Reframing Work #2: Min Hours, Max Cash – or Do What You Love?

If you haven’t read part one in this series, Reframing Work #1: Ditching Drudgery and the Conventional View of Work, you might want to head there first.

I’ve got two books on my desk. Both are ones I’ve enjoyed, and which have opened my eyes to different paths, new adventures. Their titles are:

• The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere and Join the New Rich (read my review here)
• Career Renegade: How to Make a Great Living Doing What You Love (read my review here)

As you can probably guess just from the titles, these two books exemplify the difference in two attitudes towards work.

1. “Work” is what you do to make money. Your aim is to make as much money as possible with as little time investment as possible – so you can go and enjoy the rest of your life.
2. “Work” is what you can’t not do. Your work is your passion, your dream job, something that brings you alive and contributes to the world.

So who’s right? I actually think that both definitions and both books have, at the core, a similar message. They’re a passionate refutation of the cultural idea of work as drudgery, work as necessity, forty hours of drudgery a week as the price we pay for a few hours of freedom. It’s a view that’s prevailed for a long time. As a boy, C.S. Lewis told a school-friend that he felt we’re destined to endure:

Term, holidays, term, holidays, till we leave school, and then work, work, work till we die.

The word “work” throws up a lot of emotional, from despair to boredom to resignation to passion (see the quotes at the start of the Reframing Work #1 post for examples). The site “Why Work? Creating Liveable Alternatives to Wage Slavery” offers neutral, simple definitions of work and leisure:

We can define work simply as the expenditure of energy in a productive process, and leisure as the expenditure of energy without productive result. We’re not saying one is good and the other bad – they’re just two ways of being. We are not against being productive and we recognize the satisfaction that can result from being engaged in productive activity of one’s own choosing.

(Are we “anti-work”? on Why Work?)

Ferriss does a heck of a lot of things which, by that definition, count as “work” (learning languages, writing, sporting endeavours – all involve expending energy with a productive result). Both he and Fields (the author of Career Renegade) are making the same point: you should be able to spend as much of your life as possible doing something you love.

What are you working for?

If you’ve followed the standard, safe, popular, media-perpetuated route through life, it’s probably gone something like:

• School (term, holidays, term, holidays…)
• University (shorter term, longer holidays, last days of “freedom”…)
• Working for an employer (few holidays, “work” as a place and time – Mon-Fri)

Unfortunately, routes that are “standard” and “safe” and “popular” (in the sense of lots of people taking them, not lots of people liking them) rarely become adventures, and rarely bring real satisfaction.

If your “work” involves a job that you’d describe as “okay”, “bearable”, “well-paid but dull”, you might want to stop and ask yourself why. Once you’ve allowed for the commute, being stuck in or near the office during your lunch hour, and occasional overtime or worries about the job outside your actual working hours … you’re probably spending half your waking life engaged in it.

Half your waking life. And – given that we all need down time – most of your productive and creative hours.

Why? Is it for “the money”? Is it for “the future”? Is it simply because it’s what your friends were doing, it’s the path that someone else mapped out for you, the non-adventure that someone else chose for you?

You might have come across this story before. It’s one that I rather like.

An American investment banker, visiting a small village in Mexico, encounters a Mexican fisherman. The fisherman describes his life: “I sleep late, fish a little, take siesta with my wife, Maria, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine and play guitar with my amigos. I have a full and busy life.”

The American scoffs at the fisherman’s lack of ambition and goes into great detail about how he could expand his small business and make millions. “Then what?” asks the fisherman.

“Then you would retire,” replies the American. “Move to a small village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siesta with your wife, and stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play guitar with your amigos.”

(From a quote in Do You Wanna Work or Do You Wanna Job? by Patrick McGaugh, Lime)

I don’t want you to feel horribly depressed at this point. “The money”, in particular, is a strong and valid reason why many people stay in employment. But we need to fight hard against this false, indeed, dangerous, notion that’s so ingrained in society – that work is somehow supposed to be hard, dull, boring, monotonous, what we do in order to enjoy the rest of our lives.

That’s utter crap, and it’s the sort of crap that destroys lives – not, generally, by driving people to suicidal despair, but by the slow, creeping waste of year after year. If you’ve got the sort of job that you can’t wait to retire from, there’s something very wrong.

