Work Is What You Make It: Call It Opportunity
Your week can be extremely long and unfulfilling, leaving you waiting for Friday night to finally cut loose and really live. But what if “working for the weekend” was just a mentality; what if it was your mentality. And what if I told you one simple exercise I use to this day that I have benefited from, that can help you look at each day of your week as more important than the last? Too late, I’m going to answer anyway.
I’m not a whimsical spiritual guy. That being said, I am interested in conspiracy theories like the Illuminati, reptilians, flat earth; all that good stuff. But not in the “man, I have to tell my friends about this ground breaking new truth I just discovered that the Government is covering up!” kind of way – and I’m no friend of Government, but that’s another tale – more like in the way that someone might have been interested in Friends in the late 90’s.
It was a great series; so many classic moments and memories, laughter and tears, heartbreak and fuzzy feelings. Pure entertainment – I didn’t think that Ross and Rachel were two people who in real life actually broke up and somehow we had a special inside look at their day to day lives, although the tears I did cry were very real. But I knew that it was just a made up story. And that’s how I look at conspiracies; they’re super entertaining, like how a comic book is for a teenager or The National Enquirer for an alcoholic house wife.
Why is that important? Why did I have to tell you about my fascination with the occult? First off, slow down sailor! ‘Fascination’ may be too strong of a word. I’d say ‘interest’. The truth is, it’s probably somewhere in the middle. Now, the idea behind “mind over matter” is a spiritual and not necessarily scientific perspective or theory.
I want to be clear that I don’t buy into The Secret or the idea of real magic with a G or J, C or K. I don’t think that just because you make yourself a dream board you’re suddenly going to wake up with results that you never worked for. But I do buy into the idea that your mentality has a direct correlation with how you preform. An article written in 2015 on the website Asaya Mind shares a collection of thought experiments – a lot of spiritual driven perspective but with scientific study to back it up.
Placebo or not, the results found in these cases were very interesting. How much does your thinking have to do with your day to day life? We can see this first-hand with positive and negative people; is the glass half full or half empty? How does thinking one way or the other guide an individual's train of though, and how do others who are around that individual feel about how they act, are two very important results produced from each interaction that this positive or negative person may have.
Believing you can fly while going over a cliff certainly might stop any anxiety from overcoming you to hold you back from taking that risky plunge. On the other hand, you’ll never know if what you believe is true unless you put it to the test. A person who refuses to cross the road because of the possibility of being hit by a bus has a good chance of never getting anywhere in life. Sure, you may be safe and sound but you get to decide how much life would be worth living if you are just standing in one place.
There’s an old saying that goes something like “You do you, boo.” And that’s very true. In the same breath, you also have to accept the responsibility for your actions. Or at least that’s what I want you to think about. If I go into work every day feeling like I am wasting my time, dreaming about being somewhere else, and working to get home so I can play in the evening or on the weekend, you may have the best life ever. I don’t doubt that possibility. But more often than not, I believe that people who find themselves in this cycle lower their expectation of happiness so that they can feel good about the repetition they have found themselves caught in.
This is what I’m getting at. Calling work ‘work’ and ignoring the affect it has on you in real life. The idea of waking up, disgruntled that you can’t sleep in, having to rush out the door because you’re always almost five minutes late, sitting in an office for eight long hours counting the clock and looking forward to an outing with friends on the weekend; “Yep, just five more days and I’ll be free! Until I have to come back to work and do it all over again…” This mentality is one that I believe is detrimental to your life and to you being able to achieve greater success. The beautiful part is, you get to decide what ‘success’ is.
What I’ve been experimenting with is how context and perception can impact your mood. An interesting piece on Psyblog shares nine experiments dealing with the power of persuasion and correlates with the idea that what we think determines – or at least is a factor in determining – our reality.
When coming in to work, I don’t think about the hour and a half drive to and from the office, I don’t think about sitting in my chair for eight hours while I stare at a computer screen, and I don’t spend time daydreaming about what I’ll be doing outside of the confines of my occupation. I’m not preaching, in the sense of feeling proud about anything. If I’m coming off like I’m preaching at all, it’s because I believe in what I’m saying because I’ve seen it work for me first hand.
I’m not a genius. I’m pretty lazy. I would find out how many sick days I had every year and make sure I used them all up. I would take every short cut I could just to get home early; all to play another game of Madden and try to draft the perfect team. At that moment, that was what I was living for, and it was a fair trade. I worked very little to supply me with enough income so that I could pay bills, not have a car, and too much free time to play as much Madden as I could handle. I can look back and say “it’s not my fault that I’m not where I want to be in life!” but that’s not the truth. That is a distraction.
