L.I.F.E.- List Idea Friday Everyone!

Every Friday I will feature a new idea from the book Dream it. List it. Do it! that you can add to your life’s to do list.

Today I picked one from the chapter called “Love My Job”-

Come home from work exhausted but fulfilled

Don’t you just love those days? The days where you work on a project you feel really passionate about and you get a lot accomplished. Maybe you have to stay late and maybe no one notices the work you are doing, but you feel good about it. It’s like a high. And you want to complain about how much you’ve been working and how tired you are but secretly you love it and wouldn’t trade it for the world.

I have captured this feeling a few times at every job I have had and it has always been for different reasons.

At my first marketing job, I loved the numbers. I was a Marketing Analyst and I loved working with the numbers to make sure everything added up just right and creating the reports and organizing the data in a way that made sense. I love breaking down the previous year’s data and trying to find the pattern to set the budget for the next year. I would stay until 8 or 9:00 at night sometimes just to get to a good stopping point. I loved creating the marketing dashboard report every Monday and would race myself to see if I could beat my time from the previous week to complete it. I felt important because I knew everyone, including the CEO, was waiting to see MY report. I got frustrated when they wanted to see things a different way sometimes after all the work I had put in, but that work really did give me a high.

At my second job, I loved streamlining and perfecting the processes and procedures in our department. I was a Marketing Programs Supervisor for a regional chain of drug stores. I loved making our department’s processes more structured and getting a perfect printed piece with no errors in the end. I also loved having creative input. I loved trying to think of new ideas to promote the products and our stores. I loved doing copy writing. I loved being the team lead for our Visual Merchandising Team and seeing our projects come to life in the stores. I would spend my time on the treadmill thinking about creative ideas for our projects. It was so satisfying to come up with a great idea and see it through to completion and hanging in our stores.

At my current job I get really excited about trade shows. I feel like the one show I was in charge of last year went really well (except for some staffing issues) and I’m looking forward to trying to improve on it this year. (It was one of the few that didn’t get cut!) When I was at the show I worked my butt off and almost lost my mind, but I loved it. I also like working on projects as a team with the other Product Marketing Managers. We kind of came together as a group and started thinking of projects that could promote and help all of our product lines and then working as a team to get them done. Working as a team breathes a different kind of energy in the project and helps us think through things we might not have thought of as individuals. It is also helpful to have a team effort to cut through the miles and miles of red tape we have to go through. Whereas on your own, you might get stopped or even not have the energy or hope to even start the project on your own in the first place.

I still yearn for a position where I feel this high more often than not. Usually the high will only make a few appearances a year. And I know it might be unreasonable to expect that everyday, but even if I could get that feeling 50-60% of the time, it would make all the difference in the world!

One of the things on my list is to find a job I love. In this economy I am going have to figure out a way to mold my current position to capture that feeling more often, or pray for a miracle intervention. Either way, being happy with your job and feeling that satisfaction is one of the most important things in life.

What gives you that high at work?

P.S. Check out these clips from real-life job interviews on How to Nail an Interview. I seriously could watch these all day!