The "Eat, Pray, Love" author doesn't think you need to love your job

Elizabeth Gilbert opens up on choosing a calling over a career, and why "do what you love" isn't always great career advice

Should our profession bring us purpose and fulfillment? Steve Jobs urged Stanford grads in his famous speech to "love what you do." Maybe that's the wrong way to think about your job. I discuss this and more with Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert. Caroline Fairchild speaks with the journalists behind a spate of essays examining the role of our careers in our lives.

LISTEN TO THE EPISODE HERE.

JESSI HEMPEL: From the editorial team at LinkedIn, I’m Jessi Hempel. And this...is Hello Monday-- a show where I investigate how we’re changing the nature of work, and how that work is changing us.

For those of us who went to college, there’s this assumption that our profession is more than just a way to pay the bills. It’s the place where we find our sense of purpose.

STEVE JOBS: You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.

That’s Steve Jobs, at his commencement address at Stanford, in 2005.

But it’s possible that he is steering us in the wrong direction. Maybe that’s asking too much of a career.

Maybe, your job should just be your job.

This idea is having a moment. Journalists have lately been writing about burnout, about the idea that we have to like our jobs, and a condition called “workism.” Later in this episode, reporter Caroline Fairchild will dig into this.

But first, I bring you a conversation with Elizabeth Gilbert, who inspired millions to chase THEIR passions.

Sixteen years ago, she wrote Eat, Pray, Love. It was a book that became a best-seller, and then a phenomenon. It sold six million copies.

And just like that, Liz not only fueled other people's’ passions, but she turned her own passion…writing...into a lucrative career.

And so you’d think that Liz would embrace Steve Job’s advice.

In fact, you’d be wrong.

In our conversation, she hammered the idea that nothing is owed to us. You are never guaranteed money or fame, especially in a creative pursuit. And learning this allows you truly to do the things you love.

Here’s my conversation with Elizabeth Gilbert.

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JESSI: So Liz, tell us about careers.

LIZ: Okay. I think there's sort of four different entities that often get blended together in people's minds. And that, I think part of the problem where people get stuck or even traumatized on the career path is that they mix all these things up. So it's hobby, job, career, vocation, and, and they're all different, right? So a hobby is something that you do because it's fun and you like it and you don't need anything back from it. You just do it because it's, it's, it's delightful. It fills your days, it fills your nights. It doesn't need to be your career, right? [JESSI: Right] It can just be a hobby. Or a job is a thing you have because everyone has to have one and it doesn't need to – a job doesn't need to fulfill your emotional life because you can have a job and then you can have your life outside of your job. So you have your job that you go to to pay the bills. And then you have your life outside of your job, where you do your hobbies and your pursuits and your family. And it might not be the most interesting thing in your life, but whatever. You've got to pay the bills. A career is something that you should be passionate about. So a career is a job that you deeply care about. That's the difference between a career and a job. And if you're in a, if you think you're in a career but you hate it and you're bored and it's killing you, quit it and just go get a job [BOTH LAUGH] or change it and get a career in something that you're passionate about. 13:19 It's okay to just have a job. Not everybody needs to have a capital C career because you can have a whole life outside of that. And then the other one is vocation, which is like a sacred calling of something that is very holy to you, that is the center of your life that you know can never be taken away from you no matter what. 

JESSI: I love that framework for thinking about what you do and how you do. How did you learn that?

LIZ: 14:39 I learned it because I didn't set out to have a career. I set out to have a vocation. And the thing that's really liberating about setting out to have a creative vocation is that it's not really dependent on anybody else. And what I mean by that is the seven years that I collected rejection letters, sending my writing out into the world, were not destroying me because first of all, I had a job.

JESSI: Okay, well tell us about that. [BOTH TALKING] So now we're in your twenties, right?

LZ: 0:15:07 I was a bartender, I was a waitress. I was an au pair. I, I, um, I worked on a ra – I had lots of jobs and, and I had a very inexpensive quality of life that's always been important to me so that I'm not so dependent on – so that I can just have a job and, and I can then in my other hours do what's passionate to me. So I loved my vocation before you ever heard of me. I loved my vocation when I was getting nothing but rejection letters. I, I loved my vocation when I got really famous for Eat Pray Love. I loved my vocation when the book, after it sold one one thousandths of the number of copies of Eat, Pray, Love. My vocation is mine and my career may come and go. So my career as a writer is very different from my vocation as a writer. My career is completely dependent on you. You who buy my books, you who follow me on social media, but you can take my career away. You can't take my vocation away. I will always be a writer. Whether you're gonna pay me for it or like me for it or not, I can just go get a job. [laugh] So that's how I did it, that's how I did it.

