“If you love what you do, you’ll never work another day in your life.”
This oft-quoted phrase hits home with a few.Those who have jobs they enjoy are truly blessed.
For most, though, a different, yet oft-quoted phrase is more applicable. “If it weren’t work, they wouldn’t pay you to do it.”
Rory Vaden, the New York Times best-selling author of “Take the Stairs,” talks about the “enjoyment requirement” many young folks have about work. They need a job they enjoy. They need work they are passionate about and wait — unemployed, living with mom and dad etc. — until it comes.
Often, they don’t know what it is they are passionate about. It’s, like, you know, they will know what it is when they find it.
As Vaden, who discussed this in a May 2013 column in The Tennessean newspaper of Nashville, says: “There is no perfect job. There is no perfect marriage, there is no perfect life that you find; there are only perfect ones that you create by working your butt off to make them that way.”
His point is that those who “find their passion” are willing to put in the time to be successful. Tiger Woods and other golf professionals are passionate about their sport, so they put in the time on the practice range so they can play successfully in tournaments. Passions, like anything good, need to be nurtured with hard, unglamorous work.
Some jobs are nothing but work. You have to find things about them that make it palatable, if not enjoyable, for you to keep doing them. Perhaps what you’ll find is that the job is good because it serves a temporary purpose — it gives you a paycheck while you await your passion.
Other jobs might require you to improve your skills to the point in which you are so good at them, you become passionate.
Others still may have fulfilling purpose for you, but barely make you a living. So, you have to do something a little less fulfilling to improve your financial situtionn.
“Don’t quit your day job” is yet another oft-quoted phrase. If you have a “day job” or a “night job” and are looking for your passion, you may find it by visiting www.bign.com/pbilodeau. If you like what you see, know that a potential fortune is there — if you work at it. But, you can work at it while you are working at something else.
Perhaps you’ll adopt the oft-paraphrased mantra: work full time at your job and part time on your fortune.
Don’t wait for the ideal, Work for it, to paraphrase Vaden. You don’t have to love what you do. You have to create a situation you love. Or, in another oft-quoted phrase, “life is what you make it.’
Peter
Tag Archives: work
TECHNOLOGY AND EDUCATION: PART 1
“If I had only an hour to live, I would spend it in this class because it feels like an eternity.”
That was one student’s comment to Jason B. Huett, a technology guru and University of West Georgia professor, when evaluating one of his courses.
Maureen Downey, education columnist for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, quoted Huett for the Dec. 10, 2012, edition. Huett was making the point that education is slow to change the way students are taught, despite the technological advances.
But a larger point might be: must students be bored in school?
As Downey paraphrases Huett, a frontier teacher from a century ago would be agape at the changes in the world, but the classroom would still largely look the same.
That teacher probably was taught that school needs to feel like work to a student. School should be the student’s job. When the student finishes school, he would go to a job that would be tedious and hard, so they had to learn to endure that in school.
If you read a typical textbook of yore, it’s hardly something you’d take to the beach to read – unless, of course you were cramming for an exam in the sun.
TEDIUM AND DUPLICATION
But what if teachers concentrated on ways to make learning more fun, or at least enjoyable? Sure, learning IS work, but a century ago, it seemed we taught students how to be good employees – how to duplicate repetitive tasks that they would do in the workplace when they graduated. We taught routine. We taught doing what you are told, and only asking questions if there was something you didn’t know.
In yesteryears, we gave students information in the only way we knew how. Today, however, students can get their own information through technology, faster than a teacher can convey it. The jobs of the future are going to require more innovation, because machines will handle the repetitive and tedious tasks.
Incidently, there are ways to make good incomes through repetition and duplication. To check out one of the best, visit www.bign.com/pbilodeau.
But, if we want kids to be more innovative, the education system has to be more innovative. If we want kids to be more collaborative – employers are looking for good, team players – we have to teach them that collaboration trumps competition with those on the same team. Sure, we have to evaluate students in terms of what they’ve learned, but what if the grading system were less about beating the person next to you, and more about the student’s and the person next to him’s mutual achievement?
Technology is changing our workplaces, but it is changing our education system at a much slower pace, Downey paraphrases Huett. Huett refers to the education system as a factory model that puts students on a conveyor belt at medium speed.
The workplaces of yesteryear had few innovators. To compete globally as a nation, innovation has to be encouraged at the earliest stage of life possible. Technology can make education more productive, and, perhaps, more interesting to students.
How refreshing it would be for educators to have more students in their classroom who WANT to be there? The jobs of the future will be less repetitive, less duplicative and more innovative – no matter the level a person works in an organization. Workers will relish the mutual success with those around them. It will be work, but it will seem less like WORK. Why can’t school be work, but seem less like SCHOOL?
Peter