Do not ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.
— Howard Thurman
Do what gives you joy. Do it now.
Joy, satisfaction, enthusiasm, contentment, absorption in your task: these are how the Universe tells us what to do next. If you are waiting for an engraved invitation, wait no more. Your own immediate joy tells you you’re doing the right thing, and it also will lead you to the next right thing. Most of all, it will ensure you happiness in this moment.
A mistake in going after happiness is not in pursuing it directly, but pursuing it indirectly, as though it were a cake you create by following many complex, unpleasant steps, in a long recipe, in a hostile kitchen.
The cake is not the point. Being absorbed in putting the elements together in the kitchen is the point. The fun of the process is the point.
Happiness is a process, not a thing. It is not something you magically get by making yourself unhappy for a long period of time.
IMHO, a recent post in the New York Times’ Ethics column might have steered someone in the wrong direction. A young writer asked something like, “I’m qualified to get into med school, but what really makes my soul sing is painting. Would being a doctor be so much more good to the world that I ought to go to med school and practice medicine anyway?”
The ethicists said, “Yes. Medicine does more good than painting. Practice medicine instead of doing what you love.” I disagree.
In fact, I’d prefer that this person not be my doctor. Why?
I want a doctor who is into doctoring the way I’m into teaching, writing, beading, gardening: I want someone who finds practicing this profession endlessly fascinating, who thinks about it outside office hours, who lights up when he encounters a case that doesn’t follow the expected script. Who finds it an interesting problem.
I personally don’t give a rat’s ass where this guy went to med school, or how well he did there, or how long or how briefly he’s been in practice, or how what his average ratings are on Doctors.com. I want a doctor who gets as much satisfaction out of treating patients as I get from teaching, as the writer of that letter gets from engaging with her chosen medium of painting.
Besides, even before entering med school, the painter who sent in the question already knows that studying medicine does not make her soul sing. If she occupies a spot in med school, she may be taking the place of somebody who did not score as high on the MCAT, but whose soul is made to sing by being a doctor. I believe that, given he can do what the AMA and the med school requires, I’d rather be treated by this other person, who would be kept out of med school by the painter who one day will graduate to be a disappointed doctor and a frustrated painter.
Sure, if the painter finds herself in a situation where she’s the only person around who can stitch up a wound or deliver people’s babies safely, she’ll do that. But in the present situation, where there are plenty of people who can learn to do those things, I hope she decided to ignore the ethicists’ advice and go to art school instead of med school.
If making the cake makes you happy, it doesn’t matter how the cake turns out. Any particular cake is simply one iteration in engaging with a complex and fascinating problem of baking. The cake is not the point: being absorbed in, engaging with, the problem in the kitchen, and learning from what does or does not arrive at the result you aspire to, is the point.
- If making the cake makes you happy, do that.
- If seeing the delight one someone’s face as she eats the cake makes your soul sing, then do what gets you that particular delight. So patronize your local baker and make somebody’s day by giving her a cake.
- If re-creating the cake your grandma made is the point, then go about re-creating that cake.
- If figuring out how your Choctaw ancestors made cakes gives you joy, then the point might not even be to mix ingredients yourself, but to research historic foodways.
- If decorating baroque wedding cakes, and basking in the adulation of football stars on their wedding days brings you joy, then do that.
Happiness is something you do, now. That’s all we can know.
Doing something you don’t love forty hours a week for the rest of your life, and hoping you’ll have time someday to do what you truly love, is nothing I’d recommend to anybody.
I have a problem with following someone else’s recipe for happiness. How can anyone else know what would make you happy? You might not even have discovered it, or might not have discovered all of it, yet. And the only one who can ever truly know what makes you happy is you.
Your parents want you to be happy, but they can only know what makes them happy. The best tool they can give you is the example of their own lives spent discovering their own most satisfying ways to engage with the world. Your parents want you to be able to keep the wolf from the door, sure, but there are many ways to do that, not all of which they know about.
Example: A guy I’ve known for decades would have made a great engineer. Like my dad, who enjoyed his long career as a chemical engineer, he has an eye for a particular genre of interesting mechanical problem. A capacious, curious mind. A great sense of spatial relations. An ability to hear the relationships between groups of numbers the way I listen to music. The nerd’s capacity for delight in myriad details. He wears a pocket protector.
This guy, though, spent his working life not being an engineer. Why not? Because his dad was an engineer, and his dad hated it. His dad hated being an engineer so much that he forbade his son from becoming an engineer. This guy was a good son, so he did what his dad wanted.
Now that the good son is retired, he has amused himself by: teaching himself how to do plumbing and replumbing an old house; teaching himself how to design and build an airplane; deciding that building a plane took too long, and flying an airplane someone else built; installing lighting and fixing cabinets and repairing doors in whomever’s house he happens to visit. (We fight over him). Doing carpentry. Renting smallish earth-moving equipment at every opportunity.
He had a spectacularly successful career, but it’s safe to assume he also might have enjoyed even more thirty-odd years spent doing more of the engineering-type stuff that he enjoys.
As a college teacher, I encounter these folks: “My parents will only pay for my college if I major in accounting,” or “I just want a good-paying job as quickly as I can get it.” Can we re-think this? Doing something you don’t like because it’s a means to an end is not the optimum way to spend the lives we’re given; it’s not even a guarantee of the desired end.
People die all the time from the stress of doing jobs they hate. Do you want that for someone you love?
Recommended reading:
Parkin, J. C. (2016). F**k it — do what you love. London, England: Hay House, Inc.
Kay, J. (2011). Obliquity: Why our goals are best achieved indirectly. New York, NY: Penguin Books.
Think UP! 