Love Is Not a Luxury
The scariest devil on your whole journey may be the last: Suckitup.
He will tell you that your entire quest is a waste of time. That most jobs just suck, are to be endured not enjoyed, and that what you need to do is take a deep breath when you go to work, do your job, and then come home. Reserve love for your friends and family.
I first came upon this devil during my research into the talents of the world’s best housekeepers.
“What is it with you and housekeepers?” a Wharton professor asked me back then. “Apparently, they fascinate you.”
Apparently, they do. I featured a team of Walt Disney World housekeepers in my first book, First, Break All the Rules, and a different group from Hilton in the follow-up, Go Put Your Strengths to Work.
I think the reason I’m so intrigued by them is that theirs is one of those jobs that we condescend to. Anyone can do that job, we think to ourselves, and if we were unlucky enough to have to do it, we would count the days until we could get ourselves promoted out of it. And yet here I was interviewing the ten best housekeepers at Walt Disney World, and to hear them tell it, it was interesting, challenging work that they loved.
“What do you love about it?” I asked them. A whole range of different answers:
“I love vacuuming myself backward out of each room. Taking the mess of a room and turning it into perfectly straight vacuum lines. Love that!”
“Busy check-out days. There’s so much to do, getting the carts filled up just right, everyone moving so fast.”
“Making a show for our guests. I’ll arrange the fluffy toys in a little scene so that one day the kids’ll come back and find Mickey and Minnie dancing on the windowsill, and the next day I’ll put Donald and Goofy with one arm around each other and the other on the remote control or an empty French fry container, so the kids think that while they were out at the park, Donald and Goofy hung out snacking and watching TV.”
English, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Spanish, a chorus of housekeepers who were all excellent at their job, none of whom knew each other, and who all found things to love in housekeeping. To hear them tell it, not only was this a hard job to excel at, but if you did excel, it was the kind of work that they would not want to get themselves promoted out of. A number of them had been offered the chance to move into a supervisory role and had turned it down.
These outstanding housekeepers gave the lie to the view that finding love in your work is a luxury, one most of us can’t afford. The view that work is called “work” for a reason. That you should not define yourself or try to find yourself through your work. That you are not your work. That you go to work to earn money—that’s it—and you return with this money and then use it to provide for those you love. Just suck it up.
Toni Morrison once quoted her dad sharing this view with her after she complained to him about her work: “Listen, you don’t live there. You live here. With your people. Go to work. Get your money. And come on home.”
Barbara Ehrenreich, in her book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, played out this same view in greater depth. Basically, she spent a year getting herself hired for what she considered menial labor, and then wrote a book about how awful and soul-destroying these jobs were. And about how, if we were going to coerce people to do housecleaning or manufacturing jobs, then we should pay them a heck of a lot more to suffer through this loveless work.
This isn’t the place to get into a debate about wages—though, frankly, I agree with her that the wage disparity between frontline workers and senior leadership has reached an obscene level. But what we can say is that virtually any job is awful and soul-destroying if it is being done by a person who doesn’t find love in it.
Listening to those housekeepers describe their work, they made it sound exciting and intriguing and chock full of variety. Whereas Barbara’s description of the very same job sounded horrific.
Here’s another horrific-sounding job: doing research for a year, organizing the interviews, keeping copious notes, arranging those notes, and then figuring out how to turn them into a compelling book. That’s Barbara’s job, and to millions of people it sounds utterly soul-destroying. But not to Barbara. She loves it.
Same with the housekeeping job. Sounds soul-destroying to Barbara, but not to the hundreds of amazing housekeepers I’ve interviewed. They love it.
Who’s right? Well, no one is. Or rather, they all are. Each of us finds love in different activities, people, situations, and outcomes. We all need to be very careful that we don’t impose our loves on other people and assume that, just because we love putting words on a page but hate cleaning a bathroom, everyone shares these feelings. Just because you hate a certain job doesn’t make it hateful to everyone.
Or, turning that around, we shouldn’t assume anyone performing a job excellently must find love in all aspects of it. As the Mayo Clinic research from chapter 6 suggests, the goal should be to find love in at least 20 percent of it. And in any job, if you find that you don’t love 20 percent of it, if the percentage slips to 15 percent, 10 percent, or, God forbid, zero, then you are far more likely to experience burnout, accidents on the job, and to start medicating yourself with absences, alcohol, and drugs.
