This week, Slow Leadership posted an article about Living from the Inside Out. Carmine Coyote writes “Living from the inside out means finding your own innermost values and basing all choices on those. That’s the best way to increase your happiness with whatever you do for a living.”
As I read this article I realized that I know several people who live from the inside out. It occurred to me that these people are very brave – and also very happy.
The most extreme (and perhaps brave example) of living from the inside out is a friend I met at work several years ago in my first software job. She is an artist and created art for the children’s multimedia print applications the company made. That company was fun. It was the type of start-up I love to work for. Yes, it had stresses. Yes, we worked extra hours. However, we all had energy, and for the most part enjoyed each other, and we all liked the products we created. My friend brought her parrot to work. The parrot would walk down the hall to my office and grab the paper out of my printers. It was wonderful.
That company was purchased by Mattel, and shortly thereafter became a terribly stressful place to work. Eventually, Mattel closed the company. What happened to my friend after that is what happened to pretty much all of us after the “dot.com bust.” She drifted from stressful job to stressful job, getting paid too little for too many hours by people who thought of employees as ‘resources.’ She was laid off time after time for all her hard work.
The safe thing to do, the thing most of us are still doing, was to find a company where she could lay low, hang in there, and collect a paycheck and some health insurance. It’s just a job, it isn’t fun, but that is why it’s called “work” anyway, right? It could be worse, we are lucky we don’t have to do hard manual labor for minimum wage. Just take it day by day. You’ve heard all these platitudes many times, and probably still do (Lord knows, most managers recite them to their employees in a mantra-like fashion.) We are a very dissatisfied bunch and meet for beers regularly to discuss our dissatisfaction (or in my case, blog about it).
This is not what my friend did. She re-examined her values. She realized that she would be happier if she could create something – become an artisan of sorts – even if it meant less money. All the time I’ve known her she has been a cook and baker as a hobby. I mean a serious baker; she made wedding cakes for her friends – for fun (talk about stress!). She examined what she enjoys most in her life and realized she needed a change of atmosphere. She realized she did have a ‘calling’ and it was not producing software that makes some unappreciative CEO rich.
She took a huge risk and followed her values. She spent a fair amount of money to go to culinary school. She finished culinary school and ended up doing an internship at one of the best known gourmet restaurants in Napa Valley! She came back to the NorthWest and now bakes for one of the finest artisan bakeries in Portland. She earns less money than she did in software, and she has to go to work at 3 or 4 AM. She is also way way happier than she’s been since I’ve known her. She actually looks happier. I can just see it in her skin and her eyes. She laughs more when she discusses her job and she is proud of the products she makes.
I know risks like the above story are scary, but I really think you deserve it. You deserve to spend the majority of your time doing something you love with people you love. You don’t have to love it 100% of the time, but it should rarely make you cry. You should never leave work feeling disrespected. You should never have to ‘up your meds’ to get through the work day. You should rarely feel that you just can’t get up and face the day. If you put up with these feelings, you are short changing yourself. You can be happy. You can work it out. I know several brave people, just like you, who have worked it out.