Welcome to today's talk love your work or quit.
This might be a little bit of a confrontive title so I want to share what this talk is really about.
It is about the value of time.
I am writing this talk because in my humble opinion a vast majority of people do not understand the real value of time.
They feel like there is no other way when it comes to how they spend their time.
I think the root of these kinds of thoughts is not being able to see the real value time holds.
So let's look at why it might be beneficial to become more conscious of time.
Let us start with the name of this talk which is love your work or quit.
Now first of all I want to acknowledge that some people are not in a position to do exactly that,
To just quit a job they hate.
But I also want to acknowledge that that person is not you.
This might sound harsh or confrontive but I believe it is accurate.
You have time to listen to this talk and you could buy a device to listen to this talk and you could buy a membership to listen to this talk.
So I believe that if you quit your job or change jobs you would still be able to cover your basic needs.
Maybe without luxury,
Maybe in a smaller house,
Without a car and all of that.
But I do believe it is possible for you to survive.
Thus I do believe it is your choice.
Now let's look at what Khalil Gibran had to say about work.
Work is love made visible and if you cannot work with love but only with distaste it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.
For if you bake bread with indifference you bake a bitter bread that feeds but half man's hunger.
And if you grudge the crushing of the grapes your grudge distills a poison in the wine.
And if you sing though as angels and love not the singing you muffle man's ears to the voices of the day and the voices of the night.
I love this text because it explains to us the unexplainable.
Khalil Gibran attempts to explain the things that are either impossible or at least very hard to see.
The things he's talking about cannot be seen easily but they can be felt when we pay attention to them.
Let me try to explain further.
Sometimes we have a certain feeling around either ourselves,
Our actions or another person.
It could also be a feeling around something materialistic,
A place,
Around food or around a house.
It is usually just a feeling and we do not know its origin but we know it exists.
It can be a positive or negative feeling and it can be more detailed and subtle.
The feeling is often hard to explain but it does exist.
Your work and the result of your work have energy.
Do not underestimate that.
I would argue that the basic origin of that energy that creates this feeling lies in the love or hate people do things with.
And I think the point here is that if you do a job you hate,
You will not only end up hating yourself,
You will also spread negativity throughout the world.
Now let us look at another quote from Gibran.
They deem me mad because I will not sell my days for gold and I deem them mad because they think my days have a price.
This quote can help us come to the realization that time is the most precious thing in the world.
In today's hyper-capitalistic environment you are made to believe that the biggest goal is to a.
Increase the monetary value of your time and to b.
Accumulate wealth.
Increasing the monetary value of your time already starts young.
Often parents try to send kids to good schools or at least try and pressure kids to have good grades.
Then young adults do an apprenticeship or go to university.
All of these things are done to increase the monetary value of their time.
Now let us talk about the goal of accumulating wealth.
I'm not saying it is wrong to make money and to save money.
But what I am saying is that thinking of your days and hours as mainly potential working time to be sold to companies or individuals might not serve you.
And if your biggest goal in life is to increase your wealth then you will do exactly that.
On this note I highly recommend reading interviews with people who are about to die.
Almost all of them regret spending time the wrong way,
Glorifying money and neglecting family and friends.
Maybe we're all too busy in our lives to even think about the concept of time.
But when death is near we get confronted with it.
So just as a little experiment maybe pretend time is running out rather soon and see how that makes you feel about how you spend your time right now.
I'm not saying you should create an ongoing image in your head that you will die.
But what I am saying is that reflecting on this thought could help you understand how you spend your time.
Let us now look at another ancient story around exactly this topic.
Realizing the value of time too late.
After many years of hard work a middle-aged businessman had amassed a fortune that amounted to three million dollars.
He decided that he would take a year off from work and live in the kind of luxury that his wealth him.
But no sooner had he made this decision the angel of death beckoned on him.
The businessman was a skillful negotiator and so he tried every argument he could think of to persuade the angel to give him more time.
But the angel of death was adamant.
The man's time had come.
In final desperation the rich man made the angel an offer.
Give me three more days of life and I will give you a third of my wealth.
That is a million dollars.
The angel refused.
Give me two more days of life and I will give you two thirds of my wealth.
Two million dollars.
The angel again refused.
