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The Wonder of Work

April 16, 2023 by  
Filed under blog

I’ve been talking a lot about retirement and how to keep busy and motivated. Not only is it helpful to create more goals, it’s also really smart to become friends with a word we mostly think of as a bad thing–work.

In the book, When All You Ever Wanted Isn’t Enough, Harold Kushner lists the many super benefits of working. He notes that, “we work for meaning as much as for money. We work so that our days will not be empty of meaning, but the key to our happiness, to our being able to find pleasure in our work, is the sense that we are using our abilities, not wasting them, and that we are being appreciated for it. Whatever it is in your power to do, do it with all your might.”

Wow. There is some real wisdom and truth in what he is saying and, of course, that’s a big reason we all should be involved in the kind of work that we have a real passion for, even if that kind of work doesn’t pay much. Kushner says, “If we are lucky, we will find ourselves at a place in life where we can derive pleasure from our work. Some of us, if we are lucky, will see ourselves launched on new careers in mid-life which will give us that elusive feeling of pleasure.”

Kushner, paraphrasing a couple lines from Ecclesiastes in the bible, also wrote, “If you are not going to win a Nobel Prize for your work, if it is not going to make you rich and famous, it still can give meaning to your life if you take it seriously and do it with all your might.”

I am absolutely convinced that work is a powerful and wonderful thing for our lives and makes us feel so much better about everything. As the novelist Wallace Stegner said, “More people than would probably admit it find in work the scaffolding that holds up their adult lives.”

After I read Kusher’s book some 12 years ago, I began to re-dedicate and re-motivate my life with the work I loved to do. Of course, I still spend plenty of time enjoying life so I’ll keep playing and traveling but let’s face it, you can’t realistically play tennis, work out, hike in the mountains, and watch movies for 8 to 10 hours a day, every day, but you can work that long!

In other words, if you’re feeling bored or aimless, you can find great fulfillment in the accomplishments found in hard work. You can also meet fascinating people, contribute to humanity and, as an added bonus, make a bit more money along the way. So don’t try to get away from work. See it as another wonderful thing that can lift your life to great new heights.

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