31 Days: Do Your Best, Even If You Hate Your Job

This one is very appropriate for a Sunday night. Dreading Monday morning is how I spend most of my last hours of the weekend. When I took my job 7 years ago, it seemed like my dream job. I was getting to be the editor of a national publication. It took me 6.5 years to actually get to be the editor. The person who was retiring and creating the vacancy I was hired to fill, stayed on and did the part of the job I was most looking forward to, putting red pen to papers and finding mistakes in their pages. And because of changes in her circumstance, she needed to stay on until a year ago. I spent a lot of that time hating my job - hating that I was editor in name only, doing all of the dirty work without any of the actually editing.

I wasn't always best at it, but I got to a point where I decided that even if the job wasn't exactly what I wanted, I was going to try to do my best. If nothing else, working harder made the day go by faster. And eventually, the job became what I had wanted it to be and I'd like to think that was in part because of how I did that dirty work.

Now most days it is a dream job. It's been a bit bumpy lately since we are changing production companies but in that transition, I've been in meetings, give input and being asked my opinion, which was not the case several years ago. Sunday nights aren't quite as bad as they used to be but I still do spend a little bit of each evening figuring out how many hours I need to work to save up for my next dream vacation and how long it will be before I retire completely. When I go to bed tonight, I will sleep better knowing that I tried my best last week and I will spend the next week doing the same. That keeps me going until that Sunday night that I don't have to set an alarm.

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One Is Just A Number

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