You can live brilliantly without a job

As I explained in Monday’s post, I found myself pretty dissatisfied with having a day job. I quit. I’m still alive. I’m also a lot happier, I’ve learnt far more in the past year than in the previous two of employment, I’m involved in various Church projects, I’m halfway through an MA and I’ve written 140,000 words of a novel since January…

I’m no super-woman, and a lot of that would have been impossible if I’d had a 9-5 job.

I’m making less money now, but that’s because I don’t work many “paid” hours. I have an incredibly flexible schedule – and I can bring the whole of myself (including my personality and my values) to my work.

Because, yes, I still have work. If I won the lottery, I’d still want to do something that fell under the broader definition of “work”: I suspect a life of leisure would make me, very rapidly, horrifically bored.

What sort of work has chosen you?

That probably sounds like an odd question. Bear with me for a few paragraphs.

I spend a lot of time with writers, especially fiction writers. We’ll often talk about a piece submitted for feedback as “work” or “the work”. I think writing is one of the purest examples of expenditure of energy in a productive process: when you write, you literally create something from nothing except your own thoughts.

I love writing. I can’t imagine a life in which I didn’t write, especially fiction – it’s something I’ve did as a hobby for years, before I ever even considered that I could be paid for it. I found that this post from Joely (also a blogger and novelist) resonated with me:

I don’t need to be happy to write. I don’t need to be happy to get out of bed in the morning, but I do need to be able to write.

If I didn’t, it would be like going without a limb. I can’t imagine not writing.

…

Writing chose me, wove itself into me, and I honestly didn’t get any choice in the matter. I have even less now. I couldn’t walk away.

I believe that we all have a passion that involves “work” – putting in effort for a productive result.

(Isobel Joely Black, Writing, happiness and the meaning of being, In These Heels?)

Your passion might be something that you can see a way of making a living from, even if that means taking a sideways step: I went from fiction writing (which I love) to non-fiction writing (which I love only a little less, which I’m much faster at, and which pays!)

Your passion might be something that you can doodle around. Perhaps you’re passionate about playing retro computer games. You could write ebook strategy guides, write news and feature articles for a relevant blog or magazine, create t-shirts on cafe press – if you’ve got a passion, there’ll be others out there who share it, and who have money to spend on it.

Or, your passion might be something you don’t want to do for the money. Sam commented on part one of this series:

If my passion was my day job, I don’t think I’d be all that passionate about it. The contrast is important. Writing is something I’m able to indulge in and that makes it special. The chances are, no one else will ever enter the worlds I’m creating and follow my characters on their journeys, but I will. That’s my escape and the day job just enables it.

(Sam Strong)

I know the feeling. There’s a definite danger in “jobifying” your passion. I realised this when I studied English literature as an undergraduate – I’d been a real bookworm as a kid and teenager, but when reading became “work”, it was something to procrastinate over!

You might be a fiction writer, like me and Sam. You might want to travel, or do voluntary work. Whatever your passion is, you don’t have to work forty hours a week to finance it: like Tim Ferriss, you could work four. Like Glen Allsopp, you could spend a few weeks setting up a handful of minisites, and live off the income. (Glen makes five figures monthly.)

What can you give to the world?

When you find the work that’s chosen you, the work that you’d do even if you won the lottery, it feels amazing. You know that you’re doing your best in the world. You’re not just getting more from life – you’re giving more back.

More people than ever before are looking for ways to contribute – to make a difference, to make the world a better place, to do something noble, to make sure they are living out the purpose for their lives by doing work that really matters.

(Dan Miller, No More Mondays – Amazon.com / Amazon.co.uk, pg 18)

The more time you can spend on your passion, the more you can contribute to the world. You can look back on a day, week, year or lifetime and say, “I did something significant.” For me, there’s no better feeling, no higher value, than that.

On Monday 17th, I’m going to be releasing a free ebook “Getting More From Life: Quit Your Day Job” to build on this mini-series. It’ll open your eyes to the possibilities, get you enthused, offer practical tips on escaping the day job and show you three perfectly practical alternatives to traditional employment – all of which involve having as much time as possible to do things you’re passionate about.

There’ll also be a competition! So make a note to pop back over on Monday, or grab the Aliventures RSS feed, and see you then…