Courage Revisited
Back in Rule #2, I was dismissive of the “courage culture.” This was my term for the growing number of authors and online commentators who promote the idea that the only thing standing between you and a dream job is building the courage to step off the expected path. I argued that it was this courage culture that led Lisa Feuer to quit her corporate job to chase an ill-fated yoga venture. This culture also plays a big role in egging on the less successful members of the lifestyle-design community.
In light of the second control trap, I need to moderate my previous disdain. Courage is not irrelevant to creating work you love. Lulu and Lewis, as we now understand, required quite a bit of courage to ignore the resistance generated by this trap. The key, it seems, is to know when the time is right to become courageous in your career decisions. Get this timing right, and a fantastic working life awaits you, but get it wrong by tripping the first control trap in a premature bid for autonomy, and disaster lurks. The fault of the courage culture, therefore, is not its underlying message that courage is good, but its severe underestimation of the complexity involved in deploying this boldness in a useful way.
Imagine, for example, that you come up with an idea for injecting more control into your career. As I argued earlier, this is an idea worth paying attention to because control is so powerful in transforming your working life that I call it the dream-job elixir. Also imagine, however, that as you toy with this idea, people in your life start offering resistance. What’s the right thing to do? The two control traps make this a hard question to answer.
It’s possible that you don’t have enough career capital to back up this bid for more control. That is, you’re about to fall into the first control trap. In this case, you should heed the resistance and shelve the idea. At the same time, however, it’s possible that you have plenty of career capital, and this resistance is being generated exactly because you’re so valuable. That is, you’ve fallen into the second control trap. In this case, you should ignore the resistance and pursue the idea. This, of course, is the problem with control: Both scenarios feel the same, but the right response is different in each.
By this point in my quest, I’ve encountered enough stories of control going both right and wrong to know that this conundrum is serious—perhaps one of the single most difficult obstacles facing us in our quest for work we love. The cheery slogans of the courage culture are obviously too crude to guide us through this tricky territory. We need a more nuanced heuristic, something that could make clear exactly what brand of control trap you’re facing. As you’ll learn next, I ended up discovering this solution in the habits of an iconoclastic entrepreneur, someone who has elevated living his life by his own rules to an art form.