even your calling has crummy requirements
Even when you are working in your vocation, responding with your labor to a deep calling, your work will include crummy stuff. Stuff that feels different in kind/character from the kind of thing you feel called to do, the thing that drew you to the work you signed up for. In teaching, that gravity might be “building relationships with kids” and the friction might be “lesson planning” or “attending district inservices” or “getting compliance paperwork up to spec”.
What to do with this crummy stuff?
With money, you can outsource it.
With time, you can own more of it (and thereby shape it more to your liking).
With imagination, you can make it fun.
With patience, you can find it less grating.
With ambition, you might be able to eliminate it or automate it or solve it or rewrite the rules of it.
At least one of those resources above is available to you. You might have several of them. A couple of postures I see from unhappy people at work, who get less done and enjoy the doing of it less, too:
With resignation, they’re at the mercy of it.
With resentment, they make it even worse for others.
-eric
