Alasdair Stuart said something quite poignant at the end of Escape Pod 391 (that I just listened to the other day), and it really resonated with me.  It made me think about my job, and why I show up every morning at 7:00 and leave at 4:30, or 5:00, or 6:00 without a single word that my job is draining the life from me…  …Because it’s not.

Here’s Alasdair’s snippet:

Community.  A feeling of belonging.

When you do something you love, when you participate in something you love, when you do something that makes you feel at home, then the hard stuff is…  …well, it’s still really hard, which sucks, but it’s also minimized.  When you do something you love, you always know where North is.  You always know how to get home.  And the bad stuff, when it comes, and it does, sucks, but it has edges.

I enjoy my job far more than the paycheck I get at the end of every month.  I won’t lie – part of it is that I love my job because it provides for me, but that’s not all of it.  Most of it is the community around what I do, the people I work with, and the myriad technical and non-technical challenges I get to face every day.

Because of this community, my professional pride translates into pride in my professional community, and we are all working toward the same goals.  Similarly, because I trust implicitly the people I work with, knowing that we’re all moving in the same direction, I can be very efficient with my time and do the things that I’m best at.

The last couple of months have been super-busy at work, and there have been times where I feel like I’ve worked a lot more hours, a lot harder, and it has, at times, sucked…  …But, when I sit back at home, after an eleven hour day, and think about that single “thanks” I got from just one person, or that technical problem that finally cracked, or even that one e-mail with the information nicely collated that I was finally able to send out…  …I know it’s worth it, and I know, even then, I’ll show up tomorrow, and do it all again just for that.