Job, Calling, and Legacy in My Career
Remnant Review
I received this as a private email yesterday.
I have been a long time subscriber and look forward to reading your articles daily but I can't help but to feel sorry for you.You work too much. You are no longer a young man, you are old. You are heading toward the final two minute warning in life yet you spend 12-14 hours a day working. Is that all you live for?
Money at your stage of the game means nothing. Its marginally utility is zero. So why do you spend so much of your remaining life working?
At your age, you should be spending as much time with your family as possible especially your wife who has sat by your side as your literally worked your life away.
I can tell you expect to die at your computer busily typing away. I think you should turn off your computer. Cut your workday in half. Go enjoy the little remaining life you have.
Go and smell the roses Mr. North. Life isn't all about money.
Signed:
A concerned follower.
This man has subscribed to GaryNorth.com site since 2008. Perhaps this will end today. I do not worry about this. Contrary to what he thinks of my motivation, I do not need his money. I surely do not need his opinions.
This man is what I call a schnook. He has no ability to understand what he reads. He hasn't a clue about my career.
As a writer, I find this discouraging. How could anyone be so utterly blind to what he has read? Writers cringe when they see this degree of blindness in anyone, let alone his so-called followers.
He has no ability or inclination to make accurate judgments.
This is often the case with people who send me "shape up" emails. They give me a piece of their minds, when they truly cannot spare it.
JOB AND CALLING
I think everybody else on this site is aware of the fact that I have made a fundamental distinction between job and calling. I have an entire department devoted to this issue. I have delivered two lectures on this to the Mises Institute: one for college students, and one for full-time scholars.
A job is what puts food on the table. A calling is the most important thing you can do in which you would be most difficult to replace.
I write four articles a day for my GaryNorth.com site. Most of my subscribers are content with this policy. They have paid for this service. I may decide to cut this to three articles some time, but then some subscribers may cancel. It depends on how many articles you want to read every day.
I produce two or three screencast videos a day for the Ron Paul Curriculum. This is a permanent transfer of knowledge to a new generation of students.
This man thinks I am doing it for money. Money, money, money. I am obsessed with money. As I said, this man is a schnook.
Now, if you can make money while you are doing your calling, I am all in favor of it. Pastors do this. Professional athletes do it for a few years in their lives. Certain entertainers do this. But most people do not get paid to do their callings, and if they do, they work for nonprofit organizations.
My approach for over 40 years has been to fund my calling by means of my jobs. Why does this schnook think that I spent 17,000 hours free of charge to write my economic commentary on the Bible? (On average, almost exactly two hours per printed page: 8550 pages.) Does he think I was wasting my time? He has no perception of any of this. He has never figured out that writing 31 volumes of material free of charge had something to do with my calling, not with my job.
Add to this 35,000 hours of free work at the Institute for Christian Economics to raise the funds and develop the mailing list, 1977-2001.
Why did I do this? Because I had to develop an audience for the books. But this schnook either ignores this or is unaware of it. If he is unaware of it, then he really is blind. How can anybody be a long-term follower of me and not perceive that this has been my strategy for over 40 years?
I am appalled that anybody can be this blind. But they are.
He felt confident in sending me a letter calling me to task, and telling me what I don't understand about money. He accuses me of being a money-driven, money-grubbing author. Again, this man is a schnook.
The world is full of schnooks. It is sad, but it is true. No amount of writing, no amount of preaching, no amount of cajoling, no amount of threatening, no amount of anything that anybody can do can make schnooks any less out of touch. This is the message of the book of Proverbs, and it still is true.
I had to do all of the work to write my commentaries and the support materials in order to be in a position, presumably beginning next year, to write my magnum opus: a Christian equivalent of either The Wealth of Nations or Human Action. Why did I think I had to do this, beginning around 1963? A lot of people who don't know anything about economics, and barely know anything about theology, have claimed to be writing Christian economics. This has gone on for centuries. Yet not one of them ever went back to the Old and New Testaments to develop a comprehensive, passage-by-passage exegetical analysis of exactly what these passages taught. They faked it. They adopted whatever the latest fad was in their generation, and then they went back and got a few Bible verses to support the fad. I knew that was fake from day one, and I knew by 1973 that I wasn't going to play this game. But it took me until 2012 to complete my homework.
I did this all for free.
This is what it takes to fund a calling. There is no tooth fairy out there. Some sugar daddy isn't there to help you with your calling; he is there to buy your time to promote whatever it is that he wants to promote. There are no free lunches out there, folks. If you want to do something unique, you are going to have to fund it yourself.
