Time On The Job
In the 1980s, the sociologist Robert N. Bellah introduced the concept of three distinct “work orientations”—three distinct ways people relate to their work: as a Job (work as a means to pay the bills), a Career (work as a path to advancement, achievement, and status), or a Calling (work as a an end in itself, pursued for its inherent value, independent of external rewards). A decade later, the psychologist Amy Wrzesniewski began exploring this idea, studying a wide range of professions: administrative assistants, hospital cleaning staff, clerical workers, teachers, nurses, pharmacists, computer programmers, artists, and more. In every workplace, Wrzesniewski found employees evenly distributed across the three work orientations. Regardless of the type of work being done, a third of the people saw it as just a paycheck, a third as a path to advancement, and a third as inherently satisfying and meaningful. To understand what shaped these orientations, she collected data on factors: age, income, education level, tenure, job complexity, and perceived social standing. The strongest predictor of whether someone saw their work as a Calling? It wasn’t whether one had an initial passion or a long-standing dream to do this or that kind of work. Instead, it was time on the job. It takes time to develop and accumulate the things that evolve a Job into a Calling: competence, confidence, autonomy, relationships, seeing the impact your work has on others, and so on.
Time on the job—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
The Hardest Phase
The radio personality Ira Glass was once talking to three college students, each grappling with what to do after graduation. After Glass told them about how he got into his line of work, one of the students asked, “How do you figure out that [the work] is not only what you want to do but that you’re going to be really good at it?” “Honestly,” Glass replied, “even the stuff you’re really good at, you’re not really good at right away.” He told them about how long it took him to get good. A couple years into making his Pulitzer Prize-winning show This American Life, one of the show’s producers, Alix Spiegel, pitched a story similar to one Glass had made years earlier, at the beginning of his career. Glass suggested that they dig up the old episode to see if they could salvage anything from it. After they listened to it, Spiegel said, “Wow. There’s no sign that you have any talent for radio. Like there’s not even a hint that you’re ever going to be any good.” Not only was she right, Glass said, but he revisited other episodes from his archives and was struck by how, even 15 years into his career, he still wasn’t very good. “The key thing,” Glass told the three college students, “is to force yourself through the work it takes to force the skills to come. That’s the hardest phase…I feel like your problem is you’re trying to judge these things in the abstract before you do them. And that’s your tragic mistake…You have to accept that it’s going to take a lot of time and energy. And that there’s going to be a lot of wasted time and energy. And that’s not a bad thing. You know, you just have to push on things very, very hard before they get to be good. And yourself as well.”
A Long Period Of Hours And Hours In The Practice Room
Jon Batiste is often called things like: “A certified musical genius.” “A once-in-a-generation talent.” And, “a true musical prodigy.” I love Batiste. I love his music. I love videos with a camera positioned in an overhead view, where you can watch his hands maneuver the piano keys. But the more I learn about him, the more I think that the “genius” label does him a discredit, that he’s an example of The Joe DiMaggio Principle, that his talent is a product of time on the job. From a large musical family, Batiste grew up in a community steeped in the rich musical traditions of New Orleans. “Amongst my family,” Batiste said. “I was the least talented. People think, ‘Oh, you were born playing the piano and you came out singing.’ This is not the case. There was a glorious awkwardness. That was a decade or more before I got good at the instrument. There was a long period of hours and hours in the practice room.” Based on that experience—that decade or more, those hours and hours in the practice room—when asked his advice to those who want to be great musicians, Batiste said, ”You have to be okay with sounding bad for a long time.” Sitting at a piano, he demonstrated a range of exercises he used to do. Meticulous finger drills, repeating scales and chord progressions with subtle variations. Playing the same notes over and over again, exploring how a shift in pressure could completely change their sound. Limiting himself to just the two octaves of the piano, training his ear to listen more closely and uncover new possibilities within a narrow section of the keyboard. “It’s all just like boring, mundane stuff,” he said. “You might not find it boring. You might love that kind of stuff. I didn’t like that kind of stuff, but I did it anyway. Because I just wanted to get there, you know?” He wanted to get to the level of musicianship he was surrounded by—to play with the same fluency and command as those he grew up around. To get there, he continued, “You gotta get obsessed with the work…Even if you don’t like it at first—just do it until you find that flow state in it. Because once you do it enough, you’re going to find a way to get into it. The hardest part is the starting. The hardest part is jumping in to do it.”
