Rekindling the passion

A Valentine’s post!

Scott over at Pimp Your Work has an interesting piece today on what to do when the passion starts to flicker at work, and some practical steps you can take to get it back.

Technology is important, so you need to do something you care about

I think being passionate about most of what you do every day is pretty important. This is mostly because I believe so…well, passionately…in the positive power of technology to shape the future we’re handing to the rest of the world. No matter what you do for a living you’re not going to bring your best to the job if you aren’t really passionate about it. And we owe it to ourselves and to the future we’re creating to bring our best game.

We’re talking about averages here…

I’m not talking here about being giddy with joy every day over the prospect of settling into your cube and checking out the source for that module you’ve been banging on for 2 weeks. It’s just not reasonable to expect to love every single thing you do day in and day out.

But if you aren’t on balance fired up about what you’re doing, I hope you take some time to really think about why. Understand how you got where you are now. Are you still doing what you came here for? If not, why not? If so, but it’s no longer getting your creative juices flowing, why not?

Bringing back the love

Going through this process might remind you why you came here to begin with, and get you refocused on that old flame. Or it might show you that it’s time to change course. Either way, a good examination of what you’re doing now (and why) can help you bring your best game to your job every day, and help make sure that whatever you’re building contributes to the very best future we can conceive.