The dreamer or the pragmatist

Who wins?

So, the other day, a client of mine was running late for his session. I quickly found myself mindlessly scrolling through Instagram to pass the time. I noticed two reels side-by-side in my feed.

The Prof G model

The first was a treatise by Professor Scott Galloway, often referred to as Prof G. You may have seen his feed, listened to his popular podcast Pivot, or watched him spar good-naturedly with Bill Maher. In his pre-influencer incarnation, he’s served as a successful businessman and a marketing professor at NYU. Galloway insists that the path to success involves finding the thing you do best, ideally early in life, and spending all of your time, or virtually all of it, doing that thing. Clocking your 10,000 hours. He’s not much for laziness or disengagement. Become an expert. He’s a Just Do It type of guy.

It doesn’t matter if you love the thing or even care about it. What matters is that it makes you money. Money begets money begets wealth. This, Galloway insists, is the path to success. He says the only people who should be following their passions are already wealthy.

So, in a nutshell, according to Galloway, if you’re young, do the thing you’re good at, not the thing you care about. The latter is a red herring that will lead you astray from the path to success.

On the face of it, one could argue that this is sound, pragmatic advice. Galloway deftly cuts through the tangle of overthinking and indecisiveness that too often taxes the minds of our young people. He offers clarity of vision, purpose and action. Super compelling, directive, clear-eyed stuff.

The Gary Vee model

As it happens, the very next reel in my feed consisted of a few lines by Gary Vaynerchuk, Gary Vee to his many loyal followers. Like Galloway, Vee is also a former business and marketing guy turned youth influencer. In this reel, an audience member asked Gary about the road to success, and he exclaims something along the lines of, “You are young. You need to use this time to get out there and try everything. See what lights your fire. Find the thing that ignites you and drives your passion. That’s the key to success and happiness.”

First, I have to wonder why we are so set on following the advice of marketing guys. How did these dudes become our gurus?

Regardless, these conflicting messages on success, presented to me back-to-back, made me think about the confused young people I work with. They’re all carrying these conflicting messages not only from the adults in their lives, but from influencers of every stripe online. No wonder so many of them lack vision for the future, and express so very little interest in adulthood. Making sense of, and drawing hope from, this confusion is a frequently discussed, deep concern in my practice. And if you’re a parent of a teenager or a young adult, I’ll bet it’s a concern of yours as well.

My personal story

In any event, I feel compelled and uniquely qualified to weigh in on this particular point of debate.

I suspect I’ve shared my own story in some previous Substack pieces, but I was fortunate enough to discover my passion early on. When I was a kid, I saw a film called Ordinary People in the theater. I learned a couple of things that day. First, I learned how drawn I was to the deepest and darkest of dramas and traumas, especially when they involved family. In retrospect, perhaps I was preparing myself for what was to come in my own family.

If you’re not familiar with the film, please watch it. It’s a friggin’ masterpiece. The plot revolves around a boating accident in treacherous waters on Lake Michigan. An older brother drowns while a younger brother, played by Timothy Hutton, survives. As the tattered remains of his family disintegrate in the wake of this tragedy, the Hutton character sees a therapist played masterfully by Judd Hirsch.

I was so moved by the humanity of the therapy sessions depicted in the film. The way Hirsch worked to understand, tend to and contain Hutton’s pain. And I recognized for the first time that this was a way that somebody could spend their life: working as a therapist, with young people and families, in Chicago.

I could envision this life for myself, idealize it, manifest it.

Yeah, I suddenly had some vision for the future, my future. But I didn’t tell a soul. This potential path felt embarrassing somehow. I didn’t know any therapists, and the emotional nature of the work made me feel exposed and vulnerable. Still, my heart was set on that profession. It felt like a calling. It may sound absurdly naïve and idealistic, but I wanted to help, to heal. I wanted to spend my time opening brighter doors for dispirited people to walk through.

Fast-forward four years: the Sunday before we declared our college majors, I called my parents on the phone with excitement and no small degree of trepidation. I gave voice to my dream for the very first time:

“I’m going to major in psychology. That’s the work I want to do. I want to help families.”

A long period of silence followed, then my mother:

“No, John, you’re not. You’ll never get a job. You’re so good at math, gifted. So do this: major in accounting and work for one of the big firms here in Chicago.”

She was right. I was good at math. Working for one of the big firms close to the support of family would undoubtably provide a sound, solid fiscal future. It was virtually a sure thing.

Made sense, I guess.

Still, I immediately felt anxious, crestfallen and suddenly, absolutely lost. But, like any good Catholic boy, I did precisely as I was told. By noon the next day, I was officially an Accounting Major. I was told by a very excited faculty member that I was making the right choice. That my future was bright. I’ll be an auditor one day soon. I’ll earn my CPA. Maybe one day I can dream about becoming a controller, even a CFO.

