American Gold Medalist in freestyle wrestling Jordan Burroughs said: ''Embrace the grind.''
Isn't that the goddamn truth? Treat what you love most like a job, make it a second nature and you'll become the best at it. Unemployment of the last months allowed me to put the champ's words in perspective. The way we live is the opposite of Burroughs' philosophy. We fear the grind because we grind at the most meaningless things. Work became a synonym of busting your balls. You work to provide for somebody else or to afford leisure and entertainment.
I have a passion. I love writing. I love words and I think about them all the time, yet I've spent the last three months learning a skill (community managing) that involves a bit of writing, but not that much. Yesterday, I juggled with the fantasy of letting everything go and going freelance. Write like a madman: fiction, essays, sports columns, journalism, blog posts, tap the market and see what was there for me. It's the one thing I do better than most people and the very one thing I don't get bored doing.
When I was caught in my dead end customer service job, I saw writing as something that would save me and it made my fingers real heavy on the keyboard. With the hindsight a few months of unemployment, I see it now as something I want to do more than anything in the world and it helps so much with productivity. Also, simple fantasies like the idea of writing all day are empowering. It tells me I might be a little different, after all. Not everything I do is guided by money and I take comfort in that. The meaning of "embrace the grind" got clearer to me. If you have something to help you get out of bed in the morning, do it more than anything else. If you're lucky enough to have something that drives you, you ought to live by it.
When I was caught in my dead end customer service job, I saw writing as something that would save me and it made my fingers real heavy on the keyboard. With the hindsight a few months of unemployment, I see it now as something I want to do more than anything in the world and it helps so much with productivity. Also, simple fantasies like the idea of writing all day are empowering. It tells me I might be a little different, after all. Not everything I do is guided by money and I take comfort in that. The meaning of "embrace the grind" got clearer to me. If you have something to help you get out of bed in the morning, do it more than anything else. If you're lucky enough to have something that drives you, you ought to live by it.