A few years ago my back gave out when both my kids jumped on me at the same time. After a doctor visit and x-rays confirming the absence of serious injury, I received the standard issue medical advice for 90% of all back problems: “Take it easy and it will clear up in time.”

I did, and it did, but the experience was a stunning reminder that nothing can replace the good fortune of health. I stared in alarm at a photograph of myself: a sagging-posture “office physique” 40 pounds heftier than what I weighed in college. Without change, my physical condition would slowly deteriorate.

Well, it took time and hard work, but I’m finally back in shape. Though I’d never formally considered how I went about it, after reading Get Fit Slowly, I sat down and tried to distill the key points of my “program.” Here’s what I came up with: Four Simple Steps to Getting Fit (they’re not easy, but they’re simple).

Step 1. Stop eating while you’re still hungry

Most of us are accustomed to eating until we feel full. But if you feel full, you’ve already overeaten. Stop. Think. Chew your food slowly and thoroughly, and pay attention to how you feel as you proceed through your meal. If you attend closely to your eating, you’ll feel yourself gradually filling up. Stop eating when you feel about 80% full (don’t worry, you won’t starve. In Japan, this is known as hara-hachibun: the “80% full” policy—it helps you distinguish between eating to refuel and eating because it tastes good). If you decide to drink alcohol with your meal, eat less food to compensate for the additional volume (remember, stop when you feel 80% full). From the standpoint of losing weight, this 80% rule is the most important of the Four Steps.

Step 2. Weigh yourself twice a day

Weigh yourself first thing in the morning and again before you go to bed at night. Do this not to obsess about results, but to see what happens when you drink a beer late at night, or how constipation or poor elimination affects your weight. Weigh consistently, and you’ll quickly see the results of Step 1 reflected in the numbers. An enormously successful Japanese diet plan consists of doing nothing but recording one’s weight—writing it down in a special journal—several times per day. Paying attention to and becoming conscious of your weight is an extremely effective strategy. Do it religiously and the rest of your behavior will fall in line.

Step 3. Drink plenty of water and take psyllium fiber daily

Drink a couple of big glasses of water as soon as you get up, and after breakfast, drink another big glass of water or juice with a hefty teaspoonful of psyllium fiber (Metamucil is an inexpensive but poor substitute—it has tons of added sucrose). The fiber will fill you up, and—to put it rather undelicately—make you crap like a horse. And no, unlike laxatives, which loosen your bowels through chemical action, fiber strengthens your guts by making them work harder. My doctor recommended this as a way to reduce my high blood pressure, and I’ve been a fiber fan since.

Step 4. Start an exercise routine

This is the least important Step from the standpoint of losing weight, but the most important from the standpoint of becoming fit. Sticking to an exercise routine—just like the routine of weighing yourself, the fiber regimen, and the habit of conscious eating—strengthens your overall program. I got professional help from a corrective exercise specialist, who immediately perceived my biggest problem—poor posture—and designed a trunk-strengthening program for me.

Well, that’s everything I know about losing weight and getting fit, and therefore my first and last post on the subject. It’s all well-known stuff, but I learned the Four Simple Steps by doing them, and they worked for me. Maybe they’ll work for you, too.

(This post is from the Soul Shelter archives. A slightly modified version first appeared at Get Fit Slowly.)

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Upon completion of the final draft of my latest novel three years ago, I sent out an e-mail to my family and closest friends. Subject heading: “What Has Mark Been Doing for the Last Six Years?” The message field was empty. The e-mail contained nothing but the following image.

Those manuscript pages, towering at six inches, said it all. Though my book wouldn’t appear in hardcover for another year or so, it had already become gloriously material. (Actually, the book started out materially, as I generated the first draft entirely by longhand, but there had been a long, sensory-deprived period of computer entry.)

I’ve always been somewhat uncomfortable with the term Word-processing. To me, its connotations are too industrial. I picture language mashed into paste, dunked in preservatives, and canned for a lengthy shelf-life.

(What term might we substitute? Anything measurably less utilitarian. Word-pruning? Word-arranging? Word-massaging?)

But my aversion, I suppose, extends beyond the jargon itself to the technology that spawned it. As noted in prior posts, I can take only so much of staring at a screen, watching the phantasmal flash of the cursor, straining to translate my inward human imaginings into ciphers of inhuman electronic light.

