LETTER 10

Vocation

Walker,

You will never find your purpose. You will never find your purpose for the simple reason that your purpose is not lost.

If you want to live a purposeful life, you will have to create your purpose.

How do you create your purpose? You take action. You try things. You fail. You pursue excellence in your endeavors and you endure pain. The pursuit of excellence forces you beyond what you already know, and in this way you come to better understand the world.

You do this not once, not twice, not three times, but three thousand times. You make it a habit.

Through action, you learn what you are capable of doing and you sense what you are capable of becoming.

 

You are—right now—in the process of developing your vocation. You are doing this not because you are working in the concrete industry, counseling your fellow veterans, or reading to your children. You are developing your vocation because—as you wrote to me the other day—you are learning in all of these endeavors. You’re learning a new job. You’re learning what it’s like to help others again, rather than be on the receiving end of help. You’ve always loved your children, but now you’re making a more sustained effort to be a good father every day and night. This is how vocations are created.

You act and achieve a small victory. This feels good. It reinforces your commitment. You act again, and maybe you fail this time. A defeat leads to learning, which leads to better action, which is followed by another small victory, which again reinforces your commitment. This cycle, repeated again and again, inches you closer and closer, minute by minute, day by day, to developing your vocation.

Slowly you create your passionate purpose through consistent, excellent work.

 

When we “do work,” we too often think of it as a one-way affair. People think: I woke up and built a fence, or taught a class, or saw a patient; I made dinner for my family. We recognize that a fence now exists or that our family has been fed: we pay attention to the change around us, but not to the change within us.

Maybe you’ve heard this saying: What you work on, works on you. People are shaped by what they do. People who do work that hurts understand this: ask a roofer about his forearms; ask a waitress about her feet. But the work we do has an effect on our minds and our souls as well. A good writer will become more finely attuned to the way people use words. A good rabbi will learn to recognize pain before people say a word.

As ever, Walker, there is a wild diversity to life, and it makes no sense to say that roofers, teachers, nurses, engineers, or sheriffs are one way. That’s not right. The point is that what you do will shape you as much as it shapes the world you live in.

What shape do you want that to be? How is the work you are doing today shaping who you will be tomorrow?

 

—2—

 

The word “vocation” comes from the Latin vocare, “to call.” To have a vocation, then, is to have work that you feel you have been called to.

The notion of a calling has religious roots: it originally meant a call from God. Today, many people still testify that they feel called by a higher power to the work they do. What role God actually plays in this is far beyond my power to say. What I can tell you is that whenever I’ve met people who feel as if they’ve found their calling, they’ve told me stories of failure, confusion, purposelessness, even despair—stories of the hard work they did before and after they heard a call.

 

Think about the story of Newton and the apple. Newton told a few friends that he was walking in his garden when he saw an apple fall from a tree. He wondered why the apple fell straight down, and didn’t fall up or sideways or at some other strange angle—and this started Newton on the chain of thought that would lead him to discover the laws of gravity.

Now, Walker, millions of people have watched millions of pieces of fruit fall from trees. If I had been standing next to Newton, my most profound thought would probably have been: Hey, apple. Yum. Newton was able to see what he saw only because years and years of study and experimentation and wonder had made him ready.

I think that being called to a vocation is a little like that. Maybe you’ll have a revelation, an aha moment. But you have to make yourself ready to listen. The calling you hear is often the echo of your own efforts.

 

I’ll tell you a little about how I’ve experienced this in my own life.

I’ve been doing work with returning veterans for about seven years. Two weeks before I flew home from Iraq, if you had told me I’d be doing this seven years after I got home, I wouldn’t have believed you.

If I had an aha moment, it came when I went to the Bethesda Naval Hospital to visit with some recently returned wounded marines.

As I pushed open the heavy brown door of a hospital room, a young soldier lying in bed caught me with his eyes and followed me as I walked in. Gauze bandages were wrapped around his neck. He’d taken a bullet through the throat.

“How you doin’?” I asked, and he wrote on a yellow legal pad, “Fine, was actually having fun over there before this.”

His young wife sat next to him with red-ringed eyes, her hand on his shoulder. Most of the Army’s wounded were at Walter Reed, but this soldier—for some reason having to do with his care—had been brought to Bethesda. I joked that he was in enemy territory at a Navy hospital, and he wrote, “Navy actually OK, some of them,” and he smiled. We communicated a bit more, and as I walked out of his room, I was thinking, What’s this guy going to do next?

