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This post about work begins with our most recent car shopping experience. As we shuffled around the lot, fiddling with keyless entries, automatic seats, and motion sensor tailgates, we got to talking with the salesman, Chris. In his sales-y yet honest way he traced us through the arc of his time in the car sales business, from being the GM of large dealerships, to owning used lots, and hopping back and forth in between as a salesman. Notably he also shared that 2 years prior to us meeting him, he had been retired. He looked to be in his early 50s. Having reached his secular and financial goals, he settled in for that South Florida grand prize: a life of boating, fishing, and surfing. Good for him. Retirement – isn’t that the end goal of any working career?

Then why was he back selling cars? He admits, he got bored after 6 months. Without the drive to achieve something, to contribute something productive, his days lost meaning. Being happily married, having his health, his hobbies, having successful college-age kids, it didn’t matter. He missed work.

Chris unknowingly stumbled upon a truth penned long ago, which will serve as the focus of this post about work.

We were created with a need to work

I have come to know that there is nothing better for them than to rejoice and to do good during one’s life; and also that every man should eat and indeed drink and see good for all his hard work. It is the gift of God.

Ecclesiastes 3:12,13

These words were penned by the wise, ultra-wealthy King Solomon. Not to be lost among the eating and drinking is the sequence of events – the reward, the enjoyment, came only after doing the hard work. The effort put in to accomplish something made the rest and relaxation that followed it all the more sweet. Could one figure out a way to skip the work and go right to the enjoyment? Maybe. But from his words it seems that without the prior work, it wouldn’t feel quite as good. We’d be missing doing our part to deserve that gift.

So, thinking back to our car salesman, navigating the work and some enjoyment from that work becomes a matter of distribution, and balance. This post will try and slice up work in four different ways.

1. Traditional work

Traditional careers have you put your nose down, grind it out for 30-40 years, and then retire. A whole lot of uninterrupted blue, and then a sea of green. This technically follows the wise king’s recommended order. First the work, then the enjoyment. But what does that look like in your actual life?

Let’s look at a single day in a traditional full time job in the US. There’s a grind through the 8-10 hours, and then a few remaining non-sleeping hours to ourselves perhaps. Even longer days if there’s a significant commute attached. String together the days into a week – we labor Monday through Friday, and then catch up and hopefully have some relaxation on Saturday and Sunday. Taking an annual view, we repeat this week after week, save for 2, 3, maybe 4 few weeks of vacation. And lastly, repeat that yearly cycle over a 30-40 year career. This sounds lopsided, but most of us, ourselves included, are doing it. Maybe the need to pay off student loans starts one on the path, and then lifestyle creep keeps them on it.

Back to the graph. Yes, in real life there’s green snippets in the midst of the blue. Weekends out of town, a week or two of vacation a few times a year, (staycations in COVID *cry*) but in relation to the blue, they’re very small slivers. This traditional approach focuses heavily on the upfront work, in exchange for the back end reward – retirement, presented graphically as a sea of mouth-watering green.

What is retirement?

Is it an age? Is that age 65? Maybe 60 for those who “get there early”? (59.5 to withdraw from retirement accounts without penalty) Is it some forced event where you are sadly no longer able to perform your chosen work due to your advancing age, and you or your employer have to acknowledge it? And the reward, in your older state, is to do the things associated with retirees? Play golf? Lead a life of leisure? Spoil the grandkids? If Solomon called hard work a gift, is this last 1/3 of your 90 or so years the reward? What will you apply yourself to?

Some of my coworkers, as they approach “retirement age” will drop small statements in conversation like “I’ve probably only got a couple years left here, so….” Some of them have shared with me that, financially, they could step away at that very moment. But they don’t, because, in one’s exact words, “What else would I do?” And they don’t say it in a helpless, ‘pity me’ kind of way. These are accomplished and driven people. The fact is, there is literally nothing out there that they’ve seriously considered retiring “to”. Despite the deadlines, the stress, the problems…..they want to work. We were created that way, as the wise king said.

2. Chris the car salesman’s work

For another distribution, let’s look at what Chris is doing. He tried handing over the keys and trading the Jettas for Jet skis. He stopped his blue path short and rolled into the green. But alas… his planned retirement instead became a mini-retirement, and back to work he went. Not because he needed the money, but because he valued work, he NEEDED work. He overloaded on the fun stuff, and no doubt beaches and boating are fun, for a time. But he found himself missing selling cars. In other words, for him, Solomon’s ‘eating and drinking and enjoying’ wasn’t as refreshing when it didn’t follow work. (This graph extrapolates that Chris will continue at work in the second blue phase for a while, and eventually go back to retirement…maybe we check in with him next time we’re car shopping?)

