by Lucy Curran
I have so loved working on the Good Work Project this summer. The Good Work Team is a wonderful and inspiring group of people, and it has truly been a pleasure to work with them. In addition, it was difficult for me to immerse myself in the ideas of Good Work and not come away with a fresh perspective on my own life. As I typed up discussion questions for the Toolkit, I mulled over the questions myself. How would I have acted if faced with this or that dilemma in my academic work? As I drafted reflective activities, I imagined how the core idea of each activity might illuminate the places in my own work that needed improvement. Was my own current academic work excellent? I found myself wondering. Was it ethical? Engaging?
The answer that emerged struck me with particular force with regard to the third quality of Good Work: engagement. This is not to say that I do not also struggle to make my work excellent at school, or that I never face ethical dilemmas in my work. It is simply that excellence and ethics tend to be more at the forefront of my mind when I think of what I strive for in my school work. When I asked myself if my own work was engaging to me, my answer was sometimes. I find that I often disregard the importance of finding work that is personally meaningful. I have a tendency to discount work that is fun and exciting for me because it somehow seems less serious and important! An academic mentor who knows this tendency of mine well once encouraged me to pursue work that “made my heart sing,” and I think this gets to the core of what engagement means. When I find work that truly engages me, it makes me feel energized and impatient to begin. For me, the arts have this effect: there is nothing more exciting than having a fresh canvas before me and a paintbrush in my hand; and there is nothing more exhilarating than performing a dramatic scene onstage with a group of committed actors.
It is also becoming easier for me to sense when work is not engaging to me. Robert Louis Stevenson once wrote: “If your morals make you dreary, depend on it: they are wrong.” I think the same could be said of work. Work that makes me dreary is not engaging, and is not work that I should be pursuing. Of course, it is easier said than done, I have found. It is easy to convince myself that soul-deadening work is too important, or too serious to give up. And yet, I have at times paid the price for blindly pursuing work that makes me dreary. It is not helpful to me or to anybody for me to slog—feeling martyrish—through a sea of work that I dislike.
I have come to understand that when I find work that truly engages me, I cannot wait to get out of bed in the morning. Instead of waking up with a sense of dread and hitting the snooze button, I am excited to start the day. This does not have to be true every day; but it ought to be the trend. In his recent commencement speech at Stanford, Steve Jobs said he tries to look the mirror every day and ask himself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” He said that “whenever the answer has been ‘no’ for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.” This is his way of keeping himself honest. As I look ahead to my final year of college and further still to the great wide unknown of life after college, my goal is to keep myself honest. I want to find out what makes my heart sing, and then I want to pursue this work whole-heartedly.
I feel so honored to have had a chance to help out a little bit with Good Work this summer, and I know that I will be drawing upon tools from the Toolkit in the coming months as I figure out my plans for the next few years. Working with the Good Work Team has been a true pleasure, and the work has been—among many other things—very engaging!