Heavy Lifting: Grow Up, Get a Job, Raise a Family, and Other Manly Advice (2015)
PART II
Life Skills 101
10
Finding Your Vocation
No doubt, there are Millennials who need their sense of entitlement swatted.
In fact, this appears to be a point of consensus among non-Millennials. English teacher David McCullough Jr. became an unexpected social media phenomenon with his 2012 Wellesley High School commencement address that’s been viewed on YouTube more than 2.5 million times. McCullough’s blunt message to the graduates on their special day was that, in fact, they’re not special.
You are not special. You are not exceptional. Contrary to what your U-9 soccer trophy suggests, your glowing seventh grade report card, despite every assurance of a certain corpulent purple dinosaur, that nice Mister Rogers and your batty Aunt Sylvia, no matter how often your maternal caped crusader has swooped in to save you … you’re nothing special… .
You see, if everyone is special, then no one is. If everyone gets a trophy, trophies become meaningless. In our unspoken but not so subtle Darwinian competition with one another—which springs, I think, from our fear of our own insignificance, a subset of our dread of mortality—we have of late, we Americans, to our detriment, come to love accolades more than genuine achievement.
In this he echoed perhaps Pixar’s finest movie, The Incredibles, in which the superpowered family laments the everyone-gets-a-trophy attitude. Their unique powers illuminate the obvious point through exaggeration: just as only they have superstrength, elastic stretching, and freezing powers, only a select few among us are the smartest, the most talented, the strongest, the most unique—and it’s silly, self-defeating naiveté to pretend otherwise.
But if the phrase “everyone is special” makes people want to hunt down Barney the Dinosaur and ensure he joins his extinct ancestors, let’s just tweak that a bit to read, everyone is unique. And from there, let’s apply this to what they’re capable of doing in the time they have upon this earth. In short, not everyone is great. But there’s not a person on this earth who isn’t capable of greatness.
Oftentimes, that greatness isn’t so visible early in life, or it manifests itself in a quite different way than we expected.
Charles Krauthammer, maybe the world’s most brilliant political columnist and certainly one of the most influential voices in Washington, began life as a young man wanting to be a doctor. In his first year at Harvard Medical School, he was paralyzed in a diving board accident and has been in a wheelchair ever since. Work in psychiatry opened doors to the world of public health policy, which led to work in the Carter White House and writing speeches for Walter Mondale—Republican Krauthammer fans, let that sink in for a moment—which led to writing essays for the New Republic.
Wrestling and Hollywood superstar Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson played on the University of Miami’s championship-winning college football team and dreamed of NFL stardom—until a back injury sidelined him for his senior year. He went undrafted, struggled in Canada’s football league, and was finally cut. He returned to the family business of the wrestling circuit and became probably the biggest movie, television, and commercial star to come out of professional wrestling.
Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard. Elvis Costello was a computer programmer. Jerry Seinfeld was written out of his first television role on Benson. Mark Cuban was fired from his job as a salesman at a computer store. Albert Einstein was a pretty mediocre patent office clerk. Charles Schulz, creator of “Peanuts,” was turned down for a job at Disney. Alan Rickman was a graphic designer and had meager success as a stage actor until he took his signature role in Die Hard—at age forty-one.
Everybody who is indisputably “special” was, at one point, nobody special.
If you believe that God—or Fate, or the random combination of two separate sets of genetic material—creates every single person born on earth with something uniquely valuable about them, it creates some far-reaching ramifications. It means everyone has value. Nobody’s a waste of space. Everybody’s got some talent, some gift they’re meant to share with the world.
Maybe people reject this possibility because it demands too much of them; it reminds them that they are only a fraction of what they could be; and it reminds all of us that homelessness, drug addiction, violent crime, and incarceration are social problems that rob us of talents that were not properly employed.
If we accepted that everyone in our world has value, it would have a sweeping impact on our politics. “No child left behind” would be more than a slogan. Every failing school would be regarded as an abomination, a demonic waste of talent, and even schools that churn out mediocrity would be seen as having failed in their duty to get young people to seek out their potential for greatness. The problem of pervasive unemployment would not be limited to putting people on benefits or helping them find jobs, but would guide them to careers that tap their special talents.
You can imagine other far-reaching ramifications. (COUGHabortionCOUGH.)
Maybe there aren’t any obvious indicators of what makes you unique, special, blessed, and gifted at this moment. But there can be. You are uniquely capable of great achievements. It’s called finding your vocation, your special calling in life.
