I’m a little embarrassed, after a year of writing about work and identity, to have immediately fallen into the “vocational awe” trap in my conversation with Liz Haswell on Tuesday. To her credit, Liz set me straight. But it’s alarming how much I still default to language about work as a calling. If you missed this a few posts ago, “
Oh, wow, Joshua, I'm reeling with this. I was the young writer whose education was utterly grounded in the concept of greatness, whether in trying to write great books (and failing except for maybe 500 pages of the hundreds of thousands I've published) or in seeking out and reading the greats (of which there are more than enough to occupy my entire life). And, frankly, I don't see much of this push for greatness in contemporary fiction. In fact, there's active hostility toward the concept, especially because it's usually associated with white male writers. But then I think of Emily Dickinson, who could very well be the greatest poet in human history, who devoted herself so completely to her work, writing hundreds of poems, while publishing only a handful in her life. Did she suffer because of her greatness? Did she consciously pursue greatness? Was she lonely? Did she sacrifice for that greatness? I think she did.
I just read an essay by Richard Feynman talking about how teaching is the greatest thing if you’re a creative scientist. He describes the sad state of the guys who were given space and time and money and told to go make something, about how they feel like frauds and get caught in their heads and so on, but how because he was teaching, whenever he had a creative doldrum he’d go teach his students something really basic and elemental to him, and their questions might touch on some aspect that would refresh some curious point he’d long forgotten about, and he’d find his creativity again. It was an argument for not taking research-only positions, always teaching no matter how elevated you become in your career. He’s a good counterpoint to Cather. Like her, a very flawed human being but none the less a decided creative force and a great writer too. The two of them would doubtless disagree, but I think it shows the diversity of personality among human beings.
I’ve been loving reading your pieces. Your autobiographical writing is beautiful. I especially enjoyed the one about church and baseball. I also admire the ability of writers to put themselves out there. I write a lot but I haven’t had the courage to try to publish because people on the internet are so quick to be critical or contrarian. But to get back to the topic…the word “awe” feels misleading. Awe is an inner experience that makes us feel small but in a good way. It gives us perspective on our mortality and reference for the mysteries of life and existence. Overworking is a behavior that is usually tied to feelings of insecurity and striving for external validation. Sometimes this overworking is because we want to feel big and important from acknowledgment and accolades. The state of awe and the behaviors of overworking don’t match. It feels like vocational awe is really pointing to an economy that takes people who once had awe and asks them to engage in endlessly meaningless tasks like hours of checking and responding to emails so they can achieve some external legitimacy. If we truly felt awe, we would be more still and slow down and evaluate the meaning and importance of our tasks.
At the beginning of my nonprofit career, my entire life was my vocation. I wrote about this in a piece titled when home is a vocation (and doing this on my phone I am too lazy to provide a link). But I think there is something about ego tied up in vocational awe. Now, my daily mantra is simply., “ how can I be of service today?” And maybe due to age or other internal work that I’ve done, I asked this question without sacrificing my own needs. Sometimes to be of service to others, we must first take care of ourselves. That means, as much as I would like to finish a paper on Orpheus, prompted by a friend’s question, it continues to sit in a pile now for a year. Today, there are other things I must attend to.
What an interesting essay and discussion! I feel so lucky to have bumbled into it.
“But why must craft constitute the whole self to be pure?” Captures a lot of how I’m feeling right now--like the act of leaving nullifies everything.
I believe it’s also worth thinking about how this idea affects (or infects) academic scientific culture, because it’s often used to justify low pay and long hours. If being a scientist is a calling rather than a vocation, you should be willing to work late nights in the lab, and accept low salaries because the payoff is glory.
Writers aren’t really writing for their era — or for anybody they know or may know. They’re writing for people who don’t exist yet, they are attempting — assuming that some mode of literate transmission survives — to convey the truth of themselves and their era for people who will never experience it themselves. Both of these are holy tasks.”
I think structured ways of mattering were opening up in the great massification and democratization of the 19th Century--but that fueled Romantic envisionings of passionate originality and greatness in part as a desire to matter MORE than just being a citizen, a community member, an equal part of a society moving towards equality. To have a calling--and to fulfill it with distinctive individuality--set you up above that, almost as a preservation of an aristocratic ethos against the crowd. But if you weren't going to be Lord Byron or William Blake, the notion that you had civic duty, that you could steward and maintain a profession's mission, that you could participate in the everyday disposition of decisions in your community or your institutions, all gave people a way to matter--to own a share of the commonweal. As that dwindles in our own moment, I think the flame of "but I might still be great" burns brighter because there isn't that other route to mattering through the basic pursuit of duty, honor and mission for most people, even though we do still invoke that a lot.
