With my busy life, I recently had a rare opportunity to spend an evening with my best friend. We fell into old patterns of interaction, like no time had passed at all since we were kids. I picked his guitar off the wall and immediately broke a string as I tried to tune it. He gave me his immaculate and complete guitar maintenance toolkit and his less immaculate mix-and-match pool of guitar strings. We chatted about all sorts of things as I undressed the American-made Fender Strat in a delicate maintenance ritual.

Like most of our good conversations, this meandered from subject to subject. It started with tech and work. Something we have in common is that we take work very seriously. We talked about some people seem to lack passion and enthusiasm for their work. To me, it seemed a natural consequence of the exigencies of modern life: we’ve all got to make money, but student loans and expensive homes force us to choose well-paying work that we may not enjoy.

My friend was more optimistic. In his view, most people are passionate about something. But not every passion can or should be monetized. Some things like raising children or fishing don’t lend themselves well to paying the bills. Usually, passions cost money rather than bring it in.

That’s not to say that they couldn’t be monetized. For example, there’s a cottage industry built around family vlogging, sharing everyday moments of one’s children on social media. For many, this can even be quite lucrative, though it comes with serious ethical questions about child exploitation and privacy. So, we’re stuck trying to find a balance between financial needs and joy in our work. I think that Oliver Burkeman was right, though, when he wrote that people can learn to love almost any job.[1] Each career path has its own unique challenges and opportunities.

As I unwound the strings to remove them from the headstock of the guitar, I discovered that they were locking tuners: a thumbscrew on the back of each tuner locks the string in place to keep it from slipping, improving tuning stability. This was my first encounter with this wonderful feature. As I unlocked them, our conversation rounded another corner, from passion to relationships.

We talked about my marriage. It’s tough. Not easy. A pain in the ass. With kids, it’s even more difficult because there’s so much to balance. While I’ve done my best to be a good father for my little boy, I haven’t put the same effort into my role as a husband.

My friend helped me see specific ways in which I was falling short. A great, obvious example: My wife is Chinese and she moved here to the US with our son earlier this year. I had enough time before they got here to really make our living space clean and homey. Instead, I scrambled the day before to get everything ready. Several pieces of furniture didn’t arrive until several days after they did. That would be enough to make anyone upset and disappointed, and I’m ashamed to admit things went down that way.

With the strings off the guitar and a new perspective, I looked through my friend’s assortment of unpackaged guitar strings. Everything I needed was there, except a low E string. A low E string! The string that I’ve never broken in twenty years of playing guitar. But that’s really how I feel a lot of the time. I’m never quite prepared. I wish I was only a string short, like my friend. But often, I’m just missing the whole set.

That’s one reason why it’s so important to have a good friend. I owe a lot to him, more than I could repay. He keeps me in line, helps me think things through, and doesn’t take my bullshit. We push each other to be better than we are, though I feel like he’s often doing most of the pushing. Beyond that, we also just simply enjoy each other’s company. True friendship is hard to come by.

1. Author of 4,000 Weeks: Time Management for Mere Mortals↩︎