It's Just Your Job

It's just your job.

You've been working through your email, following up on your leads - making calls, wrapping up quotes. As you stretch your back out of the static posture you've been in for the last two hours you notice it's 5:01. Time to go home.?

You're looking forward to a relaxing evening. As you move to shut off your computer, you see a new message has infiltrated your inbox. Technically, you've done your work for the day - it wouldn’t be wrong to leave it unread and answer it tomorrow, when you're fresh into the day.?

It's just your job. It can wait. And besides, it’s getting chilly outside and you’ve parked further away than you wanted. You’ve got plans with friends after you freshen up at home. Work and life balance, right?

It was a cold, fall day in 1993 on my family's farmland; my grandmother and I were planting trees. She was a tough farm girl, 75 years strong. I was 22. We didn't have any mechanical tillage to help us plant these walnuts and acorns. Instead we were digging or using a bar to make a hole and dropping the seed in.?

You see, I'd had this idea to plant a tree farm on the land, in an area that wasn't easily tillable for farming. Growing up, my grandfather would tell me stories of camping out along the river and the trees; seeing all these deer and really just enjoying the beauty of the scenery. In the 90s, the Midwest deer population was very, very low; it was a real rarity for me to see a deer even as a child.?

So I convinced my folks to let me plant these trees. I'd done a lot of research, studied with the Purdue Extension Office, and consulted with them. The best recommendation they had was to buy seedlings. At 22, I didn't have expendable income to afford seedlings, so on the weekends my wife and I would go around and gather up the nuts we wanted to plant. The next five years or so were spent replanting nuts, spraying pesticides around them, and trying to get them a good start. I was able to spend a few bucks on seedlings to fill in as well. 20 some odd years later and we have a nice little forest on the family land.?

Well, that cold fall day in the first year of planting, I remember feeling tired from a good day's worth of work. I looked over at my grandma close to 3 o’ clock in the afternoon and said, “You know, it's getting late. Do you want to go?” I figured I could just come back later, when I was fresh and ready to start another day.

“I think we can get this done,” she said. And so we did.?

We could have stopped, we had a good ending point. It was just a job. Just some thing I was doing. My grandmother taught me a valuable lesson that cold, fall afternoon; one that I have carried with me to this day. Get it done, don’t wait for better circumstances. Don’t allow yourself to come up with excuses.