Work it out. Your potential, that is.

During a weekly sales catch-up, one of our team asked the question, why we work for Palesa Mbali Group? While I wracked my brain to come up with an awe-inspiring, highly motivational response, one answer from a member of our team humbled me… she said,

“Honestly, I work here because I needed the job, and I had the skills to do it.”

Though that response was blunt, I realized that it was no more or less of a valid response than the rest of the team. They all had different answers because they were in different places in their lives, that happened to intersect at our place of work, Palesa Mbali Group. Our mere existence as a company, never mind our highest ideals of contributing to a diverse African workforce, met the need of a woman who needed the job to help her family, and gain a sense of independence and identity by being gainfully employed.

When we have a job, we can easily take it for granted. We complain the most when it comes to work. It’s a basic need to earn a living but a job is so much more than earning money – it works out our hidden potential, it reveals who we can be when we stretch ourselves. Work is the preparation for fulfilling our calling or dream.

I often hear successful people say that you should do what you love or do what you are passionate about and then it won’t feel like work. I believe this but I don’t think it looks like a lot of us imagine, so work hard where you are right now. Use your current task, your current work to build up the endurance, skill and discipline needed for when you step into your passion. Even the thing we would love to do, the thing we were born to do, is going to take good, old-fashioned work.