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Work is anything that you are compelled to do. By its very nature, it is undesirable. The speaker draws a dichotomy between work and play, as he defines these terms, with work being things done under compulsion and play being things done based on desire (and especially passionate desire). His theme is a clarion call to shape your life, and the way you make a living, around things you love to do and to avoid dying a slow death by simply doing a job that makes money - the point being that it makes no sense to pursue modest comforts at the cost of spending your life doing soul-deadening things you don't like doing just because they earn you a livelihood. That is what "average" people do, and it is a pit that college kids facing life all fresh and ready should by all means avoid. A few comments on this: 1. Hard work, even lousy forms of work, can be precisely the sort of thing that allows you to develop into someone who has the talent and character to be able to do the extraordinary things you might love. The prototypical person who has all the time and ability to pursue nothing but his passions, I would contend, is the spoiled heir, the person who has never had to work a day in his life in the way the speaker here defines work, i.e., as doing something that only a drudge or a drone would bother with. It is no secret that many persons of privilege of this type will wind up frittering away their lives with little focus or purpose and will never develop the character traits that would enable them to excel in life. They can pursue their "passions" all they like but, in the end, they stand a considerable risk of being spendthrifts, worthless heirs, or whatever other pejorative term captures what it means to waste one's life away in the name of pursuing passions without focus or purpose. Work - hard work, even menial work - is exactly what helps shape most people to rise above the frittering stage and to make something of themselves. For me, as a young kid and through my early adult years, it meant preparing myself for life's challenges by doing a whole host of things that I was "compelled to do" as the speaker uses the term: (a) enduring the drudgery of many parts of the education system itself, (b) selling papers, delivering donuts, working in a cannery, washing dishes, busing tables, waiting tables, tending bar, running delivery routes for a pharmaceutical wholesaler (yes, I know where most every pharmacy is in the Bay Area), (c) learning Latin on my own to help fill a deficit in my vocabulary and grammatical skills, (d) doing scut work to help meet family obligations, (e) working as a slave in a large law firm doing endless round-the-clock tasks of the dreary kind that young attorneys employed by large law firms often do (and quite a few other things to boot). Eventually, all these things led me to a position where I developed the skill and talent to do what I loved, and to do it well. But there was no short-cut to getting there. Work, pain, and adversity are an integral part of life and it is no loss - indeed, it is great gain - to spend some years doing things you don't necessarily love if they help shape your character in a strong way and if they help you develop skill sets that you can later apply in a more optimal way. It is called "growing up." 2. What most young people lack is not passion or intelligence but wisdom. That is, they do not yet know at their stage in life how best to apply the skills, talents, and strengths that they know they possess. They have a sense of what they want but insufficient life experiences to make right judgments about how best to proceed. In this sense, the old, dreary job - with all its limitations - is very often a good way to get out in the world and discover important things about yourself as you gradually grow and develop to face even more important challenges ahead (which, by the way, can consist of doing exciting things in the form of a job - not all jobs are dreary and many provide all the excitement and challenge one would expect even in a startup). I would add that merely deciding to "play" (as the speaker uses the term) can be decidedly dangerous in this sense because it assumes, very often contrary to fact, that the goals you want to play with are really worth pursuing - of course, they may be and I am all for those who want to throw themselves headlong into what they love doing, but many young people will simply not be equipped to make the sort of good judgment at an early age that they could make later after they have had a few working years under their belt. Wisdom combines intelligence with good practical judgments; to make good practical judgments, one needs to know life and not simply from the vantage point of a 22-year-old who normally has not yet developed to a fully mature stage. 3. Many people throughout the world do not have the privilege of completing a college education and it simply cannot be a rule of life that "play" is the operative way of doing things. Hardship and privation are everywhere in many large pockets of the world and people live life doing many things they wouldn't do if they had different circumstances. Often this takes the form of hard, manual labor, agricultural or otherwise. Can it be said that such a large segment of humanity is doing nothing ennobling but is merely spending life dying a slow death while living worthless lives because work is done of necessity? This to me comes off as exceedingly elitist. There is much in life that is precious and people everywhere share these things, whether they are forced to do things they don't want or not to earn a livelihood. My parents were immigrants who grew up in conditions of squalor. They couldn't wait to come to America to have the chance to better themselves, and they did. But they did so through incredible hard work of the type that the speaker here denigrates. To this, I say to him, "get out of your bubble and get a broader perspective." 4. All that said, I liked the punchy, colorful style with which the speaker presented his points and I can appreciate that the points made, and the manner of presentation, can cause young graduates to examine their premises and to think about what they really want to do with their lives. No one with even a modicum of ambition really strives to be average. On that broad theme, the speaker's points resonated with me. By all means, strive to rise above the mediocre. I would just take issue with the idea that hard work of even the "deadening" type is not an important part of that process. |
Elitist? It's quite the opposite. Elitist is calling it noble and righteous to toil away miserable while yourself enjoying a nice lifestyle.