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.

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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.

The first is a zookeeper or an animal conservationist, who works with endangered animals or something like that. This is a very strong vocation. You don't just drift into this job. You have to really want to save the eagle or the or the panda. You have to be very devoted. You’re rescuing the animal, nurturing the animal, maybe getting it to breed. They've really found their thing.

In general, this is not a happy job. It's not just because you have to shovel the dung. It's a Sisyphean task. You're not actually building a utopia. You're trying to stave off a catastrophe. It's not just animal shelter workers. Think about climate change activists. They have really, really strong vocation, real passion, but they're obviously just plainly unhappy in some way. I don't know if it's possible to be happy in that in that job.

This should really make you think about, do I want a calling? Do I want a vocation? I don't think you can know before you go in. No one's saying, I'm going to become an animal conservationist, I'm I going to breed eagles, there'll be a lot more eagles, and I'll be really miserable.

You will know people like this. Think about politics, nursing, journalism, certain types of corporate work. People who go in and they think they're really going to change something. They're going to change the world in some way. And they end up doing a bureaucratic job that is that does not feel significant to them. Charities are really bad for this. Certain types of charity get become very, very difficult places to work, very tedious, very slow.

So that's the first example. The second example is people who work in tech.

The people who get called the tech bros: coders, software engineers, developers, entrepreneurs, project managers, all these Silicon Valley, Silicon Roundabout kinds of people. Now, you might not like these people. But they're all quite happy. I've known some of these people. Some of them aren't happy, but mostly they're actually pretty contented.

When I worked in Westminster, everyone was miserable. When I go and see people in tech, they're like, I'm having a great life.

The reason is that in tech you can just get stuff done. And people love to get stuff done. Their problem is merely that half the world hates them. But that's quite easily ignored.

So think about these two groups. The animal people, the climate people, and the tech people. One of the much less happy, one of them much more happy.

Would they swap?

Would the animal conservationists and the climate activists say, those guys over there, look pretty happy. I'm going to down tools on the mission. I'm going to get a six figure salary and I'm just going to have a good life.

I really don't think they would. I think a lot of them just say, I'm not going anywhere near that. That's that's not what I want.

Now, maybe they're crazy. Maybe you're saying, well, they're saying they don't want to be happy and have a six but they say, these people are insane. I'm not following their example.

But while the swap would make a lot of people happier, it will not make everyone happier. It can't do anything about the potential dilemma that what you really care about is animal welfare or climate change or whatever. I spend a lot of my time writing about books written by dead people. I'm having a great time, but I'm not I'm not getting rich. There are other ways I could be earning my money, but if you don't want to, you don't want to.

Now, obviously, some people should not do this. Some people should not try and become an impoverished artist. Some of these activists should just get a job. The question is what's going to work for you. But there is the paradox I want to get across to you that the work you most want to do might not be the work that makes you feel happy the most often.

And people are looking about, asking, what's my calling? What's my thing? What is my vocation? they are constantly mixing the two things up. And I think it gets in the way.

Some dreams, you should quit on. I wanted to be an actor when I was young, and I knew a lot of people who went into acting because it was their calling. One or two of them, did well: Royal Shakespeare Company, BBC period dramas. Most of them are doing more like Italian lottery commercials and voiceovers for kitchen adverts. Of the people like that, the ones who just left and did something else, they are happier. It's a kind of a sad thing, but they are.

So you have to decide: not do I want to be happy, but what are the trade-offs I want to make. I think that will help you much more.

You should also remember that you can simultaneously be happy and unhappy at the same time. One thing that psychology has really taught us is that you can love your work and hate your working conditions. Probably everyone here has worked with someone like that. The person who will sit very determinedly at their desk and produce really good work and bring really good ideas. But they are just a grumpy, grumpy, grumpy bastard. He hates the management. He hates the setup. The pension used to be good, all this stuff. This is a common thing.

For my job, I used to go into other businesses and find out what's the culture was like. I did this for charities, car mechanics, banks, cleaning staff, pharmaceuticals, accountancy startups, tech companies, supermarkets, funeral homes, retailers, law firms, airlines. Everywhere you go, there are happy people and unhappy people. And a lot of it is just to do with their personality.

