Show me your work and I’ll see your insides
If you want to change yourself, consider changing your work.
This is part one of a two-part series exploring the reciprocity between our public work and personal tension.
If fridges were more popular in the 1880s, Picasso’s parents would have proudly plastered his paintings on theirs.
I’ll never forget standing two feet from his childhood paintings at the Picasso Museum in Barcelona and realizing he wasn’t one of those artists who had to die before becoming famous. Picasso was great even before puberty could make him feel insecure enough to believe otherwise.
I’m grateful the Picasso Museum wasn’t artsy about its user experience. When you walk in, you enter Picasso’s childhood work. You then make your way through his paintings in chronological order. You grow up with Picasso.
With every few steps, you can see his paintings evolve. You can see him evolve.
My takeaway?
Before Taylor had eras, Picasso had periods.
Over time, his work got bluer.
Then things got rosier.
And then it got… cubier?
Picasso’s work transformed with his age.
And it was more than practice that led to the transformation.
It was his life’s tension.
Putting the “pain” in paintings
Like it does for all of us, Picasso’s life got more challenging as he grew up. When he was 19, Picasso’s close friend Carlos Casagemas died by suicide. The loss sparked Picasso’s Blue Period, where he painted the outcasts and the marginalized. This period of somber shades lasted for a few years as he also struggled financially and with feelings of loneliness.
Things eventually got better. Watching circus performers inspired Picasso’s Rose Period; he started to feel joy again. He found success, a community, and a lover. Life was rosy.
You can look at Picasso’s paintings and see what emotions he was experiencing as he painted them. He went from painting what he saw to how he saw them.
In Picasso’s public work, you can see his personal tension. You can see his pain and how his work was an attempt to express it and solve it.
This is true for all of us.
We all show our insides by what we create.
"Painting is just another way of keeping a diary." — Picasso
One side of the coin: Your work shows your insides.
By your insides, I mean your tensions, your values, and your story. The parts of you that people can’t touch but you feel most deeply.
In 2021, I left New Story after working there for a year to take a communications role at Chick-fil-A corporate. I loved New Story but I accepted Chick-fil-A’s offer because I wanted security, comfort, and a social flex. It was a year into the pandemic, and while people were scared and overstretched, Chick-fil-A was thriving. On the other hand, working at a Y Combinator team like New Story is hard work. And doing it from my home for more than a year made it hard on my soul. It was difficult to discern the line between pushing through and asking for help. I defaulted to pushing through until I found myself in self-preservation mode. When things got hard, I saw Chick-fil-A as an easy route to a more comfortable life. I could do half the work and get paid more. I developed a scarcity mindset and made security and comfort my core values. I chose to make a job change because my tension warped my values. While security, comfort, and social status may be pleasant passengers in your life, they make for terrible drivers. Over the next few months, I got healthier and my values came back into focus. I had to do work that blended creativity and social impact. I wasn’t getting that at Chick-fil-A by editing PowerPoints about parking lots. Thankfully, New Story took me back as their first boomerang and it’s been a rewarding ride since.
People say your budget and your calendar reveal what you value. But so does your work.
A resume shows more than your skill set. It shows what you value in different seasons of life. Shifts in resumes show how you responded when you experienced tension.
You chose your current job based on the values you had when you chose it. But are your values the same today?
Julian Shapiro, founder of Demand Curve, says, “Without self-reflection, we ride the momentum of whatever we're already doing and whatever we stumble across. That's dangerous, because it stops us from self-reflecting on how we've changed and whether we should be doing something new.”
We should normalize value audits for ourselves.
And if you don’t like the results of your audit, then it might be time to work on something different.
Because here’s the scary part: Not only does your work reveal your insides — it also shapes them.
The other side of the coin: Your work shapes your insides.
There’s a reciprocity between our public work and personal tension. When you’re in a blue period, you’re more likely to paint with blues — and painting in blues is more likely to keep you blue.
Studies show that a significant amount of content moderators experience PTSD, and many others develop long-lasting mental health symptoms including depression, anxiety, and insomnia.
Your work is working on you.
In one of my favorite pieces about work, Trae Stephens and Markie Wagner write about choosing “good quests.”
Quests are the work we build our lives around. And not all quests are created equal.
Good quests, like nursing and teaching, make the future better by addressing real pains. Bad quests, like building another NFT marketplace, fail to address problems worth solving.
The article challenges Silicon Valley talent to choose good quests because our biggest problems need our best resources. I agree. It makes me sad to see the most privileged people on the planet devote their lives to bettering the lives of the top 1%. The world’s biggest problems will only be solved when the people who can attract the best resources choose to work on them. But not only does the world need you to choose good quests — your inner life needs you to choose good quests, too. Because your quest will shape who you become. I can’t have dinner with my friend Jason, a licensed therapist, without him asking deep questions that help me see my attachments. He has the eyes of a counselor. My wife Sarah, a camp counselor, can make a child feel known and seen better than anyone I know. When you choose to paint, you’re choosing to become a painter with a painter’s lens of the world. You become what you do.
