Live With a Purpose

Funny thing happened after I finished my MFA. I suddenly didn’t have anything to do.

For the last three years, I always had something to do. I would eat dinner, sit on the couch, and do schoolwork until I went to bed. I did schoolwork on the weekends, and when I could steal time at work. It consumed pretty much all my spare time for years, now it’s gone, and I’m gazing into the void.

My purpose over the last three years was to get my MFA. What is my purpose now?

1.     I could spend all my time trying to publish the best newsletter in the world—but I already do that. And I’m unwilling to do some of the things I would need to do to get more subscribers. So it’s fine.

2.     I could spend all my time trying to become a famous DJ, but I’m old and fat and I’m not willing to put in the time it takes to produce tracks.

3.     I just took up guitar—I could try to get really good at that—but realistically, this is just a fun hobby and I’m just learning something new.

4.     I could get really good at podcasting, but one of the things I’ve discovered about podcasting is that the success of the podcast frequently has little to do with the quality of the podcast. No one knows what makes a podcast go hockey stick.

5.     I could be a family man, and spend all my time with my wife and my cats. That would be a good thing to do.

6.     I could get back in the gym, and try to mold this chewed bubblegum of a body back into some kind of shape.

7.     I could put my MFA to good use and write as much as I possibly can, and try to get published in the lit mags.

I could do some or all or none of these things. But it doesn’t really answer the question: what is my purpose?

You don’t have to be a famous writer to have a purpose. Anyone can have a purpose.  If you wait tables, you could endeavor to be the best in the world at waiting tables. There is no dishonor in that. If you go to the factory and you put part A into slot B for eight hours a day, you could be the best in the world at putting part A into slot B, and there is no dishonor in that. Or you could do these things, do them well, and make enough money to do whatever your real purpose is, like maybe guitar. There are a lot of people on American Idol who do that. In fact, that’s what American Idol is all about—finding your purpose. It’s full of people who thought their purpose was waiting tables, but it turns out their purpose was to be a recording artist. That’s why that show is so special. This last season had a burger-flipper who made it to the Top 5. He is no longer flipping burgers.

When I was at Lehman Brothers, my purpose was to be the best trader. I thought that was everyone else’s purpose, too. Turns out there were a lot of people there who were putting stock A into account B and collecting a check. Which is an unkind of way of saying that some people weren’t working with the same intensity that I was. I commented on this a little bit in Street Freak, and there was a paragraph that got passed around that raised everyone’s hackles. You’re here on Wall Street, at the third-biggest investment bank, in one of the flashiest, coolest jobs in the world, and you’re shopping for shoes online during the day? When you have access to all the financial data in the world? When you could be the next Paul Tudor Jones? Never made sense to me. I have never wanted my job to be just “a job.” It must have meaning, or else I would starve to death.

Trading will make you cynical in a hurry, but even at my age, I am still idealistic. I went seven years between books. I will never do that again. I know my purpose. My purpose is to write, and entertain people, inform them, and make them think. That’s what I’m here on Earth to do. Anything that pushes me towards that purpose is good.  Anything that pushes me away from that purpose is bad. I am allergic to bullshit. I don’t want to be spending any time doing anything I don’t want to be doing.

What I’ve found is that people without a purpose tend to become unmoored. Often, morally. If you don’t have a reason for being then it doesn’t really matter if you go to a strip club and get take-out. From a practical standpoint, you have little to lose, reputationally speaking. If you are one of these blessed people who doesn’t exist on the internet, then you are practically anonymous. On the other hand, my guess is that if you asked everyone in the country what their purpose was, about 70-80% of them would be to be a good parent. I don’t know if Pew or Gallup tracks this over time, but I would guess that number is a lot higher than it was 40 years ago. That is a great purpose to have, and I suspect that a lot of people try a little too hard at it, and the results are not entirely in your control. You can be the best parent in the world, and your son or daughter can grow up to be a stinker, and there is not much you could have done about it. It is one of these situations where you have to let go of the results.  Also, a lot of people think they’re good parents when they’re actually bad parents, so there is that. Attentive doesn’t always mean good. For some people, their philanthropy is their purpose. Also good. Boys Don’t Cry is one of the best movies I have seen, but not because of the transgender themes. It’s because the villain, played by Peter Sarsgaard, is a man without a purpose. Living in poverty in rural Kansas, he doesn’t have much to do but drink, and feel hate. If you have a void in your life, hate will rush in to fill it. If your life is full, you have the capacity to feel love.

Correspondingly, I think that there are a lot fewer people today who would say that their purpose is to be professionally successful. Not everyone can be the CEO, and not everyone will want to be the CEO, and that takes some black belt political skills that a lot of people are not in possession of. But a possible purpose is: make a fuckton of money. People frown on that these days. I don’t. I think making a lot of money is an eminently reasonable goal, as long as there is a nexus between effort and financial reward. Making money should always be hard. It should always be a struggle. When it’s not, you’re getting take-out from the strip club. Actually, when making money is easy, all sorts of bad shit happens—you tend not to value the money as much, and you squander it on stupid shit, and chances are, you will end up back where you started. Happened to a lot of Wall Street guys I knew in the mid-2000s. Money had never been so easy, but then you had the crypto guys a couple of years ago. People like to say, easy come, easy go—a common phrase on Wall Street—but the opposite of that is hard come, hard go. If you really earned your money, you won’t blow it on stupid shit.  But yes, being stupidly rich is a purpose. And the nice thing about having money as a purpose is all the good things you can do with it.  You can endow scholarships, you can save animals, you can cure cancer in children, you can free the wrongfully convicted. You can build a giant fucking building on some college campus and slap your name on it. Even that’s not a terrible use of money. But this has fallen out of fashion.

The upshot is that you should spend not a small amount of time thinking about what your purpose is. The average person lives 80 years or so. That’s both a lot of time, and not a lot of time. If you are living a purposeful life, time is working against you. Time is your enemy. Years ago, I was forced to read Steven Covey, and it wasn’t terrible. The one habit that stuck with me in his 7 Habits was Live With The End In Mind. Imagine your funeral. Who will come? What will they say about you? Generally, people remember how you treated them and how you made them feel. In a small minority of cases, their achievements will celebrated. Maybe they will be remembered as a great man.

I have always aspired to greatness.  Does that make me a bad guy?