The most important job in the world is the one that you have right now.
Trader, project manager, banker, cashier, pastor, janitor, lawyer, parent…
For you have no idea how your work will touch who, and in what kind of way.
(Hint: Your work impacts everyone – forever.)
I mean – really though – why are some occupations considered more important than others?
But bad ideas like this persist in the face of massive evidence to the contrary.
Is a doctor more important than a writer, for example?
Doctors can hold peoples lives in the balance and cure disease. But haven’t writers started wars and popularized both good and bad ideologies into perpetuity?
I don’t know.
Maybe we should all be taking our work more seriously.
And heavens, if a writer needs to stop and write down a note – let them.
I wanted to tell him that a famous writer, commiserating about this eternal problem, once said to me, “If I were a neurosurgeon and I announced that I had to leave my guests to go in for an emergency craniotomy, no one would say a word. But if I said I needed to leave the guests in the living room to go upstairs to write…” I wondered if Paul would have found this funny. After all, he could actually say he was going to do a craniotomy! It was plausible! And then he could go write instead.
-Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air (Amazon)