I'm going to limit myself here, bc I have work to do and a podcast to record and a happy hour to get to on time this afternoon, so I'll just pick up the question "Do you love something so much that you are, like the young Willa Cather, willing to be a failure at it? Do you love that craft or vocation so much that you are willing to allow it to make you unhappy?"
My short answer is FUCK TO THE NO I don't.
So, I was a less-than-happy, occasionally miserable academic. That isn't why I left, however. I got tenure, I hit plenty of the required benchmarks for academic success, but I struggled with working on things that 10 people would read and teaching in a dying field. Teaching basic language classes and navigating the people and the crumbling infrastructure of my university didn't really bring me the joy that I thought would come with the title and the job and whatever I had imagined under "life of the mind."
I do NOT believe that each of us should "follow our passion" so we "never have to work a day in our lives." Miya Tokumitsu does a better job than I in articulating why _Do What You Love_ is a bullshit phrase to parrot to people, especially people who are just embarking on a job or career quest.
What I do believe is that each of us should feel connected to purpose. Maybe that happens at work--as it currently does for me--but perhaps it happens elsewhere in your life. Finding purpose in your existence is a critical element in human resilience and nihilism generally does not create long lives filled with moments of awe and joy.
I also believe that personal growth more often than not involves discomfort. So, if you are experiencing pain or misery because you're in the process of stretching yourself, reaching your intellectual, social, spiritual limbs into new corners of the world, then that is 100% ok. Please continue to do that, because you will come out the other side of that discomfort changed, likely for the better. Then you can hang out in that new place, now that it is comfortable, for a while, before you are ready to grow and stretch and be uncomfortable again.
So, if writing a book or pursuing any craft or big thing worth doing feels like that, like a messy and uncomfortable phase that ends in some sort of transformation, then sign me up. But if you pursue the big thing and never feel the transformation, never get to the internal moment of "well done" or "now I know I can do that, so I'm ready to try it again or improve it" or some such, then I would question what it is you think you're pursuing.
On a personal note, my "big thing worth doing" or BHAG, to use Collins' and Porras' acronym for "big, hairy, audacious goal" is building a sustainable coaching business. It takes a great deal of emotional energy and has taken more learning and internal transformation than I thought I was capable of at this age. But I am a different, wiser, more compassionate person now than I was when I tentatively embarked on this mission 6 years ago. I recognize that this business-building BHAG has provided a wonderfully convenient excuse for not looking at the other BHAG that has been sitting at 15k words in a Dropbox folder for years. Perhaps, when I feel like I've caught up with myself business-wise, the memoir will have its day.
Apr 14, 2023·edited Apr 14, 2023Liked by Joshua Doležal
Joshua as a teacher of entrepreneurship (and 3x entrepreneur) I'm constantly fighting to get young (and old) entrepreneurs to review, revisit and rethink their definition of success. Certainly the Silicon Valley ethos and myth-makers would have us believe you aren't a real entrepreneur if you don't buy into the ethos of 'the-grind-is-real' or equally inane saying of the week. Of course media's coverage and adulation of mostly-male role models of entrepreneurial success who seem to go through wives, companies and money with nary a care doesn't help mattes. Oops will get off the tirade - my point was by no means are artists, academics and writers are alone in this trap of "vocational awe" but I'd argue its a larger (capitalist?) human condition. Of course artists, academics (certainly school teachers) and writers even when successful (whatever that means) don't always see the sorts of economic rewards that entrepreneurs might so the angst is far greater in the society we will live. This article on the mental health travails of entrepreneurs is a sobering peek behind the curtain. https://www.inc.com/magazine/201309/jessica-bruder/psychological-price-of-entrepreneurship.html
This is very tangential to what you have written, but it seems to me that 'greatness' invariably is measured by the support/opinions of other people. Yet the history of ideas is leavened by those who worked anonymously and un-celebrated. Mostly those unafraid of swimming against the mainstream. The need to make the original intelligible is perhaps what Amy touches on in her emphasis (and Feynman's) on teaching where the inspiration has to 'bed-down' to be useful to others. The greatness is unaffected by that, and remains, in a way, primary. Without such affirmations it remains invisible.
