While slouched over on my couch in the middle of the day last week, I decided to take a small break from debugging code and flipped through Anything You Want, 40 Lessons for a New Kind of Entrepreneur by Derek Sivers. The thin, 88-page book is a wallop of inspiration – chock full of thought candies to suck on when my mind wanders.
Derek on running a business, page 72:
“You have to do whatever you love the most, or you’ll lose interest in the whole thing.”
“That makes sense,” I nodded to myself in agreement. “Of course I should prioritize my time at work to do what I love the most.”
Wait. My thoughts tripped on a snag in the rug. What do I love the most?
Flourishing hand movements with smoke and mirrors flashed in my mind’s eye. A wizard’s voice in surround sound boomed, “science.”
I’m a graduate student in bioengineering. The concept of loving science is unsurprising, imprecise, and impassioned.
I was simultaneously bothered and intrigued that I didn’t have an answer for this off the top of my head. It seemed like such a simple question, and yet I hadn’t taken the time to think about it deeply enough for a thoughtful and authentic response.
As what often happens when I don’t know the answer to something – I ran around my room looking for my journal, ran around my room looking for a pen, pulled my wobbly kitchen stool out, and started writing down all the questions that cropped up in my head as stepping stones branching off the original query.
Original query: What do I love the most?
Follow-up question 1: If I had more time at work what would I spend it doing?
Follow-up question 2: What do I do at work that is unique to my thought patterns and experiences?
Both of the questions I came up with were helpful in understanding how I was thinking about the problem.
With regards to follow-up question 1 – I am not prioritizing my time at work to be doing what I love. This makes sense given I don’t know what it is I love in the first place.
When I am most stressed, my actions and use of time are more reactive than proactive. I’ll respond to emails, sit in meetings I didn’t need to say yes to, and tinker around with things that don’t matter. If I spend less time completing tasks that are low on my priority list, I will have more time to do what I actually love.
If I identify what I love doing, I can optimize my time around it.
With regards to follow-up question 2 – I don’t like being a cog in a machine. By its very definition, a cog must fit its role and cannot grow or else the machine will break and come crashing down.
Whatever I love doing is inherent to a general feeling of “specialness” to it.
As it turns out, the answer to all of these questions (the original query and both follow-up questions) is the same.
If I had more time at work, I would spend it sitting and thinking about a difficult problem. I like identifying a signal within the noise to ask the right questions and get to the heart of a problem. I want to be able to sit back and say, “If we answer these critical questions, the problem will be solved.”
The realization that what I love most is sitting and thinking was a bit anti-climactic, but I think the end result makes up for it by being powerful and exciting. The idea of searching for the critical questions that get to the heart of a problem is inspired from an eastern philosophy class I took in college. I have a very strong memory of my professor standing in front of the classroom while waving a small nub of chalk like it’s a butcher’s knife and shouting, “Zip! Zoop!”
From Chuang Tzu: The Basic Writings, 1964 (translated by Burton Watson): 1
Cook Ting was cutting up an ox for Lord Wen-hui. As every touch of his hand, every heave of his shoulder, every move of his feet, every thrust of his knee — zip! zoop! He slithered the knife along with a zing, and all was in perfect rhythm, as though he were performing the dance of the Mulberry Grove or keeping time to the Ching-shou music.
“Ah, this is marvelous!” said Lord Wen-hui. “Imagine skill reaching such heights!”
Cook Ting laid down his knife and replied, “What I care about is the Way, which goes beyond skill. When I first began cutting up oxen, all I could see was the ox itself. After three years I no longer saw the whole ox. And now — now I go at it by spirit and don’t look with my eyes. Perception and understanding have come to a stop and spirit moves where it wants. I go along with the natural makeup, strike in the big hollows, guide the knife through the big openings, and following things as they are. So I never touch the smallest ligament or tendon, much less a main joint.
“A good cook changes his knife once a year — because he cuts. A mediocre cook changes his knife once a month — because he hacks. I’ve had this knife of mine for nineteen years and I’ve cut up thousands of oxen with it, and yet the blade is as good as though it had just come from the grindstone. There are spaces between the joints, and the blade of the knife has really no thickness. If you insert what has no thickness into such spaces, then there’s plenty of room — more than enough for the blade to play about it. That’s why after nineteen years the blade of my knife is still as good as when it first came from the grindstone.
“However, whenever I come to a complicated place, I size up the difficulties, tell myself to watch out and be careful, keep my eyes on what I’m doing, work very slowly, and move the knife with the greatest subtlety, until — flop! the whole thing comes apart like a clod of earth crumbling to the ground. I stand there holding the knife and look all around me, completely satisfied and reluctant to move on, and then I wipe off the knife and put it away.”
“Excellent!” said Lord Wen-hui. “I have heard the words of Cook Ting and learned how to care for life!”
I think about this story all the time.
It’s not enough to have a sharp knife. I must also slow down and give myself time to think, not just react. I must watch closely to identify what really matters. I must be keen to the position of the blade, as the difference between success and failure can be the most subtle shift in perspective. Do all this and, flop! The problem will come apart like a clod of earth to reveal the elegant solution.
What do you love most?
What are the follow-up questions you consider when searching for the answer?
In what ways would your work life change if you optimized your time to do more of what you love?
1 I actually prefer the translation by Thomas Merton in The Way of Chung Tzu, 1965 (the second translation in the link), but the image of my professor shouting “Zip! Zoop!” is the anchor to this story in my brain.