Give me one more day of life to enjoy this beautiful and bountiful planet and to spend a little time with my family who I have neglected for too long and I will give you all of my wealth.
Three million dollars.
But the angel could not be persuaded.
Finally the man asked if the angel would just grant him a little time to write a short paragraph to his children.
The angel decided to grant the businessman his wish.
The businessman wrote the following words.
Dear loved ones,
Make good use of your time on earth.
I could not buy even one hour of life for three million dollars.
Be sure to know in your heart what things in your life are of true value and place your attention there.
I think nowadays it is the vast majority of people who run after money all their lives without understanding how much time they actually need to give away to accumulate wealth.
And I also think a lot of people when being more conscious of time would decrease working time and money to have more time available for other things.
Again making money is by no means bad or evil.
It is necessary that you are productive to provide for yourself and maybe also for your family.
But once you cover your basic needs make sure that every minute more you spend on work is worth your time.
Time can be spent in a lot of different ways and today's turbo capitalistic world wants to make you believe only time spent being productive is time well spent.
That is not true.
Let us confront ourselves now how we feel about time spent with other things than work and the value of these things.
Let us in our mind compare these things to work and reflect for a moment how valuable these things are to our lives or not.
So here they are.
Try to try to feel them and try to see how you feel about them.
Spending time with family.
Spending time exercising.
Spending time eating.
Spending time with friends.
Spending time traveling.
Spending time gardening.
Spending time staring at the wall.
I would say that once basic needs have been covered then all of the above things are more valuable spending my time on then making more money.
I would like to now share another quote I love which I came across in a rap song.
I embraced and lived by this quote when I was working as a theater stage actor.
Here is the quote.
You make money you go crazy.
I go crazy I make money.
I think back then it was the best fitting sentence for what I did and I enjoyed every minute of my time.
This quote gave me permission to do what I want to do for money not what others think I should do for money.
Now I would like to add a private story.
When I was in my mid-twenties I worked part-time as a painter during my studies and I worked full-time as a painter for half a year after my studies.
A good friend of mine a contemporary dancer called Mike helped me get the job.
He's been doing the work since a teenager.
I loved the crew but I hated the work.
Monotonous outdoor labor.
There was nothing really fun about it.
It seemed to me that my friend Mike did not mind it.
So one day I asked Mike how he could do this type of work for so long without hating it.
He said there is a happy place deep inside of all of us and you can decide to go there anytime and do anything you do with love.
You can find the happy spot and you will start enjoying the work you do no matter what it is.
It's still going to be the same work but you can choose your attitude and how you feel about it.
I laughed it off but the next day I found myself trying exactly what he said.
I tried to find my happy spot and I did find it and it was one of the most life-changing experiences for me.
I understand that this might only work for limited time but it's powerful.
Your attitude and mindset is unbelievably powerful.
I guess the moral of this story is that once you have become conscious of the value of your time then put effort into doing anything you do with love and positivity.
Your mindset is your choice and you're in control of making things beautiful or not and you're the first person being uplifted or suffering more by your attitude.
I would now like to share a story by an anonymous writer who describes the price we pay for joy.
Once an old man and the young man were sitting on the shore of a wild and stormy river.
The young man said,
Master when I love or when I do the work that I like or when I have a talk with friends the time flies fast but the time drags so long when I'm hurt,
When I'm afraid or when I feel lonely.
You see the old man answered wistfully,
This is what it should be.
When we are unhappy we don't live but we only exist so the time lies still in our wallets and only for our happiness we pay the ringing coin of time that we still have left.
I really love this story.
We all have a wallet full of time and only in the moments we enjoy our lives do we think we pay for it out of our wallet.
Now I would like to extend this idea around the wallet.
Let us try to think about two wallets.
Let's assume we have one wallet filled with money and one wallet filled with time.
If someone works 12 hours a day then his money wallet is full but his time wallet is rather empty.
If someone does not work at all then his time wallet is full but his money wallet is empty.
Now when thinking about these two wallets it can serve us to dream about our perfect time wallet to money wallet balance.
For me it is around four to six hours of work per day and I'm not saying this is an ideal number for others but it seems to work for me.
Now I would like to share the story of Poseidon.
Poseidon is a Kafka's short story about ego and hubris by,
You guessed it,
Franz Kafka.
