From Courage to Food Stamps

A pair of articles, published within two days of each other in the New York Times in the summer of 2009, emphasize the contrast between the passion mindset and the craftsman mindset. The first article concerned Lisa Feuer³. At the age of thirty-eight, Feuer quit her career in advertising and marketing. Chafing under the constraints of corporate life, she started to question whether this was her calling. “I’d watched my husband go into business for himself, and I felt like I could do it, too,” she said. So she decided to give entrepreneurship a try.

As reported by the Times, Feuer enrolled in a two-hundred-hour yoga instruction course, tapping a home equity loan to pay the $4,000 tuition. Certification in hand, she started Karma Kids Yoga, a yoga practice focused on young children and pregnant women. “I love what I do,” she told the reporter when justifying the difficulties of starting a freelance business.

The passion mindset supports Feuer’s decision. To those enthralled by the myth of a true calling, there’s nothing more heroic than trading comfort for passion. Consider, for example, the author Pamela Slim, a believer in the passion mindset who wrote the popular book Escape from Cubicle Nation.⁴ Slim describes on her website the following sample dialogue, which she claims she has often:

Motivated by these encounters, Slim launched a phone-seminar product called Rebuild Your Backbone. Its goal is to convince more people to be like Lisa Feuer by finding the courage to follow their dreams. The course description says Slim will answer questions like “Why do we get stuck living other people’s models of success?” and “How do we get the courage to do big things in the world?” It costs forty-seven dollars.

Rebuild Your Backbone is an example of the courage culture, a growing community of authors and online commentators pushing the following idea: The biggest obstacle between you and work you love is a lack of courage—the courage required to step away from “other people’s definition of success” and to follow your dream. It’s an idea that makes perfect sense when presented against the backdrop of the passion mindset: If there’s some perfect job waiting for us out there, every day we’re not following this passion is a wasted day. When viewed from this perspective, Feuer’s move appears courageous and long overdue; she could be a guest lecturer in Pamela Slim’s teleseminar. But this idea crumbles when viewed from the perspective of career capital theory—a perspective that makes Karma Kids Yoga suddenly seem like a poor gamble.

The downside of the passion mindset is that it strips away merit. For passion proponents like Slim, launching a freelance career that gives you control, creativity, and impact is easy—it’s just the act of getting started that trips us up. Career capital theory disagrees. It tells us that great work doesn’t just require great courage, but also skills of great (and real) value. When Feuer left her advertising career to start a yoga studio, not only did she discard the career capital acquired over many years in the marketing industry, but she transitioned into an unrelated field where she had almost no capital. Given yoga’s popularity, a one-month training program places Feuer pretty near the bottom of the skill hierarchy of yoga practitioners, making her a long way from being so good she can’t be ignored. According to career capital theory, she therefore has very little leverage in her yoga-working life. It’s unlikely, therefore, that things will go well for Feuer—which, unfortunately, is exactly what ended up happening.

As the recession hit in 2008, Feuer’s business struggled. One of the gyms where she taught closed. Then two classes she offered at a local public high school were dropped, and with the tightening economy, demands for private lessons diminished. In 2009, when she was profiled for the Times, she was on track to make only $15,000 for the year. Toward the conclusion of the profile, Feuer sends the reporter a text message: “I’m at the food stamp office now, waiting.” It’s signed: “Sent from my iPhone.”

Two days after Lisa Feuer’s profile was published, the Times introduced its readers to another marketing executive, Joe Duffy.⁶ Like Feuer, Duffy worked in advertising and eventually began to chafe at the constraints of corporate life. “I was tired of the agency business,” he recalls. “I [wanted] to simplify my life and focus on the creative side again.” Given that Duffy’s original training was as an artist—he had entered the advertising industry as a technical illustrator only after he had a hard time making a living with his paintings—supporters of the passion mindset might encourage someone in Duffy’s situation to leave advertising behind and return to his passion for the creative arts.

Duffy, it turns out, is from the craftsman school of thought. Instead of fleeing the constraints of his current job, he began acquiring the career capital he’d need to buy himself out of them. His specialty became international logos and brand icons. As his ability grew, so did his options. Eventually, he was hired away by the Minneapolis-based Fallon McElligott agency, which allowed him to run his own subsidiary within the larger organization, calling it Duffy Designs. In other words, his capital had bought him more autonomy.

After twenty years at Fallon McElligott, working on logos for major companies such as Sony and Coca-Cola, Duffy once again invested his capital to gain more autonomy, this time by starting his own fifteen-person shop: Duffy & Partners. This entrepreneurial move contrasts sharply with Feuer’s. Duffy started his own company with enough career capital to immediately thrive—he was one of the world’s best logo men and had a waiting list of clients. Feuer started her company with only two hundred hours of training and an abundance of courage.

It’s fair to guess that by the time Duffy recently retired, he loved what he did. His work gave him heaps of control and respect and, depending on your view of the importance of advertising, also had a great impact on the world. To me, however, the most vivid contrast to Feuer’s story was Duffy’s purchase of Duffy Trails, a hundred-acre retreat on the banks of Wisconsin’s Totagatic River. Duffy is an avid cross-country skier, and the five miles of wooded trails, skiable from November through March, made the retreat irresistible. As reported by the New York Times, the property can comfortably house at least twenty guests, spread over three different residential outbuildings, but on the hottest summer nights, it’s the screened gazebo by the retreat’s sixteen-acre, bass-stocked lake that attracts the most visitors.

Duffy purchased this property at the age of forty-five: in other words, not long after the age at which Feuer left advertising to pursue her yoga business. It’s this parallel that gives this pair of stories their Frostian undertones. “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,” and one traveler chose the path to mastery while the other was called toward passion’s glow. The former ended up celebrated in the industry, in control of his own livelihood, and weekending with his family in a forested retreat. The latter ended up on food stamps.

This comparison is not necessarily fair. We don’t know that Feuer could have replicated Duffy’s success if she had stayed in marketing and advertising and had focused her restless energy on becoming excellent. But as a metaphor, the story works nicely. The image of Feuer, waiting in line for food stamps, while Duffy, at a similar age, returns from a successful overseas trip to spend a relaxing weekend skiing at Duffy Trails, is striking. It captures well both the risk and the illogic of starting from scratch as contrasted with the leverage gained by instead acquiring more career capital. Both Feuer and Duffy had the same issues with their work; these issues emerged at around the same time; and they both had the same desire to love what they do. But they had two different approaches to tackling these issues. In the end, it was Duffy’s commitment to craftsmanship that was the obvious winner.