What We Want You To Buy

Today I thought I’d talk a little bit about what we would like you to buy from #lovework.

Before you close this article, know that it’s probably not what you think.

More than anything else, what we want you to “buy” from us is a philosophy, a belief. 

This belief is a simple one, and can be summed up in just four words: 

Work should energize you.

That’s it. 

Really.

What We DON’T Mean

Upon first read, it may not seem that novel or revolutionary. But we believe it is. 

To help explain, let me be crystal clear about what we DON’T mean when we use this simple phrase.

We don’t mean work should energize you once in awhile. 

We don’t mean, “Well, I felt pretty good last Thursday.” 

We’re not talking about that project I did last year that was fun, or a vague notion that I usually feel like my work doesn’t actively hurt me. 

Um… nope, that’s not it.

What We DO Mean

We mean that you feel pretty energized continually, regularly, more often than not, every single day, throughout the regular typical daily work you do all day. 

We mean that when you’re off the clock, you feel kind of “magnetically compelled” and intrinsically motivated to get back to those basic everyday tasks that make up what you actually get paid to do because you like doing them.

We mean that the regular typical daily work you do feels, to you, like it is capital-W Work — like it’s meaningful, purposeful, life-affirming Work that you’re proud to say you spend your time doing.

We mean that your Work gives you a small emotional jolt that helps you get out of bed in the morning. 

We mean that your regular typical daily work feels, to you, like Work that gives you a little “juice” even when you just think about it.

We mean that it’s Work you feel compelled to “get after,” because it matters — it matters to you that you do it, and it matters to others that you do it, because it genuinely makes other people’s lives better in some way.

THIS is really what we want you to “buy” from us. It’s an updated belief system that allows you to truly believe, deep down in your gut, that work should NOT hurt — it should heal. And if you only ever “buy” one thing from #lovework, let it be this.

“That Won’t Even Cost Me Anything!”

At this point you might think, “Oh, well that’s easy; it won’t even cost me anything!”

Well, it’s not quite that, either.

Adopting this philosophy will likely cost you a great deal — it just won’t look like a transaction you’ll make in dollars. 

Over the years we’ve watched a lot of people come into our Tribe, and I now believe most of them would tell you this journey isn’t for the faint of heart. 

To use a movie analogy, it’s not unlike being unplugged from the Matrix. Remember that film? Almost the entire first movie in the series is dedicated to one singular idea: what it means to be forcefully, painfully, disconnected from the most common way of seeing and interacting with the world you know. Where the antagonist isn’t so much the machines, but a mindset of maintaining the status quo at all costs.

And this is why what we sell is costly, but not in the monetary sense. For those of us who walk this path, it costs us — because there are a lot of others who aren’t yet ready to see the world as it actually is, and this creates tension. It hurts to be different. It’s painful and dangerous to challenge the status quo.

But for some of us — I’m guessing you might be one of us, too — it’s like we have no choice, really. Like Neo in The Matrix, we can feel in the air that something is terribly amiss in the way we work now. That the universe, in some cosmic mysterious way we don’t fully understand, is expanding all of us in one direction — forward — towards more inclusivity, more beauty, more participation, more freedom, more understanding, more diversity, and more love. And we feel the tension, because when we look honestly, we see that most of those things don’t exist inside the way we work right now.

So we fight for things to be different. 

And this, we hope you’ll buy.

“The new world will be created by people who know better than to be realistic… we will learn what is possible by struggling for the world we desire.” — Rabbi Michael Lerner