I walked into another room where a marine had lost part of his right lung and the use of his right hand. With his good hand, he took mine and shook firmly. His mother sat hunched at his side, and it seemed that she’d been there for a very long time, trapped in worry and confusion and heartache. I guessed that the marine was nineteen, maybe twenty years old. He reminded me of many of the men I had served with. I could picture him cleaning his weapon on a sweltering morning in Southeast Asia, turning a knob to check his radio frequency before a mission in Kenya, or strapping on body armor before a night patrol in Iraq.

We talked for a while about where he’d served, how he’d been hit, and where he was from. I asked him, “What do you want to do when you recover?”

“I want to go back to my unit, sir.”

I nodded. “I know that your guys’ll be glad to know that.”

But the brutal fact was that this marine was not going to be back on the battlefield with his unit any time soon. So how could he maintain hope?

 

I wasn’t conscious of it at the time, but my experiences with refugees had taught me something about suffering and hope. In Bosnia I had seen how people need a purpose to serve even—perhaps especially—when things are incredibly bleak. In Rwanda I had seen how, even in the face of unimaginable hardship, people could preserve their dignity and their compassion. In Cambodia I had seen how young girls who had lost limbs to land mines needed models of successful women to look up to.

Of course, I didn’t live those experiences as neatly as they read on paper. Not every experience came packaged with a tidy lesson wrapped up at the end. I spent a lot of time confused. But it all added up to this: when I saw veterans lying in hospital beds, I saw them differently. I didn’t see people who wanted charity, but people who needed a challenge. I saw people whose most serious injury over the long term was not going to be the loss of a limb or of eyesight, but the loss of their team and mission. To the extent that I had any insight, it came because practice and experience prepared me to see my fellow veterans differently than a lot of other people saw them.

A few days after my visit to Bethesda, I donated my combat pay to start The Mission Continues. I’m sharing this story not because I think it’s unique or special, but because it’s common: this is how people everywhere have found their vocations. A real accounting for vocation starts not just with the aha moment, but with all of the work that makes such moments possible.

 

You want to know what your purpose is. I can’t tell you. I can tell you that, whatever it is, you’ll have to work for it. Your purpose will not be found; it will be forged.

What people experience as revelation is often a result of their resolve.

 

—3—

 

The greatest definition of a vocation I’ve ever heard was offered by Reverend Peter Gomes. He said that your vocation is “the place where your great joy meets the world’s great need.”

Let’s stop for a minute and think about that definition. In a true vocation, you find happiness in your work—not just in the rewards of your work, but in the work itself. And because your work serves a need, others take happiness from your work too.

My mom was a teacher for over forty years, and much of that time was in early childhood special education. She shaped the lives of hundreds of children. (When I was growing up, my dad and brothers and I would often refuse to go to the store with her, not because we didn’t want to be with her, but because it was impossible to buy a dozen eggs without three families stopping us to update her on how the children she’d once taught were getting on.)

If anyone has ever had a vocation—a place where joy and need come together—it’s my mom. Her work was often difficult, frustrating, sometimes infuriating on a day-to-day basis. But over the years she was sustained by joy. Your vocation can be, and should be, a source of joy for you. It’s part of what sustains you.

There is nothing selfish in devoting great energy to creating and then practicing your vocation. Without a vocation, we can serve others in short bursts of enthusiasm, but before long we may wear out. It’s usually only from within a vocation that we can serve with lasting energy and consistency.

 

Remember what it was like to be a new father? The sleepless nights, the worry, the burden of feeling totally responsible for a fragile human life, all balanced by overwhelming energy and love? Any vocation—like the vocation of parenthood—will demand its toll of struggle and sleepless nights. And it will be worth it.

 

—4—

 

Almost any activity, if you pursue it with purpose and attention for its own sake, can become a vocation.

When I was in college, one of my favorite philosophy professors was Alasdair MacIntyre. One of the things MacIntyre taught was the difference between “external goods” and “internal goods.” External goods are the rewards we receive for pursuing an activity—money, prestige, promotions, and so on. Internal goods are the deep satisfactions of pursuing an activity for itself.

MacIntyre writes that you can train a child to play chess by offering her a piece of candy—an external good—every time she wins. But not until she discovers for herself the pleasures of developing strategies, reading her opponent’s mind, and thinking three moves ahead will she become a real chess player.

 

There’s a Jewish tradition that embodies this very wisdom. In the Jewish shtetls of Eastern Europe, mothers would prepare a treat for their children on the first day of school: cookies in the shape of letters of the alphabet. In some families, the new student would get a drop of honey for each letter he sounded out.

