Monitor: The Situation (or “My Work Is Not Done Yet”) [#1 of 10]

ByDavid

The next time you visit my office,  you’ll learn all you need to know about me pretty quickly, plastered all over my shelves and walls:

  • Lots of books, many of them read
  • Icons of my love for Chicago sports teams
  • Retro ads
  • Marvel superheroes
  • And plenty of other posters and magnets of motivation

Since I’m working from home more often these days, my walls aren’t covered with motivating material, but my computer is.

And so I’d like to take you on a tour of the outer border of my computer screen and share what keeps me going through the workday. I hope you can find some motivation here too.

Let’s start at the top and work clockwise.

“MY WORK IS NOT DONE YET”

Let me start by saying I love my work, the teaching and researching and mentoring and coaching and consulting. I really feel like I stumbled into a job I was born to do, especially after several early-career trip-and-falls.

And for all of the above categories, the work is never done.

That’s okay with me.

Every course I  teach can be improved upon. Every research project leads to the next one. And of course, the relationships, with students, colleagues, and clients, are what make all of this so special.

This does make it hard to slam the computer shut at night… that and all the stickers.

But it also makes it easy to come up with tomorrow’s to-do list.

I see this little blurb, taped to my screen, as not only a challenge, but as an inspiration, that my work is important and that others are depending on me.

I know you can say the same thing.

Use that idea to grow and keep moving forward.

How about you? Any words of wisdom to share that keep you going?

More tomorrow.