Paper is better. You can feel a clean white page. Each new leaf is cool to the touch. It crackles in the hands. It is of the body. On the page, the inwardly human becomes outwardly human — no cyber-middleman required. And for the novelist, a pile of papers is a thing of beauty, signifying a task slowly and inarguably surmounted, a vision taking physical form.

For these reasons I’ve recently invested in a technological downgrade of unparalleled value. Here’s a photo:

That’s right, a Royal H-H Typewriter, circa 1958.

While I’m still in the longhand stage of my new novel’s composition — and will eventually have to, ahem, word-process, the Royal allows me to get a clean (well, clean enough) printout without submitting to the numbing cursor.

Here, in summary, are a few valuable benefits — creative and I daresay spiritual — found in this “downgrade”:

1. Eschewing instantaneousness.
It’s a long, hard road one must walk when writing a novel. Patience becomes a most useful virtue. But instantaneousness, or a technology that predisposes you to it, is counterproductive. Spontaneity, okay. An adventuresome spirit, sure. But good books aren’t generally written quickly.

2. Producing hard copy as you go.
Typewritten pages provide a record of the creative process, a physical imprint direct from the imagination, a trail of decisions and revisions made along the way. This can be invaluable when it turns out that your inner editor has overstepped his bounds. Give him use of a computer’s Backspace key and that guy’ll expunge everything.

3. Avoiding repetitive-stress injury.
The Royal H-H is a twenty-pound hunk of metal with innards of good ol’ fashioned, elegantly designed moving parts. You’ve got to employ fingers and arms in a variety of interesting ways to work this machine. Every new page requires hand-loading, alignment, and knob-twisting advancement. The carriage return demands that you lift a hand from the keys after every line. The Royal keeps you limber.

4. Stimulating the senses.
Unlike staring at a screen, staring at a piece of paper rolled snugly against the platen threatens no deleterious effects upon your eyesight. What’s more, you can whiff the typewriter ribbon and the oiled key-hammers. You can delight in the rewarding chime at the end of each line, followed by the clickety-slide of the carriage return. (The whimsical musicality of the typewriter is celebrated delightfully here.)

5. Opportunity for further consideration, revision, refining.
Once the typewriter draft is done, I must re-type the entire manuscript into a computer document for ease of transmission, copy-edits, book design, etc. This provides further ample opportunity to review the work and weigh the choices I’ve made.

Well, enough hobby writing.

(This post clatters forth from the Soul Shelter archives)

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Unleashing Ideas: A Four-Fold Approach

These days, the term slow suffers a number of negative connotations. Industrialism, globalization, and high-tech, high-speed information systems have made “slow” virtually interchangeable with “unproductive,” “costly,” “out-of-date,” “useless,” “lazy,” “stupid,” “ineffectual,” or just plain “broken.”

But in recent years, the go-go-go modern lifestyle of fast food, fast connections, fast talk, fast cars, and fast money has inspired a swing of the cultural pendulum back toward the cultivation of more mindful habits in personal lives. We’re beginning to realize the costs of so much fastness — the damage it can do to our bodies, our minds, our spirits.

Wait a minute, we’re saying. We’re human beings. Our work is important and so is our time, certainly, but what is that time really worth if spent at a blurring pace in hopes of packing every minute with profit or accomplishment? Is that any way to live? — letting time drain away so you hardly notice it? No, we all require balance, rest, and peace of mind if we’re going to continue to be healthy, happy, and yes, productive citizens.

So we find certain cultural initiatives such as the Slow Food Movement emerging to new prominence. We see people stepping back to say, “The Internet is terrific and all, but we need to learn to unplug and take walk in the park, or sit down to talk face-to-face with a friend!”

Slowness, it turns out, is a fundamental aspect of a meaningful human life. Doesn’t the age-old impulse toward religion show us what an essential human impulse slowness is? Practicing meditation, attending Mass, or praying in the mosque or temple we gain perspective, we slow down, we breathe and return to the moment at hand. And it’s not only religion that does the trick. We walk in the woods, we ponder a work of art, we explore history, we write a poem or read one.

