Zen and the Art of Job Identification

I just started re-reading one of my favorite books–one that was introduced to me by one of my most influential professors at Ithaca College: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values, by Robert M. Pirsig. Written in 1974, HarperCollins calls it a “Modern Classic;” I like to call it a thought-provoking work that presents new insights and meaning each time I re-read it, depending where I am in my life at that moment.

I’m sitting in seat 7D, legs crossed, one hand holding the book, the other hand holding my pen. As the plane speeds down the tarmac and lifts itself into the air, I’m frantically underlining sentences, circling words, and writing notes in the margin–just as I did with any book I read in college. On page 32-33, I pointed this out, with a whole lotta underlines and stars:

“They were like spectators. You had the feeling they had just wandered in there themselves and somebody had handed them a wrench. There was no identification with the job. No saying, ‘I am a mechanic.’ At 5 PM or whenever their eight hours were in, you knew they would cut it off and not have another thought about their work. They were already trying not to have any thoughts about their work on the job. In their own way they were achieving the same thing John and Sylvia were, living with technology without having anything to do with it. Or rather, they had something to do with it, but their own selves were outside of it, detached, removed. They were involved in it but not in such a way as to care.”

Job identification. Pirsig couldn’t have pointed this out much better.

“Why?” I asked myself. “Why would someone not want to identify with their job? Why would you do the job just to do the job? And how could you possibly leave work and not think about it again until you returned the next morning?” Through Pirsig’s passionate prose, it’s pretty clear that he probably asked himself these same questions while facing–and recalling–this situation.

Identifying with your job is the first step to becoming passionate about your work. And, to me, my job search–my career search–isn’t about wandering in somewhere and randomly being handed a wrench. It’s about finding a position that I’ll have passion in–where I’ll delve myself into my work and its outcome, go above and beyond my tasks at hand, strategize and do and think and be creative and be savvy, where I’ll be much more than a spectator. It’s about finding a position with which I identify.

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