You might be really unlucky genetically. You might have had a certain type of upbringing. It might just be something to do in your environment now. Maybe you're just not going to be that happy.

This might not be what you came here to be told, but I think this is really good advice and and philosophers have been saying this to us for thousands of years. If you just go out and try to be happy in a very direct way, probably you'll trip up over your own shoelaces.

So I want you to think about it like this. Happiness is complicated. It’s fluctuating and it's very hard to measure and define. Psychologists have been lying to you and they've been giving you surveys saying, how do you feel right now? Is this seven out of ten, seven and a half out of ten? Is it the green face or the yellow face?

This is bullshit. There is no such thing as an experience that can be measured on a scale like that. You currently have very conflicted feelings about the talk that you're listening to, and it would be very difficult for you to average those feelings out.

For example, there is a kind of happiness that only exists when you listen to music. But there is not a kind of survey that can successfully distinguish between the gaiety of Gilbert and Sullivan and the joy of Mozart, and the idea that one of them is an 8.5 and one is a 7 is insane. But psychologists have told you that that's true and that they can measure that.

How would you put on this happiness survey, the contrasting pleasures of marriage and the terrors of not being loved by your own children? I don't think that the numbers 1 and 9 really do any kind of justice to that. Am I happier when I play badminton in the Garden with my wife or when I am battling through The Waves by Virginia Wolf? I truly don't know, and I don't think it matters. I think actually asking these questions is probably a fundamental mistake.

Now, obviously, a lot of people are generally unhappy because they don't have the life they want. Sometimes that is what we've all been like. But I just think it's a false question and the more they ask it, the more they're trapping themselves in the situation they don't like.

Because really, who promised you anything? Against whom can you prosecute this so-called claim for happiness? You're stuck if you do that. All this all this idea of happiness, the happy life, the the smiley life, the high scores on a survey, it's just a lie and it's going to lead you into the pottery-poker-playing-secondhand-bookshop merry-go-round and you're going to get stuck there.

If you read great literature, like Dante and Shakespeare and Tolstoy, they will all tell you that happiness is a mingled thing. And what I want to do when I hear those people talking in the graveyard is give them War and Peace.

If you’ve read War and Peace, you know Pierre. He's a kind of bungling, confused. He's very wonderful. He's one of the great great characters. But he's socially awkward. He has no prospects. He doesn't know what he's going do in his career. He doesn't know what his thing is.

And then he one day he inherits a big estate and a lot of money. And it's like, ah, problem solved. Pierre who didn't know what to do, has a big estate and a lot of money. He won the lottery. He won at poker. He got what everyone wants.

In fact, it's a terrible thing. Nothing gets any better for him. If anything, Pierre just falls off a cliff at that point and everything gets a lot worse. He's totally lost. And then he has a very mysterious conversation in a train station, a stranger. And he gets inducted into Freemasonry and he finds God.

Now, I'm not going to tell you what happens, because I'm sure that it will be a spoiler for some of you, and it's really, really one of the great books. But the fact is that Pierre then does all sorts of weird things, like he runs into burning buildings, which you're going to look at that and say, no one's going to be happy running into a burning building. But he is happy, because he has a purpose now, and he manages to sort his whole life out.

So I want you to think of happiness as conditional, contingent, requiring hard work, taking a lot of time and not necessarily being fun.

So again, let me give you two examples. One person works in the evenings. They come home from work and they really devote themselves to their interests. Whatever that is: they build a boat in the garden or they're writing a history of the Hundred Years War or they cultivate plants, whatever it is, whatever it is. They're really working in evening. The other one has a job they quite like, but they watch Netflix for three hours in the evening.

Who's happier? You will all immediately have strong feelings about which one of those people you want to be, and I can't tell you which is better for you, but you will know.

I just want to tell you that you're finding a vocation isn't necessarily the cure and you need to know about these trade-offs and these choices. Are you a tech worker, or are you a zoo keeper?

