“I can resist everything except delightful work”

There are very few blogs where I chance upon them and read every single post from the start! Yours is simply irresistible to any warm blooded career changer.

regards

mark mcclure
tokyo

Take Actions last blog post..Be Careful What You Wish For – Start Now!

I enjoyed pondering your provocative comments on life, work and our story. Its funny how folks keep telling a story about themselves that does not leave much room for joy in their work or their life. You’re obviously one man who has leaned to tell a better story.

You don’t need a course correction, my friend; you’re clearly on the right track with your fearless, make-frequent-mistakes attitude.
You dedication to this pursuit inspires me.

Is that like Aging Yuppie, Abundant Poverty or Boneless Ribs?

The combination of Work and Delightful strikes a chord. After-all, if most of our waking hours are spent ‘at work’, wouldn’t it be grand if that work was delightful?

Sounds good! Where can I get some? What’s stopping me? What am I afraid of?
What obstacles have existed that blocked me from having delightful work? Looking at these in reverse order I have come up with some possibilities.

One obstacle may have been my ‘higher’ education and the admonition of well-meaning advisors (aka – parents, teachers, coaches and clergy) to go to college. Get a good education.

I took that advice to heart and spent seventeen years and thousands of dollars working on a couple of degrees. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the intention of those institutions of higher learning was to enable me to get a ‘good job’. Not necessarily learn anything ‘higher’ or wealth-producing. Especially not delight-producing!

Maybe it was more accurately described as ‘hire education’.

What about fear? The formal education prepared me for a job and trained me to be afraid simultaneously. Be afraid of failure. Be afraid of debt. Be afraid of risk. And, here’s a biggie, be afraid of what others might think of me!

All that fear! Remember, in school we were always asked to ‘get the right answer’.
Turns out, there is no such thing as the right answer. Unless, of course, you find the right answer for YOU.

And the best way to find the right answer for me/you is to experiement with options until you come up with something that looks good, feels good and seems to work. i.e. it is delightful. Experimentation is all about making mistakes. Or, putting it another way, like Thomas Edison did, “… I have discovered many – 1,000’s – of ways that did not work …”

Thus far it appears that education vs. lack of mistakes and fear vs. courage have been stopping me. A course-correction sounds pretty easy to come by. If you have any suggestions on that, I’ll be glad to listen.

‘Where can I get some?’ (delightful work) Guess I won’t find it in the help-wanted ads or at Monster.com will I? Just for the record, I have been working on this for a long time.
Here’s what I am in the process of discovering. Do something that I absolutely love to do and then find an audience that is looking for that something. Charge them a fee for providing this something. Now that’s what I call Delightful Work!

Stay tuned. Tom will undoubtedly share his unique perspective on this topic.
Thanks Tom for creating this forum. I’m excited by the possibilities!

Thanks for being all of who you are.

Tom, are you nuts? That’s not exactly what God cursed Adam with when he kicked his sorry apple noshing ass out of paradise: “Because you listened to your wife: Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food.” –Genesis 3, 17-19

Thanks! Yeah, thank you so much! Leading a messed up work life like good ol’ doormat Adam and Sisyphus is alright if you listen to your wife, to your loving husband, to cousin Laura, or to your know-it-all brother-in-law Hugo. If you don’t listen to anybody but to your own gut, you do have a choice: painful toil or rather something more delightful—what’s it going to be?

‘Doing what I want to do’ is the most scary enterprise of all because it’s so utterly selfish. Where is the sacrifice in that? Exactly: sacrifice is unnecessary humbug! Unless you find it important to please people, that is. People pleasing and being happy exclude each other. Worse: while we pretend to be so ridiculously selfless, the people we’re trying to suck up to don’t give a rat’s behind about us, about the stuff we do, or about our noble and idiotic self-deprivation.

Nobody cares about what you do. Nobody cares how much you suffer. Nobody cares if you are happy. Do you care? We are quick to perform worthless chores but it takes the utmost discipline for most of us to do what we want to do. Before we follow up on a joyful idea we clean the toilet bowl first. Insane! Trust me, dull diligence doesn’t provide valuable service to your community.

“Giving back to the community” with sacrifice and harrowing labor is the idea of fools for fools. When you’re actively busy doing what you really want to do, you are at your best. And when you are at your best, your family, your clientèle, and your community get the best out of you. Truth is, there is hardly anything more selfless than the most selfish thing you can think of doing. Think Tiger Woods.

Last but not least, when we’re limiting joy in life our income is likely to be limited also. Being insanely happy has no limits, and money based on happiness has more potential than our in-laws can stomach.

Good luck, Tom! You’re doing the finest thing you can possibly do for an individual.

Egbert