What we value is as different as we are. Our basic goals and commitments—indeed
the fundamental ways in which we view the world—are as different as our
individual life experiences. So it
should come as no surprise that in seeking work that has personal meaning, the approaches we take to finding it are different too.
In
recent commencement addresses this month, Barrack Obama and Mitt Romney
recommended two very different approaches for graduates entering the workforce.
Wherever you find yourself as a worker—just starting out, trying to improve
your experience in the trenches, or thinking about a second or third act in
your working life—their recent remarks can help you when thinking about your own
“next steps.”
Kevin Lamarque/Reuters
Writing recently in the Wall
Street Journal, columnist Daniel Henninger compared their messages in A Tale of Two Commencements. Henninger
clearly preferred Mr. Romney’s. But rather than “either/or,” I see their
approaches as speaking to broad (and sometimes overlapping) segments along a
procession of worthy vocations: from
personal service as a quiet witness to political struggle as an agent for change
you can believe in.
As
we search for purpose-driven work that can bring us genuine satisfaction, there’s
a place that’s right for each of us somewhere along this continuum.
Mr. Romney’s address was at Liberty University, the largest evangelical Christian school in America. Lincoln’s
“doctrinal statement” says, in part:
We affirm
that the Holy Spirit indwells all who are born again, conforming them to the
likeness of Jesus Christ. This is a process completed only in Heaven. Every
believer is responsible to live in obedience to the Word of God in separation
from sin.
In other words, Mr. Romney was speaking to individuals who
had already committed to living their lives in a particular, value-centered way.
Most if not all in his audience already understood that transforming the world
begins (and ends) with transforming yourself.
For
Mr. Romney, your work in the world is not dictated by the social problem to be
solved.
The
great drama of Christianity is not a crowd shot, following the movements of
collectives or even nations. The
drama is always personal, individual, unfolding in one’s own life. . . [Here] men and women of every faith,
and good people with none at all, sincerely strive to do right and lead a
purpose-driven life.
“What we have, what we wish we had — ambitions fulfilled, ambitions
disappointed; investments won, investments lost; elections won, elections lost
— these things may occupy our attention, but they do not define us,” he
continued. Those things happen
within us. For Mr. Romney,
making the world a better place through your work is the result of “conscience
in action,” and the never-ending commitment that it takes to always be ready
for it.
As
many of you already know, Mr. Obama spoke
last week to my daughter’s graduating class at Barnard, one of the colleges making up Columbia University.
Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP
His speech was a different from Mr. Romney's as his audience.
For
the President, the application of your values to your work is similarly self-defining. But while your career may lead to internal changes, his approach
to work focused almost exclusively on value-driven engagement in the external
world of politics. In other words, it is by transforming the world that you
transform yourself.
The
graduating women of Barnard have their own commencement as well as a larger
ceremony with the other university schools. Until recently, Columbia College graduates received apples
with their diplomas to symbolize the “core” curriculum they had studied. That is until someone removed the fruit
because year after year Columbia men delighted in pelting Barnard women with
their apples. Barnard women
understand the politics of gender on their campus, and Mr. Obama connected with
this understanding when talking about how values should inform their working
lives.
“Remember,
making your mark on the world is hard,” the President said. You need “to fight
for your seat at the table.” Only by doing so will you be able to “earn equal
pay for equal work,” and “fully control decisions about your own health.” Somebody told Labor Secretary Hilda
Solis that she wasn’t smart enough to go to college, but she didn’t let others
hold her down, and you shouldn’t either. There will always be “those who oppose
change, those who benefit from an unjust status quo [and] have always bet on
the public’s cynicism or the public’s complacency.” [D]on’t accept somebody else’s construction of how things
ought to be.”
In
their commencement addresses, Mr. Romney and Mr. Obama offered fundamentally different
marching orders to those approaching the work of their lives.
In their starkest forms, one approach is about internal transformation,
the other, external struggle. Think about these differences as you examine the work you
have, and the work you want.
In his Journal column, Mr.
Renninger found “less tooth and claw” in the Romney speech than in
Obama’s. I think it depends on your
worldview, and where the animals that need your taming reside.