Oh, wow, Joshua, I'm reeling with this. I was the young writer whose education was utterly grounded in the concept of greatness, whether in trying to write great books (and failing except for maybe 500 pages of the hundreds of thousands I've published) or in seeking out and reading the greats (of which there are more than enough to occupy my entire life). And, frankly, I don't see much of this push for greatness in contemporary fiction. In fact, there's active hostility toward the concept, especially because it's usually associated with white male writers. But then I think of Emily Dickinson, who could very well be the greatest poet in human history, who devoted herself so completely to her work, writing hundreds of poems, while publishing only a handful in her life. Did she suffer because of her greatness? Did she consciously pursue greatness? Was she lonely? Did she sacrifice for that greatness? I think she did.
I just read an essay by Richard Feynman talking about how teaching is the greatest thing if you’re a creative scientist. He describes the sad state of the guys who were given space and time and money and told to go make something, about how they feel like frauds and get caught in their heads and so on, but how because he was teaching, whenever he had a creative doldrum he’d go teach his students something really basic and elemental to him, and their questions might touch on some aspect that would refresh some curious point he’d long forgotten about, and he’d find his creativity again. It was an argument for not taking research-only positions, always teaching no matter how elevated you become in your career. He’s a good counterpoint to Cather. Like her, a very flawed human being but none the less a decided creative force and a great writer too. The two of them would doubtless disagree, but I think it shows the diversity of personality among human beings.
I’ve been loving reading your pieces. Your autobiographical writing is beautiful. I especially enjoyed the one about church and baseball. I also admire the ability of writers to put themselves out there. I write a lot but I haven’t had the courage to try to publish because people on the internet are so quick to be critical or contrarian. But to get back to the topic…the word “awe” feels misleading. Awe is an inner experience that makes us feel small but in a good way. It gives us perspective on our mortality and reference for the mysteries of life and existence. Overworking is a behavior that is usually tied to feelings of insecurity and striving for external validation. Sometimes this overworking is because we want to feel big and important from acknowledgment and accolades. The state of awe and the behaviors of overworking don’t match. It feels like vocational awe is really pointing to an economy that takes people who once had awe and asks them to engage in endlessly meaningless tasks like hours of checking and responding to emails so they can achieve some external legitimacy. If we truly felt awe, we would be more still and slow down and evaluate the meaning and importance of our tasks.
At the beginning of my nonprofit career, my entire life was my vocation. I wrote about this in a piece titled when home is a vocation (and doing this on my phone I am too lazy to provide a link). But I think there is something about ego tied up in vocational awe. Now, my daily mantra is simply., “ how can I be of service today?” And maybe due to age or other internal work that I’ve done, I asked this question without sacrificing my own needs. Sometimes to be of service to others, we must first take care of ourselves. That means, as much as I would like to finish a paper on Orpheus, prompted by a friend’s question, it continues to sit in a pile now for a year. Today, there are other things I must attend to.
What an interesting essay and discussion! I feel so lucky to have bumbled into it.
“But why must craft constitute the whole self to be pure?” Captures a lot of how I’m feeling right now--like the act of leaving nullifies everything.
I believe it’s also worth thinking about how this idea affects (or infects) academic scientific culture, because it’s often used to justify low pay and long hours. If being a scientist is a calling rather than a vocation, you should be willing to work late nights in the lab, and accept low salaries because the payoff is glory.
Writers aren’t really writing for their era — or for anybody they know or may know. They’re writing for people who don’t exist yet, they are attempting — assuming that some mode of literate transmission survives — to convey the truth of themselves and their era for people who will never experience it themselves. Both of these are holy tasks.”
love that
I think structured ways of mattering were opening up in the great massification and democratization of the 19th Century--but that fueled Romantic envisionings of passionate originality and greatness in part as a desire to matter MORE than just being a citizen, a community member, an equal part of a society moving towards equality. To have a calling--and to fulfill it with distinctive individuality--set you up above that, almost as a preservation of an aristocratic ethos against the crowd. But if you weren't going to be Lord Byron or William Blake, the notion that you had civic duty, that you could steward and maintain a profession's mission, that you could participate in the everyday disposition of decisions in your community or your institutions, all gave people a way to matter--to own a share of the commonweal. As that dwindles in our own moment, I think the flame of "but I might still be great" burns brighter because there isn't that other route to mattering through the basic pursuit of duty, honor and mission for most people, even though we do still invoke that a lot.