Speaking of poetry, here’s one on the subject of slowness which I particularly like. Whenever I read “The Waking” by Theodore Roethke, I can practically feel the coils of my brain unwinding, the hammering of the clock growing fainter. Slowness sets in and everything around me seems to get a little bit clearer.

Do yourself a favor and read the following stanzas slowly. This isn’t the morning paper. Give each line your thought, rather than expecting the line’s thought to be given to you. If you’re able to, read the lines aloud. Each one deserves a breath — or two — of its own.

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.
(Theodore Roethke; 1953)

Carl Honore is the author of the book, In Praise of Slowness (2004). He’s got a lot of wonderful things to say about the value of slowing down and paying more attention. An online video captures his 20-minute talk at the annual TED conference back in 2005. (TED, which stands for “Technology, Entertainment, Design,” is a fascinating event geared around “inspired talks by the world’s greatest thinkers and doers.” The TED website, which features many videos of these talks, is well worth exploring.)

Let’s allow Mr. Honore to conclude this Soul Shelter post. Follow the link and give him a listen.

(This post comes to you from the Soul Shelter archives.)

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“A Moment of Fulfillment“

While reviewing thousands of psychology studies performed over the past six decades, Martin Seligman discovered a disturbing pattern: the overwhelming majority dealt with mental illness. Only a tiny portion addressed the issue of greatest concern to most people: How to be happy.

Dr. Seligman, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, was thunderstruck by the implications of his discovery. During World War II, Seligman realized, psychologists had focused on helping traumatized soldiers regain their lives. In the process they became preoccupied with studying, classifying, and treating mental illnesses. Inquiries into happiness and well-being were crowded out of the research ring. For the past 60 years psychology had been devoted almost exclusively to rehabilitation, remaining largely unconcerned with understanding how people become happier and more satisfied.

Seligman has since spearheaded a “positive psychology” movement dedicated to scientifically defining, identifying, classifying, and engendering behavior causally linked to happiness and well-being.

In short, he and others have undertaken rigorous research into Soul Shelter territory: Fortune and fulfillment. What did they learn?

Most important, work satisfaction is crucial. Seligman discovered that people become happier when they can use their “signature strengths”—another word for skills or core competencies—in an enterprise linked to a greater good. That jibes with Marcus Buckingham’s work (and my personal theory that business ventures are scalable and successful to the extent that they address significant social problems).

A growing number of scholars agree. Psychologists and couples therapist Aline Zoldbrod says recent research demonstrates that materialism is bad for one’s emotional well-being. Psychology professor Tim Kasser, the author of one such study, was quoted in an International Herald Tribune article:

Consumer culture is continually bombarding us with the message that materialism will make us happy. What this research shows is that that’s not true.

Such findings trace back to the Easterlin paradox, first proposed in 1974 by the economist Richard Easterlin. Easterlin conducted a global study showing that wealth does not improve national happiness levels once basic needs are fulfilled. Since then the Easterlin paradox has become one touchstone of the positive psychology movement as it relates to happiness.

Recently, though, the Easterlin paradox has been challenged. An article entitled “Maybe Money Can Buy Happiness” quoted two economists who found measurement problems with the data underlying the Easterlin paradox. “The central message,” one said, “is that income does matter.” Other economists agree.

Easterlin himself admits that people in richer countries are more satisfied, but cautions that correlation does not equal causality. In other words, wealth doesn’t necessarily cause satisfaction.

What are we non-economist, non-psychologist types to make of all this?

Well, it seems the experts agree on at least one thing: increased wealth clearly increases happiness for people living paycheck-to-paycheck. Yet unbridled materialism is a recipe for dissatisfaction. The problem seems to be our ability to effectively predict what will make us happy. Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert put it this way in (yet) another IHT article:

If it were the case that money made us totally miserable, we’d figure out we were wrong … it’s wrong in a more nuanced way. We think money will bring lots of happiness for a long time, and actually it brings a little happiness for a short time.

P.S. On May 2nd, 2008, after completing the rewrite of this post, I discovered that Justin Wolfers, the author of Economic Growth and Subjective Well-Being: Reassessing the Easterlin Paradox, wrote an extensive, six-part series on happiness. I really need to start reading more posts than I write …

(This essay first appeared in a different form in the October 2004 issue of Japan Entrepreneur Report. It comes to you today from the Soul Shelter archives.)

