Your Work Attitude

This is one of my favorite quotes from Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet (in the passage on work):

Work is love made visible.

And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.

For if you bake bread with indifference, you bake a bitter bread that feeds but half man’s hunger.

And if you grudge the crushing of the grapes, your grudge distils a poison in the wine.

And if you sing though as angels, and love not the singing, you muffle man’s ears to the voices of the day and the voices of the night.

Consider that the attitude and energy you bring to your work can enhance or poison your output and the ripples you’re creating.

Sometimes it’s easy to discount this for our own work, so flip it around and look at it from the other side.

Do you care about the attitude and energy other people invest in their work? Does that make any difference to you?

Would you prefer to buy products and services from people who enjoy and appreciate their work, who care about what they’re creating, who find the work purposeful and fulfilling, and who want customers to have good experiences?

Or is it all the same to you if people grudgingly show up to jobs they hate, working under poor conditions with bosses who are mean to them, feeling stressed and anxious while creating products and providing services they really don’t care about, so you can have that added value in your life?

If you see these two scenarios as meaningfully different when you’re on the customer side, how can you not see them as meaningfully different when you’re on the creator side?

Do you believe that your attitude affects (or infects) your impact?