I feel sorry for the person who can’t get genuinely excited about his work. Not only will he never be satisfied, but he will never achieve anything worthwhile. – Walter Chrysler
Happy garbage men. How are they generating excitement and satisfaction?
What does that mean?
This is an interesting quote, as it talks about excitement and satisfaction and how they relate to work. I don’t know if any of you had thought about it in this manner before, because I hadn’t.
The quote starts by feeling sorry for someone who isn’t (or cannot become) excited about their work. Any job can become tedious or boring if one is not careful. While some jobs are custom built to be tedious, the tedium can strike any job if one is not careful about their attitude towards it.
The quote goes on to say why they think that way. It says the unexcited person won’t be satisfied with their work, which kind of goes without saying, doesn’t it? If you’ve had more than two or three jobs, you’ve almost certainly been there already. Some of us got it in our very first job. Lucky us!
The other part is a bit more projective, but follows logically, I believe. If you start from a person who isn’t excited about what they do, and further push it until they are no longer satisfied, how likely are they to get to the point where they achieve anything worthwhile at work? That, of course, presumes that they will stay in a “dead end” job forever, right?
Why is excitement important?
Excitement is the thing that gets you moving, gets the juices flowing, helps you move towards happiness and away from pain and sadness. Have you ever heard someone say they are both excited and bored at the same time about the same thing? I certainly haven’t.
And have you heard someone who was dissatisfied at their job say they were excited about anything besides quitting time? Excitement makes you enjoy what is coming, instead of dreading it. Excitement gets you out of bed in the morning, and it keeps you working harder and longer than those who are not satisfied.
Where can I apply this in my life?
Excitement is what makes things worth doing. Like happiness, excitement is a choice, and wholly internal. I’ve known people who worked on garbage trucks in the summer, and were excited to do it. It earned them money to pay for their college, with a little left over for beer. They found a way to make themselves excited, by looking past the smell to the reward.
What do you do for a job? Grab some paper and write it down, leaving some space between each, ad you will be adding details on each. If you have more than one, write them all down. That might include some domestic jobs as well.
How many look forward to taking the trash out every week? How about changing diapers? That’s a job, right? Even if you’re between jobs, there are still things you do, write them down. Even finding a job is a job itself, right?
Now list the things that excite you about each job. If all you can come up with is “excited when it’s finished” then write it down, and be prepared to work on that a little more. Then list the things you dislike about each of the jobs you listed.
Look through all the things you listed for each job and select the job you feel is most in need of improvement. A trivial job with very low excitement might lose to an important job with a modest level of excitement, especially if the latter is the job that puts food on the table.
Think about what you wrote as being exciting, and the things that aren’t exciting. If you truly despise what you are doing, you might need to look for a replacement for this job, right? Otherwise, I will presume you will try to make it work as well as you can make it, right?
The idea is to accentuate the positive and minimize the negative. What can you do to make any of the exciting things even more exciting? What can you do to make the things you dislike less disagreeable. Do some brainstorming for each of them, and write down these ideas on another sheet of paper.
One of the things I find is that if I get what I concentrate on. When I have found myself focused on the boring, slow, and disagreeable parts of my job, my satisfaction plummets. When I notice this, I change my focus to the things that make me feel more satisfied.
Sometimes this is as simple as the satisfaction of a job well done. Sometimes I can find something to be excited about, and focus on that instead of the drudgery. In any case, it is up to the individual to make themselves excited and to find satisfaction in everything they do.
Like happiness, excitement is a choice. It can be as difficult or as easy as you make it. You can also practice and strengthen your ‘excited’ muscles the same way you would do for your ‘happiness’ muscles.
You will become what you think and do on a regular basis (your habits). Focus on being excited and satisfied, and it will be easier to achieve than if your focus is on being bored and dissatisfied. The choice is yours. Choose wisely, my friend.
From: Twitter, @mtbrookhart
confirmed at : http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/w/walterchry183233.html
Photo by California Cthulhu (Will Hart)
Happy Birthday to Walter Chrysler, Born on 2 April, 1875.
