A (half empty) Cup of Ambition
A few months after a glorious year of working in Northern Ireland, I found myself seated behind a switchboard in the middle of a car dealership lobby. My temp agency got me the gig, assuring me that in the middle of a recession this was about as good as it would get.
My job, as you can imagine, was pretty straightforward. Answer the phone, page the lucky recipient of a phone call, and then park the call. The days were quiet because people weren’t buying cars – there was a recession, after all! Of the 100+ lines on that massive switchboard, maybe 3 buttons illuminated on a regular basis.
Most of the staff were kind and shared my boredom, but there was one salesman who made himself busy by telling anyone within earshot, “Hey, I see what you’re doing there, but that’s wrong.”
After a few days on the job, he acknowledged my presence, asked which high school I went to (the wrong one, it turned out), and then loudly taught me how to pronounce his surname. At the risk of him reading this and telling me yet again how wrong I am, I will tell you, dear reader, that name was Wade. This was also the name of the massive road upon which the glossy car dealership sat. I knew that name. I grew up in this town, learned to drive on this road, and well, it’s a one-syllable word. (That was my crime, thinking this was a one-syllable game. Wade should have two syllables, according to the busybody gent pacing the showroom floor.)
Somehow being told I am mispronouncing a common one-syllable name incorrectly didn’t bring me an ounce of shame. No, telling people I was tempting at a car dealership was the thing that would turn my face red and cause me to quickly pivot to some self-deprecating joke. But the joke was on me the night a girl from book club asked if I worked at The Car Dealership on That Road. Turns out she heard my voice paging someone before parking their call.
I admitted the voice she heard booming across three car lots via many outdoor speakers was indeed mine, and the group shared a laugh before opening up to one another about bad temp jobs and how scary being in between jobs can be.
Spells of unemployment have a way of clearly pointing out how much value people put on work. When I’m craving a job, it seems I am craving an identity. How often have you been introduced to a new acquaintance and quickly asked, “So, what do you do for a living.” Once we know what someone does for a living, we can assess who they are and perhaps their value to us. Deep down you and I know that’s hogwash, and yet we keep up with the Joneses and continue classifying “work” as the grandest of life’s major keys.
When you consider people spend an average of 90,000 hours at work – roughly a third of a life – it makes sense why people are quick to intertwine identity with career choice.
It's all exhausting. And this most certainly isn’t how God wired you or me to define success.
Look at nature, and you’ll see all living creatures work. Working isn’t a bad thing. It can provide pleasure and pride (the good kind). It can give purpose and provide for our tangible needs. But work isn’t the only thing. Allow me to share a bit of my Failure Resume with you to illustrate just how work isn’t the only thing.
As I mentioned in a previous post, I graduated from college during a rocky economic chapter. After failed rounds of interviews, hours of perusing websites to a soundtrack of sad Simon and Garfunkel songs, I found myself armed with a journalism degree and working in a kitchen store. It was humiliating. I avoided many college friends and played cool when customers asked personal questions. I used that retail job to help me move across the country where I would later land MY DREAM JOB (!!) in the publicity department of a record label. But the music industry was changing, and the rumor was our execs needed cash to build a fancy new headquarters in New York City. Layoffs were a constant part of life at the record label I called home. So much for landing a dream job if it evaporates.
Years of good jobs, mediocre jobs, and bad jobs followed until I found myself at my most-recent post. While I’ve been ambitious in the I-like-to-pay-my-bills-and-order-a-side-of-guac way, I’ve never had a burning ambition to have a corner office. And yet I found myself earning a three-letter title that started with “C.” It was surreal. I’d made it to the top, so to speak. I was a girl boss (eye roll). And it was, well, weird. Turns out, people were really into that title, particularly other women. After I received the title, women I thought were friendly turned sort of vicious.
I now saw why so many of the executives for whom I’d worked threw themselves into hobbies and family. They knew what I was learning for myself real fast: you and I are more than our jobs. Heck, we are more than any one aspect of our lives be it parenting, academics, retirement, or walking through an in-between season. And yet many of us live in ecosystems where our vocation is the thing that leads when it comes to defining ourselves and where we are on that ladder to success.
For many, family is the fallback barometer to measure success. But what of those who are not in relationships and not parents? Can they still have a successful life? Or the person closing the door on a relationship or saying a heartbreaking goodbye to a child – have they failed if family is the preferred success meter?
I suppose if work and family aren’t your thing, maybe treasures are. Whoever has the most toys and all that. But one evening in a place like Palm Beach or Newport Beach will show you that doesn’t seem like a sustainable way to measure your life’s success. Someone will always be richer, younger, thinner, or better than you.
So, let’s make a pact, shall we? Let’s agree to write our own definitions for success and support one another in this endeavor. I won’t judge your list of guidelines, and you refrain from judging mine. If amassing lots of quality time with loved ones (and maybe a little time with my sewing machine) is how I choose to award myself the Successful Life Award, clap for me.