ENJOYING YOUR JOB…

06/02/2010 in Featured 1 Comment

How do you feel about your job? Maybe you hate it or maybe you love it. But you can learn to enjoy it. I hear someone say, “yes but you don’t have my job?” You’re right but I was thinking at this particular time of high unemployment and economic downturn you should be thankful to have a job. Your job may be goal making or homemaking, you could work in a classroom or a boardroom, but the question is still the same. How do you feel about your job?

Some people see their job as a prison while others see it as a paradise. Then there are a lot of people in the middle. It’s a mixed bag with good days and bad days and I’d-rather-be-in-Tahiti kind of a job.

Today we’re going to talk about how do you enjoy any job. Whichever of those groups you’re in, how do you enjoy your work? If you love your work, how do you love it even more? If you like your work, how do you learn to love some parts of it like you never have? And especially with those of you that struggle with “I hate going in on Monday,” how do you begin to find some things to like about any job?

As we look together through the book of Proverbs in the Old Testament, we find some wisdom about how do you live everyday life. That wisdom has to apply to our job life. Jesus, when He came to this earth, said, “I came to give you live and life abundantly.” That doesn’t make sense to me that the abundant life would only count on the weekends. If Jesus came to give us life abundantly, it has to be on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, too. If eight hours out of everyday you’re miserable, you can’t have abundant life.

Proverbs 22:29 is one of the most familiar Proverbs about our work, “Do you see people skilled in their work? They will work for kings, not for ordinary people.” This speaks of satisfaction, significance and success that come into our work and it talks about a skill that leads to all of that. I would say that the book of Proverbs is the most significant business book ever written.

Many of the books you read today about business practices found that origin in the book of Proverbs. It is filled with ideas.

I want to focus on four principle ideas about How Do You Enjoy Any Job, from the book of Proverbs. These four principles, if you’ve even picked up a business book in the last ten years, these aren’t going to be unfamiliar to you. These are things you’ve thought about before or seen in print before but the difference in the book of Proverbs is they are doable.

We’re going to talk about two things that you should always do and two things that you should never do in order to enjoy any job.

1. NEVER STOP LEARNING.
Keep learning and keep growing and you keep enjoying any job. Proverbs 19:8 “Those who love learning will succeed.” A love of learning leads to success. There is so much to learn these days. We’re just inundated with more and more information. There are so many places to learn these days, whether it’s at a seminar or in a book or the magazines. The truth is, you can learn from just about anywhere.

I was reading this last week some Wisdom For Your Work, not from Proverbs but from Dilbert, a different source of wisdom. Here are Dilbert’s five irrefutable laws of work:

1. Don’t be irreplaceable. If you can’t be replaced, you can’t be promoted.

2. When you don’t know what to do, walk fast and look worried. That works for a lot of people.

3. If it weren’t for the last moment, nothing would get done.

4. Keep your boss’s boss off your boss’s back.

5. Everything can be filed under miscellaneous.

The scary thing is, a few of those make sense. The truth is, you can learn from almost anything these days. But what are the best places to learn? What are the places that, if I focus in there, I’m going to learn things that will impact me for the rest of my life?

Proverbs talks about three areas that we often forget. Proverbs encourages us to…

1. Learn from critics. The great thing about that is you can always find somebody to criticize you so you’ll always have someone to learn from when you begin to learn from your critics. When you begin to learn from those who criticize you, you have the potential to learn more than you could ever imagine.

Proverbs 12:1 “Anyone who loves learning accepts correction. But a person who hates being corrected is stupid.” Does anybody like to be criticized? We hate it. It makes you feel defensive, and often angry. When you’re criticized and all those feelings come up, what do you do with them? You can fight the criticism, or you can ignore the criticism.

Here’s the advice from the book of Proverbs: Accept the criticism. If you love learning, you accept criticism.

