Do What You Dig

“Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life” is an oft-heard nugget of advice that I’ve always winced at. Too often it is solely the purview of the incredibly privileged and oftentimes clueless, the proverbial “born on third base” set who think they have a secret to success, but their own success is mostly not of their own making. Or it becomes a convenient out for folks to shirk the kinds of things that may not spark joy but are essential to being successful, building a career, or even at times just making a paycheck.

That said, the saying is not without its merit, so there’s no need to throw the whole thing out. Most of us will spend a plurality of our years and hours working, so figuring out what moves you and then figuring out how to do that in a job is paramount.  

Nowadays, many people have a very conflicted view of working for pay. So I realize that I may be making assumptions here that not everyone agrees with and in fact some people are quite upset over. I do subscribe to the notion that work is a matter of creating value for others, even though I know that exploitation of workers does exist. And I do subscribe to the notion that your reward for working is a combination of intrinsic and extrinsic compensations, one being your pay and the other being the things you get out of the work itself, even as I know that rampant inequity exists in what people make and how they are treated on the job.

All these injustices are things we must work to name and oppose. Is that necessarily inconsistent with a worldview that says that work can be a good, perhaps necessary, part of a fulfilling life? I’m not sure.

I do know that a lot of people ask me for career advice. And, I have two teens with whom I increasingly have conversations about the choices they will be making about where they go to school and what they study and ultimately what career path they want to work towards.

One colleague who I connected my daughter to gave some really good advice, which I’d like to repeat here, when asked how they got into law school (she is a law professor at a school Jada wants to go to for undergrad). This highly accomplished person said, “do what you dig.” The thought being that if you pick a major that interests you, and then after graduating from college you pick a job that interests you, then you will be interesting. And when you are interesting, you become a better candidate for law school. This advice was given in contrast to what people think law schools are going for, which are academic topics and extra-curricular activities that are just fine, but overdone in that a lot of people do them, so it’s harder for you to stand out. And, if you’re doing them because you’re supposed to and not because you enjoy them, then it doesn’t really grow you in any meaningful way that helps you stand out further.

“Do what you dig” can be extrapolated beyond getting into law school. Pursuing what you’re interested in and becoming an interesting person as a result is a good pathway to becoming a good consultant, which is the career I specifically recruit and screen for. And I would venture to say it’s pretty good life advice too.

It may still smack of privilege, which by definition means you have choices, and are able to opt into any number of things as opposed to having your life limited by life circumstances. But, wherever you are on the continuum of having opportunities before you, doing what you dig is pretty good advice. Would that more people actually do that.