If there’s something you must do, income and vocation might clash

By David McElroy · December 1, 2017

It was an odd feeling Friday to meet a couple at a house that’s for sale — and to be the “expert” to help guide them through their process of evaluating whether to make an offer on it.

Even though I’ve worked for a real estate company — in one capacity or another — for a couple of years now, it was my first time to be the licensed agent showing the house and hoping to write an offer. Everything went well and I’m showing them another house Saturday. I hope I can help them find what they’re looking for.

To be honest, I know I can do this job well. I’ve worked extensively with the ins and outs of contracts and negotiation and managing the closing process for more than a year now. Nothing about it is intimidating to me.

I also know I can make a lot of money doing this job. If I average closing just two houses a month, I should be able to bring in more than $100,000 in 2018. I haven’t made anything close to that kind of money since I got out of politics. I’ve gone through such a dark period that the money sounds really good. This is a business in which I can become wealthy after a few years if I choose to.

I have solid financial plans and projections, but there’s still the matter of my identity. I can make a lot of money doing this. I can help a lot of people get what they want. But it will never be who I am.

About 15 years ago, someone I know in Tuscaloosa saw a display of new books on campus at the University of Alabama. She called me in excitement.

“You have got to buy this book,” she said. “I’ve never seen anything that more perfectly describes who you are and what you do.”

The book was called “Thinking for a Living,” by Joey Reiman. He was one of the brightest stars of the advertising business until the middle of the 1990s, when he announced he was closing his successful advertising agency in Minneapolis and moving to the South. In Atlanta, he founded a company called BrightHouse — a company based on the idea of gathering a group of bright people who clients would hire to think about their problems and come up with solutions.

It sounds a lot like traditional consulting, but Reiman put more emphasis on pure creative thinking than traditional business analysis. He was so successful that the Boston Consulting Group eventually bought the firm.

What does this have to do with me? What was it that made my friend so excited when she discovered this book?

There are several different ways to explain what I am — what my identity is. Although I still feel unworthy of the title, I think of myself as an artist, because that best describes what I have a need to produce. But at my core, what do I actually do best? What do I have a passionate need to do?

More than anything else, I have to observe the world and think about what I see, then come up with insights and ideas to explain what I synthesize. I have to ask questions. I have to be curious. I have to make connections that others haven’t seen. I have to share those insights. That’s simply who I am.

Novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “You don’t write because you want to say something. You write because you have something to say.”

That might seem like an odd distinction, but I know what he meant. In the purest sense, I don’t really want to say anything. I’d rather just keep my mouth shut and let the world burn on its own. But I can’t, because I see things and feel things that I somehow must say.

I have to be this observer and synthesizer and thinker.

I can’t help it. In various ways, I will always produce works of art — hopefully better and more original art in time — to express the ideas which have slowly coalesced in me. I don’t have any choice about that. It’s a burning need — and I need someone in my life who cares what I have to say.

That’s my identity, but it doesn’t really make much money for me. Not yet.

Today, we think of a vocation as being the same as a job or career, but that’s not what it’s always meant. The word comes from the Christian church — and it originally referred to a calling that a person felt. A vocation was something holy. It was something that came from inside — something which said this is what this person must do to obey what he was created to be.

What I’ve described is my vocation, but it’s not the way I can make a good living. At least not right now.

The world doesn’t tend to pay well for people who observe and think and talk. But I need money — lots of it — to support a family in the near future and to make up for stumbling around so much for much of the last couple of decades trying to figure out some things.

So that means my career and my vocation will have to run on parallel tracks for the time being. Maybe they can merge in the future. Maybe not.

In the meantime, I can gladly serve the people who have real estate needs that I know how to serve. Helping others in this way will never be my vocation, but it can serve my needs if I’m willing to serve the needs of others.

I would love to be paid well for my vocation. Maybe there will come a time when I can make the sort of art that people will enjoy enough that it will be wildly profitable, but entertaining them will never be enough. If I can’t make art that expresses the things I need to say, mere entertainment will seem like a waste of time.

So I’ll be showing houses for now. I hope I’ll be writing a lot of offers and closing a lot of contracts. I hope my wealth will quickly grow and the painful poverty of the past few years will soon be just a bad memory.

But as I’m working hard at selling houses and helping people find what they want, my true vocation will be churning away in the background. I’ll still be observing and thinking and synthesizing. I don’t have any choice. It’s simply something I have to do.

I’ll be happy to make a lot of money, but the most valuable things I have to offer are those things which nobody is willing to pay for right now.

Maybe it’s ego or delusion — it really might be — but I’m still confident that people will one day pay dearly to hear what I have to say.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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