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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I’ve never been attracted to skinny women. There’s nothing wrong with someone who’s naturally thin, but it’s never been my preference. What has shocked me, though, is the judgment I’ve heard from women all through my life — about themselves and others — about who’s “fat.” I concluded long ago that most women in our culture have been brainwashed to believe that skinny is attractive — and that anything other than skinny is ugly. I first assumed that I was the oddball — for preferring women with bigger and heavier bodies — but I’m coming to the conclusion that most men naturally feel this way to one extent or another. I just ran across new research by a couple of Northwestern University psychology professors that shows that women seriously overestimate how much a straight man will be attracted to a skinny woman. In a perfect world, we would all be at a healthy weight, but when it comes to attractiveness, too heavy is more attractive than skinny. At least to me — and to a lot of men, too.

Years ago, I heard a question that seemed very insightful at the time. You’ve probably heard it, too. What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? The question is intended to help you uncover things you really want to do, but which you’re afraid to try — for fear of failure. In an interview today, I heard the great marketing guru Seth Godin give a different point of view. He said the better question is to ask what you would do even if you knew it would fail. That struck me as far more insightful than the original version. We ought to be doing what we know is right, not what will maximize our success or praise from others. There are some battles that are worth fighting even if you believe you’re doomed to failure. Those battles are often for love or important ideas or our children. Some things are simply worth fighting for — and the truth is that you might win anyway. Do the right thing. Take the chance.

The more I understand about myself, about human nature and about the nature of reality, the more I realize I’m a radical by the standards of both Modernism and Postmodernism. Seeing the things which I’m stumbling toward makes me an enemy of many of the core ideas upon which contemporary culture is built. It exposes the culture as a monstrous lie — like a dangerous infection that’s slowly destroying what human were created to be. My “inner observer” has always known that truth was found in the ideas of the Enlightenment, but I’m slowly finding words to explain what has merely been instinct until now. The Enlightenment was humanity’s great leap forward, but shallow and arrogant thinkers for the next two centuries threw away the fruits of that achievement. We can’t go forward as a species until we go back to correct this intellectual and spiritual error — and part of that is acknowledging that our collective attempts to do away with our Creator will always fail.

I’ve come to believe that some of us — including me — aren’t very good at knowing how to be happy. I don’t mean that in the sense that happy talk and positive thinking should be able to make us happy regardless of the circumstances. I mean that some of us had so much experience with being unhappy when we were young that we were trained to be unhappy — and that being happy is an unconsciously uncomfortable thing. When I look at times in my past when I should have been happy, it rarely lasted. I believe now that I found reasons to be unhappy — and caused real problems for myself — because being comfortable and happy felt so foreign to my programming. If I’m right, this means that some of us have to do more than just change our circumstances. It means we have to learn how to accept the happiness that we unconsciously fear we don’t deserve.

After I wrote last night about being happy, I thought of an old song that mirrored what I was feeling. After listening to the entire album, I found it remarkable how well the emotions of that music match my own heart at this point in my life. Bob Bennett’s “Matters of the Heart” came out while I was in college. Even after all these years, it holds up really well, and you can listen to the entire album on YouTube. The specific song which matched my feelings last night was “Madness Dancing,” but I still find every song on the album to be strong with the exception of the eighth and ninth. (The song about his parents, called “1951,” is especially poignant.) In fact, the opening and closing songs paint a picture of my heart at its best now in these lines: “A light shining in this heart of darkness, A new beginning and a miracle, Day by day the integration of the concrete and the spiritual.” It’s old music that you’ve probably never heard, but it means a lot to me.

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