Make room for work you enjoy

We’ve been told all our life that we have to suffer at work to get ahead.

If I ask you to make a list of words that come to mind when you think about what it takes to have a “successful” career, at the very top of that list are probably words like pressure, stress, and sacrifice.

I used to believe that too.

If I wasn’t stressed or under intense pressure every moment of my workday, then I wasn’t working hard enough or getting the right kind of work done.

I was directly linking high stress with professional progress.

I would “fall back in line” by taking things that I enjoyed out of my workday. I told myself that the only way I’d accomplish my goals was to fill my day with hard things I didn’t like to do.

This is a story we’ve been told our entire lives: if you want to be successful and you want to achieve, it has to hurt.

But professional success and experiencing happiness during a workday are not mutually exclusive.

If you want to experience your version of professional success, run towards the things that get you excited about your workday.

When you incorporate things in your day that make you happy, you unlock who you really are as a person and a professional.

You owe it to yourself to understand what that is and accentuate those aspects of your work.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t work hard. Pursuing a career you want involves hard work, managing stress, and making sacrifices.

But what it does mean is that your hard work can be in the name of something that makes you happy.

We don’t have to think of suffering as the only path forward. It’s possible to work hard and be happy.

You’re not only allowed to have this, you owe it to yourself to craft a career path that accentuates it.

Go have a great workday.