At 65, there are a lot of places Walter O’Rourke could have been. He could have been in his 4,000-sq-ft model train workshop, in his log cabin on 140 acres in Townsend, Delaware or in one of his two Florida homes or at his insurance company. At the time I first saw this story he estimated he was earning $2 million a year from his investments. But every morning you’d find Walter showing up for his $52,000 a year job as a conductor for the New Jersey Transit railroad.
”I realize that some people, especially some of my co-workers, might see me as a strange duck,” Mr. O’Rourke said. ”But where does it say that a man can’t love what he does for a living?” Walter adds, ”I don’t need the money,” he added. ”I need the job.”
How’s that for a healthy perspective on work? Walter seems to understand that work provides benefits in addition to just a paycheck.
In Turning Pro: Tap Your Inner Power and Create Your Life's Work, Steven Pressfield says we all get two salaries: a financial salary and a psychological salary. The first can be called conventional rewards—money, applause and attention. Those are great if you can get them.
But then there’s the psychological reward—the sense of honor and satisfaction that comes from knowing we did something well, lived out our calling, or made our part of the world just a little better.
How do we find, or create, that kind of work? We should ask ourselves what we are good at, what we have a passion for, and what talents God has gifted us in. In what kind of work do we find our greatest spiritual and emotional satisfaction?
Finding the work that provides a big psychological salary may also protect us from one of the great temptations of our times: consumerism. Doing our work well, and finding satisfaction in it will protect us from the desire to drown out our unhappiness in buying things we don’t need. And as Dave Ramsey would add, to impress people we don’t like.
Doing the work that God gifted us for—whether it be writing, driving a truck, or selling train tickets—does not make us second-class citizens, but rather people who are worshiping God with the unique abilities He gave us and expects us to use.
Is your work so important and meaningful that you would continue to go even if you didn’t need the money?
