🛠 TREE 149: Believe in your craft

When you are an employee or running a service business, you don’t necessarily get to choose what you work on. It may be bland. It may be stupid. It may not be completely aligned with your values. There are no perfect jobs.

What do you do?

You could complain. You could phone it in. You could make the whole project a misery.

Or you could get your head down, focus on your craft, turn out best work that the situation allows, and learn something you can apply to the next project. Find the joy in putting your skills to work, no matter the job at hand. Getting paid to do a thing you are good at is a privilege.

Obviously, you stay within your ethical bounds. If you’re a heating engineer and someone asks you to build a gas chamber— Well, you know when to say no. But there’s nothing wrong with a bit of a mercenary approach to work.

Believe in your craft. Bring your best to every project, even the not so good ones. It will make you happier. It will make the world a better place (if only marginally). It will get your closer to opportunities to do what you really want to do.

Right now, you’re probably imagining an assassin reading this and feeling much better about their day ahead even though it’s a boring sniper job and doesn’t involve poisoned ninja throwing stars and jetpack escapes. All I can say is: That’s not what I meant!

Grow slowly.
Jeff

We were never

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