yourself in order to learn to experience the joys of giving. But it can also mean that you don’t really value the other person in genuine terms of personal worth, and you subconsciously treat him/her as an object to satiate your desire of social status, lust, or a masochistic impulse.

Step 2 – Discover what you’re passionate about and go for it

After conforming for a log time, you might have become apathetic to the point that you just can’t fathom the idea of leaving a life in which work is delightful and meaningful. As I mentioned earlier, I was exactly in that situation a few months ago.

This feeling can be so strong that it might become an obstacle towards taking the first crucial step of breaking away from conformist work. You will catch yourself thinking that it’s crazy to quit your job or shut down your business without knowing exactly what to do next. Perhaps you should just hang on right there until you figure out what your next move will be. You reckon that you won’t make a move until you start feeling that itching that prompts you to take action.

But there’s a problem with this approach — it’s the soul-crushing work what’s blocking you from discovering what you really want in the first place.

The reason is what psychologists call “cognitive dissonance”. Human brains are simply not designed to hold two contradictory desires, beliefs or behaviors at the same time, especially when issues of self-worth are at stake. Whenever this happens, we come up with a subconscious mechanism that eliminates the contradiction.

Sticking to soul-crushing work and realizing there’s another line of work that we are passionate for creates this sort of contradiction. Your brain will quickly conjure some sort of rationalization to eliminate the contradiction, coming up with all sorts of reasons to tease you into believing that your current job or business is not so bad after all.

Give it enough time and this mechanism will become so efficient that your brain automatically blocks you from perceiving any alternative as preferable to your current line of work. This is known as “denial of disconfirming evidence”, and is well documented in the scientific literature. It works very well in making us feel comfortable with the status quo, and providing stability to our lives.

For example, studies have shown that after purchasing an item, people systematically give it a higher rating when compared to a series of other items than when making the comparison before the purchase. The elements of the alternative items that people found as appealing before the purchase become dissonant with the decision of choosing something else.

Stepping away from soul-crushing work frees up our mind’s capacity to appreciate the possibilities for fulfilling work available to us, eliminating our brain’s need to come up with rationalizations of any sort. And of course, an immediate additional benefit is that now you will have time and energy to try different activities that might lead to fulfilling work such as reading, going back to school, brainstorm ideas and planning the launch of your own business, etc.

There are other complementary actions you can take besides quitting soul-crushing work to help the process of discovering the work you love:

Step 2.1 – Love’s spill-over effect

There is a strong synergy between the areas of work and love. The sooner you start breaking relationships that are based on vain, socially conditioned values and substituting them with new ones based on genuine, growth-enhancing connections, the easier it will be to discover what you really want to do in the area of work.

This will simply come as a result of being surrounded by people that care for your personal development and is better able to see your true colors, encouraging you in the process of pursuing your most important goals. When true love emerges in your relationships, it will spillover to work and any other important area of your life.

Step 2.2 – The power of context

One of the key lessons I learned from my own process of re-discovering meaningful work has to do with the power of context as a source of inspiration. In my case, besides stepping away from the business I was dedicating most of my time to, the most immediate thing I did was to make a radical change of context: I left the city of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, where I had lived for the last three years.

This immediately made me re-build my life in the relationships area, as I only kept in touch with the few people I truly cared for that still live there. But there were other elements that I needed to break away from if I wanted to be at peace and make a fresh start.

For example, despite the fact that Dubai’s political regime tolerates a wide range of capitalist economic freedoms, I couldn’t bear the thought of living in a country where the press is closely controlled by the state, and other basic civil liberties taken for granted in a democracy such as workers’ right to unionize, respect for homosexual sex preference or peaceful civil disobedience are nonexistent. The gargantuan dimensions of Dubai’s skyscraper-crammed landscape, the mega-shopping mall culture, and the impossibility to be outdoors most of the year due to the extreme heat gave the city a feel of air-conditioned amusement park that I found particularly disturbing.

Needless to say, I was certain that it would be hard to get my creative juices flowing again in such an environment.

If you don’t feel that you belong to your current city or country but leaving is beyond your possibilities at the moment, try moving to a different neighborhood or even a different home within the same neighborhood. Think hard of what you want from your community and other elements of the ideal place where you want to live. Do you want to be close to the sea or the mountain? Do you need cafes, cultural scene and nightlife within walking distance or do you prefer a suburb where you can be away from the city’s hustle and bustle? All these elements of the context where your life unfolds have an impact on your ability to re-connect with your true desires and convictions.

Step 2.3 – Diet and physical exercise

Your capacity to dissipate the confusion about what you truly want to do with your life caused by years of conformist work is almost always compounded by a conformist attitude towards diet and physical exercise. If you conform to the typical lifestyle of the Western hemisphere, you will end up obtaining a large share of your dietary calories in the form of highly processed junk that can hardly be called food. And you will dedicate very little time, if at all, to physical exercise.

The West is slowly waking up to a fact that other ancient cultures, specially in Asia, have always taken for granted: we are what we eat. I cannot emphasize enough the impact that consuming a diet of fresh, non-processed, mostly organic food and a regular habit of exercise has had on my overall mental capacities. And as I’m slowly substituting the gym for martial arts training and meditation, I’m stepping into a realm of intellectual and emotional awakening that I can only describe as spiritual illumination. No wonder so many Eastern religions place a crucial importance on diet and exercise as means of transcendence.

This two-step plan is a bullet-proof tool to break away from conformism and find the motivational and inspirational boost to kick-start a new life of meaning and excitement. Stick to it and you will be soulfully itching — and scratching — sooner rather than later.

Posted on April 15, 2009
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