On Becoming a Super - Part 10: Brad's Intermission
March 9, 2020

    I'm not a big fan of the "find your passions" theory of career advice.  I get where it's coming  from, of course.  I totally get the impulse to tell young people in high school and college that they need to find something that sets their hearts and minds on fire, something that separates them from the mass of people living, as Thoreau put it, "quiet lives of desperation."  I get it.  I've given a version of this advice myself.

    But I think we do young people a disservice when we insist too strongly that they need to find that passion or that fire in their paid employment.  I think when we do this we tee up a set of unrealistic expectations about the role that paid employment plays in most people's lives.  We inadvertently put too much pressure on paid employment to fulfill yearnings and longings in us that it is not usually good for fulfilling, at least not in our current economic system.  We give it an outsized and inflated importance that obscures other avenues for fulfillment, that distracts us, ironically, from developing the passions – or better, the sense of life purpose – that paid employment can support.  Talk about "quiet lives of desperation": if you expect your paid employment to supply your need for regular heart-on-fire experiences or your sense of personal mission, but you end up spending a huge chunk of your waking hours as an income-earning adult mucking around in the mundane or the maddening (which is most of what all paid employment involves, no matter how glamorous it looks from the outside), then you likely aren't intentionally creating or protecting adequate time and space for the things that make you feel alive and give you purpose in life.

    If you are one of those rare people who actually get paid to "do what you love," good for you.  Those people do exist, but let's be honest: they are the exception, not the rule.  And even these people, when pressed, will usually admit that doing what they love often involves long stretches of mind-numbing tedium or bouts of near-paralyzing fear.  But what these people will also often tell you is that what gets them through the tedium and the fear is a strong sense of personal mission and purpose – a sense that goes beyond the mere making of money, indeed, a sense that is much broader and deeper than the mere making of money, a sense that integrates rather than compartmentalizes the components of their lives.

    That's what we need to tell young people to develop, and we need to assure them that they can have that strong sense of personal mission and purpose whether or not they are "passionate" about their paid employment.  We need to let them know that it's okay to view a job or a career as a means to other ends, as long as those other ends are truly worth the investment, and as long as they can actually make that job or career serve or facilitate those other ends.

    * * *

   Brad is a nurse.  He entered into this career later in life, after a couple of decades of career wandering. Between the end of his days as a college football player and his first job as a nurse, he took no less than four distinct career paths, any of which might have become a full-blown, life-long career.  He started out, predictably, in coaching.  He coached the offensive line for four years at the junior college here in Miami, Oklahoma, while selling sports equipment and uniforms to regional school and community youth teams in the off-season.  But the itinerant, "move on or get out" nature of college coaching didn't suit him, so he got out.  He then helped manage a railroad car manufacturing company for a few years, before becoming the managing part-owner of a few fast-food restaurants for a few more years.  When the relationship with his business partner in that venture soured, he took a job with one of the area Native American tribes, helping to administer a federal grant program designed to assist unemployed or underemployed Native Americans go back to school to increase their job marketability.  It was in that position that he found himself researching and recommending careers in the health field, particularly in nursing, to the vast majority of his clients.  Lots of demand, lots of variety of practice, lots of opportunity for career advancement.  It was in that position, in fact, that he began thinking about a career as a health professional for himself.

    There was just one problem: an unfinished bachelor's degree program, with a paucity of science and math credits.  All that football, all those years ago, didn't make for a very impressive academic record.  By this time, we were married, so we decided Brad should go back to school to re-tool himself.  He basically had to start over from scratch, as far as the math and science was concerned.  It was a slog – long, hard, tedious, expensive.  We got him a tutor for the physics classes.  He teamed up with study partners for the organic chemistry and anatomy.  And he rebuilt that transcript, one hard-earned class at a time.  Wound up with a better-than-3.5 GPA in all his healthcare prerequisite classes, which was no small feat for someone who had been out of college for nearly 20 years by the time he started back.

    He was aiming for pharmacy school, and he now had the academic record to make a realistic run at it.  Unfortunately, pharmacy schools would not bracket or waive his early academic record from the late 1980s, and his overall GPA, with those early years figured in, fell below the required minimum.  So we swallowed some bitter pills, and Brad swallowed some pride – legitimately earned pride, I will add, given his solid performance in his second attempt at completing his bachelor's degree – and he applied to nursing school instead.  Finished off that Bachelor of Science degree with honors and landed a great job out of the gate as a critical care nurse in an Intensive Care Unit (one of the most coveted jobs for new nurses).

    Nursing has been a great career for Brad, in the sense of what it has enabled our family to do.  He finished nursing school at the same time that I finished law school – in fact, we graduated on the same day (that was a trip!) – and we spent the first five years of our joint professional lives recovering (somewhat) from the chosen poverty of simultaneous professional degree programs.  And it was only because we were confident that nursing would ensure us of an income and health insurance that we were able to make the leap to return home so I could make a run at the small-town attorney gig – which is a far cry, financially speaking, from the steady stability of my former large law firm gig.  This year, we will celebrate being back home in Miami for five years, and for various quirky (and hopefully not permanent) reasons, it is still Brad's job that keeps us afloat and provides the stability that we need to build the life that we're building, the life of our dreams.  We're not building it as quickly as we would like – largely due to the still-lingering student loans, and the quirks of my current law practice – but we're building it.

    And that's what makes nursing a great career for Brad.  He doesn't love it.  He's not "passionate" about it.  It doesn't set his mind or heart on fire or complete him as a person.  It's a job.  He does it well, and he does it faithfully.  And it makes things possible for us.  It gives us healthcare insurance and covers part of our childcare costs. It allows us to make the car payment and buy scratch grains for the chickens.  It makes it possible for us to raise our kids on our little budding farm, so that they (hopefully) have the magical childhood that we want to give them.  That's what we're passionate about these days, and that's what makes Brad's job as a nurse worthwhile.