Work is Good

Work is good for the soul - but only if it's work you love.

I wonder what drives people to take jobs they don't like - and then to keep them year after year. Given that we spend such a huge chunk of our lives working, this doesn't make sense. Work has to be a pleasure. At the very least, it has to bring satisfaction - a sense of contribution. At the very, very least, it should not be a source of stress.

When I began my career many years ago, I could not have articulated any sort of work "philosophy" but I knew what I liked and what I did not like. I had a few jobs - more like gigs really because they didn't last long - that I enjoyed. I had one job that lasted maybe two-and-a-half days: a coding clerk at an insurance company. Yup - you can see why it didn't last.

I never troubled myself with money or benefits. I was after something that would make me want to get up in the morning. I found it in the film industry when I was nineteen years old. Lucky me!

It wasn't all bread and roses all those years. But boy, it was exciting! I have stories to last a long while - alas, no grandchildren to tell them to. I'll never forget the thrill of editing my first TV commercial! Heck, I'll never forget the thrill of getting thousands of feet of film from a location shoot in Hawaii that was synch sound. My job, as an assistant editor, was to synch the rushes - no big deal. Except that the Hawaiian sound man had not used a clapperboard and the sound speed did not match the film speed. On top of that, the sound I needed to synch was a bunch of Hawaiian cowboys singing a Hawaiian song.

I worked through the night - in fact, through more than one night, trying to make sense of it all. The fact that I eventually did is beyond miraculous.

Fast forward to today - still working but not very much. Still doing what I love to do - tell stories. At it's best, my work is telling stories that inspire and that touch people's hearts. Now I do it mainly through words on paper (or a screen) rather than with pictures. But it's all the same. I can't imagine the day when I ever actually stop. Why would I? Do writers stop writing? Do film people stop filming? Do artists retire from painting?

I'm so lucky to have followed my bliss and found work that never ends.

No one should settle for anything less.