One of the risks with setting a vision is not having sufficient balance. And usually with overachievers, if they over-index anywhere it’s on their jobs.
The best way I’ve found for avoiding this is thinking about my life in 4 buckets - job, vocation, work, and life.
Your job is what you are paid to do.
Your vocation is what you do that brings you the most joy.
Your work is the sum of lasting good you bring into the world.
Your life is the person you are becoming.
Each of these are important. But much of our difficulty comes when we conflate them.
Your job can be your vocation, but it doesn’t have to be. Often it shouldn’t be.
I love to cook. It’s the closest thing I have to a meditative practice. I love having people over, making elaborate meals, giving that gift.
But if I opened a restaurant it would ruin it. Making the same thing over and over again. Worrying about yield and margin and customer satisfaction. I’d be miserable.
Your work is not just your job. Your job is ideally a part of your work, but your work is bigger.
The average person changes jobs every 3 years. But your work is a lifelong endeavor. You are capable of adding to your body of work in whatever job you have.
Your work is anything you do with intention, consistent with your values. Raising your kids. Being a loving partner. Bringing people together. Serving your community.
“If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, 'Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.” ~ Martin Luther King Jr.
Your life is ultimately just the person you are, the person you’re becoming.
Your job can certainly be a part of that. In fact, I believe your job is the ideal place to develop your character. You spend more time there than anywhere else. And you often have to deal with challenging situations, with challenging people, under time and money and emotional constraints.
But if you identify your job too closely with your life, and you lose your job, it can be hard to recover.
Even when you succeed it can be a trap. Speak with founders who exit their companies and you’ll find it’s often bittersweet. Hopefully they had a legacy-changing financial outcome. But it’s no longer their company. They wonder if they were lucky and not good. They’re 35 (or whatever) and have likely had the most “successful” business outcome they’ll ever have. What now?
Your job is a tool to provide you with a living. A tool to help you develop your character. A tool to help you add to your body of work. But it is not your life.
Job. Vocation. Work. Life. All of these are good. They just need to be kept in the appropriate perspective. When setting your 10 year vision, keep all 4 dimensions in mind.
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