Friday Thread: How do you find a satisfying work "why"?

Photo by Justus Menke on Unsplash

My conversation this week with Leslie Castro-Woodhouse has thrown me back into questions about identity and purpose that I’ve been grappling with ever since I left academe.

Most of us who pursue academic careers are driven by a powerful “why.” The examined life. An abiding service ethic. Deep love for a particular discipline.

And most of us who leave academe, shortly after completing a Ph.D. or even mid-career, do so because we have grown apart from our institutions and feel that a continued partnership will do us real harm. Which is why I propose, in all earnestness, that many humanities professors need a divorce from their employers.

But as someone who has endured both a work separation and a literal divorce, I know all too well the blessing and the curse of a fresh start. If I escaped one toxic work environment, what is to prevent me from unwittingly joining another? Could it have been my idealism that got me into trouble in the first place? Or should I continue to honor my core beliefs and accept that there was nothing I could have done to prevent the widening gap between my values and my institution’s commitments?

I’m still not sure whether a work self can be a whole self.

This is the part that Simon Sinek’s classic TED Talk glosses over. Many of us don’t struggle with finding our “why” — we know what it is. We struggle with finding employers and colleagues and clients who share it. And with knowing how much of our personal “why” ought to be kept separate from our professional selves.

I have a new essay brewing on personal branding, because I find that my core beliefs jangle nearly as much with the culture of entrepreneurial hustle as they do with the corporatized university. Many colleagues on LinkedIn tell me that personal branding and authenticity go together, that I’m falsely dichotomizing the two.

Yet my gut is telling me that there’s a mismatch between all the ostensible best practices for solopreneurs and the way that I want to work. I look at people who have transitioned from academe to industry, and I wonder whether they’ve really escaped the totalizing culture of the university, or whether they’ve simply embraced a new form of relentless productivity. Much of what grated against my ethics in higher ed now plagues me in publishing and in planning my path as a writing coach.

So I find myself struggling with the same old conundrum: how to remain true to the values that motivate me and that drive my sense of purpose in the working world while still succeeding.

I have no trouble leaning into the grindstone. I’m actually too good at doing that. I just want to know that I’m doing it voluntarily, sharpening tools that I know I’ll use to good purpose, not being held there, like Napoleon Bonaparte in William Elmes’ 1814 sketch.¹

From The British Museum

A few questions for today’s discussion:

• How do you balance idealism with work? How much of your personal “why” do you bring to your professional self?

• Idealism can lead to impossible purity tests for employers (or for our own private ventures). Yet it can be equally harmful to conclude that work requires personal compromises, and that no workplace is perfect, and that we should therefore suppress our discontents and just “suck it up, buttercup.” The parallels to marriage in this regard are quite strong. How do you avoid holding your work life to impossible standards while remaining true to the standards that matter most to you?

• These questions are particularly germane to personal branding, which is what friends tell me I need to be thinking about as a coach and as a writer. But the dark side of personal branding is that if my attempts to market myself fail, or succeed more slowly than I'd like, then I'd be tempted to take that to heart. I must be what is wrong. I must not be cool enough, focused enough, attractive enough. All of this feels uncomfortably like a high school popularity contest. I’ve not yet solved the puzzle of how to curate a selective (performative?) authenticity as a professional without simply moving all of the totalizing attitudes I once brought to academe over to my entrepreneurial life. How do you solve this puzzle for yourself?

1. Now I’m wondering whether this cartoon might serve as a useful metaphor for our own time. “Nose to the grindstone” did not originate as a positive phrase. I’d be curious about others’ interpretations of it. Who now plays the role of the Tsar turning the crank? Bonaparte (the imperialistic rival)? John Bull (the common Englishman)? Is there anyone to admire here?