Saturday, March 11, 2006
Path to Happiness- part 5
Finally! The last piece of the happiness puzzle. Ready for this?
Living up to your own standards:
It's not good enough to work for the money. Oh definitely that's why we work initially. And though it's nice to pick a line of work that we enjoy or that suits our talents/nature, we all have parts of our actual jobs that are a drag. So how do we work for ten, twenty, even thirty years without having a nervous breakdown or midlife crisis? We have to find meaning beyond the dollars in our work. How can we do this job to the best of our abilities? I've had to do some serious soul-searching in regard to my own career: I picked it for good but not complete reasons (good pay, respect of the community, community service, interesting subject matter, noncorporate setting). But it is truly draining and often annoying to work with the public and within an inperfect healthcare system, land of endless paperwork, threat of lawsuits and irate patient/customers. Sometimes I'm too tired to think so hard!
Somewhere along the way, though, I decided it was time to work for myself. I pictured how my job should be done in a perfect world and I strive for it every hour of every day. Day-tight compartments. Even half-day-tight compartments on a particularly bad day. It couldn't be just about the money for me or I'd have quit long ago. You have to instill a human message/ meaning into what you spend so many hours of every week doing.
Living up to your own standards:
It's not good enough to work for the money. Oh definitely that's why we work initially. And though it's nice to pick a line of work that we enjoy or that suits our talents/nature, we all have parts of our actual jobs that are a drag. So how do we work for ten, twenty, even thirty years without having a nervous breakdown or midlife crisis? We have to find meaning beyond the dollars in our work. How can we do this job to the best of our abilities? I've had to do some serious soul-searching in regard to my own career: I picked it for good but not complete reasons (good pay, respect of the community, community service, interesting subject matter, noncorporate setting). But it is truly draining and often annoying to work with the public and within an inperfect healthcare system, land of endless paperwork, threat of lawsuits and irate patient/customers. Sometimes I'm too tired to think so hard!
Somewhere along the way, though, I decided it was time to work for myself. I pictured how my job should be done in a perfect world and I strive for it every hour of every day. Day-tight compartments. Even half-day-tight compartments on a particularly bad day. It couldn't be just about the money for me or I'd have quit long ago. You have to instill a human message/ meaning into what you spend so many hours of every week doing.
# posted by Moopy and Mopey @ 8:05 PM 