JESSI: Look, so many of the people who love your work and follow you also are writers or songwriters or tap into a creative source in another way. But they're working day jobs (LIZ: Yes.) and then lean on top of their day jobs. (LIZ: Yes.) And I look at you, it looks to me from looking backward, like you figured out how to fuse the two. Do you have advice for someone who wants to try to do that?

LIZ:        00:16:45 You have to remember that. I mean this, I'm just going to say it. You have to remember that nothing is owed to you. Nothing is owed to you, nothing is owed to you. And that may sound lonely and like a banishment and like some sort of an exile and harsh, but it's actually where the seat of all the liberation is. Um, there's tremendous anxiety to be had in any creative field because it is so unpredictable and you, and, and then the landscape is changing. You know, like the jobs that I had starting off as a writer at 20 years ago don't exist anymore. [JESSI: Yes.] Um, other jobs do, uh, other things do. Podcasting didn't exist. Now we've got this, but it used to be that, you know, you can make a really good living as a, as a magazine writer, a lot of people made very good livings as magazine writers. Now 11 people make very good livings as magazine writers, you know, that entire landscape has changed. But if you're going to be creative person, and this is my problem with the professionalization of creativity, is that the implied professionalization of creativity, if you go get a master's degree in the fine arts, for instance, the danger is that you start to think that you have like a certification now [JESSI: Mhm] and that you should therefore be able to get a job in that field doing the thing that you love, as if you had gone to school as if you'd gone to a technical college and learned air conditioning and refrigeration and you got a trade. You know, creativity's not a trade. It never has been. It's never been a safe bet. You must remember that. And nobody owes you anything. You know, your obligation is to the creative process that you love. It's on you. It's on you, and it's flighty. It's unpredictable. People who are less talented than you will do better than you do.

JESSI: That is, that's so hard to learn.

LIZ: It is true. It is capricious. There is no ground under your feet in this. And, and if you, and I think where people start getting depressed and angry is the expectation that there should be. And what I would ask you to do is just look back through all of history and just see that there never has been. There never has been. And, and, and so you have to find another reason to do this. And then go out and hustle.

JESSI: What was that first year like after you wrote, Eat, Pray, Love?

LIZ: [~25:00] I used to have – this shows how much my life has changed. I used to have my email address and phone number on my website. Like, like we all did like 15 years ago cause I was always trying to get work, right? So, I started getting emails from people and, and I was initially like, Oh wow, somebody read my book. Um, that's so great. What I noticed that I thought was very strange was that people were writing me emails. I can't tell you how many emails I got that started with saying, I'm halfway through your book and I just have to stop and send you an email and say, thank you. I'm two chapters into this and I need to just stop and say you've written something that's incredibly important to me. That to me remains very strange.  

JESSI: Well, talk to me about that. Do you have a male audience that you know of or that you connect with?

LIZ: I mean, I used to. My publishers keep trying to bust that down and they keep trying to figure out how to market my books to men. And, and my feeling is why don't you let people choose what they want to read. And I also feel like there's a teeny tiny, tiny little thing, even when it’s well intentioned, even when friends get angry that my friends don’t read my novels. They’ll be like, c'mon guys, you’re missing out. This is, this is a real writer, you know, this is a real novelist. I think it's really interesting that there's a sort of, even within those people, there's an inbred prejudice that says, if men aren't following your work, it's not really maybe legitimate?

JESSI: So let’s go back to 2006. your, your book published two days after Valentine's Day, February 16th, 2006. A month in you start really understanding that it has become a phenomenon maybe larger than you, that it is going to reward you in different ways than you thought. But I imagine maybe it might take some things away from you that you hadn't expected. And I'm curious like was there a day that you sat down to write again and when you lifted up that pen, did you freak out?

