The Career Clinic: Eight Simple Rules for Finding Work You Love

Preface

I am afraid to die.

I know this because for a while, I wasn’t. I was writing my first book, and so immersed in work I loved that it was as if magic dust had been sprinkled on everything. I was filled with such a sense of purpose and peace that if someone had asked me what I thought about dying, I think I would have brushed off the question. “Well, whatever,” I can imagine having said. “I just want to get back to my book.”

The minute I turned in the manuscript, it returned—what Gregg Levoy, author of Callings, calls a low-grade, background anxiety about death.

It made me think the secret to life is doing the work we are meant to do.

It was also about this time I began hosting a radio program that helps people find work they love. Since then I’ve done hundreds of interviews and met many people who not only love their work, but live without regret. They don’t necessarily define themselves by their work, but it was their foundation—the starting place from which their lives evolved. As someone put it, they know where they’re going, whom they want to take along, and what they want the scenery to be like.

I want to share some of their stories with you because I believe they have something important to teach us about how to live.

Levoy thinks we want to die “with a yes on our lips and not a no. We don’t want to enter kingdom come kicking and screaming and begging for more time.”

I don’t want to, anyway. I don’t want to get to the end of the road and find out my life hasn’t added up to anything. I want to run a subtotal now, so I can make adjustments.

Most of all I want to be like the monk in Bernie Siegel’s Prescriptions for Living. When asked what he would do if he had only fifteen minutes left to live, he smiled, said “This”—and went back to his gardening.

ONE

No Regrets

They never warn you. The old ones. There should be volumes written on it. There should be billboards proclaiming it on every street corner. Government pamphlets should be printed up and distributed to every citizen. But as it is, only the old ones know, and they never tell. They keep it to themselves like one final inside joke. Passing knowing glances and head nods. This is for them to know and for the rest of us to find out. And we, all of us, do find out eventually—when it’s too late to do anything about it.

We grow up hearing the worn adages: Time flies, time is of the essence, there’s no time like the present. Words of wisdom that we commit to memory and never completely grasp. We never took it seriously, not really. We should have been shaken awake, slapped hard across the face, somehow been made to appreciate fully the preciousness of time.

—Greg Crosby, Newsweek

I’ve already mentioned that I’m afraid to die. Since writing that, I’ve made peace with the concept—to some extent. But my peace was tested recently. A routine medical test came back with the recommendation to get more tests. For twenty hours or so, I was in a place I’d never been before, and it wasn’t fear I felt, only grief.

If more tests confirmed there was something to worry about, what would I do then? How could I say good-bye to my sweethearts? I wasn’t afraid to die. I just didn’t want to.

There wasn’t room for much of anything else. Just sadness at the thought of saying good-bye.

Work did cross my mind, though. What, exactly, have I contributed? Has it mattered that I’ve been here? And in those scary moments, it wasn’t the past I was thinking about. It was now. What am I up to now? I thought of two things: this book, and a speech I was giving a few weeks later that terrified me.

They were comfort, those two things, because I was still reaching—and that’s all that mattered. Giving myself a chance to matter. Not knowing how my story’s going to turn out, but not minding—because I’m still having fun writing it, still excited to turn the page.

Before this health scare I would have told you I was on speaking terms with death. What a crock. I had no idea. But I can report there isn’t much I’ve changed, having had a glimpse of just how much I love my life. From now on I want to do more of what I’ve been doing, become more me, throw myself out there with more abandon.

When I interview people for The Career Clinic we often talk about death. We begin with the end, as the saying goes. How do you want it to have mattered that you were here? Now do that.