dreaming

Sunset by J. Steel Hutchinson

The Dark Side of Dreaming

It’s officially November, and the time for introspection is beginning with the celebration of Halloween, Samhain, the Day of the Dead or All Souls Day, depending on your cultural heritage.  The days get shorter, darker, and colder and I want to curl up in a blanket on the coach reading a good novel rather than thinking about work and what it means.  Meanwhile, my elder daughter wrestles with being employed on a project-to-project basis without benefits, and my younger daughter struggles to figure out if the $100,000 investment she anticipates as the full cost of graduate school is really worth it.

Which brings me to Steve Jobs.  We have heard a lot about him since his death on October 5th of pancreatic cancer, so much of it a celebration of his life and the impact his products have made on the world.  The now-famous commencement speech delivered at Stanford on June 12, 2005 has been quoted over and over as an exemplar par excellence of why it is important to find what you love to do and do it.

Here are his exact words, after his very public firing from Apple at the age of 30:

“I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.”

While I do not want to deny the accomplishments, which are indeed extraordinary, from the invention of the iMac to his reinvention of himself through the acquisition of Pixar, then his ultimately heroic return to Apple and the introduction of such extraordinary products as the iPhone and the iPad, I have to say that this philosophy has a serious downside.  I have known far to many people, in and outside of academia, who pursued what they loved believing the money would follow, only to become disillusioned and frustrated.  No one would choose an academic career today based on money: you have to do it for love.  Architects and artists may absolutely love what they do, but that doesn’t mean they have the talent to land in the big leagues.  What do you do when you are faced with school debt of over $100,000, wanting to have a family and own a home, but have an income of only $30,000 (the average entry level salary for a new architect)?

It’s just that not everyone can be a Steve Jobs.  Remember, although he was adopted, his intelligence in a community that was filled with intelligent engineers in Palo Alto, CA where he grew up, was off the charts.  And he himself was a little off the charts:  He exhibited odd and eccentric behavior, at various points in his life refusing to wear shoes, put a license plate on his car, going on strange diets of only fruits—whence the name Apple—or only vegetables, or refusing to bathe.   In fact, before he and Steve Wozniak partnered up, he was put on the night shift while working for Atari, because he smelled so bad that other employees did not want to work with him.

He wasn’t the nicest person either: Jobs had a daughter, Lisa Brennan-Jobs (born 1978), from his relationship with Bay Area painter Chrisann Brennan, long before his second marriage to Laurene Powell in 1991.For two years, Chrisann raised their daughter on welfare while Jobs denied paternity by claiming he was sterile; he didn’t acknowledge or even speak to his first child until she was practically an adult.

At work, he was a perfectionist and prone to yelling at people.  One of his colleagues once said,  “He would have made an excellent king of France,” an allusion to his arrogance and management style.  He had a very public war of words with Michael Dell of Dell Computers. He did not initially believe in philanthropy of any kind, but was eventually persuaded to participate in Product Red to eliminate AIDS in Africa.

So take Steve Jobs’ advice with a grain of salt.  You will need to earn a living. Young people with limited work experience may not actually know what kinds of jobs they would actually like.  Or they may pursue what they like in school, only to find it unsatisfactory as a career.   Or, for many of my clients, they work for years in an academic career they thought they would love, only to find it too stressful or too unrewarding to continue.

Here’s what Will Wilkinson, blogger at Big Think, has to say about it:

“As an undergrad I was an art major. Frankly, few of my fellow art majors were talented enough to make a living at it, even after four (or more!) years of training. Sure they loved art, but in the immortal words of Tina Turner, ‘What’s love got to do with it?’

 

‘Find what you love and never settle for less’ is an excellent recipe for frustration and poverty. ‘Reconcile yourself to the limits of your talent and temperament and find the most satisfactory compromise between what you love to do and what you need to do feed your children’ is rather less stirring, but it’s much better advice.”

 

The truth is that most people would rather have a happy, relatively balanced life than one where they obsess 24/7 about their next product to the exclusion of everything else.  I am not suggesting you do not follow your passion, but rather that you match it to the marketplace in a way that fits your own values.  You ma find that providing for your children is your highest calling, and that is perfectly OK. So, while you are dreaming of the wonderful life you will have once you finish that degree, get that first academic job, or discover that you actually want to explore an alternative career path, pay some attention to the dark side of “doing what you love.”

 

 

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