Moneylove, Worklove, and Vocational Arousal

The Richest Man In All The World…….

It’s pretty hard to ignore a sentence that starts out with the above words, which is exactly why I used them thirty-some years ago to open my Worklove chapter in Moneylove. The whole quote goes like this:

The richest man in all the world is the one who has a good time earning his daily bread. WORKLOVE means just that, loving the work you do, doing the work you love.

In recent days I’ve been reminded of the profound importance of this concept, which back then was, believe it or not, a rather strange and foreign idea to most people. Even stranger is the fact that many still have not gotten the message. On CBS Sunday Morning, one of my favorite shows for a lot of years, actor/philosopher/commentator Ben Stein had a great segment on just this subject, called Decide To Live.

Decide To Live!

Stein aimed his comments at today’s college graduates, but they apply to all of us. He says he asked his shrink, “a very smart man,” what he thought the differences were between unhappy people and happy people. Stein says his shrink answered (I admit I do wonder if these aren’t really Stein’s thoughts, and if this shrink even exists) that unhappy people are the ones who “let their parents or their family talk them into a career that really wasn’t them. What they do is not them–it is not who they are or who they wanted to be.”

So what about the happy people? Again, crediting his shrink, Stein said,

They made a Decision to Live. They decided to do what their heart told them to do.

Food for thought? I’ll say! Is there any simpler way to explore how on purpose your life now is than by asking yourself when and if you made a Decision to Live? And how powerful is that phrase, “They decided to do what their heart told them to do?” We can all ask ourselves whether we are now living lives that evolved from making a decision to do what our hearts told us to do.

Vocational Arousal

And then, on Sunday, at Unity San Francisco, Rev. Sonya Milton mentioned that she attended a major Unity conference in San Diego the preceding week, and one of the keynote speakers was Barbara Marx Hubbard, who is celebrating her 80th birthday and going stronger than ever. I knew Barbara back in the 1970s, when she was President of the Association for Humanistic Psychology, an organization I was very involved in–for several years I headed up the Florida chapter of AHP. This was before Barbara became the first woman to seriously run for President of the U.S., and launched her award-winning TV series in which she interviewed the finest minds of our time, and more recently produced two movies called Visions, solidifying her role as one of the most significant visionaries and futurists of the past fifty years. Just Google her name and prepare to have your mind boggled.

Anyway, Rev. Sonya repeated a term Barbara Marx Hubbard has coined that describes with passion and vitality exactly what I mean by Worklove.  “Vocational Arousal.” I love the sound of that. It’s a question we can all ask ourselves over and over again–Am I Aroused by my Vocation? By the work I choose to do in the world? Or is my work something I just do to get through so that eventually I can afford to follow my heart and live my passion?

Barbara Marx Hubbard actually came up with Vocational Arousal to describe that powerful spark that gets ignited when someone you meet moves you forward in your own purpose in a powerful way. For her that was meeting Jonas Salk, who wanted to discuss with her the concept of co-creation. But I like using it more generally to describe the excitement and thrill of doing work you love, are passionately involved in, and feel is making a valuable contribution to the world in some direct or indirect way.

But as with any profound concept, this one did get me to thinking about what got me going on my life’s path, what moved me forward in my purpose. And I remembered that I decided to be a writer at very young age. I could see the limitations and frustrations of the work-a-day world of my father and his job as a foreman on an assembly line at RCA in Camden, New Jersey. And my mother had written short stories before she married, and was an avid reader–a life that seemed much more free and satisfying. The two of them definitely fueled my purpose, aroused my vocation.

And for me, the most powerful part of vocational arousal is the energy it creates around you, so that you not only are aroused yourself, but other people become aroused by both what you are doing and what they are doing. And when this happens, let’s face it–you don’t even have to think about money or prosperity or abundance or the Law of Attraction. It all happens effortlessly and naturally.
Jerry