Lessons on Leadership from the Little Things in Life: Enjoy What You Love
Life is full of examples that teach us lessons. When we see or hear or experience something from which we can learn, it is that example and experience that often helps us remember the lesson. That’s why stories and illustrations make learning so much more effective. When a story can be used to illustrate or demonstrate a valuable lesson, the story makes it much more understandable, relatable, and memorable. And so I am sharing examples of circumstances and stories that I have experienced in my everyday life which illustrate leadership lessons that we can learn and apply. This is one of those stories, and it serves as an illustration that reminds us about the enjoyment that comes from doing what you love.
We were away on a family trip, and as one of the activities on this trip, we went to an escape room. My six-year-old grandson loves to solve puzzles and clues, and he is enthralled with locks, secret doors, and hidden rooms, so when we surprised him with this, he was so excited. As we worked our way through the clues, his enthusiasm and joy were obvious. He absolutely loved figuring out the codes to unlock locks, which led to a door to a secret room, which had more clues that led to another door to another secret room. From start to finish, he was invested and fully involved because he was doing something that fed his soul and brought him joy.
What I observed in my grandson is a valuable lesson for you and me. If you do what you love, you will enjoy it more. You will be more committed and more invested in what you are doing, because it’s something that brings you joy. And when you do something that brings you joy, you want to do it more, and you want to do it well. Applied to your leadership, that means that if you are in a place doing work that you love, the joy in the work that you are doing will be both motivation and reward for you, and you will thrive much more in that work.
And when the work that you do is not something that you necessarily love, you can help yourself by weaving what you love into what you do. Because of what my grandson loves, we look for ways to “gamify” his learning, which means that we look for ways to incorporate puzzle-solving into his curriculum and his learning process. By doing that, work that he would not necessarily enjoy becomes work that he enjoys doing. You can do the same for yourself by looking for ways to weave what you love into your work.
But there are also the things that you have to do, that you don’t want to do or don’t like to do. In those circumstances, you have to do what you can to enjoy what you don’t. You may have to get creative, you may have to determine a reward that you can give yourself, or you may have to break it into manageable components to make it work; regardless, find a way to turn it into something that can bring you joy, even if that is only joy in its completion.
That’s the lesson on leadership from this little thing in life, from watching my grandson having the time of his life solving an escape room full of puzzles and clues. As much as you are able, do what you love. When you love what you do, you do it with greater enthusiasm and excellence. If it’s not something you love, find a way to weave what you love into what you do. If it’s something that you don’t enjoy at all, you need to find what you can enjoy anyway. If you can love what you do, you will have joy in doing it.
