If you like what you do....

   It is one of those weeks when I had several topics to choose from when it came to writing. I thought I would write about the upcoming election and how I wasn't sure the person gaining the most votes would be the winner in the race. The man who wins may get a really nice house and of lot of perks, but will have to deal a Congress who will make sure that nothing gets done. I was going to talk about how all the rumors,lies and fear mongering have completely destroyed the spirit of cooperation that is needed to really run this country.
  Last night C and I watched a show about writer Erma Bombeck. I thought I might write about how I would have liked to have met her and maybe had lunch with her.
   Then I remembered a speech that I heard last week.
   Guy, a fellow Toastmaster, gave an icebreaker speech. The icebreaker is the first speech that a Toastmaster gives. It is meant to introduce yourself to the club and to asses what skills you have or need to improve. A Toastmaster can repeat the projects from the first book as often as needed. Guy had decided to do this and started with a powerful icebreaker.
   In it he talked about his younger years growing up in Green Bay, Wisconsin and how that shaped him later on. He included a quote from his dad. "If you like what you do, you'll never have to go to work."
  That phrase caught my ear. I got the same advice in different words from my own father. My Dad told me to find a job that I liked to do and do it. I just had to make sure that it paid well enough so I feed, clothe and house myself with a little left over to put in savings. He not only told me this. He lived it. He worked at a radio station as an engineer when he got out of school and stayed at the same job for 50 years. My mother would have preferred that he find something that paid better. Radio is notorious for low wages. That didn't bother Dad, he was making enough to pay the bills and he liked what he did. End of argument.
   I took that advice to heart. I wanted to find something that I would like. A job that involved helping people. A job that paid enough so I could support myself and insure that I could live wherever I wanted. I stumbled onto pharmacy.
  It was a lucky stumble. I went to pharmacy school at just the right time. I had to do some graduate internship time after graduation. I had two really good preceptors who were the kind of pharmacist I wanted to be. I knew that community pharmacy was the right job for me. Jobs were plentiful and the wages were good.
   I can honestly say that in the nearly 20 years I've been a pharmacist there are few days when I've had to go to work. All of that was due to where I was working and who I was working with. When I go on vacation, I don't dread going back to work. (Although I did worry about how messy the pharmacy would be when I got back.)
   Not many people can say that, especially these days. It seems now that a job is something that you do to earn the money to do what you really want to do. To me, that is sad. A person shouldn't spend their life waiting for weekends,vacations and retirement. A job should not be something to be endured.
  It could be that a lot of people chose jobs based on what will earn them the most money or bring the most prestige. What would happen if people chose professions based on something they liked or were good at. How much more successful would we be as a culture? How much better would we be as a nation? How much more satisfaction would there be out there? No one would ever have to go to work again.....