Finding Your Place

There is something almost primeval about this recognition of the importance of doing a job with excellence. As I mentioned in my article two years ago, It’s What I Do, doing something extraordinarily well is more than just a matter of pride. It essentially defines us. We are all inherently social creatures, and our sense of belonging to the communities which we adopt, and which adopt us, is caught up in, and expresses itself through, our role, our specialization. Even in the earliest tribal cultures individuals recognized other individuals’ strengths, experiences and talents, and this recognition refined and defined each individual’s role, and importance, in the community. These skills, these differences, established one’s position, one’s membership, in the community.

Doing what we are, what we enjoy doing, and what we do well, is essential to our self-esteem, so it is not surprising that it is naturally selected for. A Lakota leader defines ‘mastery’ — the need to build on personal competence — as one of the four ‘capacities’ of ‘the circle of courage’ that gives each of us heart, self-confidence, and spirit.

What is it that determines this special role, whether it be ironing, running, painting or writing or giving care to others? It is, I think, a product of four things:

1. our natural talents — things we inherently find easy to do well,
2. our learnings and experience — which come from study, but more importantly from practice,
3. our passion — the desire and focus and dedication to excel at doing this one thing, and
4. our audience — the degree to which this role is needed, appreciated, respected and encouraged.

The search for one’s personal role, our place in community, is often a lifelong quest. Today, when it is so easy to be anonymous or left alone, and in which we move from community to community often, the fourth element — our audience — can be the hardest to achieve. When we have no audience, when we do not know where we belong, we are left to choose what we will do in abstraction. As a result, many of us devote large parts of our lives to study and diligent work only to find we have no audience, and that no matter how great we see our own talent and acquired skill, it was all wasted time.

The task is much easier when we find our audience, the community with the need for what we can do, first. In this respect we are all entrepreneurs at heart. We are all seeking to find something that is needed, and for which we have talent and passion, and the rest is just hard work. Or rather, it isn’t hard work, because our passion, our natural talent, and the recognition of its value by our community makes it easy work, obvious and important. As we learn, lifelong, to do it well and then exceptionally well, we are merely following our heart, our destiny.

The characters depicted in the vidcap above, from Aaron Sorkin’s comedy Sports Night, have found, in journalism, the intersection of talent, experience, passion and audience. That’s why they can, and do, say That’s What I Do, That’s Who I Am. How many of us, in the real world, can say the same, without a sigh, a doubt, a frown?