But the culture you are living in is against you on this. We all want to live our best lives, be our best selves, follow our passions, blah, blah, blah. What's best? Who says what's best? I think what's happening there is people are saying, am I living my best life as much as you are living your best life? And this is a very, very bad comparison.

I promised at the start to tell you how to find your thing.

The answer is this: You probably already know the answer.

You are either sitting on a dormant vocation, such as musical skills left unused for years. Or, you are not thinking enough about your own history.

Our lives are fractal: similar patterns repeat themselves with increasing complexity. A fractal pattern is a very simple pattern or a similar pattern, and it repeats itself on a bigger and more complicated scale, the way that a seed will go from a little sampling with the leaves like this, and it will grow out to be a big canopy.

So the more interested you are in what am I going to do, the more interested you should be in what have I already done? Probably you're sitting on the answer.

Take the example of Vera Wang, the dress designer. When she was a teenager, she came really close to being an Olympic level ice skater. She realised she would not make it to the top, so she quit, and became a fashion journalist at Vogue. Twenty years later, she had the same experience. She's deputy editor. She's this close, right? And she looked the editor and she said, I can't do that. I can't go to dinner with 17 people every night and shake hands. She did not want to be the editor. So she left, and set up a business. At first, she was a wedding dress designer. But she wants obviously to do evening wear. Her break came when she was commissioned to design the costume for an Olympic skater.

One way of looking at this is to say, she bounced around between three careers and she's always interested in fashion, but she's just doing three different things. Another way of looking at it is saying, well, it was quite fractful. The pattern was there and it was just coming out in different and different ways. And really, she was circling around a lot of the same things

Psychologists Robert Pryor and Jim Bright have a chaos theory of careers based around this idea, which essentially says that everything that you do has got kind a little bit of chaos in it. You can make all these careful plans about how your life will go and it kind of won't work because you can't plan for the slight the slight chaos of everything. Everything's a complicated system. You're a complicated system. Whatever career you're in, whatever organization you're in. There's just too many things that are that are moving around. And the plan will always slightly go wrong. Once we see the sorts of patterns that people exhibit, we can think about them in this complex, emergent way, rather than simplifying their career to a trajectory. And you need to harness that and think about how you can make sense of that yourself.¹

The secret to getting that right is not happiness: it’s motivation.

When I wrote Second Act, I interviewed two economists: Noah Smith and Robin Hanson. They both told me the same thing. Motivation is what matters.

Noah said this:

Motivation is everything. When we talk about late bloomers, we have to talk about motivation, because kids aren't born motivated.

He gave the example of a friend of his who was very smart, had smart parents, and all he wanted to do was play Dungeons and Dragons, get into fights, and chase girls. Now he’s a physics professor. His life changed when his motivation changed. The talent was always there. What he needed was interest. He was perfectly happy. Indeed, he would have said that his life of games, fight, drugs, and girls was a very happy one. What mattered for him finding his vocation, his thing, was finding his motivation.

Robin Hanson took a slightly more despairing view. He told me:

The closest thing to magic in our world is motivation. Motivation just appears or it doesn’t… some people are just motivated and then just do stuff. And other people are not motivated. And I think we still just hardly understand what makes that difference.

I agree with Robin that we don’t really know what makes the difference between motivated and non-motivated people. But I don’t think there’s nothing you can do. Based on his understanding of psychological research, Noah believes that

Motivation is social. There is some intrinsic motivation that you get from nothing, just from curiosity. And we over emphasize this. It's fun to tinker with stuff, and it's fun to play with stuff. There’s certainly, like mathematicians out there like Terence Tao, who just from a very early age, were just intrinsically motivated by the fun of tinkering with stuff and have never stopped. That's real, that's a thing that exists. But I think that for most people in most cases, motivation is social. It has to do with the people around you saying attaboy, attagirl.

He believes that people who are too strongly influenced by parental approval when they are young often end up going off the rails and losing motivation when they become independent. It can take many years to regain their motivation. Some never do. To change someone’s motivation, therefore, you need to change who they are associating with.

