By now you should know that I've been posting a list of personal principles for the past few days. Yesterday's was about moving forward every day. Today's is about getting the most out of work.
I remember growing up always being encouraged by my parents to reach for the stars. There wasn't anything they discouraged me from when thinking about what I wanted to be when I grew up.
It started at an early age, when I wanted to be an astronaut. Now before you laugh, I put some actual planning into this. I had a kind of path to my goal sorted out -- I would enter the Air Force Academy to be an aeronautical engineer, become a pilot, and eventually fly the space shuttle. All of this came to a crashing halt when, in preparation for my future years of touring the stars, I took a drafting class in high school and found myself in a remedial math class on fractions for the vo-tech crowd.
There's nothing wrong with vo-tech, and nothing wrong with remedial math, but when I was taking Advanced Placement Honors Calculus at the time, remedial fractions broke my delusions of getting ahead in aeronautics in high school. Nonetheless, my parents were still encouraging.
I don't know why, but I remember many days when Dad would come home from the cookie factory, and he'd tell me, "Do what you love." I kind of understood that at the time. It seemed like a simple concept. But it's really not.
I'm not even sure my dad understood it the way I understand it today. Today, I don't think about doing what I love. I do love the field in which I work. I think that's part of my problem sometimes - feeling like a dancing monkey, putting on my show whether I want to or not, just as long as they're cranking the music box. But that's obviously not the solution or the today's rule.
What I'm talking about is getting work to feel like it's something so involved, so fun, so engrossing that they shouldn't be paying you to do it. Think of maybe one of those effortless days when you start in the morning, and before you know it it's dark outside, and you're high on the activity of work itself, and you're feeling sad that you're going to stop. Maybe I'm the only one of us having those days? I hope not. If I am the only one, then you're doing something wrong. I don't have those days every day, but I know I can, and that's pretty important.
So that's the nature of this rule: Push yourself to be in the flow. It's hard to quantify. It's harder even to say how this should be done. I know there are a lot of books on "flow", which describes a kind of altered state of being. "The Zone," some people call it.
As they say, recognizing that it happens is the first step to repeating it. I recommend that if there's any place you do get into the zone, it should be work. When marrying this concept with what my parents always told me about doing what you love, I think there's an endless amount of happiness to be found in doing what amounts to basic subsistence.
Sure, it's a simple rule, simply described, but sometimes those are the best. If you have a problem with that, or you want to applaud it, the comment form is there for your submission.
Tomorrow's principle is the most esoteric and mystical of the bunch. I've been struggling all week with how to even present it, but whatever -- I wrote it down, and it's one of the oldest ones, so I have to pitch it whether I fail or not. It's called, "Zero Is Bad." I'll probably be cursed just for saying it aloud, too.
