One of the great concepts from Tim Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Workweek is the idea that what you do as a job isn’t a reflection of who you are.

What You Do Isn’t a Reflection of Who You Are

According to Ferriss, too often, a typical conversation with a stranger begins with the following question: “So, what do you do?”  The common perception is that what a person does (in terms of a profession) is a reflection of that person’s interests and values.

In reality, however, what we do is no reflection of our interests, values, and what ultimately excites us and makes us happy.   

I hate that question because I hate telling people about my job.  I take no pride in explaining to someone that I’m an attorney, that I work for a big firm, that I shuffle paper all say, that I spend countless hours doing mind-numbing research on a computer, etc.  If someone wants to know something about me, I wish they’d ask a different question.  Explaining the mechanics of my job isn’t going to reveal to them anything about me. 

So, How’s Work?

Another variation of this conversation-starter begins with a similar question: “So, how’s work?”  That question creates another misperception that how things are going at your job reflects your overall state of mind . . . that as your job goes, so do you because it reflects your identity.

I am in no way chastising anyone who has asked me this question in the past.  Instead, it’s an inescapable epidemic.  As a society of employees, we are bred to think in this manner.  If you’re an accountant, and you see other accountants that you work with, you think that that profession is their whole identity.  But there is so much more to a person than what they “do” for a living, particularly when the means to make that living is in the form of a job.

The Burden of a Job

The main problem with jobs isn’t that they suck, or that they are stressful, or that they burden us with politics and needless bureaucracy.  The real problem with jobs is that they prohibit us from pursuing our REAL passions.  The passions and exciting interests that make up an individual can’t break the surface of that individual’s experience due to the shackles of 8-hour work days, meetings, memos, the restrictions imposed by paychecks, 45-minute commutes, and 401(K)’s. 

Likewise, the passions and interests you haven’t discovered might remain buried forever thanks to the 9-to-5 grind that enslaves you. 

This is the REAL issue with jobs and employment.  Because you have to devote all this TIME to the thankless endeavor of building someone else’s business for 8 arbitrary hours per day, you can’t develop and discover your own self.

You Owe It To Yourself 

As an individual, you owe it to yourself to test the limits of what makes you unique.  A job places you in a machine and forces you to adapt to a set of rules.  This unnecessary structure inhibits your own growth and prevents you from unlocking the potential with which you were born.

Becoming an entrepreneur not only provides you with the opportunity for achieving real wealth, but it also gives you the value and opportunity of realizing what makes you tick, what makes you happy, and what thrills you.  Building your own business enables you to create more time for yourself to explore your own thrills and passions.  

Money isn’t the objective of wealth.  Time is the real objective because it allows you to stretch yourself beyond the limits within which you’ve been living your whole life. 

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