What was the first job you loved?
Do you love your job today? What about yesterday?
Does it change by the day? By the hour sometimes?
I know a handful of high school principals counting down years, months and days until their retirement. I don’t blame them. They’re saints for signing up for that in the first place.
I have a friend who ‘grinded it out’ (her words) for more than 30 years in her government job. For the pension obviously.
I know the uber accomplished, the super high earners, who’ve traded a career of misery for big boats and bragging rights.
It’s unpopular to love your job today. It’s much cooler to be aloof. To have an axe to grind or better yet, bring just enough motivation to show up everyday without caring enough to be disappointed if things don’t go your way.
You can’t hurt me if I don’t care. Take that, paycheck.
I’ve been the disappointed and disengaged employee before. Not a fan of the feeling.
And maybe it’s no one’s fault. For more than a century, we’ve largely designed work around a pretty simple deal. Show up. Do the job. Get paid. Put a roof over your head. Feed your family. Buy a big boat.
Work pays for life.
But work is also a huge part of life. The vehicle for you to spend your talents, learn a little, grow a lot.
Gallup says only about one in five employees worldwide is engaged at work.
How could that be? Humans want to contribute. To be useful. To make progress. So how is it that the vast majority of people feel ‘meh’ about the work they do?
That’s a massive nut to crack, onion to peel and hill to climb.
I wonder how much of it is actually about the work.
I read a story about a teenage boy who started a summer job at a burger joint. A simple way to get spending money. Show up. Sell some burgers. Clean some tables. Go home.
Then his manager told him about the people who came into their restaurant.
For many of these families, this meal is the high point of their week. Time with their kids. The treat at the end of a soccer game. A reprieve from cooking and cleaning. You could just hand them a burger. Or you could put a smile on their faces.
And just like that, flipping burgers had a purpose.
Yesterday I went to the same Starbucks twice. There’s a middle-aged man behind the counter, happy as anything to be there. Greeting people like he just invited you over dinner. Cracks a joke about the cookies. “If these cookies were any fresher, they’d be Brad Pitt in the ’90s.”
I would have bought my coffee either way. I’m addicted, you see. But this time, I left with a smile and a little dose of…I’ll have what he’s having.
What if the thing that could change everything about your work isn’t the work at all? And what if you could help someone else see it too?
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Each week, I share something I’m learning, living, or working out in real time. It’s part storytelling, part reflection. I hope there’s something in it for you too.
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