You Are What You Do

And Six Other Lies about Work, Life, and Love

Daniel Im

• Publisher: B&H Books
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781535943987
• eBook ISBN: 9781535943994
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Personal Success

Things have changed. Have you seen it?

The way that we’ve done things for centuries has been unsettled and unseated. We’re living in a new normal. And while on the surface many of these changes look like the next best thing, there’s actually a complex and fragile web of lies holding it all together:

• You are what you do
• You are what you experience
• You are who you know
• You are what you know
• You are what you own
• You are who you raise
• You are your past

In You Are What You Do, author and pastor Daniel Im considers these seven lies and the context that causes them to flourish. Through personable stories, research, and pastoral insight, Daniel will show you how to recognize these everyday lies in your life, so that you can discover the truth on the other side. The truth that leads to freedom. The truth that moves you from surviving to thriving. The truth that will unlock a life of purpose, adventure, meaning, and destiny.

Chapter 1

Hustle

Blank stare. Tossed hair. And a longing to be elsewhere.

If you’re up for it, let’s play a game of “Guess Who?” It’s simple. Just try and guess who I’m looking at right now.

Hangry, irritable, and unable to focus.

Is a picture of someone forming in your mind? Here are a few more descriptors.

Piles of dirty laundry, protein bar wrappers in the trash, and a cup of coffee that’s been warmed up one too many times.

If you guessed a prisoner, an executive, or a working parent, you’re close, but not quite there yet. If you guessed yourself, you’re closer, but that probably means one of two things—you’re either sleep deprived or a doer.

Recently, one of the largest online marketplaces for freelancers ran an ad campaign in New York subways plastering up headshots of doers and excerpts from their interviews. They called this campaign “The Year of Do,” with the catchy tag line, “In Doers We Trust.”1

Here’s the excerpt from the ad I’m looking at: “You eat a coffee for lunch. You follow through on your follow through. Sleep deprivation is your drug of choice. You might be a doer.”2

Apparently doing has become a badge of honor. A status symbol. And the way to define ourselves.

Freedom and Flexibility

When traveling, one of my favorite things to do is talk to my Uber driver. I’ve been driven around by college students, graduate students, cyber security analysts, insurance agents, retired veterans, full-time moms, an HOA president, and a guy in finance who had just lost his job because his CEO and CFO went to prison. Although they all have different reasons for driving, a common theme I’ve heard over and over again is a desire for freedom and flexibility—regardless of age, ethnicity, and whether they were doing it part-time or full-time. Since freedom and flexibility are hallmarks of the gig economy, this makes complete sense.

One of my favorite conversations was with a fifty-something full-time mother, who for the first time in thirty years was earning a paycheck outside of the home. Since she could drive whenever she wanted to, Uber was a perfect fit for her to earn “spending money.” So several nights a week from 9:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m.—since by that time everything has settled down at home—she gets in her car, opens up the app, and starts her side hustle.

I remember this other conversation I had with Melissa, a single mom who, after putting in a full day as a cleaner, would drive for Uber in the evenings and weekends to support her three teenagers. Her dream is to start her own cleaning company one day, but in the meantime, driving an extra twenty hours a week does the trick to pay for those “dang expensive pizza pockets,” in her words.

Teenagers eat a lot of food—and one pizza pocket isn’t enough to fill a growing adolescent after school. I get that, since that was me as a teenager. But I remember, even after eating a pizza pocket or two, I’d still be hungry for dinner a couple hours later! Well, it’s the same for Melissa’s children—the only problem is that now, pizza pockets cost a lot more! In fact, everything costs more. So for Melissa, working an extra twenty hours a week is the only means she has to afford those pizza pockets and chip away at her credit card debt, while also saving up for that upcoming trip to Atlanta.

I could go on and on and tell you about the number of dads I met who were driving for Uber, as a side hustle, to pay for extra expenses. Others were driving to save up for their children’s college tuition. And still others would rather earn some extra spending cash than relax with their family on the weekend.

I’ve even met individuals who see their side hustle as the new credit card. Instead of going into debt to go on vacation, they just gig a few hours a week to save up. This is the new normal.

Let’s get back to the “Guess Who?” game. It’d be one thing if the lady on this poster looked happy, but she doesn’t. Sure, by doing more—or gigging—she might have earned some extra cash, but was it worth it? She looks miserable, scattered, anxious, dehydrated, and emotionless.

If this is the end result of doing, I don’t want it. It doesn’t look like much of a status symbol to me. In doers, I don’t want to trust.

