Finding Love Through Work
Thousand Reflections by Sandbox
Issue #27
About Thousand Reflections: Thousand Network is full of people from all walks of life and background. Here, we try to tap into this collective wisdom by offering a prompt every week and sourcing short responses from the members.
This Week’s Prompt:
During our lives, we have deep and shallow cycles of work. There is some work that makes you feel like your best self, makes you feel alive, helps you to design a great life experience. But there is also much work that is shallow, temporary jobs, or work you don’t want to do but must do for whatever reason.
In this reflection, we want to know how you have found the work ‘love of your life’? Is the the same as you thought when you were a kid, or is it constantly changing? What jobs have you felt like you are in the wrong place doing the wrong thing, and where have you felt like you are in the right place doing the right thing? If you are in your dream job, how does it feel? How can your relationship with work make your life more fulfilling, and how can you leverage it to feel that you are using your time, energy, and skills most effectively?
I was lost (aren’t we always?); I was lost between the need to find myself and the struggle to be what everyone expected me to be. I was meant to be somewhat of an echo of others’ will, a project of a much-desired success. I became really talented in keeping myself occupied — occupied with organizations, occupied with people, occupied with everything that could keep me distracted from myself. I knew that I wanted to make a change, I knew that I wanted to be more complete, I knew that I wanted to love unconditionally — but that was about it.
I pretended to study law for seven years, part of this inability to break character, to be something other than what someone considered me to be. One day, I became less lost. I sent a resume and a kind of a motivational letter. As days saw themselves go by, I was surprisingly selected to be a part of a social junior enterprise — and love presented itself to me. Since that day, three years ago, I have three kinds of privileges: I work to create social impact every day, I work with and for people and I find a little piece of me each day.
As an enterprise, we mainly believe in change. We most definitely believe in love. Change and love. Changing other people’s lives by reminding them that change is a matter of awareness, it’s a choice. We can choose to look at each other, help each other, take care of each other, love each other — because love is a choice. We choose to give; we choose to become more by giving ourselves, by opening our hearts to others. We choose to be in love with all kinds of different people because they are a brand new world within themselves — a multitude of visions, meanings, and questions. We choose to develop one another, to feed this love, to feed this change. We choose because we can. We love because we can. I had the opportunity to realize that I couldn’t ignore the process of understanding “the wonderful disaster” I most probably am, as Nick Cave puts it. I am still lost — but I found a work that allows me to accept me for me as I inspire others to do so as well — so we all become the best version of ourselves. So we can make a change. So we can love a little more.
My primary love in work has changed over time. Being raised in a third world country, my parents wanted me to choose a safe option that would ensure a healthy living wage. Primarily they wanted me to be a doctor, but they didn’t force me to do it. I chose computer engineering based on my assumption that it would be something pretty cool, and from being inspired from career magazines where Computer Engineers were always doing great things.
I did so even though we never had a computer in our house and in fact I learned to click a mouse for the first time in my first programming lab in Engineering school. Other guys were already typing logic and code, while I was learning to single click, double click, and typing at the same time as drafting my own work.
Engineering school wasn’t as cool as I expected, but I passed through and worked as an analyst. Later, I learned that engineering is an art to solve worlds problem. Being a computer engineer means I have some tools that I can use to solve many problems of versatile domains. I worked as an analyst mostly in divisions between data and business for the pharmaceutical industry and found that analyzing is my thing. My tech skills mostly increased in that side and I love it. But in order to make a living wage, I did other tech-related work such as web and mobile design, and still do.
So, what is my primary love now? Over the years, I think it’s analyzing in both the tech and business domains. At least, I feel myself whole there.
I never knew what I wanted to do when I grew older. I never knew what work I loved and if that work would make me become something. I wanted to be a sea diver or a detective. But I didn’t want to work as a sea diver or a detective. Or was it the other way around? Maybe robbing banks would be nice though. Especially because they kept the money of all those people who knew what they wanted!
Anyway, until recently I still didn’t know what I wanted. It was easy to understand I would be able to find meaning through working with bright and kind people in a way that would make us learn and grow. But are there any other possible combinations of teams and tasks that could provide even better meaning, learning and growth? How to optimize all those possible scenarios within the restrictions our past choices created? And how to ensure work doesn’t cannibalize other non-work related parts of our life that can even bring more meaning?
Well, I still don’t know the answers to those three questions. I’ve burned out trying to find them. But I have some guidelines to help me navigate the space in between them.
- Always focus on learning, especially outside your work, so that you maximize the chances of finding an answer to this question or of finding the people that will help you understand who you should be working with.
- Focus even more on learning so that you minimize the constraints created by past choices. Sometimes those limitations just make the quest easier!
- Number three is about learning that work is intolerant towards our lives. It puts itself above us because its results are more important than us. And while I believe that can be something okay, it’s necessary to consider ourselves our most important work or else whatever is our work will make itself a top priority. And that can only be good if we have learned enough, which is by definition something contradictory, i.e. you can never learn enough. So, to find love through work then focus on learning more and learning better. Love is derived from that pursuit.
“Love recognizes only itself as sovereign; when it becomes a servant to subsistence, it chooses to die rather than live in bondage. To “do what you love” may just kill it. You may earn a living but not feel alive.”
This quote is from a larger article entitled “How Love Dies At Work.” You can read the full article here.
I’ve been dancing since I was five years old. But I wasn’t a dancer then, it was just something I did. I quit, I found it in other forms, I missed it, I went back to it, I studied it in university, I fell in love all over again. I decided, come hell or high water, I would make it my life’s work.
But it wasn’t something I decided once and never again. It’s something I decide every day. I decide to get up and love it once more, even when my body aches and I’m exhausted. Then I go to class, or rehearsal, or performance, and I fall in love all over again.
Love — in work as well — is a constant choice. I have decided to dance so many times it feels inevitable that I’ll continue to do so — but nevertheless, every morning, I have to make the decision once more. So far, it’s been worth every second.
This is the first part of our February series on Finding Love. If you enjoy this series, be sure to click the green heart to recommend and follow the publication so you never miss an issue!
