This one comes from EA. EA says, "Is the monastic life the ultimate deep life, and what can we learn and implement from it?" EA elaborates, "Lately I have been studying monasticism, especially the Benedictine order and their rule. Their motto is 'Ora e labora' - pray and work. Traditionally they focus on everything they do, often in silence, and utilize the lessons learned in the 1500 plus years of their existence." And so she elaborates, "Is the need for deep work so old, and can we learn from these traditions in a way that is useful to us in the outside world?" I think we can, EA.

This is an idea that I have been developing recently. When there are work-related fantasies or stories, specific stories of, "Yeah, here's a monk in the Benedictine order in a monastery," or "Here's this person I knew who moved to Maine and they built this cabin by a lake and they just write all day," or whatever it is.

When we come across these concrete instantiations of a working life that really resonates with us, these escape fantasies, what do we do with that? And the theory that I'm working on right now is that they're not meant to be taken literally, right? In the sense that this is not a roadmap that you are now considering, "Should I follow this path or not?

Oh, maybe I should become a monk. Maybe I should move to a cabin in Maine." In fact, I opened my book, So Good They Can't Ignore You, with the story of someone who actually did that. It was the story of someone who had become so attached to the fantasy of becoming a monk that he actually went to this monastic center where he got accepted in it, you live the simple life, you...I think it was a Buddhist center, and you meditate and you have these sort of simple jobs, and through the repetition you gain insight.

I mean, he had built this up in his head so long, these images of these monks had resonated so much that it just became in his mind, "This must be the path to having meaning in life." So you can imagine how the story unfolded in that opening chapter, So Good He Went, he joined, and within a few weeks he broke down because he realized this wasn't a magic transformation, and that there was still stuff that was annoying, and he still had the same anxieties, and it had failed to transform his life, right?

So the things that resonate aren't necessarily meant to be roadmaps. So what should we do with them? Well, I think we should take a mythological approach to understanding these professional work fantasies that resonate so much. And by mythological, I mean in a Jungian framework, right? We should actually come at this and try to understand what are the archetypical elements of this story that are creating that resonance.

We isolate those from the actual details of the story. So when we look at the monks, what is it about this order that I just get that information that there's something right or appealing or aspirational about what they're doing? You strip away the fact that they're a Benedictine order, and it's a Christian order, and they go to these type of buildings, and they pray every morning, and you extract from it what is the underlying element here that's really catching my attention.

In this case, maybe it's the slowness, the not having a really big load of things that you have to do, that your life is simpler, and you can move from one thing to another, and there's presence. You pull out the non-work content-specific underlying archetypical elements, and you isolate them, and you clarify them, and you realize these deep elements, which could apply to any different type of field, it can apply to many different types of jobs, this is what really resonates to me.

All right, so once you pulled out these are the deeper elements that resonate with me, now you can actually start to do some blueprinting. Now you can start to say, "Okay, given my context, my circumstances, what opportunities are available to me? What are my constraints? What are my abilities?

What is the landscape surrounding me of where I could feasibly get in my career?" And start using these isolated elements as the lodestone that guides you. All right, if slowness, having less to do, moving from one thing to another, presence with each type, if this is what's really important to me, and yet I am a, you know, I work for a think tank in Washington DC or something, you look around, okay, given my career capital, given my skills, given the different possibilities here, how could I craft a career that gets that thing in it?

And the career you craft might have nothing to do with being a monk, but everything to do with what it was about the monks that appealed to you. And maybe as that think tank director in DC, you end up shifting to, "Let me use the the capital I had developed there to do a consultant-based work," and I'm really just thinking off the top of my head here, "but consultant-based work where I help put together white papers, and I do it six months out of the year, and I could do it remote.

I'm gonna move to this different location where life is a little bit slower. I'm going to move out of DC, and I'm moving to wherever, Chestertown, on the eastern shore or something like that, and I'm gonna have a slower life out there, and I'm gonna buy some property that's cheaper out there, I'm gonna have a huge garden that I'm gonna work on, and really the work I do, I do it during six months a year, and it's, I do it in my gazebo, I do it during the warmer months, and I do it in the morning, and you could kind of craft the whole life that has that element that you care about.

The content of this life may have nothing to do with the content of the story that first told you about this element." So I'm a big believer in this now, a mythological interpretation of career fantasies. Extract the underlying archetypical elements that are driving your aspiration, purify them, isolate them from the specifics of that job, and then look at your landscape and say, "What could I feasibly do that is going to give me more of this thing that's really resonating with me?" And I think people have a lot of options.

In other words, you can get a lot of guidance from these concrete stories, just like you can get a lot of guidance from the great myths of the past, without actually having to take them literally, without having to say, "I guess I have to go into Grendel's Den to find, you know, meaning in my life.

I guess I have to kill a literal dragon and save the Virgin Princess in order to find drive in my life." Right? We don't actually have to take the myths literally to extract a lot of high-impact value into our life. Let's treat these career stories that resonate the same way.

At least that's the idea that I'm working on recently. (upbeat music)