Chasing Wonder with Damon Davis
Talk to enough people about what makes their work feel purposeful, and a pattern surfaces: the old scorecards of title, salary, and prestige rarely tell the full story. On our podcast, A Life Worth Working, guests often describe wonder as a different measure of success and enlivenment.
Wonder is way more than just a passing sensation of awe; it’s a stance toward living. Damon Davis is an Emmy Award-winning, post-disciplinary artist, and TED Fellow best known for blurring the borders between music, film, and public art.
For Damon, the finished painting, the next beat or sculpture is just a byproduct of living. Art isn’t about completion but about the trek itself. He describes it this way:
“And the real thing is the process of making [art], and that's living life. The thing at the end — the thing that we call art— it ain't necessarily art for me. The art is getting to the end of that. What was the journey to get to that, to create this thing? So the artifact is a a byproduct of living.“
And this reversal of process over artifact puts a spotlight on how we work, not on the trophy we carry home.
Practicing wonder asks for courage over control — openness over self-armor. It nudges us to trade the security of tidy answers for the richer terrain of beautiful questions. At one point, Damon even muses that physical death scares him less than a life without wonder: “Without it, we wither.”
Click on Damon’s episode below to hear how one artist chases wonder as a way of life.
A Life Worth Working is a podcast about reinvention, career pivots, and the messy middle we don’t talk about enough. In each punchy 20-minute episode, we explore the missteps, gaps, and heartbreaks that often spark new purpose.
You'll hear from guests who have navigated winding, real-life paths: a comedy writer who became an ER doctor, a hedge fund manager who became a death doula, a K-pop star who became a lawyer—and many others.
The show is hosted by Michelle Weise, a TED speaker and author of Long Life Learning: Preparing for Jobs That Don’t Even Exist Yet, and Dana Allen Walsh, a professional coach and senior pastor at a progressive church who helps people find meaning and direction in moments of transition. This isn’t a podcast about faith, but about finding meaning in the work we do.
We hope you’ll join us to radically rethink what it means to live a life worth working.