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“Recognizing the Opportunity Within“

Here in the Pacific Northwest the tree-leaves that haven’t yet fallen are burning bright with reds and yellows. Over the last several weeks twilight has come on noticeably earlier, and with our clocks now turned back an hour, we find ourselves in full tilt toward the year’s shortest days and longest nights.

As deep autumn alters the structure of my weeks ahead, time is much on my mind. So I thought I’d offer a few simple if occasionally offbeat ideas for “stretching” time — not, mind you, in the quantitative sense of maximizing productivity, but in the qualitative sense of remembering and appreciating how rich and deep with life every fleeting hour can be if one seeks one’s fulfillment in each.

1. Log-Off, Disconnect, Unplug

In his book The Gutenberg Elegies, Sven Birkerts makes an important point about the nature of time:

‘Duration’ is deep time, time experienced without the awareness of time passing. Until quite recently, people on the planet lived mainly in terms of duration time. Time not artificially broken, but shaped around natural rhythmic cycles, time bound to the integrated functioning of the senses, the perceptions. We have destroyed that duration… We have fractured the flow of time…into competing simultaneities. We learn to do five things at once or pay the price.

Given the way our ultra-connected, online existences splinter time into frantic parcels, one’s first and most reliable method of stretching time these days is to switch off one’s devices in favor of analog reality, to become electronically inaccessible, to deliberately remove oneself from the pixellated up-to-the-minute what’s-new-what’s-now? hubbub, and step back into the true Now of the natural world.

In other words, whenever possible choose solitary introspection over information acquisition, or face-to-face interaction over hyper-connectivity.

And once offline, consider each of the following.

2. Travel, or Just Go Someplace New to You

We’ve all experienced a certain strange sensation while walking up a path and back in a place we’d never been before: Always, on that first outbound walk the path seems much longer than it does on the return.

A similar thing happens, on a larger scale, when one travels — especially when one travels abroad. While plunged amid a different culture, and perhaps surrounded by an alien language, each week can seem a month, each month a year, and each year a lifetime in its own right.

In traveling, or just going someplace new, one puts oneself into the realm of the unexpected, where one’s senses and imagination are stimulated to a degree that simply doesn’t occur in everyday life. This has a profound time-stretching effect. In the thick of business as usual, on the other hand, one’s response to the world is largely habitual, and through the lens of habit time seems only to grow more scarce.

Try it. Go away and think nothing of a homecoming. Go as one likes to go by the sea in the night, farther and farther out under the many silent stars. Try it. –Rainer Maria Rilke

3. Undertake a New Project Whose End Is Nowhere in Sight

Write a novel (no outlines allowed). Research your genealogy. Bond with a child. Volunteer at your community center or library or local tree-planting organization.

This point relates to my previous one, for the activities I just mentioned call for a new, often imaginative disposition. Each is an undertaking bound to break up routines of thought and behavior, and thus to take one out of one’s own customary sense of time.

4. Read Books About Other People’s Lives (Fiction and Non)

A wise and inspiring teacher (who happens to be my wife) puts it this way for her students:

We read to live a thousand lives with the one we’re given.

What could I possibly amend?

5. People-Watch

This is one of my favorite activities. I park myself at a busy spot (in my car or on a bench) and simply observe the various characters strolling or hurrying past, getting coffee, exercising their dogs, chasing after toddlers, waiting for the bus, etc.

The time-stretching benefits of people-watching are much like reading. Again, it’s all about exploring one’s own imaginative capacities.

I want my soul to be a wandering thing, able to move back into a hundred forms. I want to dream myself into priests and wanderers, female cooks and murderers, children and animals, and, more than anything else, birds and trees; that is necessary, I want it, I need it so I can go on living, and if sometime I were to lose these possibilities and be caught in so-called reality, then I would rather die. — Hermann Hesse*

6. Meditate

This one’s probably obvious. But many people are unsure about what meditation really is. Think of it, if you like, as sitting and doing nothing — but remember that it’s got to be unadulterated inactivity accompanied by presence of mind, which is a very different state from the vacant passivity arrived at while, say, watching TV. Meditation, as I recommend it, means centering one’s focus upon one’s own pulse and breath, thinking about nothing else in particular. It means removing oneself from all stimuli save the flow of time.