2. Learn from your failures. Learn from the failures that you and I are inevitably going to face in life. People have the mistaken idea that successful people, happy people, don’t fail very often. I’ve discovered that we all fail at just about the same rate. Proverbs 24:16 “For though a righteous man falls seven times, he rises again, but the wicked are brought down by calamity.” A righteous guy fails seven times, but the difference is he found the strength to rise again, the strength to try again. There’s something about learning from your failure that enables you to live a different kind of life. The greatest lessons often come out of our failures. I think that’s because when we face a failure it gets our attention and we’re really listening. You learn from your failures and you learn from your critics.

3. Learn from the source of all wisdom. Learn from God. I don’t know why it is with all the seminars available and all the books available we forget the very source and creator of wisdom when we’re learning. Proverbs 2:6 ”Only the Lord gives wisdom; He gives knowledge and understanding.” Any truth has its ultimate source in Him. He may not get the credit but it’s true. Anything that’s true, the ultimate source of that is God. So you learn from God.

So you learn from God and you learn from failure and you learn from criticism because learning is one of the ways that you keep enjoying a job.
Rate yourself one to ten on how you’re doing in this, one being worst and ten being best. If you haven’t picked up a book in ten years, give yourself a one. If you learn when you’re forced to then you might give yourself a three or four. If you learn something every week that makes you better at what you do, give yourself a nine or ten and rejoice in the fact that that’s a quality in your life. Never stop learning.

2. ALWAYS BE DILIGENT.
Probably the clearest advice about enjoying your work in Proverbs is this willingness to stick with it. Proverbs teaches us again and again that success and significant aren’t so much a matter of our intelligence as our diligence. We know this. Albert Einstein said, “I think for months, for years. Ninety nine times the conclusion is false but the hundredth time I’m right.” Even geniuses need diligence.

We’ve heard all the statistics that in any job if you’re going to be a success you can’t expect to succeed every time. You’ve got to keep trying. A basketball player makes only about half of his shots. The greatest football quarterbacks complete only six of ten passes. Major league baseball players make it to first base only forty percent of the time at best.

But the thing that the book of Proverbs adds to this thing we all know (You’ve got to work hard, you’ve got to be diligent) is some wisdom about this. Because sometimes it’s tough to be diligent. What is it that keeps us from this quality that we know should be in our lives? How do I do it in a way that lasts?

Proverbs 21:5 “The plans of the diligent lead to profit as surely as haste leads to poverty.” Haste is one of the enemies of diligence. You’re just in such a hurry. Of all the ones, I’d say this is the one we’re in the greatest danger today because we’re in a very hurried world. You wake up, you turn on your computer and it takes 2.5 extra seconds to come on and you’re going, “Come on! Come on!” We’re in such a hurry! There are some times when it takes diligence and patience to get the right thing. This fast paced world that we live in is sometimes the enemy of the diligence it takes to be a real success, to have real significance in whatever we’re doing.

There are a couple other enemies of diligence talked about throughout the book of Proverbs. Proverbs 10:4 “Lazy hands make a man poor but diligence brings wealth.” Not only haste but also laziness, sometimes creeps into your life. You procrastinate. You start to make excuses. That’s how you recognize it. It’s something you learn when we’re very young. We started procrastinating when we were kids. You’re watching TV and a parent asks us, “Can you take out the trash?” and you said, “At the next commercial.” You put it off. We started making excuses even when we were kids. The homework didn’t get done and instead of honestly saying, “I blew it this time. Can I have an extra day?” we went in and said, “My dog ate it!” Today we have a much better excuse: “The hard drive crashed.” It’s a lot better excuse. They still don’t buy it but it’s a better excuse.

There’s another enemy of diligence talked about in Proverbs 12:11 “Those who work their land will have plenty of food but the one who chases empty dreams is not wise.” Chasing fantasies or empty dreams. Diligence is invited in our lives in many ways. One of the enemies is laziness. That term is not what we traditionally think of as lazy. It’s not always about doing nothing. Sometimes it’s about doing the wrong thing. Sometimes it’s about chasing empty dreams, not having the commitment to do the hard thing, to finish and keep commitments.

We must never forget that to be successful in anything, it takes hard work and diligence.