My father-in-law worked until he got a combination of heart disease and cancer. He still cranked out more work than most people when he was sick. He didn't do it for the money. He did it because it was his calling.
I have known a few men like this, and I have never met one of them who did any of it for money. Think of Ludwig von Mises. Think of Murray Rothbard. People like them do it to change the world. They do it because nobody else will do it. That is what the whole idea of the calling is about.
I work at least 16 hours a day. If I could get by on less sleep, I would work 18 hours a day. I need five hours of sleep, but if I could make it on three hours, I would devote the extra time to work.
THE TICKING CLOCK
Nobody knows when he is going to die. If he has a lifetime project in mind, he has to pace himself. He makes guesses about when he is going to die, and then he paces himself carefully, so that he can get all of the work done in the time he is likely to have left to him.
He works like a maniac while he can, because he doesn't know if he's going to die the next day. This is what I have found in the lives of those men I regard as men who have contributed something that may significantly affect the world around them. This is the price it takes.
This is why the average guy will not do it. This is why the average rich man will not do it.
I am sensitive to this because I am teaching this very week on the book by Richard Koch, Living the 80/20 Way. He is worth a couple of hundred million dollars, and he comes along to tell us that we really are working too hard. He thinks we should enjoy more leisure. He has created a worldwide cottage industry of books and materials on the Pareto 80/20 principle. He is making money hand over fist doing it. And yet he tells us we need to slow down. No, we don't need to slow down. He says: "We have all the time in the world." That is the title of Chapter 3. On the contrary, we have almost no time. We have so little time that it's here and gone seemingly overnight. Older people tell this to younger people. It is accurate.
My model is Caleb. Caleb at age 85 was ready for war.
And Moses sware on that day, saying, Surely the land whereon thy feet have trodden shall be thine inheritance, and thy children's for ever, because thou hast wholly followed the LORD my God. And now, behold, the LORD hath kept me alive, as he said, these forty and five years, even since the LORD spake this word unto Moses, while the children of Israel wandered in the wilderness: and now, lo, I am this day fourscore and five years old. 11As yet I am as strong this day as I was in the day that Moses sent me: as my strength was then, even so is my strength now, for war, both to go out, and to come in. Now therefore give me this mountain, whereof the LORD spake in that day; for thou heardest in that day how the Anakims were there, and that the cities were great and fenced: if so be the LORD will be with me, then I shall be able to drive them out, as the LORD said (Joshua 14:9-12).
There was a popular song in 1950: "Enjoy yourself. It's later than you think." It is far later than we think. That is why we have to work hard, rather than spending time on leisure activities, enjoying ourselves. Our enjoyment must come from our ability to work like maniacs, day after day, decade after decade. If that is not how you enjoy your life, you are short-sighted. You are also hard of hearing. You need to hear that ticking clock. If you are going to leave a legacy behind, you have got to work at it systematically. Most men won't do it, which is why most men won't leave much of a legacy.
MONEY: A TOOL OF DOMINION
I make a lot of money. I make a lot of money on this site, and I make a lot of money with the Ron Paul Curriculum. I'd like to make 30 or 40 times more money on the Ron Paul Curriculum. That's because I'd like to influence 30 or 40 times more students.
I would not work 30 times harder to build this website. I have enough to do as it is. I have to deal with emails like the one the guy sent me. But with the Ron Paul Curriculum, it's different. Once those videos are up, it's all over but the marketing. Then the only question is this: how many buyers of the curriculum can we get? I will have to write the ads to get these buyers. But it's better to get 100 times as many buyers than half as many buyers.
The issue of the Ron Paul Curriculum is this: should there be a legacy of free market economics for students whose parents pull them out of the public schools? There is nothing else like this curriculum. There is certainly nothing else like it for $500 a year.
Was it worth doing? Second, could it be issued for free? I suppose if some multimillionaire came along and offered to buy us all out, and then devote $20 million a year to advertising it, I would agree to that. I'm sure Dr. Paul would agree to that. But then the question is this: will this person then get rid of all of our materials, and substitute someone else's materials? But why would he do this? He can do this on his own. He doesn't need me and Tom Woods to carry his water.
CONCLUSION
Again, this will remind you that it really is important that you pay attention to what you read. The man who sent me that email has not paid attention to anything I have written, and I don't know how many decades he's been reading me. But he doesn't read with any degree of perception. If you're going to spend time reading, I recommend strongly that you make some attempt to understand what you're reading. Otherwise, you are wasting your time.