It is a sort of Eternity for a man to have his Time all to himself. – Charles Lamb

My previous two suggestions, reading and people-watching, could be understood as more active forms of meditation — but how often these days does one consciously free oneself to do nothing at all, to exist for a while fully separate (and still awake) from all pressing matters and all noise? To do so is to return to a core, and to bask in what Birkerts calls “deep time.”

I suspect that this kind of sitting meditation is today, more than ever, confused with — and avoided as — boredom. But really, boredom, at least as we often mean the term, is the opposite of meditation, for unlike meditation, boredom itself does nothing to renew and enliven the soul’s rich sense of time and time’s elasticity. (This fine article in The Boston Globe, however, makes a good case for reassessing boredom’s benefits).

Here’s a final word for today on the subject of boredom, time, and time-stretching, written some eighty years ago by the great German novelist Thomas Mann:

What people call boredom is actually an abnormal compression of time caused by monotony — uninterrupted uniformity can shrink large spaces of time until the heart falters, terrified to death. When every day is like every other, then all days are like one, and perfect homogeneity would make the longest life seem very short, as if it had flown by in a twinkling. …We know full well that the insertion of new habits or the changing of old ones is the only way to preserve life, to renew our sense of time, to rejuvenate, intensify, and retard our experience of time — and thereby renew our sense of life itself. **

*Hesse translation by James Wright

**Mann translation by John E. Woods

(This is a renascent post from Soul Shelter’s Year-One archives)

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Then we boarded, then we were in the air, and I watched as two rows in front of me one of the young girls started braiding her long, flaxen hair.

Somehow the expert weaving mesmerized me, and suddenly time stopped. There was a pleasant buzzing drone, and I felt like animals must feel, just sensing, no thinking, no disembodied “mind” driving the body like a car. Everything seemed one.

I was in the moment, and didn’t have to read, or write, or watch a movie, or do something or be productive or think about tasks ahead or past behind. I was content to watch the girl’s fingers braiding and not anticipate the next moment, which never comes anyway, because this is the moment: Now, the Now that is, the Now that will be, the Now that was. It’s all one Now, and always was, and I knew this again entirely, as I hadn’t for some very long time.

Then the braiding of the flaxen hair was finished, and I started to think about the extraordinary experience of time stopping and scrambled to write this down. But thinking was my mistake; it made the moment disappear. I scribbled down some of the words you see here, then looked back at the braided hair, and tried to recover the feeling, but it was gone, and wouldn’t be willed back.

So I finished the eight-hour flight, with some movies and some reading and some sleeping, but without another Now moment.

And today, some months later, I fondly remember that Now, and how now cannot be willed into Now.

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She had to attend a meeting, so I fixed dinner while the kids finished up homework.

I made chili and it came out really good. We all sat down and started eating and the kids said the chili was yummy, better than Wendy’s, in fact the best they’d ever had, and I felt like their Mom must feel.

The pride welled and the nurturing feeling flushed through me, and I started to explain to the kids how we’d been out of chili powder, and when I went to Fred Meyer they didn’t have the usual bulk chili powder, but they did have some sort of deep red powdered chili pepper flakes, which looked hot and potent as the devil, so I bought a little bag of that stuff and used less than I normally would because I didn’t want to take the roofs off our mouths, ha ha. And the chili came out perfect, sweet and spicy but not too hot, and so forth and so on.

But the kids interrupted to talk games and movies, happily uninterested in how clever I’d been with the chili powder, in my minor improvised success. They were like me, quickly acknowledging good food but ignoring the rest of a homemaker’s small triumph, taking me and the chili and our home for granted, as children will.

And suddenly I realized, for the first time (again, in 20 years), why at dinner my wife always talks about the food and how she made it, and how to me — who wants to discuss Important Things — her food talk had seemed like, well, prattle. And for the first time ever I truly felt myself in my wife’s place, and knew the taken-for-granted feeling she must know so well. Yet amidst insufficient acknowledgment, amidst all-too-fleetingly expressed gratitude, I felt happy, too.

