If you want to feel happiness at work- you must fix your weekdays. They are most of your life. Let us delve deep into it.
Monday to Friday is 5/7th of your life. Please take a few minutes and consider that. In percentage terms, it’s 71.4 %. If you are not happy with your weekdays, you are literally wasting your life, no matter how much money you make.
What’s the purpose of life? To be happy. Right?
I know, a lot of people may have different answers to that question. That’s fine. If you don’t think that the purpose of life is to be happy, this post or this blog is not going to help you, because this blog is about happiness.
This blog assumes that the purpose of life is to be happy. Having made that assumption, if one were to call that as an assumption, we are trying to look at different perspectives which concern human happiness.
Now, let’s talk about time, our most precious resource, which we are given in limited quantity. Our time here is limited and there is only so much we can do. We don’t know how much time we have.
Why happiness at work is important?
Let us take the best case scenario. If you live 100 years, that’s 36500 days. Yes! Only thirty six thousand give hundred days and most of us will not live that long. Even Jeff Bezos assumes 80-90 years of life and he is the richest man in the world and has access to all the resources in the world that money can buy to make himself live longer.
However, we will assume that you will live 36500 days. How old are you? Count how many days you have lived out of your 36500 days. How many are you left with?
Shocking, right?
It is bizarre that we live in a society where postponing happiness for some later point in your life is considered a good thing. What is a later point?
After you finish school, or college?
Or, after your kids have finished college?
Till then, you are going to live your days unhappily hoping to be happy someday?
In India, at least in the times I grew up in, this was the attitude. I am not sure about now. The tendency to postpone happiness till eternity makes you realize one day that life passes you by, and most of your stock of days is over.
Also, each of life’s stages has some value which cannot be replaced once that stage is over. Once you lose your childhood, you lose it forever. Once you lose your college years, you lose them forever. They will never come back.
You can’t experience happiness at work if you hate your weekdays
It’s horrible that a lot of people spend Monday to Friday in jobs that they hate. It makes no sense. Alright, no jobs are perfect and you can’t define your job for yourself unless you are an entrepreneur, which by the way, is a great reason to become an entrepreneur if you have the courage to do that.
However, even if you cannot become an entrepreneur, it is your responsibility to yourself to work in a job that you like. It is important that you like the content of your job.
The work that you do is the most important part of your job.
It’s not the colleagues, although they are extremely important since ideally you should work with people you admire so that you can learn from them, not office politics, or the facilities that matter.
What is important for happiness at work?
Nothing but the content of the work is the most important part of a job. If you like the content of the work, and it comes naturally to you, you will enjoy your weekdays and over 71.4% of your life will be happy. If 71.4% is happy, then your weekends, 28.6% will be even happier, making the entirety of your life happy.
When your weekdays are not happy, they will cast a shadow over the rest of your life too, making most of your life a sheer misery and an outward pretense to please the people who are trying to please you.
That’s your life, my life and everyone’s life in this pie chart.
Once you figure how to kill the Monday morning blues by picking work that you enjoy, you will be motivated to work and you will find ways to scale that work up, and be more useful and productive.
However, it is surprising that most people don’t do that or even try to do that.
Most people make peace with the idea that work is pain and they live for the weekends. They wait for Friday end so that the work week ends, go drink, party and come back for another horrible week. On Sundays, the thought of Mondays scares them off and they can’t even enjoy the weekend properly.
Our work is where we spend most of our lives, and if we don’t choose what we do consciously, it will destroy our entire life.
You cannot fix Monday blues without making changes in your life
If you want to be feel happiness at work, there has to be a fundamental change in the way you live your life, the way you approach your work, your weekdays and 71.4 % of your life.
How do you bring about the fundamental change?
Look closely at your relationship with your work. Redefine what working means to you. If you look at your work as pain, then you will not be able to form a positive relationship with it.
Work is not meant to be pain
The most successful people in the world don’t look at work as pain. They look at work as fun and find a way to create a work like that’s enjoyable. You have to figure out a way to do that.
People say taking risks and experimenting with your career is difficult. Yes, that’s difficult. What’s more difficult though is staying in the same painful rut and not doing anything about it.
Your weekdays are majority of your life. If you want to be happy, you will have to figure out a way to be happy on your weekdays. You have to figure out a way to find work that’s meaningful for you, that inspires you. You don’t have to, you must if you want to be happy.
There is nothing more important than your happiness. Why should there be?
Thank you for reading.
The purpose of this blog to help you find your happiness. Please read the other posts on the blog, and follow so that you get updates when new posts are published. Please share any posts you like with your friends so that they can also find their happiness. If you have any feedback for me, please leave it in the comments and I would be happy to work on it. If you would like to support my writing and this blog, you may please send a donation through PayPal here.
I appreciate the time you spent in reading the blog and wish you happiness.
Love,
Amarvani
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