"Only connect."

Of the many dozens of career books I've read over the last two decades, I believe I've found the grail: Roadmap, The Get-It-Together Guide for Figuring Out What To Do with Your Life, the companion to the PBS documentary series Roadtrip Nation. It grounds the new work-as-journey metaphor in concrete terms.

All of those DWYL practitioners frame the search abstractly. They tell us to look to our childhood joys, continuing interests, things we like to do whether we get paid or not, and then, you know, just build a career out of them. Like a magic trick. They leave a huge gulf between the inventory and the how-to.

Roadtrip Nation and Roadmap are the bridge. They interview hundreds of real-life work explorers and help us see how to follow our noses incrementally. None of their "leaders," as the interviewees are called, set out to do the exact work they're doing now. Their work lives, skills, and directions continually evolve. They stop and start, readjusting, learning new skills, following the next opportunity that shows itself.  They listen to their guts. They trust the feeling that something isn't right, and they trust that they'll figure it out when the next step is uncharted.

Most importantly, they work their asses off. None of the leaders sit around navel-gazing, waiting for light to stream from the heavens and show them the way. They do stuff, constantly. They look for the next tiny step, as tiny as making one phone call, writing one paragraph, drawing one picture, playing one song. They act. Reading and learning and musing are important, but they're wary of dwelling too long. They connect with the next, and the next, and the next action.

What is the smallest action you could take, right now? Got one? Stop reading, then, go do, and repeat.

No Really, There is No Free Lunch

Being asked for highly skilled work in exchange for little, or in some cases, no pay is a common experience, especially for artists. There is a sense that because the work seems, to many, like fun, it somehow doesn’t merit pay. It’s close to a hobby. The years of training, experience, and quantities of student loans required to reach professional proficiency are not even an afterthought.

Nobody would walk into a car dealership or a retail store and ask to take home the goods for free. When a lawyer has to be called, a big bill is expected. Maybe it's an indication of creativity's value, or lack thereof in our society, that somehow makes it okay to ask. 

Teach as Teach Can

Do you love teaching? Or maybe you love a subject so much that teaching it seems a natural next step. Be careful of what you wish for. 

Within our universities, countless undergrad courses are taught exclusively by adjuncts. These educators, often Ph.D.s, are unable to find increasingly rare tenure-track positions. They scrape together a living teaching multiple courses each semester, often at different and widely dispersed schools. Brutal commutes, huge course and grading loads, minimal pay, and no benefits may be your reward for passionately following your professional love all the way through your dissertation.

“Seventy-five percent of America’s college faculty earn less than $25,000 a year. Often hired one semester at a time with no healthcare or retirement benefits, paid per course an average of $2700, faculty are now academia’s migrant workers.”

- The Homeless Adjunct blog

Location, Location, Location

So how do you feel about your cube? Yeah...guessing you don’t love it. Where we work is a major driver in the DWYL movement. Check the title of one of the early entries into the canon: Pamela Slim’s Escape from Cubicle Nation: From Corporate Prisoner to Thriving Entrepreneur. Our corporate work spaces are flexible, efficient, practical…and utterly dehumanizing. We love to slam The Cube. It has been satirized and vilified far and wide. Think Dilbert, Office Space, Real Life Adventures:

Those of us who work in corporate cube farms want desperately to escape the monotony. Workers decorate their cubicles like stylish mini apartments, yoga studios, even beach vacation getaways. This cube has a “window” onto longed-for nature, maybe even a permanent vacation destination. Most cube dwellers’ décor demonstrates a yearning to be somewhere else.

But where else is a question that deserves consideration. Your passion may happen in a different but equally unhappy place, for you.

Take archaeology, which I love. I once thought I’d found a great career fit in archaeological illustration because I also love drawing from life. The primitive visual nature of early human settlements and objects speaks deeply to me. I knew I could happily draw them for weeks on end. Well, happily, except for the dirt, and the blazing sun, and the sleeping in tents, and the sheer physical discomfort of life on an archaeological dig. Being in the field, in situ, where the work needs to happen, would be as bad as a cube farm for me. Maybe worse.

Think of the work you think you'd love. Where does it happen? Do you love that location as much as you love the work? You'll be spending a lot of time there.

Limitations, Liabilities, Looking Beyond

Why don't more people Do What They Love?

Tradition. Our ideas about what constitutes a job are several decades behind the reality of the modern marketplace.

Influence. Culture at large, and parents in particular, reinforce conservative ideas about education and work.

Obligation. Responsibilities to others make us conservative in our risk taking.

Fear. Forging a path is frightening in a way that following one is not.

Scope. A narrow world view, often imposed by poverty, limits the possibilities that we can even imagine for education and work.

Why don't you Do What You Love? How can you challenge those assumptions and limitations?

The Dream

If you could just figure out what color your parachute is, the precise nature of your bliss, your passions, your strengths, if you could finally pinpoint exactly what you love, and do it, then the money is sure to follow. That’s what all the books say, right?

Join the legions of Escapees from the Cubicle Nation, the hipster hordes who have Started Up on a mere $100. No more wage slavery, working for The Man. No more cube farm, no more factory floor. The internet has leveled the playing field. We don’t need no stinking bosses.

The Do What You Love (DWYL) movement has spawned dozens, if not hundreds, of books, ebooks, online courses and seminars. The variations range from how to make a living selling handmade crafts online to how to launch a software startup that venture capitalists can’t resist. The PDF workbook or first chapter is always free.