By: Tracy Thompson
You know the feeling. Your heart beats a little faster. You lose all sense of time. You can’t think of anything else from the moment you wake up until you go to bed. You can’t wait to go to work. You have passion for what you do.
“No one likes their job”, said an old friend recently. He is out of work. Coincidence?
“I’m good at what I do because I do what I love because I love what I do”
Many a word has been written about finding your passion and pursuing it. You spend most of your waking hours working. In the connected world in which we live, work-life balance is fleeting. If you work from home your job spills even more into your day-to-day existence. This isn’t necessarily bad. When you love what you do and you are energized by your work, work feels more like your passion and your passion is a facet of who you are.
Not all passions translate to careers. I am passionate about cycling and swimming. With that said, I am not delusional. Not only do I lack the skill and talent to be a professional athlete, I lack the desire to turn a hobby into a career.
Find a way to become passionate about your work.
Some of my most cherished friendships are with former or current work colleagues. It’s a natural progression. These are people I interacted with for countless hours each week. We were passionate about the work we were accomplishing. We got to know each other well. When I reflect on the past decade I can think of a miserable year I spent at a job I loathed. Not surprisingly I don’t maintain friendships with any of those co-workers. We were all unhappy, there was no passion. I just wanted the day to end.
Recently I found myself laughing to the point of tears rolling down my face as my friend/colleague related a story to me. I’ll concede that I laugh more than the average person. I tend to find humor in just about every situation life presents – cancer can be hilarious, funerals can be funny as hell, conflict and fights are fodder for years to come. However, not everyone is fortunate enough to work in an environment in which they truly enjoy their colleagues and the challenges that come with them.
Your career is such a huge part of your life. How you choose to support yourself is such a major part of who and what you are both in your professional and personal life, isn’t it important – even vital – that you choose wisely? Why would you surround yourself with inferior products, surly co-workers, and miserable working conditions?
On your last day on this earth you will never say to yourself ‘Wow, thankfully I worked that lousy job with those miserable people’. Find something you can be passionate about, work with people who bring joy and laughter into your life. Work should never be miserable. You devote way too much of your life to it. Not everyone finds their ‘passion’ but everyone should be able to find something they can be passionate about.