In any job, sustained excellence without love is impossible. Love isn’t a luxury. It’s a necessity.
Of course, there will be occasions—many, many occasions—when companies create loveless jobs, and when supervisors take zero interest in which aspects of your work you love and how you can turn this into contribution.
If, for example, a company creates warehouse roles with little space for exercising judgment or even taking bathroom breaks, then no matter how many mental games the workers play to try to get through the day, they will always be just getting through the day, enduring the work rather than contributing what they love.
Or if teachers are given so few financial resources they can’t even buy supplies for their class, and so many students they can’t pay attention to each one, it’s hard to see how they could find love in this overstretched, underfunded world.
Indeed, one of the goals of this book is to get companies and managers to realize the benefits—in the form of fewer lost workdays, higher-quality work, less burnout, better student outcomes—of designing a role around what the best people in that role love about it. Use love as the design criteria for a job—any job—and it will look very different from the inhuman job descriptions and mandates so many have to suffer through.
Back when I was interviewing those Walt Disney World housekeepers, the irony wasn’t lost on me that, though the best ones lay on the bed and turned on the ceiling fan because this is the first thing a guest does after a long day at the park, their formal job description actually forbade them from lying on the bed. And those housekeepers who arranged the kids’ toys in a different little scene each day? They were breaking the regulation to not touch more of the guest’s possessions than is necessary to clean the room.
Design a job as though there’s no love in it, and it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy—you wind up designing loveless jobs in which the best have to actually break the rules and regulations in order to find love in what they do. As far as we can, it’s up to us to try to persuade our leaders that this is wrong. That if we can define jobs through the lens of those who love them then higher performance, higher quality, and less burnout are the happy result.
Love Lives in Motion, Not in Balance
Love isn’t just a feeling. It is a source of energy, and like all energy sources, it must flow. For you, for me, for all of us, a healthy life isn’t one where we find balance. A “balanced” life—where your work, your family, your finances, your dreams are all perfectly in sync—is not only nigh impossible to achieve, but even if you did achieve it, that life would be stationary and stagnant, with you tiptoeing along thinking, Please, don’t anyone move! I’ve got everything just so!
Instead, a healthy life is one where you are in motion, where you are moving through life—all aspects of your life—in such a way that you draw strength and love from it, and this then gives you the energy you need to keep moving.
This means to live happily and fully, you have to express your loves. Yes, they spring from within you, but then they demand expression. You’ve got to get them out somewhere, somehow, turn them from loves into actions, from passions into contributions. And when you do, your life feels coherent and authentic, and you know, you just know, in every fiber of your being, that you are on your path.
The inverse is also true, though. If you love doing something, anything—organizing, writing, designing, challenging, teaching—and you are prevented from doing it, then your life starts to feel wrong. It might feel to you like frustration. It might feel like anger, or depression, or confusion. You sitting on the couch crying to yourself and not knowing why. You finding yourself short-tempered and impatient, pushing away those who want to help you. You walking around in a brain fog, wondering where all the creativity and quick-wittedness went.
In your quiet moments you ask yourself, Where did I go? What’s wrong with me? I don’t think I recognize me anymore. I don’t think I like me anymore.
It’s the oddest feeling, isn’t it. Love seems like such a positive emotion—it opens you up, bringing you new ideas, a generous spirit, a collaborative heart—and yet, love unexpressed transforms into a caustic, abrasive thing, withering you from the inside. Your loves—the very things that can elevate and reveal the very best of you—can, when bottled up, burn away any signs of who you really are and turn you into a husk of a person.
My mom, Jo—who loves reading about the origins of the world’s great religions—found this verse in the Gospel of Thomas. It captures perfectly the dangers of loves repressed: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”
So, no, Suckitup, loves are not a luxury, reserved for the precious few. Loves, expressed, are a necessity for us all. Stifle them, deny them, block their flow, and they will destroy you from the inside out.
But identify them, honor them, and let them flow into contribution, and you will become the biggest and most powerful version of you.