Effort tells you about passion

You know how you’re supposed to be passionate about your work, right? Right? Being passionate means you wake up in the morning ready and willing to face the work day; perhaps even really looking forward to the work to be done.

Not all of us are like that, however. For some of us, work is a struggle where we attempt to balance the work we don’t like with that of the personal need to continue to work. We balance the temporary situation while we wait for something better to open up that will be more satisfying for us.

One of the ways we can individually tell if what we are doing is great for us is “effort” versus “effortlessness.”

If it is a struggle for us on Sunday night knowing that Monday will be coming, that’s effort. If we dread the next two hour meeting because of the subject or the people in it, that’s effort. If we have to continually optimize our schedule so as to fit everything in and it feels like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, that’s effort.

On the other hand, you can be working a task and totally lose track of time. All of a sudden, you look at the clock and three hours have gone by while you were totally absorbed in your work. That’s effortlessness. You can have a great brainstorming session where things get down to tasks the next day and something starts to be built that means something to you. That’s effortlessness. You can operate at the task level while at the same time be looking down on your work and figuring out what cool things you could also do to make your work even better. That’s effortlessness.

That’s a range, of course. But important. Which end of the spectrum you are on in your work will tell you a lot about how well you feel about your work. Maybe even tell you that you should be doing something different or keeping on keeping on with what you are doing.

A Tip of The Purple Hat to Christine Kane’s posts on The Opposite of Effortlessness and Effortlessness — A Personal Story for the inspiration for this post.