Pertaining to work: doing what you love, loving what you do

Early in my vocational pursuits, my father told me I would be lucky to find a job that not only pays well, but one in which I enjoy. Although you will never have to work a day in your life, if you choose a job you love (according to Confucius), and “the only way to do great work is to love what you do,” per Steve Jobs, I believe to do what you love and love what you do requires removing ourselves from the equation to ask: How does my work impact or bless someone else—a colleague, customer or stranger I might never meet? Perhaps Kahlil Gibran got it right when he penned: “Work is love made visible. And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.”

How can you do what you love and love what you do?

Image source: associationsnow.com.

 

 

Where happiness + success intersect: overcoming the burden of expectations

 

There’s something to be said about the correlation between loving what you do and doing what you love and vice versa. Similarly, theologian Albert Schweitzer once penned: “Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.” And, recently, during an interview with WD magazine (March/April 2019), author Min Jin Lee talked about overcoming the burden of expectations. Which ultimately leads to joy. So how do we do this? In “Rekindle the excitement,” I pose the challenge to rediscover what makes us excited to jump out of bed each morning… by starting somewhere. Yet first we have to ask the question: If I removed expectation from the equation, including time and/or money, and if I could be or do that one thing I love doing, that brings me joy and spells success (in my book), what does it look like? And will I regret the not doing?

Are you doing what you love doing?

Photo source: pinterest.com.

Grammar lesson #16: fun, funner, funnest

[Image credit: Stuart Miles]

Ouch.  That’s how it felt when I posted on a friend’s Facebook wall that funner is a word.  (Her mom is a teacher and I felt the sting of the imaginary ruler as she whacked me across the knuckles in admonishment.)  When Googling the derivatives of fun, I discovered its adjectives in slang form.  So are funner and funnest real words then?  According to The Grammar Girl, when fun is used as an informal adjective (rather than a common noun), funner and funnest slip down the same slippery slope.  (If crazier and craziest are okay, then why not funner and funnest, I ask?)  Apparently Steve Jobs touted the “funnest iPod ever” campaign, and now Chuck E Cheese commercials challenge its customers to: “say cheese, it’s funner.”  Personally, whether slang or not, I think these words are playful and, all rulers aside, funner*.

What do you think: are funner and funnest “real” words?

*If you refuse to use the informal approach, try more fun or most fun, instead.