If you’re not proud of who you’ve become or what you value, changing your quest might help. We often change from the outside in, where our actions lead to an inner transformation. When my alarm goes off in the morning, I’m never excited about going on a run. Everything within me wants to stay under the warm sheets. But after a run, I love running. I have a desire to do it again tomorrow. My actions change my desires. We’re foolish if we think pouring our minds, bodies, and relationships into a job for 40+ hours a week isn’t affecting our insides. Last year when I got my oil changed, the employee said the customer before me was the “biggest jackass” he’d ever seen. He was also the owner of a thriving strip club in Atlanta. The work of your hands will influence your heart.
Of course, it’s possible for a person to have decent character in almost any profession. I’m sure there are kind strip club owners (although kindness shouldn’t be the only way we judge character). While it’s possible to have healthy insides in most professions, some work makes character building an uphill battle. The man on Wall Street is more likely to struggle with greed than the school teacher. We’re too quick to consider the pay for our work without considering its costs to our inner life.
A place to find a good quest is at the pains that have impacted you.
My friend Palmer used to be an alcoholic. Now he’s a therapist who specializes in supporting men experiencing substance abuse. And Brett Hagler, the CEO of New Story, founded the org after visiting Haiti and meeting families without safe housing. Good quests address the pains you’ve encountered.
For those of us who have our basic needs met, the good news is we can always change our quest. As C.S. Lewis said, “You are never too old to set a new goal or dream a new dream.”
When Apple recruited Pepsi’s John Sculley to be its CEO in 1983, Steve Jobs asked him “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to change the world?”
Jobs was asking Sculley to leap from a bad quest to a good quest. I’m inspired by people who choose to make that leap. Some examples are:
Scott Harrison went from managing nightclubs to founding charity:water, a nonprofit that has brought safe drinking water to nearly 20 million people.
My mom left a Big Four accounting firm to run the finance team at the small private school I attended.
My friend Kyle left consulting to do Teach for America and commit to a career in education.
My wife Sarah left acting to work at an all-girls summer camp.
I agree with Eric Brown and Taylor Jones, founders of Whiteboard, who say, “We believe that lasting personal fulfillment is only found when we spend our lives working on behalf of someone or something else.” I’m not saying you can’t serve others while at a Big Four accounting firm. Of course you can. I just think a better quest is taking your resources to the people and places who will benefit from them exponentially in their pursuit of tackling problems that are desperate for solutions. Why be a cog when you can be a changemaker?
"We believe that lasting personal fulfillment is only found when we spend our lives working on behalf of someone or something else.” — Eric Brown and Taylor Jones, founders of Whiteboard, authors of Agency
I’ve had some friends tell me how they’d like to get rich so they can give it away. But from my decade of working with nonprofits, I can tell you small teams tackling complex problems need more than your money: they need your talent and time. Money doesn’t do any good if talented people aren’t injecting it into smart solutions. Your brain can solve more problems than your bank. I’ve had other friends say they want to get rich now so they can do more impact-focused work later in life. The intention sounds nice, but the game you have to play to get to that point will shape who you become. Your work shapes you. By the time you feel safe enough to move from a bad quest to a good one, you’ve become an entirely different person than the one who made that “noble” decision in the past. Choosing to serve money now so you can serve people later is a dangerous game. And what makes you think you have that time? Life is too short and unpredictable to sell sugar water today in hopes of changing the world tomorrow.
And please don’t fall for the fallacy of “It’s not what you do, but how you do it.” They’re not mutually exclusive. Oddly enough, I hear my fellow Jesus followers say this more than others. I love what Dave Blanchard, co-founder and CEO of Praxis, says: “The gospel applies not only to how we work but maybe even moreso, what we choose to work on.” There are too many legitimate problems in our world to use your privilege to tinker with problems only affecting the world’s wealthiest people. Your work is meant to serve people and shape you. Choose wisely what you work on — because your work is working on you.
Washing the dust off our souls
During World War II, Picasso stayed in Paris while the Germans occupied the city. He painted his feelings about what he saw, with his most notable piece being “Guernica,” an anti-war painting of the bombing of Guernica by German and Italian air forces during the Spanish Civil War.
During a search of his apartment, the Gestapo saw a photo of the “Guernica” and asked Picasso if he painted it. “No,” Picasso said, “You did.”
As the pains of life squeezed on Picasso, his insides came out in paint.
His work made his tensions, values, and story tangible.
And the more he painted, the more his insides evolved. He spent about 20 years painting political commentary in the second half of his life. According to his dealer, Picasso never read a single line of Marx but became a communist out of sentimentality. Our work may shape our insides more than anything else.
"The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls." — Picasso
In the second half of this two-part series, I’ll share more stories and solutions around the reciprocity between our public work and personal tension.
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— Luke