Kay:
Hey gang, welcome back! It’s Tuesday, January 19th and this is episode 272. We have our favorite inventor for you today. You know it!
Kay & Shi:
T Eddie!
Kay:
T Eddie is in the house, Mr. Thomas Edison with another killer quote for you and he says, “Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.”
Shi:
There was no way I was going to miss the opportunity to co-say T Eddie with you because that’s always what we’ve called him. So, we did not practice that gang.
Kay:
No, we did not.
Shi:
Just want you to know.
Kay:
Well, we do have a very big passion around calling Thomas Edison T Eddie.
Shi:
We’re not sure why but we do love it and we love this quote too. It’s down-home, it gives you a good picture in your mind, and it is absolutely reflective of the total truth.
Kay:
Alrighty, guys. So, if you’re not sitting down, I hope you’re sitting down. If you’re walking, keep walking, but just brace yourself okay. Work is hard. Even the work you like to do is hard, period.
Shi:
Yeah. Whatever it is you want to achieve even if it’s getting from point A to point B across the room, it’s going to take some work and effort to get there. So, the bigger your point B is, the bigger the work and the effort is going to be. It’s a transaction. It’s an energetic exchange. It is what must be, right? If this, then that. So, however big the thing is the path to get there is going to be full of things that you have to work on, to do, to learn, to lose at, to course-correct around, to be challenged by and all of that feels like work even if you like it.
Kay:
Well, work I think is one of those things that many of us have negative associations to like the word work. Homework is probably…
Shi:
It is going to be a lot of work, yeah.
Kay:
“It is going to be a lot of work.” We’ve got this negative association with work. Hard work probably even has more of a negative association with it unless you’re being complimented for being a hard worker. But when thinking about whether that’s going to be hard work or that’s going to be a lot of work, that doesn’t necessarily feel good all of the time. But that’s just the thing, work doesn’t equal bad. Hard also doesn’t equal bad. There are times when we have to do hard things and it’s not bad. In fact, it’s fun, it makes me think of running a half marathon. That was hard freaking work. That was fun. It was painful, but it was fun.
Shi:
You also think about work showing up in the word workout. So now people have an extra reason to attach emotional meaning there. But the first part here is one that I don’t want to miss and that’s T Eddie talking to us about, “Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.” So, it’s like one of the analogies we often like to make, which is: you’re staring over a bunch of heads of people right in front of you. Where is everybody? You’re looking 100 feet out and there’s a bunch of people standing five feet in front of you. So sometimes we’ve got to look at what’s in front of us and that’s that opportunity. No, not that hard work. Get out of my way hard work. Where is the opportunity? It’s right in front of you and it’s called that hard work. So, not missing those opportunities because it doesn’t maybe look the most glamorous and I think this is definitely harder in your youth. You want to be a high achiever and so you go to strive to do something. But if you want to get great in anything, you start at the bottom and it takes a long time, a lot longer than society would let you believe sometimes and so you ended up yelling over hard work’s head, “Opportunity where are you?”
Kay:
Then you end up seeking an opportunity at the behest of the work that could get done right now, that then opens up opportunities and doors for you down the line. If you’re the kind of person who sees hard work and in your brain, you think work equals bad or hard work equals bad all you can see is the way to get to my opportunity is by doing something I don’t want to do. That is just a miserable experience. Just because work is hard doesn’t mean it has to be miserable. Work can’t be miserable. Only you can be miserable and so thinking into your mindset around work can help. We recently got to help facilitate a virtual New Year’s Eve party with our partner Joseph McClendon III, and (Kay here), I had to be the DJ at that party. I found out I was going to be the DJ about three minutes before we were going to go on.
Shi:
It was 13 minutes okay.
Kay:
Well, you can’t play copy-written music on Facebook Live, so we had to download un-copy-written music. We had to figure out how to play it through Zoom. I had about 10 million other things that needed to get done in that meantime too, but it was really hard work. When we got down to it, that was hard work. I had to be ultra-focused for one hour at a time.
Shi:
Yeah, extremely efficient.
Kay:
I had to be listening for the cues. I had to be extremely efficient and my computer was the one running the whole broadcast, so I had to make sure to do a proper balance between the downloads and the running of the broadcast. So, there’s all this hard work component, but was I miserable doing it?
Shi:
No way.
Kay:
No way. I was thrilled. In fact, I was ECSTATIC!
Shi:
Yeah. You had a lot of fun and you were in that flow state and it was fun to observe and what a fun party that was. But to remind you today, bring you back to your quote from T Eddie.
Kay:
T Eddie yup!
Shi:
He says, “Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.”
Kay:
Alrighty, gang, you’ve got an Opportunity in Disguise quest today. We want you to put on those lenses that may allow you to see work as an opportunity in disguise and approach that work with the same energetic effort you might do of a delightful dream. Are you ready?
Kay & Shi:
Let’s quest!
