Stepping Stones: My Journey to Becoming a Literacy Consultant- Do What You Love. Love What You Do. (Step 10)
From the desk of Hope…
This is my last post in my series Stepping Stones: My Journey to Becoming a Literacy Consultant. If you would like to read Stepping Stones 1-9, you can find them on the ERG website www.myedresource.com.
There are many things I could write about to bring this series to a close but I have decided to write about how much I love my job. The job that I created for myself. The job that doesn’t feel like a job to me. The job I dread leaving to go on vacation. The job that brings purpose to my life everyday.
How many people could say this about their job?
Sadly, there are so many people, some of which I know personally and some of which I hear stories about, who wake up everyday dreading going to work. How execrable it must be to feel this way about your work.
Steve Jobs says it best in his 2005 Commencement address at Stanford University. “Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.”
Doing what you love is not always easy…
Seven years into co-creating ERG, I have come to know myself as an entrepreneur. (This is not something I even remotely learned how to do in the School of Education.) Entrepreneurs share an innate passion for questioning the limitations of ideology and finding logical solutions to problems by thinking outside the box. They are resourceful and you better bet they (we) are tenacious.
Being an entrepreneur is not easy. Most days I come home from work and my brain is tired and feels like it is going to pop out of my head. I am faced with more work later in the night after I cook dinner, run my son to basketball practice, unload the dishwasher, do a load of laundry, monitor homework and various other things that need to happen at my house.
When you love what you do, you just “push through” to do what you need to do. To me, the tired feeling is a good kind of tired. The kind of tired that is fulfilling, invigorating and in some crazy way, energizing.
There is no “perfect time” to do what you love and to love what you do. Perfect timing doesn’t exist. You’ll wait forever. Once you make the decision to do what you love, the only regret will be that you didn’t start doing it sooner.
In retrospect, I am thrilled Alice and I went for what we wanted and did not wait for the “perfect time”.