The lesson was easy enough for a six- or seven-year-old to grasp: learning is sweet. In time, children would learn that the real sweetness was in the knowledge they could unlock as they mastered their letters. They’d move from seeking external rewards to pursuing internal happiness.

Some jobs are just jobs—we work ’em for money in the way that a kid works for honey. But other jobs, over time, become part of us in a deeper way. We begin to study the job—we want to learn how to get better at it. We begin to enjoy the job and time seems to fly by at work. We begin to build friendships at the job—we find people we like and sometimes admire. And we begin to take pride in the job. We come to associate the work we do with who we are, and when we’ve found our vocation we’re proud of both.

 

—5—

 

Today, almost any working person in any developed country can purchase almost any book for the equivalent of two or three hours of labor. Those two hours’ worth of wages are precious, but books are much, much cheaper than they used to be. In medieval Byzantium, for example, an average laborer would have had to work for two or three years to buy a single book.

Even in colonial America, a printed book was one of the greatest luxuries you could own. If a family owned only one book, it was usually the Bible. And if a home had two books, you could be almost certain that they were the Bible and The Pilgrim’s Progress.

These days, not many people have heard of The Pilgrim’s Progress. But this allegory by John Bunyan, an army veteran and a self-taught preacher, is among the most influential books ever written in English. For 335 years—from the day it was published—it has never been out of print.

Why did so many people spend so much of their hard-earned money to buy this book? One reason stands out: The Pilgrim’s Progress described, better than any other book, the call of vocation.

Bunyan’s book tells the story of an everyman, known only as Christian, who discovers one day an overwhelming sense of vocation to embark on a spiritual journey. He cannot shake it, try as he might to put it out of his mind: “The night was as troublesome to him as the day; wherefore, instead of sleeping, he spent it in sighs and tears. So, when the morning was come, [his wife and children] would know how he did. He told them, Worse and worse . . . He would also walk solitarily in the fields, sometimes reading, and sometimes praying: and thus for some days he spent his time.”

One of the reasons why this story has endured is that it is painfully honest about what it means to struggle with a calling we can’t ignore. Christian pursues his calling at great cost. He leaves his world of security for a long and trying journey.

Everyone who has ever felt that they’ve been called to a vocation has endured similar suffering: leaving the comfortably familiar behind for something you know you have to do. When I started working with veterans, I lived for months on an air mattress in a near-empty apartment, wondering if my organization would survive. When a veteran lied to us and tried to steal funds, I wondered if the effort was worth it. When we were turned down by donors, I wondered why no one else saw value in what we were doing.

Working at your vocation doesn’t mean that your life is going to be easy. In fact, in many ways it may be harder. And working at your vocation does not mean that you will always be happy. But such work is an absolute necessity for living the flourishing life I’ve been writing to you about—the kind of life in which you can exercise your vital powers to the fullest.

 

With nothing meaningful in life, nothing is interesting.

 

—DANIEL KLEIN

 

Fireworks are interesting. Once or twice a year, we might spend an hour or two watching in wonder as fireworks light up the night sky. But imagine two straight days of fireworks. You’d pass out from boredom.

A spectacle can capture our attention, but it takes meaning to sustain our attention. If we forget this, we are liable to hop from spectacle to spectacle, entertainment to entertainment, diversion to diversion.

People who lament, “I’m bored,” are usually complaining about an absence of diversion, a lack of spectacle. But often, I think, they’re really lamenting a lack of meaning. Without meaning, everything becomes spectacle, and spectacle becomes exhausting. In the long run, the only cure for boredom is meaning.

We all know what it’s like to do work that doesn’t engage us. Everything—the thought that you need to wash the dishes, a movement in the corner of your eye—becomes a distraction.

In response, distracted people often try to eliminate distractions. They create processes, rules, or tricks to help them do their work. This is helpful sometimes. But much of the time, the drive to kill distractions can be a huge distraction itself. There will always be distractions in life. We can be unnerved even by the sound of silence. Focus comes not from working without distractions, but with a devotion so intense that distractions fall from our awareness.

When we see people whose talents lie fallow, whose energy is engaged in pursuits they see as trivial—or worse, in pursuits others see as destructive—the problem usually isn’t that they have too many distractions. The problem is that they have too few devotions.

 

—6—

 

I am a creature of God and you are a creature of God.
My work may be in the city, yours is perhaps in the field.
As you rise early to your work, so I rise early to my work. As you do not claim that your work is superior to mine, so I do not claim that mine is superior to yours. And should one say, I do more important work and the other less important work, we have already learned: more or less, it does not matter, so long as the heart is turned toward heaven.