LIZ: Yeah, I did. I mean, here was the good news. The good news was that I had already written three books before, Eat, Pray, Love. If that had been my first book, I cannot imagine how I would have figured out how to get over that speed bump, you know? But the good news is that I'd written three books, so I knew how to write a book and I knew that it was okay to write a book that 3000 people read because that's what happened with my first book Pilgrims. It's a tremendous thing to write a book period. But the first draft of the book that I wrote after Eat, Pray Love, which was Committed I, it was a disaster and I didn't know it. I finished the book and I went, I went to Kinko's and I got the first printed copy of it and I sat down and read it and I started crying because I was like, this is all wrong. And I don't know why. I just didn't get it. There's nothing. This voice is so forced and so inauthentic. And I ended up writing to my publisher and saying, I'm not even gonna show it to you. You're not getting it unless you come to my house and steal it from under my bed. No one will ever read this.

JESSI: What was the feeling layer under that? Did he feel like a failure at that point or were you –

LIZ: I did. I felt like a failure and I felt like I'd lost my, I just didn't, I didn't know what had gone wrong. I just knew that I burned the cake and I didn't know what I had done wrong in the recipe, and –

JESSI: That's an awful feeling.

LIZ: It's terrible. And what I did was walk away and truly start a garden. And I spent the year outside with my hands in the dirt. I had, I just, it was such a smart thing for me to do because it was very literally grounding

LIZ: It was about a year and change later that I was raking up the leaves and putting the garden to bed when suddenly the new first line to Committed came to my head. And, and I thought, and I realized in that moment what had gone wrong and what had gone wrong is that I had tried to write a book for 6 million readers and how do you do that? And instead, what I did was I sat down and I wrote Committed as a letter to my 10 closest female friends who I do know, and who I'm intimate with. So I circled the intimacy back around myself and I wrote it to these women who I knew rather than writing to millions of strangers and trying to please them. I don't know how to please millions of strangers. I know how to talk to my 10 best friends.

JESSI: Liz, it's so, that's such an interesting thing that you say because I've spent 15 years writing about technology and in particular the people who are creating the technology and one of the lessons that comes up over and over and over again for anybody trying to make anything is stop trying to make something that you don't understand for everybody and figure out how to make 10 people love you. 

LIZ: Yeah. It's almost like that same idea is, I won't be a legitimate writer until men follow me. It's like, oh, I won't be these 11 people don't matter. I need a thousand, I need 10,000 no, those 11 people are who's giving you their energy and their attention, serve them.

JESSI: So what have you learned over the course of your life, about yourself, about how to harness and make peace with and make the best of that emotion rather than letting it –

LIZ: Okay, harness I haven’t learned.

JESSI: You just gave me a look right there.

LIZ: Oh god, harness? I don’t even try. Um, I've, I've learned to not even try to harness that because I'll lose. I know that some of the most pain that I've ever been in my life is when I was trying to harness myself in order to conform.

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Alright, back to my conversation with Liz Gilbert.

It’s been a hard year for Liz. Her partner, Rayya Elias, died just more than a year ago. And not long after, her latest book was due. It can be hard to muster the energy to create when you’re grieving, but if your job is to be a writer, then you have to write. So I wanted to hear more about how she actually got it done. 

JESSI: So let's talk nuts and bolts of writing for a couple of minutes. Uh, when do you do it, how do you structure your day?

LIZ: I do it first thing in the morning because that's when my brain is the best. But I would say too, I would say unto you, anybody out there who's writing is that if you are a grown ass adult, and I'm assuming that you are, if you're listening to this. You already know when your best hour of the day is. You know, and it's going to be different for every person because all of us have different circadian rhythms and different biologies and different psychologies and different work schedules and different family needs. But if you're lucky, you get like a like one hour of the day where actually, you kind of feel okay where you kind of feel like you're awake and your energy is good and you're bright, you've got your brightest mind, your shiniest mind. My question to you is who or what is currently getting that hour? Who or what is currently getting that hour of today claim it for you. That's yours, that's yours, that's yours for your work, for the thing that you're creating for the thing that you're passionate about. You take that hour and you put a border around it and you say that this one belongs to you and then the 23 other hours of the day, give your second best to everybody else. Right? Keep your best for yourself. So for me, my best self is between six and 8:30, 9 o'clock in the morning. That's when I and other people are groaning because they don't even wake up. I have a friend who's an Oscar winning screenwriter, um, who can only write between two and 3:00 AM you know, I'm just hearing even wake up until seven o'clock at night. Like, he keeps bartenders hours. That's how his mind functions. My mind happens to be, I wake up really sharp.

