HOW I QUIT MY JOB & FOLLOWED MY BLISS

One of my favorite lines from one of my favorite people is one from Joseph Campbell in his "The Power of Myth" series with Bill Moyers. To paraphrase: "Can you imagine—some people actually work for money!" He let out a hearty laugh after he said the words, disbelieving that anyone could be so dumb. I didn’t get the joke at first. I thought, "what else would anyone work for?" But now, a few years after quitting my job, I understand what he meant.

Before I made the decision to be a writer, full-time, I had a job as Creative Director for a travel company. By almost any standards, people would consider it a great job. I was paid generously enough that I was able, for the first time in my life, to save for retirement.

But my problem was that the longer I worked at the job the more I was working for the money. My job had lost its original creative challenge and had become one of managing people—something I had no interest in. My department began to suffer and I began to suffer.

When the end was near, I found myself in England overseeing the printing of a brochure. I was holed up at the Britannia Hotel beside the American Embassy on Grosvenor Square waiting for the printer to put our job on press. But, as it turned out, each day there were delays. Major storms caused flooding that stopped the trains, which in turn prevented the paper from arriving. I am certain that God planned these series of events just so I would end up spending a week in London with lots of time to think.

One night I walked out into the square to get some air. I stood beneath the tall, well-lit statue of General Dwight Eisenhower that commands the square and read his words on the rear of the pedestal—words that inspire greatness. "Soldiers, Sailors, and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force: You are about to embark upon a great crusade… the hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you." —Order of the Day, June 6, 1944.

Reading the words sent a chill up my spine, because they elevated my thinking from the level of the individual to the universal. Perhaps because I’d been a soldier, I related to the idea of a common good—"hopes and prayers of…people everywhere." This is the level I aspired to live on. I knew some greatness lived somewhere within me—as it lives within us all. Eisenhower’s words had suddenly put me in touch with the possibility to live that greatness.

It then became a fairly easy decision to quit my job because my employer’s primary reason for being was merely to make money. If I was aspiring to something more, you can see the rub. As they would say it in "business speak," my relationship with my employer was no longer synergistic.

Leaving was one of the best and truest things I’d done in a long time. I was free at last—free of the bondage of money. My fear of financial insecurity has diminished greatly since those days, even though I now make far less money than I did. But how truly insignificant that is, compared with having saved my soul!

Lately, I’ve been learning this lesson even more deeply. After undergoing three heart procedures in two months I realize that, without a doubt, there is no time to be wasted. The dumbest thing I ever did was think of "saving" as in "saving for the future" because I’ve honestly learned that for any one of us there may be no future at all!

As idiotic as the idea of working for money is, the thought of saving money ought to be eliminated from our vocabulary as well. Instead of saving we need to spend what we have while we have it to spend. I have finally come to understand what Joseph Campbell meant. I also cherish his most well known words, which hang proudly on a sign above my desk: "Follow Your Bliss."