Contradictions of the Heart
A twentysomething wrestles with a self-contained Civil War, with lessons from famous friends.
It’s hard not to feel guilty, sometimes.
Coming of age in the 2010’s in suburban Boston isn’t all that bad a proposition, when you think about it. It’s about as safe a place as you’ll find anywhere on Earth. There are jobs and friendly faces and nice apartments. A good cup of coffee is never far off.
I remember my first real job after college. I was pounding away at articles about marketing for a small firm a few minutes away from my childhood home. It wasn’t a bad place to land after four years of unfocused study at a quiet state school in Western Massachusetts. I didn’t have many bills yet, but I could pay them off. I bought a car.
It was around this time that a very specific type of angst set in. It’s a bullshit angst. The kind well-off twentysomethings run into when they’re not sure what they want to do with the rest of their life. They share this angst with friends their own age over cheap beers at a local pub. Then they all drive home and play Xbox or search online for validation in some deep diving thread of self-pity.
Things were never really that bad. But I was a kid who wanted to put a dent in the universe, like all the titans I read about. How do I get from nowhere to the top of the mountain, conveniently?
Slugging away at my day job, my eyes began to wander towards people who could distill my restlessness better than I could. It led me to a speech from my favorite musician, Bruce Springsteen, at SXSW in 2012.
His reason for speaking that morning was to discuss his musical metamorphosis. He spoke of Roy Orbison and Woody Guthrie and Smokey Robinson and the Sex Pistols. He gazed longingly backward at the stone faces on his private musical Rushmore.
For a fan of rock history, it was a charming keynote. For a fan of Springsteen, there is no such thing as too much pontificating. I’ve listened to it enough times now to know the beats and punchlines. One section, though, has rattled around in my skull for nearly five years.
Open your ears and open your hearts. Don’t take yourself too seriously, and take yourself as seriously as death itself. Don’t worry. Worry your ass off. Have ironclad confidence, but doubt — it keeps you awake and alert. Believe you are the baddest ass in town, and, you suck!
It keeps you honest. It keeps you honest. Be able to keep two completely contradictory ideas alive and well inside of your heart and head at all times. If it doesn’t drive you crazy, it will make you strong. And stay hard, stay hungry, and stay alive.
I think about that line almost every day. Two contradictory ideas alive and well. For a 22 year old kid at his first real desk job, it made partial sense. I wasn’t fully happy and thought there was more for me out there. I assume most kids feel that way when they’re starting out. Who truly loves their first job? Who truly loves any job they have? I wager not most.
As I waded cautiously through my twenties, I held a couple of different jobs in the marketing world, with varying levels of success. I learned that as you find yourself closer to the middle of society’s curve, you think longer and harder about what success you hope to find for yourself one day. Inevitably, you end up watching commencement addresses on YouTube to restore the flame you had burning on your own graduation day. The world wasn’t a frightening place then. It was something to be conquered. Wait’ll they get a load of me, you thought.
Like millions of others, I stumbled across Steve Jobs’ address to Stanford University graduates from 2005. This was my first real exposure into the mind of Jobs. He was a visionary who brought ubiquitous products to market. He had announced he had overcome pancreatic cancer, and his star seemed to be rising higher than ever.
Much like the Springsteen speech, Jobs hit one note that still reverberates.
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.
Yes. Of course. Don’t settle. Why should I? I’m young and have so much to offer. No desk job can hold my boundless potential. This made sense to me. No sense in worrying too much about desk jobs I didn’t believe in.
I learned fairly quickly that student loan bill collectors don’t really care much for your aspirations. Big dreams don’t pay enough to take girls out on a date. And your boss certainly doesn’t blush with excitement to know that you think you’re bigger than the job they’re having you do.
Time marched on. The work was okay. The dreams don’t die, exactly, but you’re willing to make the small compromises your college self would smack you in the face for if the two of you ever bumped into each other.
Scrolling mindlessly through Facebook one day, as I am wont to do, I came across one of those headlines that is designed to shake you from your waking slumber. “…. you HAVE to see the response!”
The headline was referring to an interaction Mike Rowe had with a fan who penned him a letter looking for job advice. Mike Rowe was the host of Dirty Jobs, a show about the dirty work that you probably never thought about, but was essential to the proper functioning of society. The letter was from some kid who wanted the world and didn’t know where to start. Rowe’s response knocked me for a loop.
Stop looking for the “right” career, and start looking for a job. Any job. Forget about what you like. Focus on what’s available. Get yourself hired. Show up early. Stay late. Volunteer for the scut work. Become indispensable. You can always quit later, and be no worse off than you are today. But don’t waste another year looking for a career that doesn’t exist. And most of all, stop worrying about your happiness. Happiness does not come from a job. It comes from knowing what you truly value, and behaving in a way that’s consistent with those beliefs.
Many people today resent the suggestion that they’re in charge of the way the feel. But trust me, Parker. Those people are mistaken. That was a big lesson from Dirty Jobs, and I learned it several hundred times before it stuck. What you do, who you’re with, and how you feel about the world around you, is completely up to you.
Rowe’s response couldn’t have been any more powerful. He was absolutely right. Who the hell did I think I was? The world doesn’t owe anybody anything. So fill up your lunch pail and get to work.
Every day, I think about Springsteen, Jobs and Rowe. I still believe in the dream, in matters of the heart. They’re out there. But what I never gave credence to was Rowe’s philosophy. Beautiful things don’t just fall from the sky. Incremental progression is how you get to those places. You get there by forging meaningful relationships and building skills and putting in the time other’s would prefer not to. I was spending all of my time trying to write a movie script. I should have been learning how to work the camera equipment.
Two contradictory ideas, alive and well. I think about it every single day. It forms the crux of my personal philosophy. Some days it is maddening. It doesn’t always translate well.
Bruce said it best. “If it doesn’t make you crazy, it will make you strong.”