JESSI: Okay, so place. Do you drink any special potion? Do you have a cat that sits to your left?

LIZ: Look. I've written everywhere. As you're asking this, I feel there's like a, there's a mystical, magical juju-y thing that we want where we're like, if I could, you know, get the right desk and the right people ask me like, what kind of pens and pencils, what font do you use? [JESSI: Right.] And I'm like, you guys, it's not that –

JESSI: We're all just looking for an excuse for why we can't do it, Liz.

LIZ: It's not that. It’s not that.

LIZ: And Roxanne Gay tweeted something the other day where I was like, preach, where she just said, y'all keep asking me a million times for all these secrets and tips and, and the way that you do it. And I'm here to tell you, it is really only the one thing which is sit down, clear the calendar, make time and don't stand up until you've written for a certain number of either words or minutes a day.

JESSI:      So what's the last thing you wrote? 

LIZ: The last thing I wrote was, um, it's actually about Rayya. I mean, I've been, I've been writing about her, um, and trying to figure out what to make from that pain and from that story, that glorious, horrible story. In a weird way, if I can kind of bring in a spiritual bent with her cooperation, you know, it's an ongoing conversation with her from beyond the grave of, you know, how do you want me to do this? How are we going to do this? That's the question I keep saying to her, how are we going to do this? Right? How are we going to tell this? What, what are we going to make this into? And I don't quite know the answer to that yet, but, but that's what it, where my thoughts have been.

JESSI: Do you find that you sit down with people and they immediately jump to tell you about their losses?

LIZ: I don't mind. Yeah. Yeah. And I don't mind, you know, um, I don't mind. I think, you know, I, I used to think that my, my focus, I feel like my vocation has changed. Um, I used to think that my vocation was to be a writer and to a certain extent it is. But 00:51:12 now I feel like my real vocation is to be love in the room, whatever room I happened to be in. Um, and so if somebody comes to me to tell me about their loss, whether it's their divorce or the death of a loved one, um, then it's so clear what my job is in that moment, you know, um, that my vocation, my job, my, my career in that moment is to, um, receive that. (JESSI: Yeah.) Like, just let them say whatever they need to say and I'm not trying to fix it, but just to, just to be love in the room.

***

That was Elizabeth Gilbert. She has a new book coming out in June, City of Girls. Stay tuned after the credits to hear more about it.

If you have a daily creative practice, I want to know about it. Send us a voice memo at hellomonday@linkedin.com and I’ll include you in an upcoming story.

I learned a lot from our conversation with Liz, specifically this idea that your job may not be your career, and your vocation might be something else altogether. And maybe we shouldn’t be trying so hard to have rich, fulfilling careers that we love...and just get a job.

It’s not just Liz who’s talking about this -- Journalists have recently been writing about it in Buzzfeed, in The Atlantic and The New York Times. And so I asked our reporter, Caroline, to look into it. Hi, Caroline!

CAROLINE: Hi Jessi. Erin Griffith just wrote about this in the New York Times. And her article is called, Why Are Young People Pretending to Love Work? I called her up to learn more.

ERIN: It's almost like Stockholm Syndrome where we're in these situations. Some of us might genuinely like a lot of aspects of our jobs, but not all of it. But we were promised or we kind of expected to be in these fulfilling jobs that we went to school with and instead, we have crippling debt and instead we're being overworked and underpaid and maybe our jobs are precarious. All of those kind of expectations that are not being met is leading a lot of people to kind of just decide to delude themselves a little bit into believing that this is what they wanted and you know, tweeting about it and sharing about it and bragging about it and making their job a piece of their identity. Um, and really, you know, taking pride in that even if deep down they know it's not real.

CAROLINE: In other words, just to deal with the reality of working, some people may actually need to convince themselves that they love what they do.

But how did we get here in the first place – where did we get the idea that work is supposed to fulfill us?

DEREK: There is a theory that comes from Martin Luther that jobs should be callings.