It seems that turning off the productivity that we naturally exhibit for so many years just because we hit an age or a financial milestone would throw our life off. It’s been said that the most successful retirees are the ones who retire to something.

So this raises a question. If you reached a point financially where you could step away from work, like Chris, would you do your same job for free? If money wasn’t a concern, do you enjoy your work so much that you’d do it for no pay? Or since your terms have changed (you don’t need the money) might you change a few things? Let’s walk through how this could look for our car salesman.

What do you like about your job?

Now, Chris obviously enjoys selling cars – meeting the public, getting to know their situation, and matching that with a vehicle for sale. Within minutes of meeting us he knew Clari was an engineer, we moved from Miami, and we like spring training baseball. He’s a pro at the standard transaction – he guides us as we select a car, we buy it, he gets his commission, and the dealership gets their fee. But maybe there’s other parts about “the job” that Chris doesn’t care as much for. Hates all the paperwork to complete the sale, isn’t inclined to push for extended warranties, and has no interest in dealing with the wholesalers or auction houses that supply the lot with new inventory. Hates working Sundays too. If Chris didn’t need the money, could he use this position of strength to negotiate opting out of all of those tasks? He would certainly have more options than if he was living paycheck to paycheck.

In this case we’re keeping Chris on the car lot but stripping the job of all the things that didn’t spark him. But expanding beyond one’s current job, think of all the other opportunities out there for meaningful work that bring true fulfillment, that might not offer financial compensation. So again, if you could step away from your work, would you do your same job for free? What would you do? I think we all recognize the importance of having the answer to that question.

3. Solomon’s work

Do the work, enjoy the results, and repeat. Blue-green, blue-green. As long as the transaction is working, why not keep it going indefinitely? The work/rest interval is not unlike a workout at the gym. Lift the weights (work), then rest so you can get ready to lift them again. The lifting strengthens your muscles, but without rest to replenish the phosphagen expended, you’ll fatigue and can harm your body. (I just Googled that, hope its true) On the other hand, just resting, i.e. going to the gym to watch Netflix on your phone while on the treadmill set to 1.0 speed, wouldn’t help you reach the goal of getting stronger.

What’s appealing about the Solomon distribution is you can adjust it many ways. For display purposes on the graph, this 60 year period is divided into 2 year chunks – work for 2 years, enjoy for 2 years. Imagine what it would feel like to go through life like that. Imagine it 6 months and 6 months, AKA “The Snow Bird,” in honor of Florida’s northerners that come to spend the winters down south. Zooming in further, how about one week on, one week off? How about mornings on, afternoons off? Certainly 10 hours on, 2-3 off, daily, over a 40 year career, doesn’t sound as appealing as any of those other distributions between Work and Enjoyment.

I’ll propose one last distribution. What about Both?

4. Both work and enjoyment

The previous three blue/green graphs assume that you’re either working, or enjoying, but never both at the same time. What about doing work that you truly enjoy? With this distribution, work and enjoyment for the work overlap and extend indefinitely. Let’s occasionally mix in some true “time off” uninterrupted green, and could this be the ideal way to slice it? For that to be possible, it would require doing work that you love.

In a corporate world with quarterly earnings and performance reviews, the blue is definitely there but the green may be hard to find. On the other hand, in the volunteer/ministry side of things, like we touch on in our About page, you will very likely have your green and your blue. Only drawback is it likely won’t earn you an income. So if that’s something you’re planning to do more of, how important to take care of the money you have now! (shameless plug for our personal finance blog)

Either way, combining both sounds like a pretty good goal to have. Do good work, and enjoy it at the same time.

Wrap up – get fulfilling work

Something true about all the work/enjoyment distributions we looked at is the only time work won’t feel like work is when it’s something you’re passionate about. Maybe that’s how Chris feels about selling cars. Maybe that’s how I feel about this blog. After all, writing a ~2,000 word post about work has definitely taken some work! And maybe that’s how you feel about parts of the work you do. The important thing is: don’t shy away from work. If you haven’t yet found work that lights you up, then apply your energies to exploring what that could be. That bit of up front, deliberate effort will push you closer to finding what that is, and the sooner that happens, the sooner what you’re doing ceases to feel like work.

And lastly, and most importantly, as King Solomon said and as a good friend of mine likes to repeat, after a job well done…. don’t forget to eat and indeed drink!