PP 063: Finding More Joy in Your Life Through Work

For the past few days, I’ve been reading “The Art of Work” by Jeff Goins – as is one of the upcoming reading selections for the Positive Productivity Book Club. I didn’t really know what to expect when I was coming into this book, but let me tell you. If you haven’t read it yet, I highly recommend it, and it will be in the show notes – which you can find at TheKimSutton.com/PP063.

The reason why I’m bringing this book up today is because it’s given me so much to think about – including this quote, which I found on page 11. The quote says, “Life is too short to do what doesn’t matter, to waste your time on things that don’t amount to much. What we all want is to know our time on Earth has meant something.”

This quote could be used to look at so many different aspects of our lives, including relationships, jobs, education, hobbies – really, the context expands beyond anything imaginable. While we all deserve a chance to relax, another way that I think we can even use this passage is to think about what we do in our off-time.

In High Performance Academy, Brendon Burchard provides a statistic where he talks about how the average American spends four hours a day watching television. While this figure is astounding to me now, I was living this life in my past life. And I’m almost embarrassed by how much time I spent in front of the TV.

As children, we have dreams of growing up to be doctors, or lawyers, or movie stars. And as we grow older, our aspirations change – most often because of income. We no longer consider what we might be happy doing, but we consider what we could make the most money doing.

If you’ve been a listener of Positive Productivity for a while, you’ve heard me talk about “making impact before making income”. (Yes, this is another quote I did borrow from Brendon Burchard.) But I want you to think about this in everything that you do.

How does getting up every day and going to a job that you don’t enjoy make a positive impact on your life and the lives of others? What could you do today to change that situation, and bring joy to your life? When you have that joy in your life, you can share it with others, and it gets spread beyond your wildest dreams.

Now, I know you might be thinking, “Well, I need to make money. I need to do my job, I have house payments to make, car payments to make. I need to feed my family.” And I am not going to deny any of that. Quite honestly, this has been something that I have been speaking with my own business coach about a lot lately.

As I’m building the Positive Productivity brand, there are definitely things I want to be working on. I have so many projects I would love to share with you right now; however, there is another part of my business as a digital marketing and launch strategist that I still need to focus on in order to bring in income. So by all means, I am not saying, “Stop what you’re doing to make an income right now”.

What I do want to encourage all of you to do, however, is see how you can start bringing joy into your life – or more joy into your life – by doing things that you are truly passionate about.

Now, I am not telling you to give up television by any means! If you enjoy four hours of TV every night, then do it. But if you need those four hours of TV every night to recover from a job during the day that you hate, then maybe take a little bit of that time and see how you can branch off in another direction.

We have one life to live, so we might as well make the most of it.

Now I am going to repeat the passage from “The Art of Work” one more time, just because I really want you to think about it before this episode closes out. “Life is too short to do what doesn’t matter, to waste your time on things that don’t amount to much. What we all want to know is our time on earth has meant something.”