When I was five I wanted to be a paleontologist. Like the vast majority of little boys, I thought dinosaurs were the coolest things ever. I also liked saying the word paleontologist. I dreamed of roaming great deserts and rugged mountains digging for fossils, discovering new species (like Camosaurus rex), and maybe even finding out if the Loch Ness Monster was real. After Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom came out, I decided I wanted to be an archaeologist with a bullwhip to fight off enemies.
As I grew older, the list of things I wanted to be expanded. When I was twelve, I picked up a biography of Edward R. Murrow, and as I read about his reporting from London during the Blitz I became captivated by the power of the microphone.
When parents (my own or a date’s mom or dad), or guidance counselors, or college applications asked about my future plans, I replied, “I want to be a journalist.” And I wasn’t lying. Not really. Well, kind of. I did want to be a journalist, but only if my real dream didn’t pan out. In my heart of hearts, I didn’t want to be a reporter. I really, truly, and desperately wanted to rock.
I’m just old enough that the first years of my adolescence dovetailed with the glorious swan song of the Metal Years. I spent my Friday nights in sixth and seventh grade at the roller skating rink in Norman, Oklahoma, desperately trying to make my feathered hair look longer and hoping that my Ratt T-shirt and the zebra striped bandanna on my thigh made me look like Warren De Martini and not, say, a victim of a horrible safari wound that forced me to use a piece of zebra hide as a tourniquet.* Every fifth song or so the lights would dim and a power ballad would start playing before the roller rink DJ would intone, “Couples skate,” or even worse, “Ladies Choice.” I was not part of a couple. I was a loner. A rebel. Plus, I couldn’t skate backward, so that made skating with a girl an even more daunting proposition.
I’m pretty sure I failed.
Every now and then I’d get to go to a concert, which only fueled my desire to become the next Stephen Pearcy. It was gonna happen, and it was gonna rock you like a hurricane. I had my jean jacket with a hand-drawn Metallica logo on the back. I cheered on Dee Snider when he faced down Al Gore and the censorious Parents Music Resource Center in a congressional hearing. Like countless other metal kids my age, I doodled logos for my future bands on the covers and insides of all my school notebooks.** I had all of the desire, and absolutely no ability to play a musical instrument other than the piano (the most un-metal of all instruments). If I couldn’t play, I’d have to sing. I’d also need to find other people who had actual musical talent.
According to my thirteen-year-old self, I was going to front either Gracious Fury or Saintz Alive. I think I was going through a Stryper phase at the time.
It wasn’t until high school that I was able to find people my age who actually owned musical instruments, and by then my tastes had changed. R.E.M.’s Out of Time turned me from a metal head into a poetry-writing, Homburg-wearing, wannabe Michael Stipe. With my friend Todd on guitar, my friend Joe on the drums (well, a drum, a snare drum; it’s what we could afford), and me on a Casiotone keyboard and a Realistic brand microphone from RadioShack, we began to create music. Really, really crappy music.
Oh, we tried. And we could muddle our way through three-chord rockers like the Velvet Underground’s “There She Goes Again” and “House of the Rising Sun.” We did a not-too-terrible-for-teenagers version of “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine).” We also tried to write our own songs, all of which were pretty awful.
After high school Joe headed west, while Todd and I went off to college together. Journalism remained my backup career choice. I was (sadly) way more excited about playing college bars than going to college. We reconstituted ourselves as an acoustic duo called The Almighty Bucks,* learned a lot more R.E.M. songs (as well as the 4 Non Blondes song “What’s Up?,” which I loathe to this day), and eventually acquired Todd’s roommate Len as our bassist and a local musician Neil as our drummer. Finally we were a four piece!
The band logo I doodled featured a stuffed and mounted deer head with a halo; yet another band name with a semi-religious reference. Maybe I really wanted to be the next Michael W. Smith, not the next Michael Stipe.
A four piece that went absolutely nowhere, unfortunately. Still, the dream refused to die. Through personal and personnel changes alike, Todd and I continued writing and playing music together. Another four piece formed around our nucleus, with our friend Jonathan on bass and a different Joe on drums. This time we were called Another Engine, after an R.E.M. song, and we played a few club dates around Oklahoma City. We recorded a five-song demo, including the first song I ever wrote about my future wife (we were communicating online and hadn’t actually met yet). In February 1997 she flew out to Oklahoma City for a weekend, and our band had a gig that Saturday night. The crowd was good (we played a lot of covers, though no 4 Non Blonde songs), the woman I was trying to impress was impressed, and I even had a chance to sing a couple of songs I’d written about her to her face.
