Loving What You Do

I’m typically a person who skips reading the Foreword of a book. In school, it just seemed to add more work to what already seemed like too much homework, and let’s be honest – it never really mattered. As an adult, I will read the Foreword only if it seems to be brief and to the point. Thank goodness Ken Blanchard didn’t have too much to write when he wrote the Foreword to the book, Fish!, by Stephen C. Lundin, Ph.D., Harry Paul, and John Christensen. One page, titled “Loving What You Do,” really struck home with me and I wanted to share it with others who may feel the same way.

From the Foreword of Fish!:

Loving What You Do

Ranger Petrucci - who always seems to be doing
what he loves and loving what he does!

“It is fashionable today to believe that we should not settle for anything less than doing what we love. Write poetry, travel the world on a sailboat, paint – do whatever you love, and the money will follow. We tell ourselves that life is too short to spend our working hours doing anything less than the ideal, and we continue our search for the perfect workplace. The danger is that if our quest for ideal work focuses us on the future, we will miss the amazingly wonderful life that is available today, in this moment.

The fact is that in the real world there are conditions which prevent us from chasing the perfect, ideal job. Many of us have significant responsibilities to family members or to a way of life. For others, a true calling hasn’t made itself visible yet. Some of us are under so much stress in our personal lives there is literally no time or energy to seek a new line of work.

Fish! Is a parable, an invented story about finding the deep source of energy, creativity, and passion that exists inside each of us by learning to love what we do, even if at the moment we may not be doing what we love.” – by Ken Blanchard

The passage above seemed to describe many of the challenges that I faced in both personal and professional life since even before working full time with the Park Service. In both high school and college, I thought I knew what I wanted to do. I majored in Psychology and got my teaching certificate in Elementary Education. After a few very rude real-world awakenings, I came to realize that Elementary Education was absolutely not what I loved, and that I didn’t have much hope for a future in the field of Psychology without an advanced degree. I had spent all of my high school summers and many of my college summers working at Cunningham Falls State Park, so when a full time position opened I decided it might be worth a try to get an interview. I received notice that I was best qualified for the position, had the interview and called my family crying immediately after the interview was over – I was positive I hadn’t gotten the job. However, several weeks later I got a call saying that I was being offered a full time position!

While I wasn’t entirely sure how it had happened, I knew that it was my only option at the time for a stable job. I accepted the position and began working at Seneca Creek State Park. For the first few months (okay, it was years), I was still looking for employment somewhere else – in another job that I thought I would love more than the one I was in. I was looking for perfection in a work environment rather than trying to change my attitude toward my work. According to Ken Blanchard’s writing from the passage above, this is dangerous! “...If our quest for ideal work focuses us on the future, we will miss the amazingly wonderful life that is available today, in this moment.”

Ranger Ledbetter focusing on what's
 available "in this moment."

Looking back on my first few years as a full time employee with MPS, I realize just how much more I could have accomplished and how much happier I could have been if I had been focused on fostering a positive attitude in the workplace rather than dwelling on the thought that I was just doing the work until I found a job that I loved. I spent hours of time in my personal life looking for new jobs when I could have spent that time learning a new hobby or just enjoying more time with family and friends. The time that I wasted complaining about the negative aspects of the job could have been used to build stronger friendships and happier memories with my coworkers.

As far as I am aware, there is no “perfect” job that allows you to do only what you want to do, when you want to do it. There are parts of every position that may fall short of our expectations, but if we take the time to focus on the positive more than the negative and to construct a workplace we thrive in rather than expecting others to do so for us, then we might just succeed in creating a work environment that we love.