In search of purpose

I have from time to time been asked by young people emerging into the workforce how they might best find work that they find meaningful and purposeful when so much of what they are encountering feels the opposite. I take it as an enormous honour that they think I might have anything of value to share with them but I have not found it easy to provide any helpful, or even coherent answers. The truth is the most important life lessons I have ever learned have been hidden in some unexpected, and distinctly unglamorous, places. I find it hard to distil them into anything resembling ‘useful, actionable advice’.

I do work that I love, now.  This has not always been so. Earlier in my working life I spent time washing pots, serving ice-cream, scrubbing toilets, cleaning hotel rooms, pulling pints, waiting tables, picking all sorts of fruit, entering endless streams of data, and making 4am doner kebabs for Brisbane’s drunks and taxi drivers. I once sheared a sheep (a wholly unsatisfactory experience both for me and the sheep). I provided corporate tax advice for decade.

I was not particularly gifted at any of those things.  Nor did I feel I was changing the world for the better whilst doing them. I certainly did not believe I had found my unique purpose in life. I don’t recall ever giving that much thought, though I think I knew at some level I was learning…about myself, human nature and what matters.

I was (still am) an introvert and experience shyness on meeting new people.  Over time, in those early jobs, I learned to keep the attention off myself by asking questions and listening.  Turns out you can learn a lot when you shut up.   

Once, for a month, I picked grapes in Mildura, Australia with a small crew of itinerant pickers. We worked in pairs on either side of a vine, paid for how many vines we completed per day.  I was travelling alone so was paired with a seasoned picker. He was in his 50s but he looked much older, though he was wiry and tough.  He scraped by following the fruit picking seasons around the country, camping and living hand to mouth, literally.  Everything he owned in the world was a small tent and a few possessions in a worn backpack.  He had no social security number. He did not waste words but I did learn a little of his life over those dry, hot weeks.  In the 1950s he had run away from home in Ireland aged 14 and found his way onto a boat to Sydney. He had never seen nor contacted his family again.  He fell in with a group of travelling performers. Later he had survived 10 years as a homeless, speed addict in Kings Cross. He was now clean, though the ravages of that time were etched on his face, and ran far deeper. His was a story of survival, loss, regret, trauma, aloneness, hope, facing death repeatedly and choosing life.  I was 21, naive, privileged, heartbroken, and a little lost. He was unfailingly courteous and utterly kind. In the searing Victorian heat he worked more quickly than I could manage.  When he finished his side of the vine he would wordlessly shift on to mine and finish it alongside me, refusing to take any extra share of the pay at the end of the week. For that month we spent all day, every day together in the vines, in the evenings cooking on the BBQ and swatting away flies. I was sad to say goodbye to him. 

I think of him from time to time and I am grateful that I met him. If I had entered my 20s full of certainty, ready to forge a path into one of those glittering steel and glass towers that beckon our bright young people, our paths would not have crossed. My life and world-view would have been poorer.  Later, in some of those gilded towers, I was fortunate to work with many impressive, clever, successful people. They taught me a great deal - though in hindsight nothing more important than I learned in those hot, dusty Mildura vines.

So if I do get asked again by somebody how they might find meaningful work, perhaps by my own daughters one day, I might say something along these lines…

If you want to find work that inspires you, then go do a whole lot of work that doesn’t. And whilst you are doing it pay attention. Get outside your own head. Equip yourself with what you need to be in the world fully. Read everything. Listen generously. Keep your mind full of questions. Be more interested in other people’s stories than in your own dramas, plans and grievances. The former will give you a better perspective on the latter. Pay particular attention to people whose paths have been different and more difficult to your own, you have much to learn from them. Do your best at whatever it is you are doing. Laugh at it and take it seriously at the same time. Trust in yourself. Have patience. Keep searching.

This might not help you find a sense of purpose but I believe it will make your life rich and maybe, if you are lucky, meaningful work will one day find you. Or you will find meaning in your work. And then you will pinch yourself and not take anything for granted.