“How disgraceful is the lawyer whose dying breath passes while at court, at an advanced age, pleading for unknown litigants and still seeking the approval of ignorant spectators.”
SENECA, ON THE BREVITY OF LIFE, 20.2
The last entry for July in The Daily Stoic book is about one’s career. (The quote above uses the example of a lawyer, and author Ryan Holiday extends that example by including a hypothetical scenario that I feel goes off-course, so I’ll skip over that and come back to the point that Seneca is trying to make.)
Your job is not everything! So don’t make it everything. It’s literally that simple, and that is today’s wisdom: Don’t let work be the only focus you have in your life, or even the main focus.
Don’t get so caught up in your career that you’re one dimensional and have only one facet to your being. Be multi-faceted, have many pursuits, and remember that your job is only one (hopefully small) portion of who you are as a human. Remember to let go of your work when appropriate. Life is rich and many-varied in color and flavor, and hopefully so are you.
At the end of your life, do you want to be remembered for how far you advanced in your career? Or do you want to be remembered for what kind of person you were, your character, and who you loved and how deeply?
I have to remind myself every day
Every day in the morning, one of my routines is to write affirmations. These usually take the form of positive statements about myself, and to myself, such as “You are awesome” and “You did great yesterday on xxxx”, etc. But I very often include one more, very important statement: “Your job is not everything.”
Because it’s not, and I need to be reminded. I work in the very intense industry of digital marketing, at a very intense company, and it can be all-consuming during work hours. When something goes wrong or I make a mistake, it’s very hard not to internalize it or take it personally, and it’s very hard to let go.
But I have to let go. Because my job and my career are just one small part of who I am as a human being. I have so many other aspects of my life that are important to me — my kids, my wife, my creative pursuits, my side hustles — that I simply can’t allow my job to take over my life. In fact, I won’t let my job take over my life, and that’s a conscious choice and something I remind myself of regularly.
When I pass away from this Earth someday, I don’t want to be remembered for my accomplishments at the office. Ugh, what a horrible thought. Further, I don’t care if I’m remembered within my industry, or if I’m immortalized in written form anywhere. Nuts to that! I want to my gravestone to say something about how I really ‘knew how to live’, and that I created some things that made people smile or laugh, maybe both. And that I loved a lot of people, and a few of them very deeply, and that I was quiet and wise and calm at the end of my days. That’s how I want to be remembered. Not for my career or job.
