What’s my thing?
Advice about how to “bloom”
This is the text (more or less) of a talk I gave last night in Dulwich. It was different to what to I often say.
Ever since I wrote Second Act, people keep asking me for advice about how to be a late bloomer.
I thought I didn’t have any useful advice. Everyone is different!
But I realised recently that I do.
It’s this. Stop trying to be happy.
That was what my talk was about.
I think you all came here because you want me to tell you how to be a late bloomer. Ever since I wrote this book, everyone asks me, how can I be a late bloomer? They all want advice. Well I don't have any advice. I'm sorry.
The trouble is, everyone is different. And when you think of blooming, all of you will have different ideas about what that means. So there's no 10 step plan. A lot of self-help books will say, these are the five things you do and then it works. And you buy the book and and you do the five things and then nothing changes.
As people kept asking me about this, though, I realised that I did have one piece of advice—stop trying to be happy.
I think this is the most important thing I can tell you.
Let me explain why.
I was in the churchyard this week eating my lunch and I overheard two young men talking about professional poker players. They were really obsessed with these professional poker players. They really felt they could become professional poker players, but the trouble would be their income would fluctuate so much they would struggle to get a mortgage.
It was a kind of daydream. They would get out of their jobs and become professional poker players and make all this money and it would be great. And they said, all we need is six months savings to get a start. It was a very sweet conversation. They joked that they were going to win the money to do this at the bookies and then they went back to work. (They didn't look underpaid.)
If you do a lot of eavesdropping in public (which I do, and I recommend it to all of you), you actually hear this conversation all the time. It comes up in a lot of varieties. People who work in blue suits and black shoes constantly think about the way their life will become a holiday.
Poker will make you enough money to be free from the office. You'll leave your law firm and make pottery and you'll have a very nice life. I'm going to run a second hand bookshop. I'm going to run a bakery. I'm going to run a cafe. There are lots of these dreams of a good life.
The conversation you never hear is about the love of the thing itself. If you say to people (or you just ask your friends, which probably you shouldn't do because they don't like it) Why do you want to play poker? What do you enjoy about pottery? you will actually find that this utopia is very, very far away from their real life.
They do not go to pottery classes on a Wednesday evening. They do play poker online, but they do not have any kind of semi-professional practice regime. Yes, they have a big shelf of Folio Society books, but they don't know anything about the trade, they don't know anything about the market, and they're far too busy to read the books, sadly.
What this is, is a kind of confusion about what does blooming mean? If I want to be a late bloomer, what does blooming really mean? And it tends to mean that people don't want to be stressed and they do want to have money. Maybe they want to be more famous or more artistic, or they want to be free from all the bother of having a job. So they know that they want to bloom, but they don't know what they actually want to do while they are blooming. And so they sort of reach for these other things.
And I think really, unless you really, really love the antiquarian book trade, what you would end up doing is leaving a job you don't like and ending up in another job you don't like. There's a very nice secondhand bookshop in Canterbury. It's right down at the end of the main street. And I spoke to the guy behind the till and I said, this is one of the best secondhand bookshops. This is still going. It's amazing. And he said, we bought it for my son because he didn't like his job and we can barely break even. This dream is not a dream.
What you need to stop doing is stop imagining this happy life, this pottery by the beach life, and start trying to find out, what do I actually want to do for eight hours a day? And this is a very difficult question.
You might remember the scene in the sitcom Friends when Chandler realises that all of his friends have jobs they love. Actor. Chef. Masseur. Palenontologist. Fashion executive. And he’s doing data processing. So he asks: What do I love? He goes to a careers counselor and he gets a big psychology report, and they say, you're really perfect for data processing!
He's so miserable about this; he says everyone has a thing. Why don't I have a thing?
When I hear people talking about poker and pottery, I think that's what they're saying. What's my thing? Running a bakery, running and a bookshop, that would be nice. That could be my thing. But they don't actually want to work out what their thing is. This reminds me of a study in Sweden where a lot of people who won the lottery in Sweden went back to their old job. Not just like the next day because it would be rude to quit. They just stay in the job. Their life is basically the same.
Sometimes that's because if you win 200,000 pounds, well, you can't live on that forever. But you can win a lot of money and still stay in your job. And I think that goes to show you that what these young men saying about poker don't understand is that unless it's really their true calling, like they really, really have this deep love of the game, they're going to be a bit like those lottery winners. They could get all this money and then, well, I guess I go back to work.
A lot of people, I think, are like this. They're looking for something. But what they actually want to do with their time is a vexed question. It's complicated because when we say, how am I going to bloom, we're thinking about money and status and happiness and all these other things, we're not thinking about the task that we want to perform.
Take out money and success and will I be smiling every day? and just think, what do I want to do? There's a great story in the National Geographic this month of a very successful surf border and she says, “I can't lie to you, I don't do this because it's fun.” I think that's the right attitude, You're falling in the water all the time. You're getting injuries. It's cold. It's wet. This is terrible! But she has a great love of doing the thing.
And so this is why my advice is, don't be happy. Don't follow the daydream because your true vocation, whatever it is, really might not make you happy.
Let me give you two examples.