CAROLINE: That’s Derek Thompson. He’s a writer for the Atlantic, and a self-professed workaholic.

Recently, Derek wrote about something called “work-ism.”

DEREK: Workism, I would define it as the relatively modern idea that all of the things that we've traditionally looked to religions to find in life, meaning and community and transcendence and self actualization. A certain sliver of the modern economy now looks to work to provide all those things. And I worry that at a time when we're really fetishizing the idea of work for meaning, work for passion, find everything that makes you happy in your nine to five job that we're essentially asking for better bread than can be made of wheat. Our jobs just aren't designed to do that. I at the same time believe that we should seek meaning and we should see passion. We should seek transcendence from our lives. The big question is all right then from where? Now that's a philosophical question. And I'm not a philosophy expert, but I've read enough to know that there's a diversity of answers. But it's interesting to me that in all of that literature, practically nobody has said that the place that we should seek meaning from is our jobs.

CAROLINE: Derek says all of this has become intensified because of everything we put online about ourselves. 

DEREK: I think that a life lived digitally is a world in which we are all for us into a tournament of status. It's just impossible to forget that status when you're online, especially on social media networks. And I think that if your sense of self worth is so attuned to a question of status that you make status mongering your religion, you put it on a pedestal.

CAROLINE: Hm, so one of the questions I've been wrestling with personally is, I'm sure you've heard this, this is what I grew up hearing from my parents and from everyone I knew, which is find something that you love to do. Find something that you wake up in the morning and just can't wait to do, find a job that gives you purpose. Is that that bad career advice now?

DEREK: Well, yes. I think it is bad career advice. Even great work sucks. Sometimes everyone, even if they're in a job that they might describe as their dream job, wakes up some mornings thinking, I can't believe I have to do this. I can't believe I have to go into work. I, I can't believe I have to go to this meeting, right? Like everyone feels this. And so to pretend by way of advice that we should never feel those feelings, that work should never feel like work. That's a lie.

CAROLINE: At the end of your piece, you admit that you have the same tendencies that you described of this generation and have this kind of new philosophy of work. How are you working on that? 

DEREK: I wish I could tell you that I wrote this article and then achieved a state of Nirvana and now I can report back to you mere mortals from the state of Nirvana that I've discovered, um, about how exactly to balance work and life. The balancing of work in life is probably the project of living, and I'm never going to figure it out and I don't think anyone is ever going to perfectly figure it out. But I will tell you this, I’m more mindful of the moments that make me happy.

CAROLINE: Again, that was Derek Thompson, and Erin Griffith.

JESSI: Thanks Caroline. Next week, I’m talking to Tim Brown – he’s a designer who runs the company, IDEO. So much is going to change in the future, but if you’re a person who can come up with ideas--an original thinker--I suspect you’ll be ok. So I want Tim to deconstruct where ideas come from.

How and where do you come up with your new ideas? We want to hear from you for the next episode. So send us a voice memo--the more specific the better--about how you get your best ideas at hellomonday@linkedin.com.

If you enjoyed listening, subscribe, and rate us on iTunes – it helps new listeners find the show.

Hello Monday is a production of LinkedIn. The show was produced by Laura Sim and Wes Wingo, with reporting by Caroline Fairchild. The show was mixed by Joe DiGiorgi. Florencia Iriondo is Head of Editorial Video. Dave Pond is our Technical Director. Lucas Sloan is our Creative Inspiration in Mississippi. Music was by Podington Bear and Pachyderm. Dan Roth is the Editor in Chief of LinkedIn.

I’m Jessi Hempel, thanks for listening.

[CODA]

LIZ : I guess I would say this, this is a line that's in my new books. I've got this book coming out. It's a novel. It's about showgirls in New York City in the 1940s it's, it's called city of girls available to be published by Riverhead books. It's about promiscuous women. Um, I wanted for years to write a novel about women who have had a lot of sex in their lives and their lives are not destroyed by it. And this is the line that's in the book. You can be a good person without being a good girl. (YES.) You know, I'm, I've not been a good girl in my life, but I am a very good person. 00:44:26 I have my own deep kind of integrity. I'm a good friend. I'm, uh, I'm, I'm devoted to the people who I love. There's loyalties and I'm a really passionate person whose, whose heart's desire changes over time. And that's okay.

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