Labors of Love

Hi, friends!I’ve had an especially busy month of being Businesslady. I wrote a new column (about mitigating the effects of incompetent bosses). I did a professional development workshop on pushing back against unmanageable requests, communication, and time-management, which you can watch here. (Email me if you have questions or want a PDF of my slides—and if you don’t have time for an hourlong video, here’s a short recap from my editor at The Billfold.)I was also a guest on a two-part podcast, revisiting the Dear Businesslady archives and discussing other job-related advice questions. I’d already met the hosts in person, which put me at ease—and while I’ll never hear a recording of my voice without bemoaning my hyperfast cadence and less-than-articulate tics, I enjoyed the chance to really be myself during the conversation.All this verbal analysis—during the podcast and the workshop Q&A—has made me philosophical about these things called jobs that most of us are obligated to have. There’s so much advice out there that resolves to “do what you love.” And even though plenty of folks have critiqued that idea (this, from Mike Rowe, is one of my favorite counterarguments), it’s too seductive to disappear entirely. If you have to find some way to make an income, shouldn’t your livelihood have some connection to the activities you most enjoy?The biggest problem with this notion is that plenty of jobs don’t correspond with anyone’s personal passions. But the other major problem is that anything that you could conceivably get paid to do—no matter how much satisfaction you get out of it—is work.There’s a line at the end of my book that’s my best attempt to offer a universal summary of what a successful career looks like: “a job you don’t hate and a life you enjoy.” If you love your job, great—that’s an especially lucky version of “not hating.” But even a job you love can be frustrating sometimes. Everything is frustrating sometimes. You can be in a terrible mood while doing your favorite thing in the world, for no reason at all—or for the frustratingly circular reason of “I’m not enjoying this as much as I want to be.”And no matter how much affinity you have for your particular professional niche, the thing you do for work is unlikely to be your favorite thing in the world. I actually do love to edit—for me, there’s something intensely satisfying about puzzling through a text and helping it become the best possible version of itself (and my career advice is motivated by a similar ethos). But it would be disingenuous for me to pretend that I don’t also experience editing as labor.The other reason I’ve been thinking about that fun/work dichotomy is because I just finished reading Doug’s book manuscript. (For new subscribers: that’s my husband, an assistant professor of literature and technology who specializes in 19th-century games and material culture.) Anyone who knows me knows that I’m an enthusiastic fan of Doug’s research. That, coupled with the fact that editing academic writing is one of my particular talents, meant that there was no way I was missing the opportunity to review the final draft before he sent it off to the press. I wanted to read it at least three times over—as an interested audience, as a supportive spouse, and as a rigorous editor—and yet. It was a hundred thousand words long. It is complicated stuff that requires brainpower to understand and even more brainpower to edit. Getting through the entire thing was not not work. Even though I was legitimately happy to do it.Not everyone has a professional specialty that can be deployed as a favor to partners and friends. But we all put effort into a wide variety of things, and only get compensated for a subset. The way your job fits into your larger life—whether it’s helping you pursue the things that you enjoy most, or getting in the way—is always worth reflecting on. Sometimes the conclusion is “I need to find a new gig,” but sometimes the big-picture view (with a bit of distance from the petty day-to-day annoyances that are an unavoidable part of working life) makes you realize that things are better balanced than you realized.Whoa, that got a li’l heavy there. Let’s wrap things on the lighter note of SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTION.I went to the Post Office yesterday (despite the exhortations of countless podcast hosts that I should use Stamps.com and never go there again), and they've already put up advertisements for holiday shipping. Now that it’s November—which means I’m pretty sure we’re all culturally obligated to get our wintertide shopping done before the end of the week—I’ve got a great gift idea for anyone who likes books but is less than thrilled with their job situation: Is This Working?: The Businesslady's Guide to Getting What You Want from Your Career. If you’d like a signed copy, just email me (or hit reply on this message). You should also get in touch if you’ve got a problem you’d like me to tackle in a future column—or just a quick one-off question.I'll be back with another email to you in a month or so. Until then, stay warm and increasingly jolly. ~court, AKA Businesslady PHOTO TIMEIn honor of Doug’s manuscript completion, here’s one of my favorite images ever, courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society (a wondrous place and the site of crucial book research). It’s been the background on his computer for years, and never fails to crack me up whenever I look at it.Our running joke is that the dialogue goes something like this: “Now son, when you go out in the world, stay on the lookout for giant hands.” “Whatever, ma, there's no such thing as—[smash cut, boy drops stick in shock]—GIANT HANDS!!”

…so don’t let anyone tell you that 19th-century lithography isn’t hilarious.