Things were going well for the band, but to my surprise so was my backup plan to be a journalist, since I was now a producer at a local television station. I enjoyed my day job and worked hard at it (after all, it was paying the bills), but I thought it was tiding me over until our band’s big break.
Instead, the band had a big breakup. In a matter of months, Jonathan and his wife moved to Texas, Joe left the band, I’d gotten married and was now a father with two kids, and I’d taken a radio job as a beat reporter. Music was no longer the most important thing in my life; even when I listened to the radio, it was now Dr. Laura, Rush Limbaugh, and my mentors at the station, Mike McCarville and Jerry Bohnen.
Looking back, my dream career derailed at exactly the right time.
But the dream didn’t die entirely. My friend Todd and I managed to spend a few hours a week writing songs; we played a few open-mike nights (without ever promoting ourselves). It was not about a career anymore; it was another way to be creative and to maintain a great friendship.
As it turned out, it wasn’t archaeology or rock stardom that I wanted, or even journalism necessarily. What I wanted was a job that allowed me to explore the world around me, to indulge and engage my curiosity, to be creative, to inform and be informed. I’m very lucky that my semi-practical backup plan actually worked. I’m well aware that’s not the case for everyone.
It may be that you end up working a job that you tolerate in order to pay for the things you’re passionate about. This really isn’t that unusual, at least according to a 2013 survey by the firm PayScale, which found that 48 percent of Millennials reported having “low job meaning.”* But a boring job can pay for a pretty interesting life, and there’s no reason why you have to define yourself by your career.
“Gen Y on the Job,” PayScale, October 2013, http://www.payscale.com/data-packages/generations-at-work.
Moreover, a job doesn’t have to be permanent. If you want a job with “value” and “meaning,” you’ll make that a priority. Just remember, it might take you a while to find that job. In the meantime, paying your bills is meaning enough. With resilience and perseverance, time and effort, you can build from a “pay the bills job” to a “dream job.”
In early 2004 I was presented with an opportunity of a lifetime: move to Washington, D.C., and host a live, daily talk show focusing on our right to keep and bear arms. The only drawback was that it meant uprooting my family from the life that we’d established; my wife would have to leave her job, my kids would have to leave their schools and day care, we’d have to sell the house, and we’d be leaving all of our friends behind to start over in a new place. What’s more, I wasn’t unhappy in my job hosting the morning news show at the AM radio station where I worked, and I’d established a good relationship with advertisers and sponsors. The ratings were good, I had a great mentor in my program director Mike, and there was a really good chance that if I stuck around, I could eventually be the afternoon drive host. Plus, I knew Oklahoma City. I’d grown up there. I loved the city and the community I served, and I’d be leaving right as the city was poised for something of a renaissance.
At the same time, I’d been wondering about my career path. I was comfortable in my job, and there was something appealing about the potential to become a local radio institution, but there was also a part of me that wanted to push myself, to see where my career would take me if I left the safe haven of my hometown. I liked the idea of focusing on the political and cultural fights being waged over our right to keep and bear arms, and the idea of going from my state’s capital city to the nation’s capital (actually, the studio was located a few miles outside of D.C.) sounded pretty cool to a twenty-nine-year-old.
I took advantage of the opportunity and accepted the job at NRA News. It helped that Mike, my program director, told me I should take the job. The opinion that mattered most, of course, was that of my wife. She had moved from New Jersey to Oklahoma seven years earlier, and now I was asking her to move another fifteen hundred miles to Virginia. She had a house that she loved, friends that she adored, and a job that she liked (and one she did very well). I was asking her to give up her dream for mine, or at least that’s what it felt like, and part of me felt crummy and selfish. She’d built a life of her own in Oklahoma City, and I was going to take that away.
I would have understood had my wife told me she didn’t want to move; but she said that she had built a life with me, not with a place. That made it a much easier decision. In fact, the hardest part was for the kids; it was a big change for all of them, but especially for my oldest daughter, who was a junior in high school. She spent her senior year in a huge and impersonal high school in the D.C. suburbs. She handled that with more grace and good humor than I would have; she also made a beeline back to Oklahoma for college.
Our career dreams can change, but the point is, whether your job fulfills you or fills you with dread, a meaningful life is always within your reach. I thought my vocation was in music. Actually, it was in radio, and even more than that in being married with kids.
What Would Ward Cleaver Do?
It’s pretty obvious that Ward found his vocation when he married June and had two sons, Wally and Theodore (“the Beaver”). Whatever work he did, whatever hobbies he had, his priority, his calling in life, was to be a husband and father.