It’s Low Dread, Every Morning
The great writer Joan Didion said she never felt confident heading to her writing desk every day. Instead, Didion said, she had “blind faith that if you go in and work every day it will get better. Three days will go by and you will be in that office and you will think every day is terrible. But on the fourth day, if you do go in, if you don’t go into town or out in the garden, something usually will break through.” When the interviewer asked how she felt in the hours before heading to her writing desk, Didion replied, “Oh, I don’t want to go in there at all. It’s low dread, every morning. That dread goes away after you’ve been in there an hour. I keep saying ‘in there’ as if it’s some kind of chamber, a different atmosphere. It is, in a way. There’s almost a psychic wall. The air changes. I mean you don’t want to go through that door. But once you’re in there, you’re there, and it’s hard to go out.” As she spoke about putting in time on the job every day, regardless of her mood, the interviewer recalled Didion once mentioning that, unlike most, she used her good silverware at the table every day instead of saving it for special occasions. “Well,” Didion replied, “every day is all there is.”
Put A Little Drop In The Bucket
In the 1920s, Russian-German meteorologist Wladimir Köppen discovered something surprising. Ice ages aren’t caused by extremely cold weather. They are caused by consistently cool weather. It starts with a mild summer. If it stays cool enough that some of a winter’s snow sticks around until the following winter, the leftovers create a cooling effect: the sunlight rebounds off the snowy surface and returns to space at a lower temperature. The lower temperature makes it easier for some of a winter’s snow to stick around until the following winter. And so the process repeats. “The process is self-enlarging, unstoppable,” John McPhee writes in his book, In Suspect Terrain, “and once the ice is really growing it moves.” Little by little, a small base of snow becomes a planetary ice sheet. Along with In Suspect Terrain, John McPhee has written some 30 books. He’s published over 80 articles just in The New Yorker. And in addition to all the writing, he’s taught at Princeton University for over 40 years. Like the way an ice age forms, McPhee says his body of work is the result of steady, accumulated time on the job. So, he said, “if somebody says to me, You’re a prolific writer—it seems so odd…The routine of doing [a little work] six days a week puts a little drop in a bucket each day, and that’s the key. Because if you put a drop in a bucket every day, after three hundred and sixty-five days, the bucket’s going to have some water in it.”
It’s A Game Of Tonnage
Back in the ‘80s, Jerry Seinfeld’s friend was teaching a comedy course at The Improv in Los Angeles. The friend asked Seinfeld if he’d be willing to visit the class and speak to the students. Seinfeld agreed. “I went in and there were maybe 20 people in the class,” he recalled. “I went up on stage, and I said, ‘The fact that you’ve signed up for this class is already a very bad sign for what you’re trying to do. The fact that you think anyone can teach you or that there’s something you need to learn, you’ve gone off on a bad track because nobody really knows anything about any of this.’” Seinfeld suspected that the students were looking for a shortcut to becoming great comedians, hoping the class would give them the secrets to bypassing the hard phase of forcing the skills to come. “You know,” Seinfeld said, “no one’s really that great. You know who’s great? The people that just put a tremendous amount of hours into it. It’s a game of tonnage, you know? How many hours are you going to work? Per week? Per month? Per year?” If he could do it over, Seinfeld said, “what I really should have done is I should have had a giant flag behind me, and when I pulled a string, it would roll down, and on the flag, it would just say two words: Just work.”