Don’t take the job you want to talk about at parties

Work is not a series of words on a LinkedIn profile. It’s a series of moments in the world. And if you don’t enjoy those moments, no sequence of honorifics will dispel your misery.

Some people take jobs with long commutes not fully considering what it will do to their health. Or they take jobs that require lots of travel not fully intuiting what it will mean for their family life. Or they’ll take horribly difficult jobs for money they don’t need, or take high-status jobs for a dopamine rush with a half-life of about three days. Don’t take the job you want to talk about at parties for a couple of minutes a month. Take the job you want to do for hundreds of hours a year.

If you outsource your sense of worth to the feedback of crowds and the approval of peers and professional counterparties, your working identity will feel like a sailboat in a hurricane. You have to moor yourself to something that doesn’t change direction every few moments, whether it’s the confidence that you’re helping people or the joy of pure discovery.

Derek Thompson writing in The Atlantic

Within Arms Reach

Nothing has transformed my life more than realizing that it's a waste of time to evaluate my worthiness by weighing the reaction of the people in the stands.

The people who love me and will be there regardless of the outcome are within arms reach.

This realization changed everything. That's the wife and mother and friend that I now strive to be. I want our home to be a place where we can be our bravest selves are most fearful selves. Where we practice difficult conversations and share our shaming moments from school and work. I want to look at Steve and my kids and say, “I'm with you I'm in the arena. And when we fail, we’ll fail together, while daring greatly.”

We simply can't learn to be more vulnerable and courageous on our own. Sometimes our first and greatest dare is asking for support.

Brené Brown, Daring Greatly

Lovable

No sooner do we believe that God loves us than there an impulse to believe that he does so, not because he is love, but because we are intrinsically lovable.. But then, how magnificently we have repented.. (so) we next offer our own humility to God’s admiration. Surely, he’ll like that? If not that, our clear-sighted and humble recognition that we still lack humility. Thus, depth beneath depth and subtlety within subtlety, there remains some lingering idea of our own, our very own, attractiveness.

It is easy to acknowledge but almost impossible to realize for long, that we are mirrors whose brightness if we are bright, is wholly derived from the sun that shines upon us. Surely we must have a little – however little – native luminosity?

We want to be loved for our cleverness, beauty, generosity, fairness usefulness. The first hint that anyone is offering us the highest love of all is a terrible shock.

CS Lewis, The Four Loves

do I have value?

To say a person has worth or value formulates only half a sentence. It begs two questions and raises a third: Worth what? To whom? Who says? These questions reveal a search for a source, a valuer, an authority behind the action of attaching worth. This quest implies our awareness of a person larger than us, who initiates relationships with us. Our parents stood as the original superhumans in whose eyes we wanted much worth. Now as adults, when we feel worthless, we ache with the dangling half-question. Do I have any value?  We used to seek evidence from Mom and Dad of our importance to them. Though we no longer look to them as our source, we have not yet identified a new one. We spin our wheels with the unanswered questions of our half-sentences. We wistfully yearn for some authority to come along and fill those gaps that our parents left.

Dennis Gibson, The Strong-Willed Adult