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&lt;p&gt;In the summer of 2017, Toni Morrison, the great American writer and &lt;a rel=&quot;noopener noreferrer&quot; href=&quot;https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/toni-morrison-the-teacher&quot; target=&quot;_blank&quot;&gt;writing teacher&lt;/a&gt; who &lt;a rel=&quot;noopener noreferrer&quot; href=&quot;https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/06/books/toni-morrison-dead.html&quot; target=&quot;_blank&quot;&gt;died&lt;/a&gt; this week at the age of 88, wrote an &lt;a rel=&quot;noopener noreferrer&quot; href=&quot;https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/06/05/the-work-you-do-the-person-you-are&quot; target=&quot;_blank&quot;&gt;essay&lt;/a&gt; in &lt;em&gt;The New Yorker&lt;/em&gt; about one of her first jobs. The job was cleaning the &quot;beautiful&quot; house of a wealthy woman&#160;who Morrison only refers to as &quot;She&quot; in&#160;the essay. It was a job Morrison took pleasure in, if only because it was a paying job that allowed her to buy ice cream, movie tickets, and second-hand dresses. The job also gave&#160;her a considerable amount of pride, if only&#160;because&#160;she gave half her pay to her mother and father&#160;to use for &quot;real things&quot; such as insurance policy payments.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;But after some time, Morrison came to dislike the job, resent it, and wanted to quit, especially after &quot;She&quot; had asked Morrison to perform more difficult duties than&#160;scrubbing floors and washing clothes like carrying bookcases up a flight of stairs and moving a piano across a room, a move which injured the young&#160;Morrison.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;And so, one day, Morrison complained to her father about the job,&#160;wanting some&#160;sympathy. But she didn&#39;t get any. Instead, her father gave her some advice. And though the following isn&#39;t exactly what her father advised his young daughter—who five decades later would become the first African American woman to win the Nobel Prize in literature—this is what the young Nobel-laureate-to-be had heard:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p style=&quot;padding-left: 30px;&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;1. Whatever the work is, do it well—not for the boss but for yourself.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;em&gt;2. You make the job; it doesn’t make you.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;em&gt;3. Your real life is with us, your family.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;em&gt;4. You are not the work you do; you are the person you are.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Back in the summer of 2017 when I read these four points and the&#160;two sentences that followed (the&#160;two&#160;sentences that end the essay), I was so&#160;struck by Morrison&#39;s words that I immediately printed out the essay (sorry, tree), cut out the ending, and taped it to the wall&#160;next to my desk. On Tuesday, when I&#160;found out about Morrison&#39;s&#160;death, I immediately thought of this essay, and my eyes went to the faded piece of paper, still stuck to the wall.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;I then re-read the ending of the essay, the entire essay, and thought more&#160;about Morrison&#39;s four points. I thought about how&#160;these points are such excellent reminders that we need to&#160;take pride in our work not for anyone but for ourselves, that&#160;we should aim to please no one but ourselves. That we&#39;re much more than our jobs. That we&#160;shouldn&#39;t let ourselves be defined by our work.&#160;That&#160;we&#39;re more&#160;complex and&#160;interesting&#160;than what we do in order to earn&#160;our daily bread. That we&#160;have full lives outside of the office filled with friends, family, desires, interests, dreams.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;And then I&#160;thought how&#160;all of this is so important (and so hard) to remember today—in an age where so many of us must always be connected, always be available, where we tend to&#160;equate our earnings to our self-worth, where we tend to define ourselves by the companies that sign our paychecks and not by the&#160;company we keep long after we leave our corner offices and cubicles.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Thinking further, it struck&#160;me that all of these points come from&#160;someone who might just go down in&#160;history as the most&#160;successful and influential&#160;American novelist of her time, or of any time, and&#160;here she is still saying that it&#39;s important not to let our work define us.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;In other words, no matter how unsuccessful—or successful—we might&#160;appear to be in and to the so-called &quot;world,&quot; the true&#160;measure of our humanity&#160;should not solely be our work; there&#39;s so much more to all of us.&lt;/p&gt;

Derek Loosvelt

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