At nineteen-years-old, I didn’t know about any of these jobs or acronyms, but they all sounded robotic and deadly to me.

At the time, Chicago held offices for each of the Big Eight accounting firms. I interviewed with all eight firms. I received eight offers. I’m not bragging, I swear. This was no big feat at the time. I was coming from a very good school with a very good GPA in a very good accounting program. I was a damn desirable candidate. Lots of us were.

And the fact that these firms wanted me in their employ solidified my parents’ position on my career. Arthur Andersen, the firm I ended up working for, even sent a representative to campus to take me out to lunch, offer me a little signing bonus, really roll out the red carpet.

Curiously, in the middle of that lunch in January 1986, the television was on in the restaurant. I watched in real time as the Challenger spacecraft exploded in the sky, killing all the astronauts aboard, including a teacher.

In retrospect, I maybe should have seen this as a sign.

In any event, post-graduation, I went the Prof G route, hard. I dug into this accounting gig and found myself moving up the ranks rather quickly. I was working 70-, 80-, even 90-hour weeks on end during busy seasons of the year. I was making good money. I looked the part of the young Chicago businessman in my power ties, my tassle-y loafers, my suspenders, my briefcase.

My empty briefcase, but still.

On occasion, however, I would experience a moment of enormous dissonance, a reminder of quashed dreams. One day, during a rare lunch break with my friend Chuck, I expressed to him that I felt unhappy and unfulfilled in this work. He turned to face me on a crowded Chicago sidewalk, dead serious, and I quote him verbatim:

“John, we are 23-years-old. What else in the world could we possibly do? It’s too late. We are locked into this whether you like it or not.”

I just checked LinkedIn. Chuck is a CFO. I sincerely hope he’s happy.

I resigned myself to life in this firm, this life. After all, on paper and from the outside, it did look damn good. My parents and family were proud. My alma mater was proud, or so their correspondence suggested. I was on the path that so many of my friends were on. I was rapidly moving up the corporate ladder. My feedback and annual reviews were super positive. Promotions came readily. I developed trusting and friendly relationships with co-workers and clients.

I was on the path to certain success, smooth, nice and easy. No mess. No muss. No fuss. Partner track, baby!

The price I paid

Still, every single day, though I could play the part, I felt significantly off. And that internal disharmony did not manifest as a quiet whisper in the back of my mind. No, it was loud, overtly disruptive. My dissonance showed up as profound, nearly debilitating panic attacks at work, every day. Breathlessness, numb extremities, disruption in my visual field, powerful sense of depersonalization, all showed up in an unannounced instant. I could always gather myself, find my way back to the meeting, or the audit, or the spreadsheet. But I never felt any remote investment in any of it. My growing paycheck would arrive every couple of weeks, and I couldn’t care less. I was assigned an office outside the collegiate-style bullpen of pseudo-private desks. Again, good on paper.

Meaningless to me.

To this point, through the lion’s share of my 20s, I went the Professor Galloway route. I found a thing I was good at, honed my skills, and started making the money he deemed necessary. In the meantime, I wholly ignored, and tried so hard to forget about, that passion for therapy that itched the back of my mind persistently.

And on a daily basis, I felt anxious, depressed, 100% shitty. And keep in mind that I was working long hours, weekends included, the vast majority of the time. There was no break in the suffering.

The turnaround

Five endless years into this career, I met Julie in an improv class. It was another year or more until we started dating seriously. One day, she pointed out the obvious:

“John you clearly do not like what you’re doing. You panic every day. You remind me of ET dying in that dry river bed. You’ve told me more than once that you wanted to be a psychologist.

You are an adult. You get to decide these things. We are going to drive out to the suburbs and tell your parents about your new plan right now. Then you can tell your bosses”

I freaked:

“No, Julie, you don’t understand. We don’t work like that. We are nose-to-the-grindstone people. Happiness is not part of the makeup of success for us. Hard work and sacrifice, those are the things.”

That day, thank God, Julie’s will was stronger than mine. We told my parents. They weren’t thrilled, but they recognized I was an adult and I wasn’t asking them for anything. I was just letting them know. Within a very short period of time, I arranged a meeting with my then boss, Andersen partner, de facto mentor and good friend Jerry Turner. Within five minutes of promoting me to manager, he suggested I leave the firm. He was certain that this was not the place I wanted to be.

Shortly after that, I consulted with my longtime spiritual guru, Father John Cusick, over lunch. I presented my quandary to him:

“So, I’ve got this job that I hate that pays me pretty well. But I know what I really want to do. I want to go back to school and get a doctorate in psychology. I want to be a therapist. I want to help people. What do you think? What should I do?”

Instead of answering, Father John slowly slid his chair back and stood up:

“Duffy, you’ve got to be kidding me. Lunch is on you.”

