Many people dream about winning the lottery so they can quit their soul-sucking job and go spend their days lying on a beach, sipping margaritas and soaking up rays.
Only one problem.
Such an existence would get boring, and fast.
Oh sure, it would be heaven at first. I have no beefs against vacations. But we’re not talking about vacation here, remember? This is your new life. And after two or three weeks (maybe after three months, depending on how much soul-sucking your job did), you would start to get restless. You’d start craving something meaningful to do.
We often get duped into believing that work is the villain holding us back from the perfect life. If only we could figure out how to work less — or better yet, not at all! — then we’d really be happy. But work is just the patsy.
The REAL key to happiness (and so-called work life balance) is not figuring out how to work less, but doing more work that matters.
They say that if you love your work, it never feels like work. I’m not sure about that. I love my work, but there are parts of it that still feel an awful lot like work. But the fact that I love what I do makes the work — even the hard parts — worthwhile.
If you’re not satisfied with your current work situation, you have three choices. The easy and smart choice is to find more meaning in the work you already do. An equally smart choice, but a little harder, is to start taking baby steps toward finding some new work with more meaning. The third choice, which is both easy and dumb, is to stay miserable while waiting for your lottery ticket to win big.