Bill Watterson, who created the best comic strip of all time (Calvin and Hobbes), gave the commencement address at Kenyon College back in 1990, which he titled, “Some Thoughts on the Real Word by One Who Glimpsed It and Fled“:

It’s surprising how hard we’ll work when the work is done just for ourselves. And with all due respect to John Stuart Mill, maybe utilitarianism is overrated. If I’ve learned one thing from being a cartoonist, it’s how important playing is to creativity and happiness. My job is essentially to come up with 365 ideas a year. If you ever want to find out just how uninteresting you really are, get a job where the quality and frequency of your thoughts determine your livelihood. I’ve found that the only way I can keep writing every day, year after year, is to let my mind wander into new territories. To do that, I’ve had to cultivate a kind of mental playfulness.

I love that line: “If you ever want to find out just how uninteresting you really are, get a job where the quality and frequency of your thoughts determine your livelihood.” Of course, Watterson had the constraints he placed on himself by his chosen medium. I don’t know if it’s easier or harder long term to do permutations pivoting around a central premise or to bounce from thing to thing as you tire and exhaust the low hanging fruit of its potential. I think they’re probably both really hard.

We’re not really taught how to recreate constructively. We need to do more than find diversions; we need to restore and expand ourselves. Our idea of relaxing is all too often to plop down in front of the television set and let its pandering idiocy liquefy our brains. Shutting off the thought process is not rejuvenating; the mind is like a car battery-it recharges by running.You may be surprised to find how quickly daily routine and the demands of “just getting by” absorb your waking hours. You may be surprised matters of habit rather than thought and inquiry. You may be surprised to find how quickly you start to see your life in terms of other people’s expectations rather than issues. You may be surprised to find out how quickly reading a good book sounds like a luxury.

I was traveling for a talk the other day and this came up with someone in the audience. I make time for the writing and the projects and the teaching/mentoring and everything else because that’s the variety that makes the more routine, potentially tedious stuff tolerable.

Yes, time management is impossible, but it doesn’t mean I wouldn’t fill more precious time with garbage if I wasn’t trying to be deliberate.

Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it’s to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential-as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth.

You’ll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you’re doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you’ll hear about them.

To invent your own life’s meaning is not easy, but it’s still allowed, and I think you’ll be happier for the trouble.

Some passages on what makes a job “good” from The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt:

Psychologists have referred to this basic need as a need for competence, industry, or mastery. [Psychologist Robert] White called it the “effectance motive,” which he defined as the need or drive to develop competence through interacting with and controlling one’s environment. Effectance is almost as basic a need as food and water, yet it is not a deficit need, like hunger, that is satisfied and then disappears for a few hours. Rather, White said, effectance is a constant presence in our lives: Dealing with the environment means carrying on a continuing transaction which gradually changes one’s relation to the environment. Because there is no consummatory climax, satisfaction has to be seen as lying in a considerable series of transactions, in a trend of behavior rather than a goal that is achieved.

This reflects the importance of developing the craftsman mentality.

The effectance motive helps explain the progress principle: We get more pleasure from making progress toward our goals than we do from achieving them because, as Shakespeare said, “Joy’s soul lies in the doing.”

Believing the opposite was coined as “the arrival fallacy” by psychologist Tal Ben-Shahar, who wrote the best-selling Happier. (As in: I’ll finally be happy when I finish that big exam or project. No, when I graduate! Or get that promotion! No, when I retire!)

Contrast the effectance motive with the many narrowly defined clock-in clock-out closely supervised jobs that limit personal choices:

In 1964, the sociologists Melvin Kohn and Carmi Schooler surveyed 3,100 American men about their jobs and found that the key to understanding which jobs were satisfying was what they called “occupational self direction.” Men who were closely supervised in jobs of low complexity and much routine showed the highest degree of alienation (feeling powerless, dissatisfied, and separated from the work). Men who had more latitude in deciding how they approached work that was varied and challenging tended to enjoy their work much more. When workers had occupational self-direction, their work was often satisfying.

My profession of radiology can easily fall into this trap in the wrong environment. You have to carve out ways to take ownership of both the process and product.