Work It

You will have an advantage in life if you find a way to change your feelings about “work” because like it or not, it is an activity that we all must participate in if we want to get stuff done.

There’s an old saying “hard work never killed anybody”. I’m sure somewhere along the line it has, but most of us do get through a spell of hard work and live to see tomorrow.

I am an enthusiast of the idea of “work smarter not harder”….

….and of what Confucius say – “Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.”

However - there are two realities that come to mind when discussing working smart and having fun doing what you love: 1.) it takes “work” to get to that point, and 2.) no matter if you’re spending your days doing mostly what makes your heart sing, there will still be “work” to do somewhere in your life….dealing with a cranky customer, cleaning the gutters on your house, or getting your taxes done. There will always be “work” no matter how hard you work to build a life where nothing seems like work.

So it’s not a matter of banishing “work” from your vocabulary or life, it’s a matter of being able to respond peacefully to the word “work” when it rears its head. This is especially important if you find yourself doing work that you don’t love as a path to get to work that you believe you will love. If that’s the case, keep your eye on the prize. See your current work not as pointless toil, but as a trek you have to take to reach a wonderful destination – enjoy the scenery, take in the experience, and anticipate your destination with gratitude and joy. Be sure and share that gratitude and joy with others along the way because if you get snake bit, you’ll want them to bring the anti-venom.

It will help also if you get out of your own head. Any work that you don’t enjoy or that feels too much like “work” is benefiting or going to benefit someone other than you in some manner great or small. Even work that seems like it is all about you touches someone else in some way. No man is an island. Try to figure out how the work you have or need to do is going to make someone else’s life a bit happier and hold those people in your mind as you work. It’s hard to come up with a connection sometimes, but that in itself gives you something to do while you’re doing the work you don’t necessarily want to do.

And once you arrive in the Land of Milk and Honey, there is still work to be done – someone has to milk the cows and harvest the honeycomb and clean the gutters. Don’t hire it out. Take your turn. A little hard work never killed anybody.