Work done with passion and urgency is never hard.
Sometimes, doing hard things is easy.
Last Saturday was the culmination of months of hard work. But here’s the thing–none of it felt hard or even like work, really.
Seventy volunteers showed up at Tamarack State Beach around 9 a.m., scanned a check-in QR code, gathered reusable bags, gloves, and a picker, grabbed a data sheet and a pencil, and set out across the beach searching for garbage. It was a beautiful, sunny, prototypical fall day in California.
Two hours later, we had twenty-two pounds of garbage, which didn’t sound like a lot until you considered the pile, primarily very light dime-sized pieces of foam and plastic. The team found hundreds of cigarette butts, dozens of single-use plastic water bottle caps, an astonishing number of flossers (who flosses at the beach?), thirty meters of fishing line, and hundreds of food wrappers.
?As they trickled back to the tent to sort and count their haul, my wife offered them her homemade cookies and muffins, and they poured cups of coffee generously donated by a local Carlsbad breakfast spot, The Naked Cafe . They diligently filled in data cards because counting each item is critical to establishing or changing local policies like single-use plastics and public smoking bans. Everyone chatted and laughed, and for a group that had just spent the previous two hours picking up garbage, they seemed awfully happy.
Several volunteers stayed to help break down the tent, fold up the tables, and load all the cleanup gear into the truck. I signed a participation form for one of the lingerers, a high school kid who’d driven almost fifty miles to help clean a beach he’d never visited.?
“We are doing another one on November 25th,” I said.
“I'll be here,” he said.
All in a day’s work.
Surfrider hosts monthly beach cleanups in Oceanside, Carlsbad, Encinitas, Pacific Beach, Ocean Beach, and Imperial Beach, and the site captains share most of the gear across those cleanups. With Oceanside coming up the following weekend, we drove to the storage locker in Solana Beach and offloaded the sandy equipment.?
On the way home, I did a little mental inventory of the work we’d done to make this cleanup a reality. A lot of people pitched in to help. Gabriel, Surfrider San Diego’s beach cleanup coordinator, bird-dogged the State Parks and Rec folks to get the permits–yes, you need a permit to clean up a beach–and supplied all the necessary documentation, like proof of insurance. The other site captains hosted me at their events, showing me the ropes and sharing tips and tricks to make my event successful. Joana, the chapter manager, committed the chapter’s resources and made this new cleanup a priority. And other program managers shared their connections in the community to help with donations and drive participation.
A good team makes the job easier, of course. When I spent an afternoon or a weekend morning ticking off my list of to-dos, it felt effortless.
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Passion and Urgency
Our environmental crisis is real, and we are running out of time. I feel very passionate about contributing to reversing the course.?
Would I prefer people not drop their garbage into gutters that drain to the ocean? Or walk away from piles of trash when they leave the beach? Or pump untreated sewage and tons of plastics into our oceans? Of course. It’s frustrating to know that Americans make more waste and recycle less than every other industrialized country.?
I am tired of stuffing plastic wrappers into my wetsuit while I am waiting for waves, filling up bags with the remnants of food containers and plastic toys scattered along the tide line, and picking up cigarette butts while walking back to my car. I could get mad. It seems like a lot of effort to barely make a dent.
Passion and urgency make quick work of hard tasks.
How to make product management easy
Product managers sucked into the “product management is so hard” hype would do well to find a problem they feel passionate about and have a sense of urgency to solve. You’ll suddenly have a job that feels easy, a to-do list that feels effortless, and great satisfaction from small victories.
Your main job is to help everyone answer the question, “Why are we doing this?” If you don’t believe in your answer to that question, neither will the rest of the team. But if you can honestly say you would solve the problem even if you weren’t getting paid, you are on the right track.
“Do what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life.” The cliche always seemed trite. But cliches are what they are because they are perpetually true.
Try it at work, and apply it in your community.
Help Surfrider make a difference.?
Or, find your own thing and get to “work”.