The Lesser Recognized Critical Value
The most valuable quality that you can offer to the world is not something you learn in school, however, a school can be an excellent place to start and develop this attribute. You can also develop this characteristic at your job, but your job does not necessarily impart this important characteristic to you. The most valuable trait you bring to the market is the actual work that you do. Learning how to work requires a change in orientation.
As an intellect, salesperson, professional, technical tradesperson, businessperson, athlete, or entertainer, your purpose allows you to focus your acquired skills and knowledge into service. Perhaps you believe that this statement is obvious. Understanding the meaning of what is being described here comes down to the difference between a capacity and an actual effort that you perform so that others’ experience benefit from your abilities. Accepting a high value for ourselves without actually delivering a high value to the market is naïveté in the least sense of significance and left unattended, a delusion of grandeur that can lead to great loss.
Leadership values people that work. Mistakes and imperfections can be forgiven, but complacency and laziness are neither forgotten nor forgiven. If we accept the lowest possible level of performance from ourselves, the casualty of this attitude is our self-esteem and self-image. Your self-concept is fed every day by your habits and behaviors and reinforced by the lesser motivation and the confidence available to meet future challenges. We cannot afford to become complacent in a marketplace for solving problems and creating value.
Believing that circumstances will work out as you hope and that someone else will pick up where necessary is abdicating responsibility and rewarding your comfort. This might even offset the risk of failure, but this attitude or habit is the enemy of opportunity and growth. Without a growth mindset and effort to improve, over time, a person declines, and by default lessens their ability to influence matters that are of importance to a purpose.
Why It Matters
We are not rewarded and appreciated in the marketplace by who we become as a result of our experience or reputation. When we receive offers of employment, for instance, it is because of the promise of what we will do when work arrives. Being clever and being unique means nothing if that does not translate into extraordinary results. If instead, we work and effectively deliver extraordinary results, this will transform us into being clever and unique people. Today, people that deliver extraordinary results rise in prominence regardless of their origin.
Learning how to work requires us to ignore the tendency to let our comfort and fear to override responsibility. Nature rewards us for doing work with a DOSE of positive reinforcement. Dopamine comes into play upon achieving a goal. Oxytocin rises from the bonding with those that love and accept us for who we are and how we make each other feel. Seratonin and Endorphines follow diet and performing challenging exercise routines. Effort rewards us for the pain and uncertainties that we overcome when work converts into beneficial results.
It takes strength and maturity to address the complacency that comes from being lazy. The best way to do this is by organizing a structure to follow for times in the day and during the week when we have time to spend at our own discretion. Morning routines as an example are the typical habits of the world’s most admired trendsetters across all fields of human endeavor. If not for the sake of our own success, at the very least we need to have a structure in place to ensure we can take care of those that depend on us. We need to be strong.
How to Transform
Some factors enable you to work, while others hinder your ability to work. The ability to step into a job or assignment depends on your sense of urgency around the importance of that work. If you are told, retold, and reminded to do your job, this signals a lack of initiative, a lack of priority, maturity, or poor organizational skills. You need in this case, to wake up. The pattern we need to change is going from passive ability to active effort.
Factors that affect your ability to work effectively are all qualities that are under your control. Namely, your attitude towards work and your enthusiasm to deliver the assigned work to a high level of quality within an acceptable time frame. Excellent outcomes require a concerted effort to achieve. The overarching determining factor is your discipline. Discipline can be put into place by way of force or conditioning. It requires a deliberate change and working through progressive challenges that require that we rise above set points of performance.
We are not born with an innate quality of being disciplined and structured in our approach to working. Performance can be improved through practice, or from a fear of consequences if we fail to observe a code of expectations. Ultimately, whether we step up to do work that is required based on fear or motivation, over time, the habit of being able to work when required makes us successful. Ideally, this happens of our own volition.
The Benefits From Learning How to Work
At some point in life, we will either feel a strong pull to manifest a certain result or happen upon an opportunity that really moves us to want to be our best. Can we really assert ourselves and influence an outcome if we don’t believe that we are worth the goodness it brings to us? How would you cope with the loss of an opportunity if your best simply isn’t good enough? The overwhelming majority of people face regrets near the end of their lives for not having done their best, lived according to who they really are, or according to their ideals. Learning how to work enables us to put aside fear of discomfort and failure and live up to the best work we can deliver.
Practice SELF-CARE to stay on top of your responsibilities, commitments, and maintaining the quality of your relationships. For those that are unfamiliar with this mindset, the effort to do this feels like work. As a genuine observation on the rewards of this mindset, the way that you carry yourself and present your best will actually attract more opportunities to you because your overall presentation communicates the fact that you do invest in yourself. When you feel you are worth the effort, others will also.