 

—TALMUD

 

Someone’s vocation might be to make herself into an outstanding grandmother, a great coconut farmer, or a professional skier. There are poets, doctors, truckers, bankers, actors, cops, cooks, and teachers whose days fly by in a blur because they are in love with what they do. There are also neurosurgeons, astrophysicists, carpenters, hairdressers, and law partners who sullenly punch in every morning and watch the clock all day. Just as any work can be made into a miserable bore, any vocation can be a source of joy if it’s pursued with passion and a love of excellence.

One of the things that’s hard for you now, Walker, is that you are leaving a well-understood and almost universally admired profession—in your case that of Navy SEAL—and you wonder, Will I ever do anything as worthy again? That’s true for a lot of veterans.

It’s possible to get stuck there. The question is, where will your joy meet the world’s need? As a coach? A father? A business owner?

 

As you think about this, you should also be aware of a few prejudices that cloud how we think about vocations.

First, we have in our culture a long-standing prejudice that places the professor above the plumber, the sage ahead of the salesman, and the abstract before the practical. It’s one of the reasons why, today, many parents push their kids to become “knowledge workers” instead of artisans, even though the life of a skilled artisan often offers more prospects for freedom, satisfaction, and self-governance than that of many kids who end up stuck at a desk, drowning in debt, and afraid to offend their boss.

Another prejudice is that we often treat public service work as inherently more noble than the work of those who make service possible by building businesses and creating wealth. Almost every occupation can be a site of service if pursued with compassion. Conversely, people can treat any occupation selfishly, no matter how public-spirited the job title.

I think that we confuse ourselves when we make service the exclusive domain of certain professions. I admire many cops, teachers, nurses, and soldiers. I also admire many janitors, receptionists, launderers, and barbers. Nobility in work lies not so much in the work that we do, but in the excellence we bring to it. We hurt ourselves as a society when we imagine that service is something that select people choose to do, rather than the expectation of every citizen.

Is your service over because you left the military? I don’t think so.

 

At the same time, it’s important to realize that our vocations may be different from our jobs. My dad, for example, worked for the Department of Agriculture. I know that he took pride in doing his work well. But I also know that my grandfather died when my dad was six years old. Growing up without a father, my dad swore he’d be a father to his sons. He often left the house around four-thirty A.M. so that he could put in a day’s work and still be home when we came home from school. He coached our teams. In many ways, being a father was my dad’s vocation.

I think it’s nearly impossible to know anyone’s real vocation unless you really know them, and it’s often a mistake to assume that what someone gets paid to do is the same as her life’s work. People are complex and multilayered. Get to know them and you’ll often find that their devotions differ from what you see them do. You may also find that they harbor reserves of courage and energy that you have never seen.

There are many beautifully diverse ways to live a good life, and you’ll create one again.

 

—7—

 

Many people—in companies, on athletic fields, even in classrooms—speak about their work in the language of warfare. To them, the idea of the warrior suggests strength and conquest. They go to war with their competitors, tell their colleagues to fight like soldiers, and imagine that their leaders are generals. They can forget that what makes a warrior is not a weapon, a uniform, or a unit, but a cause worthy of sacrifice.

Rosa Parks, Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa. They aren’t often thought of as warriors, but they endured more hardship and inspired more courageous commitment than most generals. If people want to talk like warriors, they also have to embrace the true warrior’s purpose: serving something greater than yourself.

Walker, when you joined the American military, you didn’t take an oath to be a warrior. Everyone you served with took an oath to be a soldier or sailor or airman or marine who would support and defend the Constitution of the United States. When you join the military you pledge to serve something larger than yourself.

The warrior is not supreme. The warrior is a servant. If you’re going to be a warrior, what are you going to serve?

Resilience is often strengthened by a sense of service. If you’re going to be resilient, what are you going to be resilient for?

This is why having a vocation often strengthens resilience. Your devotion gives you something worth sacrificing for. Your desire to become excellent gives you a reason to develop your habits of mind, body, and spirit.

When I think of the Bosnian refugees who found purpose in the camps by caring for their families, when I think of the SEAL trainees who made it through Hell Week by stepping outside their own pain and fear to help the men beside them, when I think of the veterans who came home from war and found a new purpose in service, I’m reminded of what Nietzsche said: “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”

If there is a purpose behind your pain, you can find a way through it. For all of us, developing a vocation helps to define and create that sense of purpose.