Poseidon was sitting at his desk working.
The administration of all the waters was a huge task.
He could have had as many assistants as he wanted and in fact he did have a large staff.
But since he took his job very seriously and went through all the calculations himself anyway assistants were of little use to him.
One couldn't say that the work made him happy either.
He only did it because it was his to-do.
Yes he had often requested happier work as he put it but whenever they came back to him with suggestions it turned out that nothing appealed to him as much as what he was doing.
It was actually very difficult to find anything else for him.
It was hardly possible to put him in charge of a particular sea quite apart from the fact that the calculations involved were no less onerous just more trivial since great Poseidon was only ever in line for an executive post.
And if he was offered a job in a different department the very thought of it was enough to turn his stomach.
His divine breath became restless.
His bronze thorax quaked.
Not that they took his complaints all that seriously.
If a great power kicks up then you have to be seen to give in to him even in the most hopeless cause.
No one seriously thought of having Poseidon removed from office.
He had been God of the seas from the beginning of time and would have to remain such.
The thing that most angered him and this was the principal cause of his unhappiness in his job was when he got to hear what people thought it involved.
That is forever parting the waves with his trident.
And when all the time he was sitting at the bottom of the ocean up to his ears in figures the occasional visit to Jupiter was really the only break in the monotony.
A visit moreover from which he usually returned in a towering bad temper.
He hardly ever clapped eyes on the seas only fleetingly on his hurried way up to Olympus and he had never sailed them as such.
He tended to say he was waiting for the world to end first because there was bound to be a quiet moment just before the end when he had signed off on his last calculation and would be able to take himself on a little cruise somewhere.
Now what does this story tell us?
It tells us that many people are stuck in their work.
They are so stuck that they can't see their lives and how they actually spend their time from a bird's view.
They can't zoom out and challenge themselves to say hey does this all make sense?
Does this life serve me?
I think that these questions are extremely valuable to everyone.
Ask yourself hey does this all make sense?
Does this life serve me?
I truly believe that everyone benefits the most from self-reflection because I believe that everyone is their own best coach.
Self-reflection might be as small as asking yourself the question does my life serve me a couple of times a year or it might be as big as going on a sabbatical for a few days weeks or even months.
Sabbaticals are of great value because you consciously create space for your thoughts ideas and wishes to arise.
For example a friend of mine is doing a sabbatical year every seven years.
He completely stops work and spends no time making money for one entire year.
During this year he re-evaluates all the things he does in his life.
Maybe this example is a bit extreme and not everyone is in a position to do something like take a year off but I love it when people challenge themselves to understand whether they are spending their time in a way that is serving them or not.
In the story of Poseidon another reason for not being able to reflect was also the ego.
I believe that it is often our ego that holds us back from even beginning to reflect.
Many people are extremely driven by developing and growing and by becoming better,
Greater,
Richer and more superior.
In these instances their ego makes them keep going blindly in whatever they do.
Don't get me wrong I love developing myself in all aspects of life but I'm very conscious of what amount of time and energy spent on growing and developing serve me.
I think the best way to find out whether your ego is involved too much is to ask yourself how much you are comparing your life to other people's lives and especially how much you compare your career and level of success to others.
Comparing ourselves is not unhealthy per se.
By comparison we get a realistic impression of where we are at in our life and also what our capacities are.
But comparing ourselves often or too much can create an unhealthy ego that is then blindly keeping us slaving away.
To finish today's talk I want to underline the claim that doing unenjoyable work is usually not a sacrifice but a recipe for disaster.
Not enjoying your work will often make your mental health so unstable that you can end up seriously depressed or in a complete burnout and I don't wish that on anyone.
I hope this talk was worth your time and I hope you got something out of it.
I would of course love to hear your thoughts,
Reflections or questions about the value of time.
I've been thinking hard about what words to finish this talk with.
I believe that as long as societies drift apart on a socio-economic level and as long as the rich become richer and as long as dictators,
Billionaires and royalty exist,
As long as that is all true,
Then I somewhat agree with the anarchist Bob Black and it is his quote I would like to leave you with today.
No one should ever work.
Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world.
Almost any evil you'd care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work.
In order to stop suffering,
We have to stop working.
