How to Go on Living After You Die
Or, if you find meaning in what you do, you wouldn’t stop after one failure
👋 Hey there! My name is Abhishek. Welcome to a new edition of The Sunday Wisdom! This is the best way to learn new things with the least amount of effort.
It’s a collection of weekly explorations and inquiries into many curiosities, such as business, human nature, society, and life’s big questions. My primary goal is to give you some new perspective to think about things.
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On to this week’s essay! It’s about ~1400 words.
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Q: How do we find meaning in what we do?
In the movie tick, tick... BOOM! Andrew Garfield plays a 29 yo Jonathan Larson who works at a diner during the day while working on an original rock musical, a passion project called Superbia, in his free time.
He’s been writing and rewriting Superbia for the last eight years.
He finally has a chance to present his work at New York Theatre Workshop — an off-Broadway theatre noted for its productions of new works. This workshop will be attended by industry professionals who might offer him a break, i.e., produce Superbia.
Larson feels pressure to be successful before he turns 30. With his birthday just over a week away, he sees the workshop as his last chance.
Larson is running out of time and he has no money. “What if the workshop happens and nothing changes?” his girlfriend asks.
This is a question every creator ponders upon. What if all this was for nothing? What if we just wasted away all these years trying to chase a pipe dream?
Is it worth ruining the present in pursuit of a better future?
Today, let’s continue talking about work. More precisely, how to find meaning in work.
In the last two essays, we’ve discussed not only how important it is to work hard but also how to choose what to work on.
In today’s essay, we’ll see how to keep on going even when everything around you is falling apart.
Human beings have a unique tendency to “attach” meanings to things. Meanings create “emotional” value which affects our behaviour significantly.
Meaning motivates us.
Meaning can make random drops of paint on a canvas into a Jackon Pollock. Meaning can make an old and broken childhood toy more valuable than a brand new one. Meaning makes us collect memorabilia. The stick that Gandhi used to walk has a tonne more meaning and value and significance than an exact replica.
Similarly, if you find meaning in what you do, you can not only make the outcome better but also increase the odds of favourable outcome.
Finding meaning in your work makes you invest more time and effort in it. It’s not just a chore anymore. Meaning gives you emotional arsenal to push harder.
When you don’t find meaning in what you do, you feel like a “cog in the machine,” even if it’s an important machine. Without meaning, you live only on will power and unlike meaning, will power isn’t easily replenished. It burns you out easily, and on top of that there’s no creativity.
Meaning is what makes you give a shit. It’s what makes you care not only what you do but also how you do it. Because if you care, you focus on the outcome as well as on the process. You own an initiative from beginning and see it through to the end.
If you don’t give a shit, you neither care about the process nor the outcome. Any work without meaning is transactional work. Any transactional work done only for the sake of transaction (say, money) is bound to be subpar.
Pravin Tambe is an Indian cricketer who made his Indian Premiere League (IPL) debut at the age of 41. He had never played professional cricket before that. While most professional cricketers retire well before 40, it was the opposite for Tambe. He is the oldest ever IPL debutant.
It’s literally impossible to go on playing all these years without giving up unless you really believe what you do is meaningful work.
Meaning gives you superpowers.
How do you add meaning to your work? Well you don’t!
It’s not something that you can just sprinkle, like a bit of salt in a dish. There’s no recipe that you can blindly follow to do meaningful work.
Had it been the case, it would have been easy for everyone to do meaningful work and I wouldn’t have been writing this essay.
Instead of adding meaning, you have to find meaning, and the easiest way is to follow “love.”
Start with love. Ask yourself, what do you love to do? What do you genuinely enjoy to do? What are some of the subjects where you can spend hours and not get bored? These are the areas where you are most likely to find meaning.
You’ll know you’ve found meaning when you start “giving a shit” — when you strive for a higher purpose, something that is challenging, something that is much bigger than you. You find meaning when you respond to a higher calling — when your reach exceeds your grasp.
Jonathan Larson loved making music, yes, but he also wanted to take Broadway musicals to the next level — that was his personal quest, his higher calling — and he spent the first eight years of his adult life chasing it. This wouldn’t have been possible if he didn’t love music and didn’t find meaning in his pursuit.
Meaning makes you take something bad and make it good or take something okay and make it a lot better. That’s actually how innovation works!
Find what you dislike. When you put a lot of time into something, you start seeing all the things you dislike, that you think are subpar, that you think should be improved, and that you decide it should be you who improves them.
Jerry Seinfeld didn’t like how talkshows were conducted. They happened inside a studio, in front of an audience, with bright lights and an in-your-face camera. That’s not how normal people “talk” at all. A real chat doesn’t have any of that, and that’s what Seinfeld wanted to capture — a real talkshow.
“What if I could find those things that people would not say in front of an audience in a talkshow and present it?” He created Comedians in Car Getting Coffee in response to that, which if you ask me is a very different and extremely authentic talkshow that isn’t actually like any talkshow.
The reason some of the jobs we do feel meaningless is because we cannot connect the dots. We don’t see how our work makes an impact, we don’t see ourselves as part of a bigger purpose.
This is why startups and creative fields have a unique advantage. People are in control of the outcome. When you make a change, you have strong, immediate, and often unambiguous feedback. You know the risk it has, but you are also excited for the thrill it promises.
If you find meaning, working hard becomes fun. The pursuit of a better future isn’t at the expense of the present. You enjoy the journey when you do meaningful work.
Even if your startup fails, or your Etsy store has not many customers, or your newsletter has very few subscribers, the fun that you’ve had all these days pursuing these creative avenues is all yours — nobody has the power to take them away from you.
If you find meaning in what you do, you wouldn’t stop after one failure. You would try again and again and again, till your last breath.
Superbia got rave reviews during the workshop but nobody offered to produce it. Then Larson made tick, tick... BOOM! where he drew on his feelings of rejection caused by the disappointment of Superbia. tick, tick... BOOM! was an okay hit. Then he made Rent, for which Larson was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Boom!
Unfortunately, Larson died ten days before his 36th birthday, the day of the first Off-Broadway preview performance of Rent.
Success is hard. Great success is rare. People need to believe in some deeper purpose behind what they’re doing, not simply the pursuit of name, fame, money. Because when the “shit hits the fan” only people who give a shit are gonna keep going, the rest are gonna wither out and die.
Do meaningful work.
Meaning lives on.
People who do meaningful work live on.
Timeless Insight
First-order thinking is simplistic and superficial, and just about everyone can do it. All the first-order thinker needs is an opinion about the future. Second-order thinking is deep, complex and convoluted.
People who overweigh the first-order consequences of their decisions and ignore the effects of second- and subsequent-order consequences rarely reach their goals.
This is because first-order consequences often have opposite desirabilities from second-order consequences. This results in big mistakes in decision making. Especially when you are treading in uncharted territories.
What I’m Reading
Politics is when people choose their words and actions based on how they want others to react rather than based on what they really think.
— Patrick Lencioni, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
Tiny Thought
Reframe “work/life balance” into “contribution/leisure” balance and see how you start looking at work and life differently.
Before You Go…
Thanks so much for reading! Send me ideas, questions, your favourite Netflix series. You can write to abhishek@coffeeandjunk.com, reply to this email, or use the comments.
Until next Sunday,
Abhishek 👋