I was recently reading a book, “Master of One,” and was struck by a story. In this book, Jordan Raynor references a study that looked at assistants and how much ownership they took in their job. The job of an assistant is one of a helper. The assistant, in most cases, doesn’t own any decision or piece of the work. The assistant is just there as a helper of the one owning the decision and work. This job can be a thankless job, but there are certain types of people who seem to be made for that kind of work. In the referenced study, there was a subset of assistants who loved their work and saw it as a calling. Guess who those were? They were the ones that had been on the job the longest. Now, you could say they’d been on the job the longest because it was something they loved or were passionate about. But, the more likely scenario is that they grew to love their job and become passionate about it because of how long they’d done it. The longer they were on the job, the more they saw the purpose behind it and more of a master they became at achieving greatness at what they did.
Have we not all wondered what we’re called to do? Have we all not fretted about others who found their calling and wonder why we cannot find ours? In the first few years out of college, I found myself in a job where we happened to have a lot of new projects thrown at us. Me being pretty adaptable loved this atmosphere and opportunity for growth. During a period in this season, there was a lot of data crunching and entry that was needed while we waited on the company’s IT group to build some tools that would allow for automation of the process. Unfortunately, the IT group didn’t think the project was as big of a priority as we did, telling us it’d be a number of months before it was done. So here we were, entering data and doing what had to be done.