Fiona Macdonald-Smith interviews John Williams, author of Screw Work, Let’s Play. It’s careers advice on the ‘work-as-self-realisation’ model. The ultimate career goal is to ‘get paid for being me’.
Don’t simply reject it as a hippy fantasy: Even if you are not realistically going to leave your job in the bank and discover your inner novelist, there is much wisdom here about getting in touch with the passions that truly motivate you – the ones you often leave behind because you think you are ‘working’.
“The rules are changing,” he says. “My mum’s belief was that work was to be endured, not enjoyed, and her generation didn’t really have a choice. But we no longer need to be driven by the old work ethic; we have entered the era of what the author Pat Kane calls the Play Ethic — ‘placing yourself, your passions and enthusiasms at the centre of your world’.”
Williams makes it clear that he’s not advocating doing the thing you love and just hoping that the money turns up. “Aristotle said, ‘where the needs of the world and your talents cross, there lies your vocation’. You need to find the sweet spot between the things you love to do and doing them in a way that solves people’s problems for them — and there is your means of earning a living.”
How do you find this sweet spot? How do you even know what you really want?
The answer is to follow your instincts. Imagine someone handed you a year’s salary and said you didn’t have to go back to work for 12 months. What would you do? Sit on a beach? Go travelling? But after the first three months of pleasure and idleness, what would you do then? That, says Williams, is the clue to what you should be doing with your life right now.
He suggests that you get yourself a notebook “Write down everything you discover — what you like, what you don’t like, people whose work or lifestyle you’d like to emulate, ideas for contacts to talk to, projects to try. This is now your playbook.”
You should also make like Columbo — the detective with the famous line, “Just one more thing”. “You can learn a lot from Columbo,” he says thoughtfully. “No clue goes unnoticed by him, and it shouldn’t by you. What part of a bookshop draws you in? What did you enjoy doing as a child? It doesn’t have to be something that immediately seems ‘creative’, just driven by a genuine interest — I had a client who, it turned out, wanted to be a City trader: one of the clues was that he always turned to the business section of the newspaper first.”
Try to make every Wednesday a day when you get a little bit closer to your ideal life. “Halfway between weekends, it’s the ideal time to build a little play into your working week,” Williams says. “Even if you can grab only a few minutes out of your day, do it. If you want to be a poet, take a book of poems to read and a notebook to write in on your commute. Then find ways to free up more time as the weeks go on.”
The problem is, Williams says, that we tend to have a job mindset, and that doesn’t necessarily serve us well in the current climate of economic upheaval. We think like an employee and look for a hole to fit into, whereas we should be thinking like an entrepreneur — what are my strengths, how can I create something from scratch that fits me like a glove? “If you can think like that, you’ll be better placed to survive big shifts in the economy,” Williams says. “If you have a self-driven, passionate, creative approach you’re one of a kind, and can’t so easily be outsourced.”
Some of this connects with the advice we give here at the seminary about how to discern your vocation. Often what starts people on the vocational journey is a ‘just one more thing’ moment.
[Addition:] A friend just sent me this quote from Mons. Luigi Giusanni:
What I must do, what I must be – my vocation – does not normally emerge as a specific command, but as a suggestion, a proposal, an invitation. Vocation, which is the meaning of one’s life, introduces itself more as a glimpse of a possibility than as something absolutely inevitable. The more difficult the task to be accomplished the truer this is. In its purest and most evocative aspect, awareness is the most discreet cue: it is inspiration. Thus one confirms one’s personal worth by readily agreeing to the subtlest of possibilities.
Bridges and Tangents 
Dear Fr. Stephen,
I hope that you are well. Just a quick note to say thank you for sharing this. I found it very interesting and thought-provoking!
God bless you!
Elaine
Thanks Elaine – hope you are well
Hello Fr Stephen,
Thankyou for another very interesting and thought provoking post. It really does raise a lot of questions. But, for me, it emphasises the fact that we spend so much of our time at work and that work has such a profound effect upom our lives – for the good or ill. I would also add my thought that, just as our lives evolve and we develop new goals, interests and passions which need to be achieved to help us on our road to self actualisation then, so too does the ‘just one more thing’ we need to do to realise our true vocation or identity.
Fr Stephen
Greetings from Oz. I am amazed at the variety of subjects in your posts. For a reflective person, you certainly are engaged in much activity. Action and contemplation!
Thanks for the ideas you collect and share. Hope you are keeping well. Remember the Blue Mountains are still here.
