If You Don't Like Mondays

A simple test: would you keep doing your work if they stopped paying you for it? The answer shows whether you've found your calling or are just serving hours.

If you don’t like Mondays, you may have wandered off your path somewhere…

There are people who do work they love, and there are people who work for the money.

It’s very easy to check which one you are. If tomorrow you were told you’d no longer be paid, would you immediately start looking for something else to do? It doesn’t matter whether you’re building a career or running your own business. Would you keep doing your work even without the financial motivation?

I understand perfectly well that many people have no savings, so if their current work stopped bringing in money, the sheer lack of resources would force them to go and find a job somewhere.

But imagine a situation where you do have a minimum income, enough to somehow live on. Or you have savings that will cover you for a few years. Would you then keep doing what you’re doing now without being paid, or would you change it right away?

The answer to that question actually determines a great deal in our lives. Because if we do something purely for the money, we’ll be in that work because we “have to” — to feed the family. Most likely we won’t have much enthusiasm, we won’t grow in the profession, we won’t burn with new ideas and hypotheses. We’ll just serve out our working hours for a specific paycheck.

Meanwhile, in that very same field, right next to us there may be people who love what they do. And those people will grow on every metric far faster than we will.

Competing with someone who simply enjoys the process is very hard.

For me, that beloved work is teaching people. On a stage or in front of a camera I feel like a fish in water.

Starting in 2019 I began travelling around Ukraine a lot (very often at my own expense) to give a small lecture to 15–20 people at some school, college, or Protestant church. I did it because I saw great meaning in it, and I believe it’s my calling.

Alongside the marketing agency, on Mondays I ran an online club for entrepreneurs and for people interested in financial literacy. It brought in a modest income, but it gave me enormous pleasure.

When I started working with social media a year and a half ago, I was able to stop doing marketing and focus entirely on education — and our online school started growing nicely.

Right now we’re 90% media and only 10% online school. Our team publishes content systematically across 8 different accounts.

I’m telling you all this to highlight one very important idea.

When we do work we love, we will keep improving and developing in it. We’ll be ready to run that marathon even if we’re paid nothing at first. And once we learn to be genuinely useful to people, money will come into our lives naturally, as the equivalent of the value we bring to the market.

In commercial terms, we earn as much as we are useful to other people.

When we’re paid money in exchange for our time in work we don’t love, we’ll feel unhappy. We’ll have the sense that this “dead” working time takes most of our strength, and there’s nothing left over for anything else.

It’s no surprise that a fish thrown onto the shore has a very hard time there. The same goes for a penguin in the Sahara. It matters that we find our element and our place in it. God gives each of us our own unique gifts and talents.

So don’t stop searching for your calling. Look for it and don’t settle for less. When you find your life’s work, you won’t just earn considerably more — you’ll also feel deep meaning and happiness. The week will stop being split into Monday-to-Friday and the weekend.

By the way, you can watch our podcasts about calling on the YouTube channel of the New Lifestyle school. You may pick up some useful hints there.

Do you love your Mondays?

Or have you not yet found the work you love?