For many, it’s easy to buy into the idea that what they do is not important, or nothing special. We have certainly heard people that we know don’t like their job let us know how trivial they think their job is. On the other hand, how many times have you heard someone say, in an act of modesty, “Oh, all I do every day is (some description that over-simplifies and trivializes their work)”? While modesty is often appreciated, this is one place where, at least deep down, it is not only not necessary, but a bad idea.
Taking what you do seriously and believing it is important is one step to great success, and one that probably isn’t emphasized enough.
In his great book The Magic of Thinking Big, David J. Schwartz shares examples of people who treated their work as important and the heights they rose to in order to illustrate this. He also gave examples of people whose sentiments about what they do were even worse than the modest expressions noted earlier, or whose actions tell the same kind of story.
Over the years, it’s been a common point of contention that some young people might think a job like working at McDonald’s is beneath them. You also hear people talking down the idea of working in a mail room, or a similar job that is perceived to be at the bottom of the barrel. Meanwhile, many point out that once upon a time, such jobs were seen as something else: an opportunity. While that is true, it misses a larger point.
In all that we do, we prove ourselves in what we are doing right now. In the early going of your career, you are likely to have the opportunity to prove yourself not from the position of the person in charge – be it a CEO, president, executive director or even a first-level manager – but rather from an individual contributor role. Maybe you’re a cashier at a store, or an administrative assistant, or a junior engineer. Just because you’re not the face of the company as the person on top or a high-level manager or director, doesn’t mean your work is not important.
If you believe your work is important, you will give your best effort all the time. You will believe the work deserves your best effort and the proper urgency to be completed well, and your effort will show it. It doesn’t matter what your job is or how much you like it – by believing it to be important, you will give it the necessary effort to do it well. From this, you will prove yourself a competent worker and gain opportunities as others realize you can do a good job.
On the other hand, if you believe your work is not important, you will do what you must to just get by. You will do the bare minimum, without the idea of growing or doing something better. This will deal a blow to any motivation you have, and it will impact your approach to the job and subsequently the results you deliver.
Even if you are not the person in charge of the entire company or organization, your work is very important, and this is true from two angles. The first is the team/company angle. Imagine if everyone in the company except the CEO felt their job was not important, and gave it the kind of effort such a mindset would inspire – not very much. How successful do you think that company would be? Chances are, not very successful at all. It would be a group of people just trying to scrape by for a paycheck, not a group trying to accomplish anything. Do you think a sports team full of players, coaches and support staff who felt their work is not important would win a lot of games? Even the managers on a college team have important work.
The second angle is the individual angle. By believing your work to be important, you will prime yourself to do your best work no matter the job, and in time this can lead to opportunities moving up in the organization. As you move up, it becomes easier to have that belief, but by then such a mentality is essentially innate to begin with. You have built up the habit of doing your best work and wanting to do better work all the time, priming you to continue to perform with more responsibility. Additionally, if you manage people, your mentality about your work and the positions you moved up from will spread to those you manage; if you believe that work is important, those you manage will as well because you will convey that with your words and actions.
While not everyone desires to rise up to be the CEO, or even a manager (in technology, one can rise up the ladder without becoming a manager), everyone desires to do work they enjoy and that they feel is important. The great news is that you don’t have to wait until you earn a promotion or two for that to happen; you can believe that any job you have is important, and that will help lead you to the kind of work you want one day. Every job you have, starting with your very first one, is an opportunity – an opportunity to establish that habit.