There is a lot of truth to the old adage that the people who you spend time with shape who you become. If you want to find your thing, you need to find your people.

There is a wealth of evidence that changing your network is an important part of changing your life.

Economists who study peer effects, for example, have found that when students live with other students who do the same major as them, the student is more likely to persist in that major, and when one of the roommates changes major, the others are more likely to change. A study from 2001, based on a survey sent to twenty-three Computer Science and Biology departments in Virginia, found that departments with predominantly male students had more women drop out. Female students who do not have other women to study with end up in an unfriendly male culture. A higher proportion of the people studying biology were women, partly because the faculty was more gender balanced.

It has also been found that having a roommate who drinks alcohol – and who drank alcohol at school before going to university – can decrease a student’s average grades. What’s important about that finding is that for some people the effect is small or non-existent while for others it is very large.

Parents don’t need to be told any of this. Parents know that the people their child spends time with have a large influence on that child. But when we are thinking about ourselves, and our adult lives, we tend to forget that it is our culture that shapes us.

This is more obvious when we look at history. This is an observation that goes back to Aristotle, who said in Poetics that humans were the most imitative of living creatures. As John Stuart Mill said, the main lesson of history is ‘the extraordinary susceptibility of human nature to external influences’. This is quite obvious when we think about genius. Donatello taught Bertoldo di Giovanni who taught Michelangelo; Socrates taught Plato who taught Aristotle. Historian and sociologist of philosophy Randall Collins writes: ‘Creativity is not random among individuals; it builds up in intergenerational chains.’

The Second World War gives us another demonstration of the way our surroundings change our lives. Many young men who were conscripted in the 1940s’ United States came from disadvantaged backgrounds. They lacked the benefit of stable homes and good schools. But once they joined the army, they were in environments with the discipline, leadership, structure, teamwork, cooperation, responsibility, and purpose they had previously lacked. One key feature of the army is equality of rank: previous differences between these men and their peers, perceived inadequacies, were no longer pertinent.

One sociologist found that men from disadvantaged backgrounds became more socially competent and had improved psychological health after military service. They also improved their occupation outcomes as a result of skills training in the army. As well as going to college on the G.I. Bill, many army veterans completed high school and undertook craft or vocational training: delinquent men who were given overseas service, for example, were much more likely to use training opportunities provided by the 1944 G.I. Bill.

Obviously, the Second World War was dreadful, and I'm not saying “put all these young men in conscription”, but what it shows you is, if you change your circumstances enough and in the right way, you can put yourself on a different trajectory.

Now, do you think they were happy about conscription? Do you think they were happy when someone was yelling at them at five AM to get up?

But they were much happier at the end of their lives that it had happened to them.

So let me reinforce this.

If you want to know what your thing is, what your vocation is, forget money, forget status, forget happiness, look at the fractal patterns in your life and go and find the people that you need to make that work.

The conclusion I’m coming to is this: what I found with all late bloomers is their lives get interrupted in some way. What I want to tell you is just be your own interruption. Don't wait for someone to conscript you. Just do it. Just look at yourself in the mirror and do it. Because it might not happen.

And it's really, really important that you find those other people and make those changes. Here’s a quote from Elizabeth Bowen from A World of Love.

Impossible is it for persons to be changed when the days they have still to live stay so much the same.

If nothing changes in the day-to-day routine of your life, you will not change. This is what the poker players in the graveyard really didn't understand. They kind of knew that they were trapped in their days, and that they come in and they wear the blue suit and they go home and it's all the same, and they're going to do the poker and they're going to get out. But they haven't really internalized how trapped they are.

That was Chandler’s problem too, right? He was trapped. and he got promoted and he was like, well, I'm still trapped. And they gave him a pay rise, and he’s like, no, the merry goat's still going round.

Now at the end he gets married and they go to the suburbs and they have children, but I think the question will come up to him again. He'll still be saying, what is it that I want to do? What's my thing?

Some people in that position should have a midlife crisis and change their whole life and Second Act has got a whole chapter about that. But actually, for many people, I want to make a plea for small vocations, for the ambition of little things.