 

—8—

 

I think that you and I talked about Joseph Campbell once before. I really hope you’ll pick up a book by him, Walker. He’s helped two generations to understand the idea of the hero’s journey. I’d recommend The Power of Myth, a book that’s really the record of a long conversation.

Campbell was a scholar of mythology, and his big idea was that the myths of the world’s cultures often tell a single, unified story. Though the surface details vary from culture to culture, the essential story remains the same: the journey of a hero who passes from ordinary life through a series of trials and finally returns to serve his people.

Here’s how Campbell summarized this recurring myth: “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”

Communities spread across space and time seem compelled to tell versions of this story. We see its landmarks—such as the hero’s call to adventure, or his symbolic death and rebirth—in everything from epic poetry to movies, from Odysseus to Luke Skywalker.

Given what we’re talking about, having a vocation, one aspect of the hero’s journey is especially important for you to grasp. “The ultimate aim of the quest,” wrote Campbell, “must be neither release nor ecstasy for oneself, but the wisdom and the power to serve others.” The hero engages in self-discovery and self-creation so that he can ultimately be more useful to others. The hero’s journey gives him the power to serve, and he returns to use that power.

Of course, we live in the real world, not the world of myth. But diverse communities wouldn’t tell and retell variations of this story if it didn’t express something true about human possibilities. And at the crux of the hero’s journey is this: the decision to return and serve. That’s the real test of heroism.

And that’s where your story is now, Walker. You left your world, you saw and experienced things that would have changed anyone, and you’ve come back. What have you brought with you? How will you use it to make your journey, and your return, heroic?

 

—9—

 

As I said before, Walker, you’re not the first man to face what you’re facing. Check out the painting called The Veteran in a New Field. It was painted in 1865 by Winslow Homer. The Civil War had ended. Robert E. Lee had surrendered. Lincoln was dead. Thousands of veterans had made their way back to their farms. This veteran, too, has headed straight for his field. He has tossed his military jacket and canteen behind him (in the lower right, though you may not be able to see them here).

 

 

There are some dark undertones. The farmer’s scythe and the cut stalks remind us of the Grim Reaper—and of the hundreds of thousands of this man’s fellow veterans who had given their lives in fields like this.

At the same time, look at that field. There’s a big, beautiful crop in front of him. Wheat up to his ears! The sky (in the actual painting) couldn’t be a more brilliant blue. A man who ventured to fight far from home has returned to bring in the harvest. Is it too simple to see hardship behind him and hard-won hope in front of him? Is it too simple for us to see the same things in our lives?

 

—10—

 

And finally, Walker, as we think about hardship and heroism and meaning and engagement, let’s also remember fun.

Think about your kids. They’re a ton of fun, aren’t they? Children play sports. They learn new instruments. They read. They try new things. They learn. They build skills. They laugh.

And then, without our really noticing or deciding, this all slows down and grinds to a halt in too many lives. Not long after our bodies stop growing, our minds and skills stop growing too.

Part of what the old admire and sometimes envy in children is their energy, their curiosity, the fun they have, and their sense of wonder about the world. Where does all of that wonder come from?

A lot of adults think it comes from the fact that children know less of the world. Of course kids are energetic and fascinated and having fun, the thinking goes; they’re experiencing everything for the first time.

But sadly, not all children have that wonder. I’ve worked with some of them—children who live on the streets of Bolivia, children who work full-time at hard labor. So consider this: maybe children don’t have these qualities because they are young. Maybe they have them because of how their young lives are structured. Energy, curiosity, and wonder are not products of age. They’re byproducts of what we do. Just as those qualities are not universally alive in children, they’re not universally dead in adults.

Think about your own kids, Walker. They can be lost for hours in play and make-believe. Is that work saving the world? Certainly not. Not directly. So let’s remember that much of the satisfaction we take in what we do comes from something other than its importance.

The good news is that joy, growth, and service tend to reinforce one another.

 

The self becomes complex as a result of experiencing flow. Paradoxically, it is when we act freely, for the sake of action itself rather than for ulterior motives, that we learn to become more than what we were. When we choose a goal and invest ourselves in it to the limits of our concentration, whatever we do will be enjoyable. And once we have tasted this joy, we will redouble our efforts to taste it again. This is the way the self grows . . . Flow is important both because it makes the present instant more enjoyable, and because it builds the self-confidence that allows us to develop skills and make significant contributions to humankind.

 

—MIHALY CSIKSZENTMIHALYI

 

You have significant contributions to make, my friend, and I hope that developing your vocation will bring you a lot of joy as well.