I got that lit­tle old book from the library last time that has been fun to read.  Here is a bit from chap­ter 4.

Tom Hodgkinson „How to be free”

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The idea of a career is that it fol­lows an upward path to some ever-vanishing point above you. It is the quest for self-perfection…a sort of lonely pil­grim­age. Your career is sup­posed to be some­thing more than just a job: it defines and lim­its you, and it sup­pos­edly pro­vides your cre­ative and com­pet­i­tive ful­fil­ment. Career is not just how you earn your bread; it is your life…
The com­pet­i­tive prin­ci­ple applied to work means that your suc­cess is achieved at the cost of some­one else’s failure.

…Career pre­cisely refelcts the dynam­ics of other mod­ern myths; it is a greedy mon­ster, never sat­is­fied, always want­ing more…in our urge to com­pete, we tend to try to become very good at one small thing to the exclu­sion of all oth­ers. This is called pro­fes­sion­al­ism but could be more accu­rately labelled ‘being use­less’… And if you can’t do any­thing else, you become depen­dent on other peo­ple to fill your needs…

…Career is just posh slav­ery. And career is an insti­tu­tion­al­ized putting-off, a par­adise deferred. We hold the abstract notion of a career in our heads as a kind of yard­stick. Sometimes we are doing well against our self-imposed imag­ined career path; some­times we are doing badly and other people’s careers seem to be going bet­ter. We use career as a stick to beat our­selves with.

…Careers don’t allow us to be fully our­selves, careers take as an index of suc­cess money and sta­tus rather than plea­sure in work and creativity.

…Vocation is a com­mu­nity based idea of work, it is a giv­ing expe­ri­ence, whereas career is a self­ish and com­pet­i­tive ver­sion of how to work. Vocation is steady and flat, whereas career is an upwardly slop­ing curve, stretch­ing into infin­ity. With a sense of work as voca­tion, we can work steadily and happily.

…And how do you find your voca­tion, your gift? The answer is sim­ply to do noth­ing for as long as you pos­si­bly can.…Most of the time we are too busy to step back and find out what we would like to do. Create some time for your­self and things will grad­u­ally become clear. Above all, stop try­ing. Career is a try hard notion. The free spirit have stopped try­ing and instead let things happen.

FIND YOUR GIFT
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