1711: [Part 1] Corrupted Callings: The Subtle Difference Between Finding Your Life's Work and Loving Your Life by Cal Newport

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[00:00:57] This is Optimal Work Daily. Corrupted Callings. The Subtle Difference Between Finding Your Life's Work and Loving Your Life. Part 1. By Cal Newport of CalNewport.com The Lonely Rise of Sonia Sotomayor.

[00:01:17] Tucked away in the northeast corner of the Bronx, not far from Edenwald Houses, the borough's largest public housing project, sits the Cardinal Spellman High School, a private yet still affordable Catholic high school. The annual tuition is under $7,000. That has been for the past 50 years, as Lauren Collins put it in a recent New Yorker article, home to, quote, strivers of assorted ethnicities, end quote, attempting to better their situation.

[00:01:44] It's not surprising, therefore, that a young Sonia Sotomayor found her way to Spelman in the fall of 1968. After distinguishing herself academically, she was valedictorian. Sotomayor graduated from the Bronx to Princeton University and then on to Yale Law School, where she was editor of the Law Review. After paying her career-appropriate dues in the New York District Attorney's Office, she moved into corporate law.

[00:02:08] In 1991, Sotomayor was appointed a district court judge, and in 1997, she advanced to the Court of Appeals. Even at this early stage, her potential to become a Supreme Court justice was recognized. Rush Limbaugh dedicated an entire show during her appeals court confirmation to stalling her, quote, rocket ship to the Supreme Court, end quote. Earlier this year, Sotomayor realized this potential when President Obama nominated her to fill the seat vacated by David Souter.

[00:02:38] Sotomayor is great at what she does and loves doing it. Translated into the vernacular of modern career advice, she found her calling. But at what cost? In a column written during Sotomayor's Supreme Court confirmation hearings, David Brooks describes the ambitious jurist as an exemplar of a, quote, meritocracy that gets more purified and competitive by the year, with the time demands growing more and more insistent, end quote.

[00:03:04] As Brooks noted, Sotomayor divorced twice and is candid about her workaholism. She once said, quote, Certainly the fact that I was leaving my home at 7 and getting back at 10 o'clock was not of assistance in recognizing the problems developing in my marriage, end quote. Sotomayor's story and Brooks' commentary were brought to my attention in a trio of posts written by Ben Casnotcha. In these posts, Ben argues that a calling, which he defines, quoting Michael Lewis, as,

[00:03:43] Ben proposes, if you want a calling, you don't have time for a family. Casnotcha and Brooks are correct to notice that true callings are often truly corrupting to the overall quality of their subjects' lives. High-stakes fields like law or finance, for example, are rich with Sotomayor-style workaholics. But this Faustian trade-off is not inevitable.

[00:04:05] In this post, I highlight a different path, one that preserves both elements of the remarkable life, professional engagement and deep enjoyment of daily living. To do so, I'll enlist the aid of a provocative personality who started life on a similar trajectory as Sotomayor, but then split off in an unexpected direction. The Charmed Life of Bill McKibben When the future New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof arrived at Harvard in 1978, he knew he was a good writer.

[00:04:34] He recalled in a blog post, I expected to shine in the mandatory expository writing class. But he was soon mildly traumatized to discover that he was only the second best wordsmith in the class. Quote, the best was a gangly dynamo with an interest in the environment, a kid named Bill McKibben. End quote. McKibben, a brash young environmentalist from Palo Alto, leveraged his writing skill to become editor of the famed Harvard Crimson.

[00:05:02] This prestige earned him a spot as a staff writer for The New Yorker after graduation, where he worked on the talk of the town section through the mid-1980s. Up to this point, McKibben's story closely follows Sotomayor. He focused his attention on building a rare and valuable skill, which earned him access to elite worlds. In 1987, however, the paths followed by these two upstarts diverged.

[00:05:25] After watching Bill Sean, the editor who hired him, be ousted from The New Yorker, McKibben quit, moving to a small village at the foot of Crow Mountain, an unassuming peak nestled in the Adirondacks. Once there, he penned The End of Nature, a bestseller that introduced global warming to a wide audience. McKibben continued freelance writing, publishing a series of books that addressed issues of environmentalism and sustainability, often centered around lifestyle experiments.

[00:05:53] In The Age of Missing Information, for example, McKibben watched 24 hours worth of programming on all 93 channels available in a Washington, D.C. suburb, and then compared the experience to a day spent on a mountaintop near his Adirondacks home. Eventually, McKibben and his wife moved to the Champlain Valley of Vermont, where he accepted a post as scholar in residence at Middlebury College. In essence, being paid to think big thoughts and inspire students to do the same.

[00:06:20] He continues to write influential books. Al Gore cited The End of Nature as bolstering his dedication to climate change. And his organization 350.org, which promotes climate change activism, has become an important voice in the conversation surrounding the topic. Though his work is engaging and affects the world, McKibben's lifestyle is far different from the late-night marathons of Sotomayor. An article in Progressive Magazine, for example, describes his days as, quote,

[00:06:48] filled with canoe trips, mountaineering, writing, and teaching, end quote. A rustic rhythm succinctly captured in the photo that opened this post, which shows a young McKibben and his wife enjoying a sunny afternoon. Whereas Sotomayor personifies ambition pursued at the expense of all else, McKibben's story resonates with our conception of the remarkable life. It's worth asking, therefore, what lessons we can extract from these two divergent tales of achievement and happiness. To be continued.

[00:07:17] You just listened to part one of the post titled Corrupted Callings – The subtle difference between finding your life's work and loving your life. By Cal Newport of calnewport.com. ServiceNow unterstützt Ihre Business Transformation mit der KI-Plattform. Alle reden über KI, aber die KI ist nur so leistungsfähig wie die Plattform, auf der sie aufbaut. Lassen Sie die KI arbeiten – für alle!

[00:07:45] Beseitigen Sie Reibung und Frustration Ihrer Mitarbeiter und nutzen Sie das volle Potenzial Ihrer Entwickler. Mit intelligenten Tools für Ihren Service, um Kunden zu begeistern. All das auf einer einzigen Plattform. Deshalb funktioniert die Welt mit ServiceNow. Mehr auf servicenow.de slash AI for People. And thank you to Cal. He writes about a really wide variety of topics, so you're going to hear him narrated across a bunch of our shows on our podcast network. He has a few really popular books, too.

[00:08:13] One of them is called So Good They Can't Ignore You. Another is Deep Work. Those are two that you may have heard of. Both of them very highly reviewed. Cal completed his undergrad studies at Dartmouth College in 2004 and received a PhD from MIT in 2009 in computer science. He was a postdoctoral associate in the MIT computer science department from 2009 to 2011.

[00:08:37] And then in 2011, he joined Georgetown University as an assistant professor of computer science and was granted tenure in 2017. And again, he has multiple popular books that are worth checking out, plus his blog Study Hacks. And you can find all of that at calnewport.com. And that's going to do it for today's installment. Hope you have a great weekend and I will see you back here on Sunday where we're going to finish up this post and where your optimal life awaits. Very meaningful way, we have a great kind of experience to that. You can see the time that you are in the whole list of books that are going to be helpful.