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life

Working to My Strengths

After years of learning about myself in various jobs I began to have a greater understanding of what kinds of work really interested me. Following the advise and conclusions I reached from reading Paul Graham’s “How to Do What You Love” I began to seek ways to focus more on doing what I was good at in my work than those things that were mundane or tedious for me.

Interestingly the first real breakthrough for me came when I gave myself permission to dislike my job. Not that I was actively trying to dislike my job but that I relinquished the burden that came with the assumption that I must like my work. Related to that, I stopped worrying about how others might perceive my efforts at work. I abandoned the pretense that I must stay at work longer to make sure I got the minimum number of expected hours at times when I could not do anything effective with the time. Previously I stayed longer so that nobody could question my effort as a way to compensate for the fact that I had not been connecting with the current work and thus was not able to use the time effectively.