Vic
I was remembering the World Youth Day trip recently, and the fantastic days in the Blue Mountains…
Thanks Fr Stephen. This has reminded me of something I was reading about Vocation by Mons. Luigi Giusanni. He says:
‘What I must do, what I must be – my vocation – does not normally emerge as a specific command, but as a suggestion, a proposal, an invitation. Vocation, which is the meaning of one’s life, introduces itself more as a glimpse of a possibility than as something absolutely inevitable. The more difficult the task to be accomplished the truer this is. In its purest and most evocative aspect, awareness is the most discreet cue: it is inspiration. Thus one confirms one’s personal worth by readily agreeing to the subtlest of possibilities.’
What are your pasions?,What are your roles in the play?.
There are some very good reasons why you should not read self-help literature. Most of it is watered-down pop psychology intended for people who are not very well educated and desperate to change their lives. The kind of people who might write self-help books would not normally be listened to in a social situation and so they have to write books to feed their narcissism and give them a sense of existing. I knew one such author before he started writing, so much pathology there but he now makes a living advising and motivating other people as a creative coach. This was my experience of him.
I knew the author for nearly ten years but have had no contact with him for fourteen years when after not for the first time he tried to extort an ‘apology’ from me by saying that we should not be friends any longer. I said yes and aside from some pathetic attempts by him to act as though nothing happened, not that he had the bravery to call me to express a wish that he should be my friend again, I have had no contact with him. At the time I was branded a thief and a liar and when I tried to return some of his personal property I was for the first and only time in my life actually snarled at by another human being over the phone.
It is very hard to say anything positive about the author, I have thought about contacting him in recent years but when I discovered his creative coaching website in recent years I knew that this was a delusional narcissist who had actually progressed from being somebody who had been totally corrupted by a degree of success as a computer programmer to somebody who was genuinely mad. It is fair to say that he probably started to become mad in the last two years that I knew him. Around that time I was having a very tough time trying to get a proper break in my dream job. I recall that when I complained about it to him his comment was ‘well you chose it’ and when I half-heartedly asked for some kind of leg-up in the large media company he worked in he wrote me off in three words ‘no product knowledge’. That was coming from a friend. He never failed to mention when he had received a pay rise, even when I was unemployed. In the last two years he started to cultivate pretentions as a creative person, musician, writer, etc all half baked and when he had an article printed about a health condition he and others suffer from in the Guardian 2 he never stopped talking about it. On the day it was published I bought two copies and showed it to my co-workers and then rang him to tell him I thought it was good. Some months later after spending a good part of an evening taunting me about some audio samples I had given him and which he had used in an avant garde jingle to be broadcast on Radio 3 he then whipped out an attack about how I was the person who had been the coldest about his newspaper article and that he would keep reminding me about it. He actually extorted an apology from me.
You may ask why I ever hung about with somebody as vicious and not to mention ignorant as the author. I should mention that again when I was unemployed, he would fizz about how London was like ‘a great big playground’ because he had a good disposable income. I should also mention that he had ideas about becoming a counsellor, very fond of diagnosing people, also chock full of class hatred to a degree I have not seen since and very touchy about being criticised himself to the point of choosing a type of counsellor who not tell him what to do. He frequently used to argue with these people. Fortunately he lacked the commitment to become a counsellor or have access to genuinely vulnerable people, something which I have monitored and have told the webmasters of various self-help forums he posts on that I would make a very real complaint to the appropriate authorities about if I ever heard of it, citing my reasons why. Finally I must say that the author had another most unpleasant hobby, linked to his liking for one-upmanship and that was to undermine people. I have recognised academic qualifications in psychology, nothing amazing, but something that the author on the strength of a few evening classes liked to undermine.
I suppose I hung around with this person, because I was scared of being alone or losing a friend and I was pretty vulnerable at the time because of what was going on at work. The author exploited all of this and acted as no friend at all. I find it horrific that the author should now be in a position where he is giving advice to anybody and where he is able to propagate his frankly idiotic views about motivation. As long as confines his activities to a few people with more money than sense I suppose no real harm can be done, but there is a whole raft of psychopathology behind the guise of the happy motivational coach. A long time ago he started to behave as if he was ‘cured’ and that everybody else around him was still ‘f*cked-up’, I suppose the delusion has grown so big that he needs to write a book and of course validate the delusion by making money out of the whole process.
Knowing this person left me with some very deep scars and it took me a long time to learn to like myself by spending time alone and to find new friends. The funny part of it is that the author is such a wage slave, actually obsessed with money, that he is the last person who would give up a full-time job and become self-employed. I once suggested that he use some of his paid holiday time years ago to create music in and I received a very hostile response indeed because I suggested that creativity might involve something that did not flatter his ego and was in fact inconvenient in a practical sense.