Good Work
by Nicola · 7 things on Twos
- The latest book from Paul Millerd - Good Work: Reclaiming Your Inner Ambition
- I finally realized that this act of creative expression was an essential part of me. It was my good work.
- For ten years I had bounced from job to job, searching for a sense of connection to my work that remained elusive, and by the end I simply ran out of energy to keep going. Pinpointing the exact cause of my burnout is an impossible task. It may have been the meetings where everyone only pretended to care, or how emails from clients were treated as secret messages to be decoded as the team jumped into crisis mode. Maybe it was simply knowing that I was playing a role in the whole performance, turning myself into the kind of person who gets a good review and a 5% raise at the end of the year.
- I saw it for what it was: work worth doing. I didn’t want to escape work; I just craved work I cared about.
- Why do so many of us pretend that formatting PowerPoint slides is the height of human existence? That jobs are the only form of work?
- I became determined to build my life around doing things like writing. Things that mattered to me. Things that brought me alive. No matter what.
- Writing was a refuge, a place where I could transcend feeling lost in my life. It was enough. So I designed my entire life around creating the time and space to think, wander, and write. Nothing else mattered.