Underneath what you do is who you are. Who you are is mostly immeasurable, since you are so many things.
Multiple Selves
The artist Aligheiro Boetti added an ampersand between his first and last name. He did it to demonstrate that he was not single, but multiple selves. He became Aligheiro & Boetti.
What you do is the outer layer of who you are. It’s not the whole you. You are a symphony of things. But asked what you do, you might say, “I play the trumpet,” whereas you might also encompass the drums and the oboe. You just don’t show your drum and oboe selves often.
In fact, most people can’t afford, can’t find the time, don’t have the discipline, to actualize all that they have within them. They simply need a job to pay the bills, to get the food, to find a shelter, to have a life.
There are other people who are what they do. They have strict priorities, a narrow focus. They stick to their knitting. In professional life, that’s almost a necessity. If it takes ten thousand hours to make a good surgeon, a good lawyer, a good architect, and you’ve paid the tuition or borrowed the money to pay for your professional education, you sort of have to stick to it.
Play the Symphony
But I know a lawyer who gets on the commuter train, takes a small portable battery-run electric guitar out of a sack, plugs in his ear phones so only he hears what he’s playing, and practices for a full 45 minutes in the morning. He does the same on the evening trip home. “That’s 90 minutes of practice,” he told me, “90 minutes that I wouldn’t otherwise have.”
I know an architect who has a full schedule with a range of clients, large and small. He makes it his business to get home as close to 5pm as possible so he can write poetry. He’s published several small chapbooks. He is playing more than one instrument in the symphony that is him.
I have another friend, a skiing buddy, a lawyer, and a trained pianist, who learned how to compose Brazilian samba tunes. In 2016 one of his songs was nominated for best Latin song of the year. Yet he’s still practicing law full time.
Some of us who are lucky, like me, to be able to do work that nurtures who we are, often forget that not everyone is able to do what they want to do.
80/20 Rule
But I suspect the old 80/20 rule applies. 20% of us are lucky enough, or stubborn enough, to make a living doing something close to our passion and talents. 80% of us work at something that pays the bills but doesn’t engage who we really are.
I work as a speech coach. In my twenties I was an actor. Then I got married and realized I needed to make a steady living to pay for my kid’s education. So I’ve pretty much stuck to speech as a career. The deep dark delicious for me is language and performance. Words put to work to make something happen.
Since I am a coach, I can say this: A great coach is different from a great player. Great players have intuitive talent, a drive to excel, plus love of the game.
Coaches as a group probably have less talent than their players, but more curiosity about how the game is played well.