Why Do You Do What You Do?

My friend Jen (Hi Jen!) is a teacher (yay, teachers!) and she is working on a career unit, so she posed the question on Facebook: Why do you do what you do?

Which got me thinking.

I mean, at this point, I’m on my third career path (well, fourth, if you count retail, which you probably should because I can sell a sweater or fold a pair of jeans like a flipping CHAMP) and I sort of stumbled into it. And by sort of I mean “Someone called me out of the blue and offered me a job with this company and I didn’t have anything better to do since I had decided to move to North Carolina so I took it with the idea that if I didn’t like it I’d totally quit and do something else, because I’m flakey like that.”

That was five years ago.

I’m still here. Only now I run the joint from the comfort of my home. Whee!

So why DO I do what I do? (That sentence makes me giggle because it sounds like scatting.)

(and also, what DO I do? You might be asking.)

For the record, my company does inspections for banks and insurance companies. What I personally do is oversee the whole kit and kaboodle. The subcontractors, the office staff, the clients, the company owners, you name a piece of the pie and I have my finger in it.

I often think of the whole mess like this: It’s an orchestra. I conduct it. Which means that sometimes I have to have heated, serious conversations with individual members or sections, and sometimes I just need to watch and listen while they do their thing. It also means that I know that I’m also watched, that people take their cues from me, and so I have to be on top of where we’re going and what happens next.

Why do I do it?

I never meant to fetch up here, to be honest, so the “Why do you do it” question is an interesting one for me. I was a planner – as in, you form a life plan and you follow it and there you are and that’s that – but I discovered that defining yourself by a plan can be an intensely bad idea, because some plans will just kind of explode on you and then you’re left with no plan and so sense of who you are anymore.

Which kind of sucks.

Jen, however, is awesome, and a serious question requires a serious answer, so here it is: I do what I do because, in this role, I feel like I’m allowed and encouraged to be the best version of myself. I keep learning and growing and finding new things to study and understand. (And I get to be a little bossy. And I get to work from home. And they PAY me for it! Can you even believe it?)

Ten years ago, if you’d asked me what I would be doing, I wouldn’t have said this.

But I love it. Even when it’s making me crazy, I love it. Even when I’m tired or stressed or cranky. It’s hard work and it’s demanding and every day there’s a problem to solve and, for some reason, that mostly makes me really happy. (And even when it doesn’t, I know that eventually? It will again.)

My name is Danielle. I run operations for a company based out of Utah. And I do it because I love it.

Why do you do what you do?