The Purpose of Work
Work is something most people don’t understand. Many think of it as a bad thing; work is anything that they don’t want to do. Work is a chore, a mindless timesink, a task to hurry through before people go off to have “fun.”
But most people’s idea of “fun” involves sitting on a couch staring at a screen, or drinking enough to forget whatever work they did earlier in the day. Their fun doesn’t do anything to move them forward as people. When the fun ends, they are the same people as they were before they started.
The only thing that drives growth and change within people is work.
Work isn’t supposed to be fun, and it’s not supposed to be easy. Work is supposed to challenge you, to push you until your only choice is to change or give up. Work carves away the soft, weak parts within you like a sculptor removing layers from a stone. No one thinks a stone is beautiful until it has been shaped into something that makes it stand out from all the other stones. And no one will ever notice you if you don’t take the same approach to yourself.
And much like a statue, work will show you who you really are. It will reveal things within you that you never knew existed until you forcefully dredged them out. Anyone can be a hero or a genius in their mind, but real heroes and geniuses only exist as a result of the challenges they have faced. Work is the catalyst of their change. Before they conquered their enemies, forged new ground in their fields, they were just simple blocks of stone. No one cared about them or paid any attention to how they thought or what they felt. They looked just like everyone else. People only started paying attention to them once they saw what they were capable of doing, when their outer layers of mediocrity were worn away by the repeated hammering of countless hours of work.
So the next time you are faced with a task that you dread doing, think of it as a chisel. There’s always going to be some pain when chiseling away everything that conceals your ideal self. Looking back, it may shock you how little you miss the parts of yourself you’ve left behind when you’ve become the person you’ve always wanted to be.