Responding to an article I recently read in Inc.com magazine Steve Jobs Said Your Overall Happiness in Life Really Comes Down to Asking 4 Simple Questions
Stephanie and I have raised 3 humans who are now 3 adults. All these years we all said – follow your passion, follow your dreams, do work that is meaningful. As I consider where these three adults are, I know they are for the most part happy, by all benchmarks in society they are absolutely successful, and they are all three really good people, thinking about how to heal the world and live in it as positive, productive parts of society. But have they followed their dreams? Are they able to answer the three questions Job’s asked in his now famous Stanford commencement speech? Am I following this advice, living this way?
As I think about this – it becomes more and more unproductive to put this kind of pressure on our children. And ourselves. You can work to fund the things you want to do. You can look for good in the work you do, even if it seems impossible. The interactions between coworkers, customers, partners are ways to fulfill this dream. When I look back, some of my best friends are former customers or coworkers, people I didn’t know before the work. Did I set out to become an expert in digital banking, banking technology, technology in general? Absolutely not? Was that my dream? Was the dream I had for my life even realistic or accurate at 21? I really think it is great that the brilliant mind of Steve Jobs turned into a philosopher of how to live your life when faced with death. But was he really serious that these three questions should dictate our lives? Can we really have a productive society this way?
Maybe we can, maybe if we look for good and follow the golden rule we can be happy in our work. My kids are doing just fine, one followed her passion from childhood and gets to dance almost every day – it is work, really hard work, but she does it. She also cannot make a living at it – as can’t most. Her “job” with the dance company is real, she performs and it is absolutely beautiful to see her in that state – it seems like euphoria to me, the work she wants to do. Or can she? Dreams change. She has found balance in teaching young children at two seperate dance schools. Some of these kids have the same dream as her. That is a part of it – but it is also the people around her who have lived that same life, the people who come to see her dance, the parents who trust their kids with her. These are important parts of fulfillment. Is that following her dream?
Similarly my youngest has built a circle of friends who also wanted to join the marketing and business world through her business fraternity. She has friends who have tried and struggled with the “dream” and she is doing the work herself. Is that her dream, did she have a dream to be a marketing professional? Like me, uh, no she didn’t. She has many dreams, her creative mind is there from art to imagination – in her work I’m sure her perspective is different than most. It is okay that she is still finding her dream, it is okay that she doesn’t know her dream for work – what on earth could possibly come of forcing her to follow her dream job, to find it, to drive for it?
And yes my boy who also had a dream, or at least a passion for creating things his whole life. A drive towards just and righteous behavior – a love of knowledge, science and the way of things. History, technology, nature and games. Sometimes silly, sometimes deadly serious, he committed to whatever dream he had at the time. All that work in school to perfect the art of design and making interesting things, shattered with the hard cold reality that it just isn’t like they said – the market changed, the way of things unclear. Is he unhappy that he didn’t follow his dream, sometimes. Is he successful in the work he does not, absolutely – his peers and leaders know he is not only competent but confident and reliable. So why insult him by saying what he is doing is wrong and asking him to doubt the value of his work every day by looking in the mirror and saying – Am I living the life that I want and doing the work that I want to do? Am I doing what I love? You might be surprised that work is just that, work. It is the space between, the people you meet along the way, the time you spend with friends and family, the things you can do by excelling at whatever work you can get.
This is the way of the greatest generation – sometimes lucky enough to find that society valued the work they did, sometimes not – just putting in the time but coming home to love and laughter instead. That is life, don’t miss it.