Element Four: Pursue Your Passion (Meaning)

 

I was lying in bed, reading a magazine, when the fear arose. It started somewhere between my stomach and my chest, and it radiated outward. Like adrenaline coursing through my body after a sudden fright, it was a physical sensation, but it felt slower, deeper, wider, as it radiated to the tops of my arms and legs. It felt hot. I started to sweat. My body felt weak.

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I put down the magazine and lay with my head on the pillow as I thought about death.

My mother-in-law was diagnosed with cancer; she died after a decades-long battle with the disease. A few months after her death, I received a call from a friend of mine, in her forties, who one morning found a lump in her breast and a few days later had a mastectomy. A few days after that, a friend told me his business partner came home from vacation feeling a little under the weather; within a week he was dead from an aggressive cancer he never knew he had. That was right after he told me that his father-in-law was recently killed crossing the street.

And here I was now, reading an article by Atul Gawande about rethinking end-of-life medical treatment. Gawande isn’t just insightful as he explores what doctors should do when they can’t save your life, he’s also vivid. The first line of his article reads: “Sara Thomas Monopoli was pregnant with her first child when her doctors learned that she was going to die.”

I am, as far as I know, thank God, healthy. But it was somewhere in the middle of that article that it suddenly hit me—not just intellectually, but physically and emotionally: I am going to die.

Each year, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics conducts an American Time Use Survey, asking thousands of Americans to document how they spend every minute of every day.

According to the data, most of us spend a total of almost 20 hours of each day sleeping (8.68 hours/day), working (7.78 hours/day), and watching television (3.45 hours/day). I know: Shocking, right? I mean, who sleeps that much?

It’s hard to look at the data and not think about where you fit in. Do you watch more or less television? Do you work longer or shorter hours? It’s a useful and interesting exercise to examine how we spend each minute of the day. To know where we’re devoting our wisdom, our action, our life’s energy.

And yet where we spend our time tells us only so much. More important, and completely subjective, is what those activities mean to us.

I recently happened upon a short article, “Top Five Regrets of the Dying” by Bronnie Ware, who spent many years nursing people who had gone home to die. Their most common regret? “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.” Their second most common? “I wish I didn’t work so hard.”

There are two ways to address these regrets. One, work less hard and spend your time living a life true to yourself. Or two, work just as hard—harder even—on things that matter to you. On things that represent a life lived true to you. Something you consider to be important. Meaningful.

Because if you put those two regrets together, you realize that what people really regret isn’t simply working so hard, it’s working so hard on things that simply don’t matter to them. If our work feels like it matters to us, if it represents a life true to us, then we would die without the main regrets that haunt the dying. We would live more fully.

That doesn’t mean you should sell all your belongings and feed the poor in a foreign country. Well, if that’s true to you, go ahead. But the whole point is that your life needs to be true to you, not what others expect of you. Maybe that’s feeding the poor. Maybe it’s cooking dinner for your family.

So the question is: What matters to you?

That’s a critically important question to explore. What matters to you? Of course making enough money, having enough vacation time, and feeling loved and respected by your family and friends matter. But you know that already. Go deeper.

First, ask yourself what’s working: What about your daily work, your daily life, matters to you? Why are you doing it? What part of your life is a source of pride? What impact do you feel you’re having on people, ideas, or things that are important to you?

Next, ask yourself what’s neutral: What are you spending your time on that you don’t particularly care about? What doesn’t matter to you? What’s not important?

Finally, ask yourself what alienates you: What are you spending your time on—in work or in life—that contradicts what matters to you? What makes you feel bad? Untrue to yourself? What are you, even slightly, embarrassed about?

And then slowly, over time, shift where you’re spending that time, so the scale begins to tip in the direction of what matters to you. Some things you won’t be able to change immediately: Maybe you’re working in the wrong job, for the wrong company. But don’t be afraid to ask the questions; you will be tremendously more dedicated, productive, and effective if you care. If you’re working on things that matter to you.

Can everyone spend their time working on things that matter to them? Maybe not. But I remember listening to a nighttime janitor as she spoke with such deep pride about how well she cleaned, how wonderful the office looked after she finished, and how important she felt it was to the people who worked there during the day. So, maybe yes.

There is no objective measure—certainly not money—that determines the value of a particular kind of work to the person who does it. All that matters is that you do work that matters to you.

I woke up at six in the morning and looked over at my bedside table where Gawande’s article lay open, the photo of an empty wheelchair with a baby’s HAPPY BIRTHDAY balloon tied to it staring at me. Once again, I felt that dreaded rush of fear and sadness spread from the center of my chest to the rest of my body.

So I took a deep breath, got out of bed, took a shower, and sat down to write this chapter. To work on this book. Because writing, to me, matters.

Focus your year on the things that matter to you. On things that have specific meaning to you.