1655: [Part 1] Zen and the Art of Investment Banking: When Working Right is More Important than Finding the Right Work

[00:00:00] This is Optimal Work Daily. Zen and the Art of Investment Banking, When Working Right is More Important than Finding the Right Work. Part 1 by Cal Newport of calnewport.com. The Seeker During the summer of 1998, Thomas was working an entry-level position in the IT department of a large London investment bank, his days filled with data entry and the occasional light secretarial work. It wasn't a terrible job, but it wasn't great either.

[00:00:28] I was constantly unhappy, Thomas recalls, looking back at this period. The most recent crop of lifestyle advice literature offers a clear directive to 1998 Thomas, follow your passion to something better. Tim Ferriss explained in a recent interview with 37 Signals,

[00:00:46] It's worse to tolerate your job than to hate it, because if the pain is painful enough, you'll make a change. But if it's tolerable mediocrity and you're like, well, you know, it could be worse, at least I'm getting paid, then you wind up in a job that is slowly killing your soul. End quote. According to this philosophy, Thomas needs to escape the tolerable mediocrity of his banker job before it becomes too late. But here's the thing, Thomas had already tried that, quite a few times actually, and it hadn't seemed to solve his problems.

[00:01:15] Years earlier, right after college, a young Thomas, who was terrified of becoming a Dockers-clad cubicle jockey, followed a passion for cycling and quickly moved up the sports ranks to join a professional team. He had a tendency to overtrain, however, and amidst the physical grind of professional-level athletics, his mind turned toward greener pastures. Quitting cycling, he entered academia, earning two graduate degrees before discovering that his research was too mainstream to be interesting.

[00:01:43] Wanting to try something more reflective and less demanding, he tried traveling to Korea to teach English. But even the lush exoticism of East Asia couldn't dampen his sense that he was destined for something better. He recalls, quote, every job I did paled in comparison to some magical future passion-fulfilling occupation. End quote. Needing to pay his bills, he moved back to London. He took the entry-level banker position and remained unhappy.

[00:02:08] If stopped here, Thomas' story would be a cautionary tale to the soul-sapping repressiveness of the working world. But it didn't stop here. Nine months into his job at the bank, Thomas did something completely unexpected, something that would change his life, but not at all in the way he assumed. He dropped everything and moved to a Zen monastery tucked into the foothills of the Catskill Mountains, where he would spend the next two years. The Monk

[00:02:34] The Zen Mountain Monastery sits in the shadow of Tremper Mountain, in the bowl formed by the juncture of the Beverkill and Espus Rivers. This is primarily forested land, home to white oaks and hickory, though the rivers support a swath of marshes and meadows that pass through the monastery's grounds. The main building of the Zen Mountain Monastery was built by a Catholic priest back in the 1930s, decades before the Buddhists arrived.

[00:02:58] The stone walls are made of the local blue stone mined from nearby cliffs, and the roof beams were hewed from the local oak. Then, as today, regardless of your religion, if any, it's hard not to recognize this land as God's country. It was early in the winter of 1999 that Thomas arrived in this tranquility, a world apart from London's Square Mile Financial District, to become a lay trainee and live among the monks.

[00:03:22] During my entrance interview, when I was explaining why I wanted to practice Zen and what issues I had been facing in my life, I broke down and started to cry, Thomas recalls. Once inducted, Thomas' days were filled with zazen, the traditional seated meditation interrupted only by chores, work as sacred labor being one of the core precepts of the training, and long dharma discourses on mind-bending koans.

[00:03:46] Westerners often misunderstand Zen practice, believing that the goal is to clear your mind and reach a blissful state of tranquility. This is a myth. Awareness, not suppression, is at the core of Zen. A practiced meditator is not unburdened by thoughts. He is instead hyper-aware of the thoughts flitting through his mind, observing them with detached interest. I just had a daydream about a Twitter post and how people might react to it, a modern meditator might think. That's interesting that my mind felt compelled to explore that.

[00:04:15] Put another way, zazen is a tool of self-inquiry, not escape, and this self-inquiry turned out to be trying for Thomas. For years, Thomas had imagined living at a monastery to be the zenith of his passions. In his fantasies, it held the magical qualities that all his previous jobs lacked. But once he arrived at the Zen Mountain Monastery, he realized that although his surroundings had changed, he was, quote, exactly the same person, end quote.

[00:04:39] The thought patterns that had caused his previous unhappiness, like and dislikes, anxieties, boredoms, and fantasies, had not magically disappeared. Hours and hours of sitting on a zafu, a meditation cushion, with only my thoughts as companions, made me super aware of these distractions, recalls Thomas. The Enlightened One At first, Thomas' realization that, quote, there was nowhere else to run to, plunged him into despair.

[00:05:07] The organizing structure of working life, that there was a magical right occupation waiting out there to be discovered, had crumbled. But armed with the tools of self-awareness honed in his Zen practice, he was eventually able to move beyond the despair and toward an important discovery about his relationship to work. He said, quote, I realized at a very deep level that most of the time it is not the job that is the problem, but me, end quote. There was nothing intrinsically bad about Thomas' prior jobs. The problem was his mindset.

[00:05:37] He was obsessed with the fantasy of a perfect job, and this obsession led him to find fault with the work actually available. He left the Zen Mountain Monastery with an important understanding. Finding the right work pales in importance to learning how to work right. To be continued

[00:05:52] You just listened to part one of the post titled Zen and the Art of Investment Banking, When Working Right is More Important Than Finding the Right Work by Cal Newport of CalNewport.com. And thanks to Cal for letting us share his work here today. He writes about a wide variety of topics, so you're going to hear him narrated across a bunch of our optimal shows. He has a few really popular books, too. One is called So Good They Can't Ignore You.

[00:06:22] Another is called Deep Work, and those two are ones you may have heard of. Both of them are highly reviewed. Cal completed his undergraduate studies at Dartmouth College in 2004 and received a PhD from MIT in 2009 in computer science. He was a graduate in the MIT computer science department from 2009 to 2011. And that year he joined Georgetown University as an assistant professor of computer science and was granted tenure in 2017.

[00:06:49] And again, he's got multiple popular books that are definitely worth checking out. Plus his blog, which is called Study Hacks. And you can find all of that at CalNewport.com. But if I were you, I would start by checking out his books. And that should do it for today. Hope you are having a terrific weekend. Thanks, as always, for being a subscriber to the show, too. And I will see you back here tomorrow where we're going to finish up this two part post and where your optimal life awaits. And that's all about this.