With that, he was gone. Without a word, he made his point. The decision had to be mine.

So, I left the sure thing, that job in public accounting. I abandoned the partner track, just a few years from making bank.

My friends at Andersen suggested I was crazy for leaving.

But after all that deliberation and psychic pain, I decided to go the Gary Vee route. The day I started graduate school was one of the happiest days of my life. Julie and I were newly married, living in a very, very modest apartment. My income prospects went from McMansion comfortable to bungalow humble.

But I was happy.

I was happy to work overnights as a psychiatric technician at a hospital in the suburbs to make ends meet. I was happy to show apartments on the weekends to supplement our income. I was happy to find ways to split time with Julie so that we could both care for our then newborn son George while maintaining the roof over our heads.

I felt hope. I was going to do the thing I wanted to do. I was going to be Judd Hirsch in Ordinary People.

And I knew things were going to work out for us. Both Julie and I knew it.

I’ve now been practicing psychology for thirty years. Every morning, I look up at my doctorate and send up a little prayer of gratitude. I am, in fact, living the life of my dreams, the only professional life I can imagine.

And it hasn’t just worked out in terms of some vague sense of satisfaction. It turns out that the thing I was interested in all those years ago, the thing that caught my eye in a movie theater at 15-years-old, was the thing that I would prove to be best at. Following passion accomplished both Galloway and Gary Vee goals.

The message

Incidentally, my therapy practice was also the thing that would prove to make me the most money. I do think Gary Vee was right. Follow your passion, and money will, eventually, follow. Not incidentally, the firm that I had worked for, that accounting firm that was going to make me a millionaire, ran into a massive, scandalous, company-destroying scandal not long after I left. I’m not saying it was the Enron scandal, but I’m not saying it wasn’t either.

Regardless, I can look back, knowing it would not have worked out had I stayed in that accounting career. I had tried the Galloway route. I had put in my 10,000 hours and then some. But it turns out that following my instincts, pursuing the thing I loved, that was the thing that was going to make me happy. And successful. And financially secure.

My career has also taken me to wonderful places I never thought I would go. Five hundred clients, three best-selling books, and countless media appearances are dreams I didn’t know I had. So, I did what I hoped I would do. But that led to results I never would have dreamed of.

The punchline, the thing that I encourage all of my young clients to do: follow your passion. Try all the things, even if they feel ridiculous, or well outside your wheelhouse. Pay attention to what grabs you, what draws you in, what you care about. Pay attention to the adults around you and what they’re doing, what your parents are doing, what their friends are doing, what people are doing in films or on TV. See what catches your eye. See what light you on fire. Pursue that thing. Trust your instincts. That will make you successful.

What Professor Galloway gets wrong is that passion is important in setting up a happy, fulfilling future. And more often than that, a financially secure future. Money matters, for sure. But I am a living testament to the reality that money, free of passion and fulfillment, not only loses meaning quickly, but for many people, it becomes untenable.

I became symptomatic and unwell under the Prof G model.

And I fear an awful lot of talent is left on the field untapped because people are discouraged from pursuing meaning and encouraged to accumulate wealth alone. We can have both, believe me.

Now, I know that wish fulfillment like this does not feel viable for every single one of us. My ridiculous privilege is not remotely lost on me. I’ve been lectured about that over and over again. But honestly, I’m not sure I believe it. I’m not sure that, with tenacity, hard work, support, mentorship and a plan, that any one of us, even the most oppressed of us, cannot fulfill our dreams. I truly believe we can. I refuse to believe we cannot.

Some people, perhaps the lion’s share of us, need to follow our dreams. The passion we put into our work will not only afford us a living beyond what we may imagine, but it can create good in the world: healing, activism, advocacy, innovation, motivation, hope.

Galloway et al may dismiss all of this as useless dreaming. But I’ve come to learn that we need dreamers, that the dream is in fact pragmatic.

And there is meaning in the dream. Not that there’s no meaning in money and financial stability: studies suggest the lack of either can drive an awful lot of stress, depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, and even completed suicides. But overall, I think the former can lead elegantly to the latter. Of course, you can make money, even good money, in work you don’t love. You can invest money, buy a home, all the things – although they seem far more remote for young people now than they did for us.

In fact, it’s this very thing that our kids fear most. They won’t be able to make a living, or they’ll hate the living they make, and loathe themselves for selling out to it.

But let’s restore some hope in them and recognize that they can have both. I’m proof of it. It may require some creativity and ingenuity, but I know our young people can create lives they can live with, they can thrive within, they can one day retire comfortably from. I know this: the idea of money without meaning means very little to them, and will leave the vast majority of them feeling empty, questioning their value. But purpose matters to our kids. So let’s allow for the flexibility in thinking that creates space for joy in their work.

Maybe we can do the same for ourselves. In a world of ordinary people, let’s choose to live extraordinary lives.