Everyone is on Fire

Burning and being uncompromising in a mild and convenient world.

Everyone has a thing that makes them tick. Unfortunately, this isn’t usually what they’ve built their life around so it can be hard to see. Sometimes it’s bookbinding, sometimes it’s motorcycles.

I was at a business dinner a while back. These engagements always have a sort of choreography to them, a semi-improvised, mostly-planned set of prescribed steps. The dance is essential but it feels repetitive on the 1000th go-around. Once the steps become muscle memory, you’re freed up to improvise a bit more. These days I focus my improvisation on finding out what makes the other person tick.

Why do this? When you find what really riles someone up, it hypes you up too. If you approach your life with the spirit of adventurous play, of climbing a mountain that you’ve mindfully chosen for yourself, the actual surface of what someone’s interested in is secondary to the vibe you get when they talk about what they’re really into.

Every once in a while you meet someone who’s primarily into their day job but it’s pretty rare. At this particular dinner I connected with someone about his love of motorcycles. Of course, I pried deeper, I used to ride. Once the conversation opened up, turns out this guy had ridden massively long adventure routes on his bike in various places across the globe. Not casual stuff either — long, grueling trips just for the love of it. It made me happy to hear about it. Whenever someone’s heart is singing like that there’s a part of me that roots for them to upend everything buttoned up in their life and just go do the thing that gets their blood pumping. To drop all pretenses about the odd-shaped you’ve been squeezing yourself into to pay the bills, burn the Patagonia vests, pick up your bike and ride.

Ultimately that’d be the second-easiest thing to do next to method acting as a gear in the corporate machine. It bears recalling here what Robert Downey Jr.’s character said about method acting too earnestly in Tropic Thunder. If you know you know but clearly many people have forgotten.

The real bear of a thing to do is walking between worlds. The thing I rarely see out in the wild was what this guy was doing: crushing it in the corporate world but keeping the fire of his love for motorcycles burning.

Most people treat this like a tradeoff and that’s the easy thing to do. It’s easy to overindex on either career or passion but it is a treacherous road in the long run.

Going All-In on Career

Overindexing on career screws you over because you rise a bit in your career then get stuck instead of growing to your full potential. When you do that your career will stall out somewhere in the middle. Your advancement will slow exponentially. In order to move beyond the middle, you’ll need to be creative. In order to be creative you’ll need to engage with something you’re passionate about that’s unrelated to your corpo work. You’ll need to engage with whatever that thing is meaningfully and passionately and this cannot be faked. This doesn’t look like casually playing pickleball sometimes on the weekend, or throwing loads of money at a nice treadmill you never use (spending money is not a hobby but many people seem confused about this), it looks like using PTO days to finish composing music for an orchestra, or training for an ultramarathon.

No truly influential person in the corporate world is all-in on work. They touch the third rail of whatever lights them up outside of work. They do this regularly and with a high degree of self discipline despite the fact that it is inconvenient to do so and doesn’t “get” them any material thing. Working in a field you love can never quite achieve the same thing, you may get fired up on your day job but at the end of the day you have to meet KPIs and other things that are ultimately quantified distillation of other people’s opinions. That brings a different mood to the things.

When you’re all-in on career you’re sorta dead in a way. The bills are getting paid and everything looks normal from the outside but there’s not a lot of human-y stuff going on inside when you’re doing it this way. It’s hard to connect with people that go that route, it’s like the thing that makes them real is dormant inside, hibernating. You’re probably picturing this happening exclusively in Office Space like careers which is true but I saw it equally as much in academia which was even sadder because the professors ostensibly got into the field because they were “passionate about it.”

Going All-In on Passion

Conversely, it’s easy to go all-in on your passion project. This is pretty easy to spot. It’s the dude that’s been working a dead-end job for a decade plus that just really loves surfing. He’s always complaining about not having enough money to fix his surfboard or gas to get to the beach.

We romanticize the fuck out of this kind of arrangement but I can tell you with total certainty that it’s a grass-is-greener phenomenon. Going all-in on your passion with millions in the bank is different than doing it broke. I’m talking about the “doing it broke” flavor here. Always sucks. There’s medical bills, no stability, your thinking is always constrained by money. The reason I can tell you this with absolute certainty is I did this for a long time. The reason this position sucks way more than going all in on career is that you can just up and quit your job any time. When you’re broke and haven’t been playing the corporate game for years, it’s hard to get an employer to trust you enough to let you back into the system.

Peaking

Do both.

I rarely advise people to do “more” but this is a very rare exception where doing more gets you more.

When you work the career you get money to fund your passion. When you do what you’re passionate about selfishly, without other people’s metrics attached to it, you develop qualities that push you higher in your career. When you rise high enough, and creativity becomes more valuable, you won’t be blocked up in the middle of things because you have a huge differentiator that those all-in on career lack.

The best time to start doing both was ten years ago. If you get stuck in the middle and only then start to engage meaningfully with your passion outside of work, it’s going to take a few years before you really start to reap those rewards. You’ll need to ramp up on your passion project and unlearn a bunch of old constrained ways of thinking you picked up from the business world. It’s preferable to start as early as possible.

The most effortless way to start this is when you first enter the workforce. You probably had hobbies in high school or college, just keep making time to engage with those. Don’t compromise either, keep very strong boundaries and fight for your time or it will evaporate. Then you’ll become one of those people, stuck in the middle, doing the things that you’re expected to outside of your nice job like playing golf.