Having a Job You Love

by Crazy Ivan

If there's a secret to happiness, it must be that.  You have to either have (a) a whole bunch of money or (b) a job that you really love.  If you don't have one or both of those things, odds are that you're gonna spend a lot of your life doing something that you don't really want to be doing.

Of course, no matter what your job is, you'll have to spend time doing stuff you don't want to do.  No amount of awesomeness in your job is going to make going to the dentist fun.  So there's a base rate of boring and/or painful stuff you'll find yourself committed to one way of the other.  But if you play your cards right, you might avoid making one of those boring/painful commitments a 40+ hour a week one.

I remind myself constantly that I'm really lucky to have the job that I have.  Not many people get to spend their days doing something that they're truly passionate about and not many people get to spend their days having fun and helping others have fun.  To be sure, there are plenty of people out there that spend their days hanging out with their best friends, playing games and having fun... there just aren't that many that get paid for it.

I try to keep all of this in mind day to day.  As I fight my way through the crowded subway commute each morning, I try to remember how much I enjoy my job.  Over the summers and the holidays when the hours get really long and the mornings get really early, I try to recall how much less fun pretty much any other job I'm qualified for would be (I'm not qualified to be a Mythbuster, unfortunately).  When I have the occasional bad day that everyone has even if they have the best job in the world (again; Mythbuster), I try to remind myself that ultimately, the good eclipses any minor bad thing that might have happened that one day.

But even though I try to keep this at the forefront of my mind all the time, I'm still occasionally taken aback by it.  Yesterday provides a perfect example.  I was at the House of Skills most of the day yesterday which meant that I spent quite a bit of time hanging out with Lucky.  As you know if you read yesterday's post, Lucky suffered a broken leg and hasn't been getting out much.

And as we were talking, he was admitting how frustrated he was by the broken leg.  But what was amazing was what was frustrating him.  It wasn't that he couldn't go out and play soccer or that he couldn't ride his longboard or go up a flight of stairs with ease or scratch an inch on his calf or go out with his girlfriend or join in any reindeer games.  What frustrates him the most is that he can't work.

To put this in perspective, for a lot of people with broken legs, the part where you take 6 to 8 weeks off of work is the one small silver lining around the whole ordeal.  Sure, there's plenty of bad to outweigh it, but most people have jobs that they'd be perfectly happy to not do for 6 to 8 weeks while they recover.  But my job is so fun that if you can't do it, you're frustrated.

And I can't blame Lucky at all for that.  I know that if I broke my leg and couldn't work I'd probably spend 8 hours a day blogging or checking in on the forum or making Trick of the Day videos under the theme of "Tricks you can do with a broken leg".  I couldn't stop doing it altogether.  But even then I'd be frustrated because I couldn't go out and be a Myachi Master.  I would be missing all the smiles.  I'd be missing all the fist pumps of victory from new players that just hit their first Under the Leg-360.  I'd be missing all the maniacs who have come to challenge me.  I'd be missing all the new tricks that were being invented, perfected, morphed and reinvented.  I'd be missing out on all the screaming, applauding crowds at the schools and the camps.  I'd be missing out on the vindicating feeling of proving somebody wrong about what they "can't" do.  I'd be missing out on all the Myachi Mania.

So on behalf of the Myachi movement, we all wish Lucky well.  Because not only his missing all the Myachi Mania, but all the Myachi Mania is missing him.