Now as I write this, I marvel at how many years — how so very long — it took me to understand this feeling.

So I recommend making chili. It can provide a glimpse of the Important Things.

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“Thanksgiving Song“

Someone once asked Billy Joel about the peak moment of his musical career. Was it hearing one of his songs on the radio? News of a tune cracking the Top 10? His agent calling with a long-awaited recording offer?

No, replied the multimillionaire pop sensation. It was when he scored his first-ever paid music job, $25 or $35 for playing the piano for a few hours in a dingy bar. Even decades later, winning that humble gig remained the high point of Billy Joel’s career— because it validated his life’s ambition and passion: to become a professional musician.

I know the feeling.

The height of my entrepreneurial career wasn’t the day I signed the contract to sell my company. It wasn’t when the first payment hit, adding another zero to my bank account balance. Both were exciting events, but after all the due diligence, negotiations, and paperwork, they had a feeling of weary inevitability.

The high point came more than a decade ago, when a reporter from the Nihon Keizai Shimbun— Japan’s counterpart to the Wall Street Journal— called to request an interview. Somehow he’d stumbled upon the soft-launch version of our Do-it-Yourself Import Center, a Web resource for Japanese consumers wanting to purchase goods directly from overseas vendors.

That call validated everything my wife and I had worked so hard to achieve. We exulted, holding hands and jumping up and down in our 90 square-foot office, whooping like junior high schoolers.

At the time I had no idea that the phone call would trigger a chain of events that would eventually bring us fortune through the sale of our company. I hadn’t even conceived of selling our company (when that idea finally became conceivable to us, it also became achievable, but that’s another story). We were simply high on our own enthusiasm. There’ve been other peaks, but nothing yet has matched that moment.

Albert Einstein said it well:

We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about.

Something to be enthusiastic about. ’Nuff said.

Postscript: Billy Joel was quoted in the International Herald Tribune a couple of years back. The voice on his latest anti-war single, “Christmas in Fallujah,” was not his own — he gave the recording session to a 21-year-old singer-songwriter from Long Island. The 58-year-old Piano Man felt he was too old to sing the song himself. Here’s what he wrote about it on his Web site:

I thought it should be someone young, about a soldier’s age. I wanted to help somebody else’s career. I’ve had plenty of hits. I’ve had plenty of airplay. I had my time in the sun. I think it’s time for somebody else, maybe, to benefit from my own experience.

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Reader Dyane responded with a telling comment:

I have found that what makes it hard to explore whatever’s-currently-in-the-headlights is others telling me there’s something Big and Final out there that I will love alone, a sort of one-and-only work, even if unpaid. That makes me interpret normal difficulties as some indication that this isn’t IT.

She went on to add that:

… nothing is so perfect that it’s all I want to do, and when I’m having a hard time deciding it’s probably because the various options are equivalent, flawed but…just fine.

Dyane’s second point — nothing is so perfect that it’s all I want to do [emphasis mine] — brought to mind a book I bought a couple of years ago called One Person/Multiple Careers: A New Model for Work/Life Success by Marci Alboher.

In her book, Alboher coined the term “slash career”: The notion that some people will be happier pursuing more than a single occupation.

It’s not merely that doing the same thing for six or eight or ten hours a day drives such people crazy. It’s that they have other, different skill sets, interests, and aspirations crying out for expression. That’s something few single-job careers can accommodate.

For those seeking more soul-satisfying work, Alboher recommends pursuing/creating multiple avocations. Thus the lawyer/farmer and the chef/musician/teacher.

Her examples of the “new model for work/life success” draw repeatedly from what seems to be a quite small circle of friends and acquaintances, most of whom are annoyingly accomplished and enjoy multiple Fabulous Careers. Still, the basic idea makes sense.

Now, you may well be thinking, “that’s all fine and good for a bunch of well-placed New York yuppies, but the rest of us have to put in eight-hour days to pull down decent coin.”

Point taken. The slash career approach is probably best for those who, in order to gain more fulfillment from work, are willing to earn less.

Still, for those who (naturally enough) remain confused about career direction, it’s worth considering that we all play multiple roles in family life: spouse/parent/sibling/child/breadwinner/dependent. Why not at work, too?

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