Whatever you accomplished yesterday, take it behind the shed and shoot it.
That is your life’s work, bottom-line.
Work every day as if it were your last, then take it to the altar and lay it down and walk away. In your heart, there can’t be an expectation on that work—you can’t expect for it to make you successful or happy.
The great mystery of the human heart is finding a life’s work, but before we do that, we have to challenge our definitions and sacrifice our expectations.
The proof of the pudding is in the tasting. Look at history and see what work great people did: how they did it, and why.
They all somehow fit into two categories.
There are those who saw success as the goal, and those who didn’t.
When success is the goal (no matter how you define it), you either achieve it and enjoy it (like Michael Jordan, who to this day wishes he could be back on the court) or you don’t (like Ernest Hemingway who ended his life early because he ran out of creative inspiration).
When success isn’t the goal, the work is. And the funny thing about work is it will always be there. When work itself is the goal, frustration dissipates. Complexity, distractions, delays all become plot-twists and opportunities for overcoming, for working.
It’s safe to say that success isn’t a great goal. It’s a great side-effect, but it’s not a real goal in itself.
The diagnosis of the human heart is we were made to make, created to create. We were made for work and work was made for us.
But work has been redefined as the ugly, grimy means of achieving success—whatever that means—when work is supposed to be defined as a vocation, a calling, a mission, something so much bigger than yourself that you find yourself in service to it, not the other way around.
When you find yourself in service to your work, retirement isn’t something you bring up; it happens to you and you respond.
When you find yourself in service to your work, you don’t measure success by your own benefit; that is just the by-product of good work.
When you find yourself in service to your work, life becomes defined not by how much you can build but how much you can sacrifice.
Life isn’t a journey where we progressively make something of ourselves, pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps. If it was, then the day you grow weary or unable is the day you become useless. Dead weight.
What life is, for the human who knows his purpose, is a series of tests, riddles that are only cracked by emptying yourself of yesterday’s accomplishments.
Which is why, if you reduce it to eight words, the core work we all share is learning to do this one thing really well, every day: take it behind the shed and shoot it.
“There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.” ~Ernest Hemingway
“It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.” ~Harry S. Truman