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<\/a><\/p>\nI’ve realized this week how much I miss work.<\/p>\n
If you’re around me in life these days, that might sound like a surprise. Each week, I’m counting down the days until I’m “on parole” from the office for a couple of days. All weekend, I dread Monday arriving again.<\/p>\n
If you didn’t know any better, you would assume I hate work. You would assume I’m just lazy and want to play all the time. But you’d be wrong.<\/p>\n
I miss loving my work so much that it was a bigger high than any drug I knew of. I miss the days when working long hours was more fun than any entertainment I might be missing. I miss the times when I was learning so much that I believed I was laying a foundation for building something bigger.<\/p>\n
I miss working for something that was my own. Something with my name on it. Something nobody else could control. Something that was mine.<\/em><\/p>\n I felt this way when I worked on certain projects as a teen-ager. I felt that way about my high school newspaper. I felt that way about projects I did to build my church youth group. I didn’t feel it for my first high school job — as an office janitor — so I can’t say that I felt it about every form of work.<\/p>\n It really kicked into high gear when I started my first newspaper job as a freshman in college. I was supposed to work 20 hours a week for the Daily Mountain Eagle in Jasper, Ala., but I was there more like 40 to 60 hours each week. I knew when to clock out — because I wasn’t going to be paid for more than my normal schedule — but nobody made me leave.<\/p>\n I was having fun. I was learning how to do almost every job in the building. I was only supposed to be working in the newsroom and the darkroom, but I learned everything.<\/p>\n I learned our archaic computer equipment inside and out. When technicians would come to do repairs or upgrades, I was their constant shadow, learning all they would tell me. I learned everything about the composing department and became just as expert as those who had worked there for years.<\/p>\n I learned the jobs of those in the camera and stripping department — where the pages were turned into big negatives and then metal plates. Late at night when nobody was around, I experimented with things nobody had told me how to do. I invented my own ways of doing things and later used many of those techniques. (The only thing I never learned was how to run the press.)<\/p>\n My father used to complain that I was allowing the newspaper to abuse me since I spent so many hours there without being paid. I thought he was crazy. I thought I was just getting a fantastic education at their expense.<\/p>\n I continued to love work as I moved through several newspapers, but it showed up its strongest when I owned my own small newspaper company.<\/p>\n I’ve told you before about starting this company and about why it had to shut down<\/a>. But for that last year, my ex-wife and I were working between 80 and 100 hours each week. I’m not going to say that’s good for the human body or for a person’s mental state, but the work itself was euphoric for me.<\/p>\n And it made me happy beyond words each week when I saw the copyright notice on the front page: Copyright McElroy Media, Inc., All Rights Reserved.<\/em><\/p>\n It was mine — and I was willing to put everything into it. I’ve never had that much fun again.<\/p>\n When I worked for another newspaper company in the next couple of years, much of the thrill was gone. I still did work that I thought was good. I still put in long hours. But I had lost much of the control — because it was a bureaucratic chain of papers — and I’d lost the promise of feeling I had a big payoff from owning my own company.<\/p>\n In the years I worked in politics, there were emotional highs — times when I made a quick financial killing or election nights when a client won against all odds. But there wasn’t the same feeling of excitement all the time. There wasn’t the same sense that I was building something lasting and important.<\/p>\n I’ve realized this week how much I miss that.<\/p>\n I lost something during those years of working on other people’s projects and companies. I grew accustomed to simply doing what someone wanted to pay me to do. It seemed like a reasonable compromise when I was working as a publisher for a newspaper chain. At least I was still in the field where I had been so happy.<\/p>\n Then it seemed like a reasonable compromise when I started making good money as a political consultant. The money was so good that it would have seemed crazy to turn it down — but I had little passion for it to start with and then I lost all interest. It was destroying me ethically and it was making me cynical.<\/p>\n I completely lost touch with the part of me that had been so excited about work in the past.<\/p>\n These days, there’s nothing wrong with the real estate company I work for. I’m doing good work. I’m helping to grow a young company into something more mature. I’m working hard to build and improve internal control systems. I’m serving clients and I’m making a living.<\/p>\n But I’m still eager for Friday at 5 p.m. to get here. And I dread Monday morning. I don’t love what I do. I’m not building something for myself. I’m simply doing what I’m being paid to do. I don’t love what I do so much that I’m constantly dreaming about ways to make it better.<\/p>\n I’ve been figuring some things out lately and I’ve rediscovered an older part of myself that was passionate about success and changing the world. I had forgotten how much I’ve missed this. Now I have to find the right project — one I can reasonably jump to from where I am — that will make me so excited that I’ll be eager to get started each day.<\/p>\n I miss having that passion and excitement and drive for my work. Newspapers are dead, so I don’t expect to go back in that direction. But there will be directions that will make sense. Real estate is a good potential platform for doing something big and profitable at the right time, preferably with the right partner.<\/p>\n I don’t ever again want to kill myself with working 80 to 100 hours a week. But I do want to love what I’m doing so much that I’ll wish there were more hours in each day.<\/p>\n I’m excited to reconnect with that part of myself — and I can’t wait to feel that passion for work once again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’ve realized this week how much I miss work. If you’re around me in life these days, that might sound like a surprise. Each week, I’m counting down the days until I’m “on parole” from the office for a couple of days. All weekend, I dread Monday arriving again. If you didn’t know any better, Keep Reading<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-26758","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1x9iR-6XA","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26758","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26758"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26758\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26775,"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26758\/revisions\/26775"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26758"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26758"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26758"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}