Dear Magicians,

They say: “Do what you love and you’ll never work another day in your life!” ​ ​ I say “Yes, that’s because you’ll be unemployed.” ​ Maybe you should take this with a grain of salt because I say this as someone who has never had a boss..

Not really. I washed dishes in high school. I worked my way up to sous chef, then assistant chef, burning my forearms on sheet pans and learning that the fastest route to humility is a Friday dinner rush. But after that? After high school ended? I walked into a university and never walked out. I’m in 50th grade. I’ve been continuously enrolled in some form of school since I was four years old.

Academics have advisors, but we don’t think of them as bosses. I have graduate students and postdocs, but I don’t think of them as employees — even though, technically, they are. Nobody clocks in. Nobody clocks out. The org chart is a polite fiction we maintain for the grant agencies.

Now, as a professor, I have a department chair. But as my friend Prof. Inna Vishik says “People outside of academia sometimes find the concept of a department chair confusing. They are not your boss, manager, or CEO. They are more like an elected representative who negotiates with terrorists on your behalf.”

This sounds like a privilege, and it is. But it’s also a strange psychological experiment. When nobody tells you what to do, you find out very quickly what you actually are. There’s no structure to rebel against, no manager to blame, no corporate ladder to climb or refuse to climb. There’s just you and whatever it is you can’t stop doing. For me that turned out to be building telescopes, chasing the oldest light in the universe, and then, to my own surprise, talking about it on camera to anyone who’d listen.

But honestly freedom didn’t make me productive. The freedom made me liable only to myself. Every detour I took under my own steam turned out to be less of a detour and more of a trial: is this is who I was meant to be? Compared to the terrifying, unsupervised void of an open academic calendar, dodging third-degree burns and screaming line cooks felt like a day spa.

I think most people suspect this about themselves but never get the chance to test it. The boss, the quarterly review, the two weeks of vacation, retire at 65 these are structures that keep you from finding out.

Which might be the point. Because finding out who you are without external constraints is thrilling and terrifying in roughly equal measure.

The data backs this up, by the way — the Wilson Effect — the finding that as you gain autonomy, your internal predispositions express themselves more fully (→Source). The adult version of you isn’t who you were trained to be. It’s who you would have been anyway. Freedom doesn’t create your identity. It reveals it.

I got lucky. I stumbled into a career with no boss, no ceiling, and nowhere to hide. Fifty grades in, I’m still not sure if I’m a success story or a cautionary tale. But I wouldn’t trade it for a corner office, even if a micromanaging middle manager is a much easier scapegoat than the laws of the universe.

I think the advice should be to “work a job you love and you’ll never want to retire!”

Until next time, have a M.A.G.I.C. Week,

Brian