A Message from our CEO: Tom Twellman, Jr.
Why do you work? I don’t mean why do you do the job you do.
I mean, why do you do any work at all? Why do we work? Why do humans “work”? It’s a bit of a rhetorical question, but one that is worth contemplating. The first answer to that question is probably something related to food, shelter, and taking care of your family. Those are fine reasons, but they’re all secondary to the real reason humans do work and how we should look at work.
It probably doesn’t always seem like it, but work is a choice. And the most fulfilling choice you can make when it comes to your work is to do it in the service of others. Your work should be seen as a vocation, a calling to a worthy endeavor. Depending on the season of life you are in, it may also be something you’re doing to up-skill your way to new horizons, gathering experiences and skills that will help you get to where you want to go.
Wealth and power aren’t as valuable to a happy life as society would have you believe. In fact, if you’re valuing the work you do based on what you get paid for it, you’ll likely constantly be seeking greater fulfillment. We’ve all been blessed with skills and abilities to do some kind of work. The value of the work that you do with those talents is measured by how well you’re using it to impact other people and make the world a better place.
When you think about work like that, you quickly recognize we were built for it. It’s the ultimate way for us to live out our calling to love others. If you approach the job you do with the goal of improving the lives of others, all the other reasons for work take care of themselves. You’ll also, without a doubt, find your work to be more fulfilling.
This commitment to serving others with your work doesn’t just apply at the place where you punch the clock for 40 hours a week. It starts at home. It starts with how you give of yourself, your time, and your talents to take care of your spouse and your children. It continues into your community where you perform volunteer acts of service to support people in less fortunate situations than your own. We say that time is money, but really, gold and silver are much less valuable than time. We can acquire wealth indefinitely, and when we spend money we can always earn more. But we only have so many hours left on this earth – and each hour we spend is an hour we can never get back.
The value of your work is the sum of the impact you have on people- people you know, people you don’t, people you love and respect, and people you don’t see eye-to-eye with. The impact is sometimes unknown or realized until we’re gone from this earth. Service to others is the reason we commit to work, and the reason you never really reach “retirement” from work, even when you leave your career.
Work is a lifelong commitment that begins when you’re old enough to serve, and ends when your body is no longer able to fulfill its purpose.
Here’s to identifying ways in which we can “work” to bring value to others in our lives.
