The Capitalist Code by Ben Stein

Author:Ben Stein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BUS050000 Business & Economics / Personal Finance / General, BUS050030 Business & Economics / Personal Finance / Money Management, BUS036000 Business & Economics / Investments & Securities / General
Publisher: Humanix Books

WORK YOU LOVE

I would never dream of telling anyone what to study or how to spend his or her working life. The years and hours occupied by work are an immense part of life. One should not spend them working at a job one hates. Life is not all about how much money you make. It is largely about enjoying oneself and feeling pride in one’s work. The matter of enjoying the great segment of life that we spend at work is one of life or death—we might as well be prisoners as work in jobs we loathe.

I can vividly recall when I worked as a trial lawyer in Washington, DC, long ago. I got off the bus in the sweltering heat and humidity and headed into my windowless prison cell of an office, bound to work in dim light on a hopelessly lost case—a case that the Federal Trade Commission should never have brought—against incomparably more experienced and better paid lawyers. I felt as if I were selling my life for pennies, as if I were a blood bucket for a tribe of vampires who gorged themselves on my corpuscles while I suffered. I was not quite a slave, because I did not work in a cotton field in the brutal heat and did not get lashed if my masters were angry at me. But I was an indentured servant whose life was not his own. I was literally throwing away my one and only life while I was in those stark, fiberboard-partitioned law offices.

When I escaped that prison by becoming a teacher at American University—and then, paradise on earth, University of California, Santa Cruz—I felt free. I was a whole new person. I could do what I liked doing. I was not a lab animal on a wheel. I was a soaring bird, applauded and loved by my students, making jokes, laughing, smiling, master of my immense classroom filled with adorable students. Doing what I wanted to do transformed me from a prisoner to a king.

It is a glory of life to be able to do work that one loves.

When I started writing for money, it got even better. At that point in time, I was writing and teaching at the same time, and because I loved what I was doing, I worked tirelessly. I was creative. I could work long hours and come up with great ideas. I made more money than I ever could have by doing work I hated.

Yes, absolutely, lawyers generally make more than film teachers and movie and TV critics. True enough. But anyone who loves his work as much as I loved mine will work like a myrmidon (look it up). So I took on ever more work—work that was play compared with the horror show of legal practice. And I made more money than a starting lawyer would make by a lot.

The point is not about the legal profession. It’s not about the subject of your work. It’s about whether or not you enjoy it.

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