An excerpt from my dialogue with Paul McAleer on our podcast Designing Yourself, Episode #13: Making Things Happen (originally aired May 7, 2014), with minimal editing for readability.
It’s really too bad that we don’t have another word for this, because it ends up giving work a bad name. This precise thing, this feeling of doing something that isn’t really who you are, doing something only for the money, doing something for someone else that benefits somebody else but doesn’t really benefit you, we call it “work.” We call that place “work.” We call it “doing work.”
And as a result, we end up with this negative connotation of what “work” is. But don’t we all feel there’s really nothing wrong with hard work? Oftentimes the more effort you put into something, the more rewarding it is. So there’s this natural kind of tension there. When I was going to this place called “work” and I started to have bad experiences there, it took so much work to get out of bed in the morning. It took so much work to get on the subway and go there. And it didn’t feel good.
But meanwhile, I could pull an all-nighter doing my own “side work” happily. It was the best feeling in the world to be really working hard and working long hours and being tied up in my work. And a lot of times I’ve been accused of being a workaholic. But I don’t like thinking of myself that way because it makes me feel as if I don’t have a societally-accepted separation between my life and my work.
I have some very strong feelings that those two things are not opposites, that work is a part of life. And I have a sense that we all feel that — that question of what would you do with a million dollars?, and the supposed I’d never work again! kind of thing, I don’t think anyone would really be happy never working again.
Over the last several years for me, it has been a journey of transforming what that word “work” means to me, going from work as that place that I go to and do the stuff that I don’t really enjoy with people that I don’t really like in a subject matter that doesn’t really matter to me, or really matter to anyone else for that matter, and transforming that into life’s work.
An excerpt from my dialogue with Paul McAleer on our podcast Designing Yourself, Episode #13: Making Things Happen (originally aired May 7, 2014), with minimal editing for readability.
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