Lie #1: You Are What You Do

A couple years after getting married, Christina and I moved to Korea. Until then, though we had visited other countries, neither of us had ever lived outside of Canada. In fact, we were about to purchase our first home in Montreal, but when I got a job offer to work at one of the largest churches in the world—I’m not exaggerating, it was a church of fifty thousand people—our priorities conveniently changed in an instant.

“Isn’t this a once-in-a-lifetime sort of opportunity? I’d be stupid to say no, right? After all, we don’t even have children yet. This would skyrocket my career. Just imagine what this would look like on my résumé! God has to be in this, otherwise, why else would I get such an opportunity? I’m going to make such a greater impact there than I would here, so isn’t this a no-brainer?”

I’ve forgotten which of those phrases I said to Christina, which ones I kept hidden in my heart, and which ones I wasn’t even aware of myself, but that paragraph pretty much sums it up—and I’m not proud of it.

Within a couple months, we sold everything—including my beloved Volkswagen GTI—packed what we could in a few suitcases, stored what we could at Christina’s parents’ place, and bought a one-way ticket to Seoul, South Korea.

The plan was to stay there long-term. Christina enrolled in Korean lessons, was working with me at the church, and started her masters in counseling. I was pastoring, finishing up graduate school, and teaching English on the side. Life was good and things were fruitful. In fact, they were so fruitful that a year after we moved to Korea, we became a family of three! So with our baby girl, we decided it was time to grow up and move out of our furnished apartment in the party district. We wanted to lay down roots, so we found a nice little two-bedroom apartment and furnished it ourselves. We even bought an oven, which wasn’t a normal appliance for a typical Korean home. Can you tell momma bird was nesting?

Life was really good, until everything started to unravel. And by everything, this time I really do mean everything. A few months after moving into our new apartment, we lost our jobs, our closest friends, and our home. We lost our livelihood and everything was taken out from under our feet. In short, my ladder-climbing-résumé-building-career-rocketing adventure abruptly came to an end, and we had to move back to Canada.

I was devastated.

Once the dust settled, I started wondering if we had somehow made the wrong decision. Maybe we were never supposed to go in the first place. Perhaps I incorrectly assumed that God was leading us (because of my mixed motives), when in fact, it was just a good opportunity.

I was also ashamed.

What would I say to the doubters who thought we were making a mistake to sell everything and move halfway across the world? What would I say to my parents who were leery of us going in the first place? How was I supposed to support my wife and child now that I was without a job and essentially homeless? And why did I feel like someone had just punched me in the gut, stolen my keys, and driven off with my car? After all, it’s just a job, isn’t it?

What Do You Do for Work?

As children, we’re asked what we want to do when we grow up. As adults, we’re asked what we do for work. And at the end of our lives, we’re measured by what we’ve done. It’s not surprising, then, that we believe the lie that we are what we do. It seems to be the primary way that we ascribe value and worth onto one another—and ourselves.

If you remember telling your parents that you wanted to be an artist, musician, or athlete when you grew up, you probably learned from an early age that not all jobs are created equal. What’s up with that? Who made the decision that becoming an engineer, lawyer, or doctor was fundamentally better than being a creative anyway? And what does “better” even mean? Just more money? And why do parents feel like it’s their universal responsibility to set their kids straight and teach them this proper hierarchy of jobs?

Referencing an article in The New York Times, Timothy Keller put it well:

So many college students do not choose work that actually fits their abilities, talents, and capacities, but rather choose work that fits within their limited imagination of how they can boost their own self-image. There were only three high-status kinds of jobs—those that paid well, those that directly worked on society’s needs, and those that had the cool factor. Because there is no longer an operative consensus on the dignity of all work, still less on the idea that in all work we are the hands and fingers of God serving the human community, in their minds they had an extremely limited range of career choices. That means lots of young adults are choosing work that doesn’t fit them, or fields that are too highly competitive for most people to do well in. And this sets many people up for a sense of dissatisfaction or meaninglessness in their work.3

No wonder we over-identify ourselves with our jobs—we’ve been conditioned to do so, both from within and from without. So to satisfy both our internal craving for meaning and our external drive for a particular quality of life, we look for the perfect job. A job that boosts our self-image and also pays the bills. And if the latter is lacking, no worries—that’s why the gig economy exists. An extra gig here or side hustle there never hurt anyone, right?

Pressure, Platforms, and Pretending

What happens when our being is defined by our doing? When we believe th...

Table of contents

• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Hustle
• Chapter 2: Experiences > Things
• Chapter 3: Me, Myself, and Maybe You
• Chapter 4: The American Dream
• Chapter 5: Hoarders “R” Us
• Chapter 6: It’s Not about You
• Chapter 7: The Other Side of Shame
• Epilogue
• Notes