That was what I wanted to do and I got what I wanted. I can blame the job and say I wasn’t making enough money, but the truth is I didn’t want to work anymore than I had to. I was content enough with my life that my level of fun had to be capped by the amount of money I had available; and that was fine, but Madden got old. And I needed to get something more out of life.
What I did and what I have been finding success with is changing the word ‘work’ to another definition that describes what I’m doing but without the connotation that I’m “wasting my time” and giving it to someone else. I began to look at ‘work’ as ‘opportunity’. The beautiful thing with opportunity is it’s relation to the idea of being beneficial.
Opportunity can mean business opportunity, moving up the corporate ladder. It could mean providing you with a means of saving up to go on a vacation every year to a new fantastic place in the world you haven’t been to yet. Opportunity to you could very well be the idea of living week to week and partying hard on the weekends. That is entirely OK and very reasonable if it’s reasonable for you. My point isn’t to say “you should want more in life”; I do hope you maximize your potential – but like I said, do you.
My point is to look at something like ‘ work’ as your ‘ opportunity’ to be able to do things that for the majority of the people on this planet are not an option to conceive.
Another way to get across what I’m trying to say is to imagine the life of an Olympic athlete. How many hours, how many years do they train before they even get a chance to make it into the Games? Let’s say four years. Most likely, though, it’s been roughly a life time. For a sixteen to twenty year old kid, that’s an incredible feat for them to accomplish. Put everything in your life on hold, dedicate every moment to a sport instead of experiencing adolescence, all for just a few moments of glory – but that glory is something only the very few will ever feel.
Sure, there are residual positives – talk shows, photo shoots, sponsorship's. If you are the best in the world at your craft, you will get recognition from someone or some place. But let’s break it down. You train for over 1400 days. You make it into the qualifiers. You make it into the semis. Then you win the gold medal. You get to stand on the podium for about 15 minutes, they play your anthem, and then... It’s on to the next one.
I’m willing to bet that an athlete who just spent the last four years or more of their life perfecting their craft is not going to be content with just sitting around and looking at their gold medal for the rest of their life. A person who is built with that kind of determination, or has had that kind of will power taught to them, no doubt enjoy standing at the top of the podium with the gold medal hanging around their neck; it is a confirming moment that everything they have worked for – every year, every day they gave their blood and sweat and tears – it was worth it. They reached their goal. But what happens to that desire after they have reached that plateau?
It doesn’t often disperse. Mentally, they are the same person. What’s next? So those 10,000 plus hours they have put into their sport that they are the best in the world at amounts to roughly no more than 24 hours of feeling successful. Then it’s back to the drawing board; that might not mean continuing as a professional athlete, perhaps it’s shifting focus and starting a business, or it might mean making sure that in four years they are more prepared to repeat this feat and taste victory one more time. The outcome, however, isn’t very even; such a little amount of celebration compared to the amount of work they had to put in to get there. And that’s if you’re a winner. What if you come in seventh; how do you judge success?
This is a big part of having a beneficial mentality; focused and driven towards a goal clearly set out and envisioned in the mind. Payoff is rarely on a one to one ratio. You don’t work for a day and then get a day of vacation. Understanding this is crucial to being able to be clear about what you are defining as your goal for the opportunity that is available and what your expectations should realistically be. I can’t wish to vacation to Europe if I only work part time and get paid minimum wage. I can if I take my free time and supplement my income with other opportunities that might be available.
In other words; your job is fuel for achieving your desires. Or at least if you can change your perspective to see the benefits that your work is providing you, whether that dream is about taking a prosperous next step in your career or making sure you have enough beer money for the big rager coming up this weekend, you can do yourself a big favor by exploring the idea of ‘work’ – being the voluntary exchange of your time for someone else’s money – as the reason you are able to imagine yourself getting there instead of holding you back.
Consider the alternative; what would you be doing if you had to find a new job tomorrow? Not many of us can afford to be unemployed. If you can believe that what you call ‘work’ is the catalyst for you to be able to achieve material possessions or experience life changing moments or propel yourself into a new position in your career, whatever you might be working towards or for, then I would argue it is fair to say that what you really are doing is creating ‘opportunity’ by volunteering to make the aforementioned exchange.
TL;DR – By changing your perspective on what ‘work’ means to you, and by looking at what you receive in return for the completion of your agreed upon duties as ‘opportunity’ for you to be able to achieve your desires, the feelings connected to those thoughts will be attached to a positive idea instead of leaving you with a mind that is heavy with dread, and the outcome will have a beneficial influence on your mentality and the way you feel about where you are in life and your ability to achieve those dreams.
Alexander Johnson Social Media Manager, Agency Media
“I love to write and work at a real cool place. We help businesses do better business. Also, tacos are very delicious.”