I'm going to limit myself here, bc I have work to do and a podcast to record and a happy hour to get to on time this afternoon, so I'll just pick up the question "Do you love something so much that you are, like the young Willa Cather, willing to be a failure at it? Do you love that craft or vocation so much that you are willing to allow it to make you unhappy?"
My short answer is FUCK TO THE NO I don't.
So, I was a less-than-happy, occasionally miserable academic. That isn't why I left, however. I got tenure, I hit plenty of the required benchmarks for academic success, but I struggled with working on things that 10 people would read and teaching in a dying field. Teaching basic language classes and navigating the people and the crumbling infrastructure of my university didn't really bring me the joy that I thought would come with the title and the job and whatever I had imagined under "life of the mind."
I do NOT believe that each of us should "follow our passion" so we "never have to work a day in our lives." Miya Tokumitsu does a better job than I in articulating why _Do What You Love_ is a bullshit phrase to parrot to people, especially people who are just embarking on a job or career quest.
What I do believe is that each of us should feel connected to purpose. Maybe that happens at work--as it currently does for me--but perhaps it happens elsewhere in your life. Finding purpose in your existence is a critical element in human resilience and nihilism generally does not create long lives filled with moments of awe and joy.
I also believe that personal growth more often than not involves discomfort. So, if you are experiencing pain or misery because you're in the process of stretching yourself, reaching your intellectual, social, spiritual limbs into new corners of the world, then that is 100% ok. Please continue to do that, because you will come out the other side of that discomfort changed, likely for the better. Then you can hang out in that new place, now that it is comfortable, for a while, before you are ready to grow and stretch and be uncomfortable again.
So, if writing a book or pursuing any craft or big thing worth doing feels like that, like a messy and uncomfortable phase that ends in some sort of transformation, then sign me up. But if you pursue the big thing and never feel the transformation, never get to the internal moment of "well done" or "now I know I can do that, so I'm ready to try it again or improve it" or some such, then I would question what it is you think you're pursuing.
On a personal note, my "big thing worth doing" or BHAG, to use Collins' and Porras' acronym for "big, hairy, audacious goal" is building a sustainable coaching business. It takes a great deal of emotional energy and has taken more learning and internal transformation than I thought I was capable of at this age. But I am a different, wiser, more compassionate person now than I was when I tentatively embarked on this mission 6 years ago. I recognize that this business-building BHAG has provided a wonderfully convenient excuse for not looking at the other BHAG that has been sitting at 15k words in a Dropbox folder for years. Perhaps, when I feel like I've caught up with myself business-wise, the memoir will have its day.
Joshua as a teacher of entrepreneurship (and 3x entrepreneur) I'm constantly fighting to get young (and old) entrepreneurs to review, revisit and rethink their definition of success. Certainly the Silicon Valley ethos and myth-makers would have us believe you aren't a real entrepreneur if you don't buy into the ethos of 'the-grind-is-real' or equally inane saying of the week. Of course media's coverage and adulation of mostly-male role models of entrepreneurial success who seem to go through wives, companies and money with nary a care doesn't help mattes. Oops will get off the tirade - my point was by no means are artists, academics and writers are alone in this trap of "vocational awe" but I'd argue its a larger (capitalist?) human condition. Of course artists, academics (certainly school teachers) and writers even when successful (whatever that means) don't always see the sorts of economic rewards that entrepreneurs might so the angst is far greater in the society we will live. This article on the mental health travails of entrepreneurs is a sobering peek behind the curtain. https://www.inc.com/magazine/201309/jessica-bruder/psychological-price-of-entrepreneurship.html
This is very tangential to what you have written, but it seems to me that 'greatness' invariably is measured by the support/opinions of other people. Yet the history of ideas is leavened by those who worked anonymously and un-celebrated. Mostly those unafraid of swimming against the mainstream. The need to make the original intelligible is perhaps what Amy touches on in her emphasis (and Feynman's) on teaching where the inspiration has to 'bed-down' to be useful to others. The greatness is unaffected by that, and remains, in a way, primary. Without such affirmations it remains invisible.