We worked yesterday, on a Sunday. Because Larissa and I are real estate agents and working on a Sunday is just part of the job. Which honestly makes me grateful.
I’m thinking of 2019. I was working on a $4 million opportunity for my company, and on the Wednesday before Easter Sunday I got a call from the Executive Sponsor. They’d decided to go with us, he told me, but before they signed the deal the CEO wanted to meet with our CEO. Could our team (including my boss and CEO) meet with the CEO’s team (including the entire Executive team) in two weeks? Of course we could!
But here’s the problem. Here we were, on the cusp on a $4 million contract that would make my boss’s team numbers for the year, and he was just so afraid that what was technically a formality (CEO handshakes) would somehow go awry. So he insisted we work over the weekend preparing.
So Easter weekend that year was spent working on a lengthy word document that we could give to our CEO. Among all the standard details about the opportunity and the company, the document included long profile descriptions (including links) for every executive who may attend the meeting. Want to know where they went to college? Where else they worked at? What hobbies they partake in? Their spouse’s background? It was aaaaaalllllll there. It took hours and hours to put this document together, and that was before we started formatting it, which my boss was obsessive compulsive about in the best of times.
Oh my gawd.
It was so frustrating, so maddening, such a waste, to work that Sunday. And I had no control over it since I knew to refuse would probably cost me my job since that was the type of company it was. Of course we won the opportunity, but it had nothing to do at all with that document or its formatting or its creepy detail that we invested an entire weekend in compiling or even with the work of my CEO who was actually painstakingly and shockingly quiet and awkward in that CEO handshake meeting.
That memory created some pain for me for a long time for reasons that go beyond Sunday work.
But yesterday was different. Yesterday — and working yesterday — was in a strange way redemption seven years later. