“Thinking about how, in small but meaningful
ways, you can change your current work to enhance its connection to your core
values.” I think that this is one of the best ways to relate the current
work to the core values, even though the work may not seem to be the something
that one would call it a calling. Perhaps a perfect job doesn’t exist in the
working world, more or less, one needs to do something he doesn’t like even
though one has his dream job. For me, a job is idealistic if it can provide me
with daily bread as well as daily meaning of why I spend the majority of my
waking hours. It is always good to wake up in the morning with a sense of
purpose and know exactly what you are going to do and achieve every day, even
though you know that you would be, more likely, exhausted or exasperated at the
end of the day. The despair of spending every single hour in office doing
nothing meaningful is simply terrible and it may change how a person think of
himself in a long run. And therefore, it must be avoided at cost.
Have
you ever heard a parable about three bricklayers? Three bricklayers are asked:
“What are you doing?” The first says, “I am laying bricks.” The second says, “I
am building a church.” And the third says, “I am building the house of God. Even
though they are doing the same job, the way they see their jobs makes a
different in their working attitude. Perhaps for some people, a job is just a
necessity of life, much like breathing and sleeping. For others, they may view their jobs as a
stepping-stone to another job. However, if you view your job as your calling,
you are more likely to be happier in your life. In reality, many of us would
like to be like the third
bricklayer, but instead identify with the first or second. It may be true that
some of the jobs are more difficult to be viewed as “calling” as compared to
jobs that can leave more impactful influence to others like teachers, doctors,
soldiers etc. However, a genuinely positive and altruistic purpose in carrying
out daily work may make a difference. An altruist is more likely to help new colleagues
who are slow learners in learning certain skills or adapting themselves to the
new environment out of altruism. Putting
it more succinctly, if you are not sure whether what you doing now is your calling,
please try to think what are the possible ways of helping others through your
works and how big the impact could be. On one hand, it will somehow help you to
think whether you can find something you want in what you are doing now. On the
other hand, it makes you keep thinking for ways to change your situation for
the better and thus, you stand a better chance of finding them. When you stop searching,
assuming they can’t be found, you guarantee they won’t.
Never waste the time that we have in
office, even a second. Instead of making zero progress and threading water at
the same place, perhaps it is better for us to find ways to get ourselves energized
and take a step forward even though it
means we need to push the boulder up the hill….we just need to do it
relentlessly.
**With ideas and lots of quotes from Angela Lee Duckworth: Grit: The power of passion and perseverance.
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