that the last 15 years had been preparing me with the expertise, know-how and relationships to pull off this much bigger feat. Raising $100 million had been the ‘training wheels’ I needed to raise $5 billion.”
ALU opened its first college in Mauritius and its second in Rwanda; its third will open soon in Nigeria. ALU received six thousand applications on its first day for 180 slots. It will take twenty-five to thirty years to build all of the universities Swaniker thinks need to be built.
Swaniker’s story is epic, and the institutions he is building are on a vaster scale than anything most of us will do. But he is still a good example of someone who listened to his life, who plumbed his desires, who asked, What problems are around me? What has my life given me as preparation? How can the two go together?
His story illustrates two final features of the vocation decision. First, it’s not about creating a career path. It’s asking, What will touch my deepest desire? What activity gives me my deepest satisfaction? Second, it’s about fit. A vocation decision is not about finding the biggest or most glamorous problem in the world. Instead, it’s about finding a match between a delicious activity and a social need. It’s the same inward journey we’ve seen before: the plunge inward and then the expansion outward. Find that place in the self that is driven to connect with others, that spot where, as the novelist Frederick Buechner famously put it, your deep gladness meets the world’s deep hunger.
THIRTEEN
Mastery
After William Least Heat-Moon lost his teaching job at the University of Missouri, he decided to take time off and travel around the United States, taking the small back roads that are marked in blue on the Rand McNally maps. Near the town of Hat Creek, California, he met an old man who was taking his dog for a walk.
“A man’s never out of work if he’s worth a damn,” the old man reflected. “It’s just sometimes he doesn’t get paid. I’ve gone unpaid my share and I’ve pulled my share of pay. But that’s got nothing to do with working. A man’s work is doing what he’s supposed to do, and that’s why he needs a catastrophe now and again to show him a bad turn isn’t the end, because a bad stroke never stops a good man’s work.”
That’s a useful distinction. A job is a way of making a living, but work is a particular way of being needed, of fulfilling the responsibility that life has placed before you. Martin Luther King, Jr., once advised that your work should have length—something you get better at over a lifetime. It should have breadth—it should touch many other people. And it should have height—it should put you in service to some ideal and satisfy the soul’s yearning for righteousness.
We all know people whose real work is hospitality, but they practice hospitality over the span of many different kinds of jobs. Belden Lane’s work is trying to write down and describe the spiritual transcendence he sometimes experiences in nature. But he can’t just tell people at dinner parties he’s a guy who wanders around in the woods seeking transcendence. “My own particular cover is that of a university professor,” he writes. “It’s a way of looking responsible while attending to much more important things.” As a professor, he appears to be “engaged in reputable endeavors, locked into acceptable categories. I manage to satisfy my employer, meet society’s expectations, sign checks.” But his real work is up in the mountains, stalking that eternity that is seen in not being seen.
DIGGING THE DAMN DITCH
A person who has found his vocation has been released from the anxiety of uncertainty, but there is still the difficulty of the work itself. All vocational work, no matter how deeply it touches you, involves those moments when you are confronted by the laborious task. Sometimes, if you are going to be a professional, you just have to dig the damn ditch.
All real work has testing thresholds, moments when the world and fate roll stones in your path. All real work requires discipline. “If one is courteous but does it without ritual, then one dissipates one’s energies,” Confucius wrote. “If one is cautious but does it without ritual, one becomes timid; if one is bold but does it without ritual, then one becomes reckless; if one is forthright but does it without ritual, then one becomes rude.”