Some of you won't bloom by changing your whole life and getting a new career and trying to become this whole new thing that's going to take 20 years and getting an obituary in the Times. For some of you it's like, I'm finally going to read Proust. That would be amazing. Maybe you're finally going to read Proust in French, which I have failed at. That would be amazing. What a thing to do!²

The example I have of this is a woman called Audrey Sutherland, whose solo kayaked the coast of Alaska, not the whole thing, a certain a certain stretch of it. She did this in her 60s and her 70s, on her own. She took a small inflatable orange kayak into arctic waters. She had solo bear encounters.

She started off swimming around the coast of Hawaii, where she lived and she just built up her explorations more and more. She just wanted to go and do it. So she did. She wasn't looking for money. She wasn't looking for fame. She wasn't looking for anything other than the love of exploration. And so she evolved fractally.

She did end up writing books and giving talks, and she did get an obituary in the New York Times, but none of this was what she set out to do. On her first trip, she discovered a piece of Hawaiian coastline she wanted to explore. She had herself flown in on a biplane to the only place on that particular island, which was a leper hospital. And she set off on her own on this bit of Hawaiian coast, which was pretty dangerous, because if she twists her ankle, no one's expecting her back for four days, no one's going to worry.

She got dehydrated and she had to climb up a cliff and she realized she wasn't going to make it and she jumped back into the sea and she came this close to dying. She was like that surfer I told you about. She didn't go back because it was fun. She went back because she had to go back.

What she used to do at the end of her lectures (and I want you to do this; I mean, obviously you don't have to if it’s too cringe but cringe) was say: “close your eyes, and sit quietly and imagine that you've been given five million dollars. Now, what would you do if what would you do with the money?” Then there would be a pause. And she’d says, “open your eyes and think, what is it that stopping you from doing those things without the money?”

Now obviously people used to laugh at that, but she really did mean it and she really did want you to think about that.

Once at the end of one of these talks, a grumpy middle-aged man stood up and he said, “I'll tell you what's stopping me. I've got a wife, I've got to pay college for my kids, my parents are getting old. I don't know who's going to look after them.”

This was not the correct thing to say to Audrey Sutherland. She was a single mother with four children. She got no financial support from her husband who never came back after he left. She often got home from work so late that the children cooked dinner. Their house was so remote that for many years it had no television signal. Her son remembers cycling two miles into town to get bread. She had waited to go on her first adventure until the eldest child was old enough to look after the others and she didn't go to Alaska until she was 60 and she'd saved enough money to quit her job. (And she also studied for a master's degree part-time that took her eight years.)

So this this man had not made a very persuasive objection to her. She told him well, then you need to ask yourself. What can you do now? What part of my goal can I achieve today?

She did this all the time. She would can her own food, she would repair the kayak, she would practice if she gets tumbled into the water, what does she do? She would study the maps. Her table had a big glass top and underneath was a huge map of the area that she explored. So she was always looking at the map. If she was driving along and she saw some rope on the road, she'd get out. Is this good rope? Can I use this rope? She was constantly doing little things.

Even if I haven't persuaded you, and you still want to be rich, happy, famous and successful, you still need to do on all Audrey Sutherland said. “What part of my goal can I achieve now? What can I do today to achieve my goal later?”

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If you want to know more, read Second Act!

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1. Chaos theory says that there is inherent uncertainty in all systems. The systems around us (family, economy, work, community) are complex and dynamic: they are made up of many parts, each open to influence, and they all change at different rates. Even people are complex dynamic systems. This is why life is unpredictable: it is a mix of so many systems, which are all subject to external changes. Your career is one of these complex, dynamic systems. No matter how carefully you plan your climb up the corporate ladder, there are too many factors involved for you to be able to predict how your career will progress. All sorts of things that might not seem relevant can affect the course of your career. What results in one sort of career for one person can become a very different sort of career for someone else. Importantly, chaos doesn’t mean randomness. Once we see the sorts of patterns that people exhibit, we can think about them in this complex, emergent way, rather than simplifying their career to a trajectory.

2. Someone told me afterwards her father did this in retirement and loved it.