a thought.
I was talking to my dad recently—who has now been a surgeon for 25 years—about how he has done the same thing for so long without interruption. And I got the same answer that I have gotten from many, which is that it doesn’t bother him that his job is not great every day, or even every month. Long hours are spent over dictations, dealing with HMOs, or listening to overzealous patients poke at their bellies and change their mind twice about where it hurts. In fact, the few chances he has each day to actually slice people open and fix them are about his only moments of zen.
And yet, he’s happy, and he credits it to thinking that what he does is important. This seems obvious, but I’ve gotten to the bottom of many friends’ career woes and it is that what they are doing just doesn’t mean anything to them. It might mean something to the masses, it might mean something to their parents, it might even mean something to the person they were three years ago, but currently, their days are spent doing something they don’t find significant, at least not without three or four sentences of justification about the money or the fame or the perks or the dues paying they are getting out of it. I never thought it would be possible to feel ironic about your own livelihood and make commentary on it like a VH1 talking head, but that’s what we tend to sound like over dinner.
I guess I’m just searching (because you have to actively look) for something where I can say what I do without five disclaimers or phrases to back it up. Just say, this is what I’m about, it makes sense to me, it matters in my corner of the world. Leave all the belly pokers out of it and just start sewing people up.
