Do You Work For A Living?

Wisdom Nuggets: "To find joy in work is to discover the fountain of youth." - Pearl S. Buck  

I organise training retreats for business executives from various organizations  During these trainings, I often ask trainees this puzzling question: "Why do you work in this organization?" , I always get the same feedback from all of them. Whether they are oil company workers, bankers, civil servants or teachers:
"For a living!" they often reply.

My reply often is, "No job can ever give you a living. Why? Because living is different from existing. No salary can give it to you. So instead of working to earn a living, "Work to earn a giving." Even more interesting was when I facilitated a retreat for Union executives of the most valuable company in the world, Exxon Mobil. I said to them, "No amount of money can pay for your true worth and value. In short the whole world's wealth cannot pay for it."

As the sage once said, "For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and loose  his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?

Since no job is worth your value, you must, therefore, work to be a blessing knowing that you have been blessed (with that job) that you might be a blessing.".

 The sad truth is that people who work for a living scarcely live. They either end up broke or at the best they live Just Over Broke (JOB).

When the company founded by Andrew Carnegie was taken over by the U.S. Steel Corporation in 1901 it acquired as one of its obligations a contract to pay the top Carnegie executive, Charles M. Schwab, the then unheard of minimum sum of $1,000,000. J.P. Morgan of U.S. Steel was in confused about it. The highest salary on record was then $100,000. He met with Schwab, showed him the contract and hesitatingly asked what could be done about it. "This," said Schwab, as he took the contract and tore it up.  That contract had paid Schwab $1,300,000 the year before. "I didn't care what salary they paid me," Schwab later told a Forbes magazine interviewer. "I was not animated by money motives. I believed in what I was trying to do and I wanted to see it brought about. I cancelled that contract without a moment's hesitation. Why do I work? I work for just the pleasure I find in work, the satisfaction there is in developing things, in creating. Also, the associations business begets. The person who does not work for the love of work, but only for money, is not likely to make money nor to find much fun in life."

And Elbert Hubbard concludes "We work to become, not to acquire."