Finding Meaningful Work

The Facebook update of a friend of mine today reminds me of the perennial struggle of young people (like me): how do you get paid (lots of) money for doing things you love?

Many of my peers are engaged in this challenge and - as one privileged to have found both meaningful work and compensation for said work - it has led me to a few reflections.

First, the young especially can struggle to find meaningful work because they don't know what they find meaningful. To get paid to do what one loves one must know what one loves and - further - acknowledge that no career, skill or vocation comes without serious challenges and, if it's something worth doing, a high and long learning curve. There is the old principle of dedicating 10,000 hours but what that principle doesn't always suggest is that many of those hours can suck. Finding meaning, like finding what we love, is a process filled with the virtue of patience. And it is aided, I might add, to no small end by tough minded thinking and thorough-going prayer, such as that facilitated by friends like Steve Garber. Wisdom, as Gideon Strauss loves to recall, cannot be taught - but it can be caught; it's contagious.

Second, I am reminded continuously that my generation - and I mean myself particularly here - have hard lessons to learn from Brother Lawrence. The apprenticing curve for my own work in policy and academia is pretty high, but it's also pretty unpleasant at the start (and I count myself still on that curve). As Ecclesiastes admonishes, it is good for a young man to bear his burden in his youth - I can't imagine the first 2000 hours of developing expertise are nearly as pleasant as the last 2000.

Maybe part of finding meaningful work - work that we love - is about finding work we come to love, rather than expect to find excellent from Day 1. Maybe instead of coming in with our skills, ideas and preferences we let the work we do find shape those things, and take - as Brother Lawrence did - each day as a gift of grace, to learn to find the divine in new and unexpected ways; ways that at times defy what we consider our gifts, strengths and loves.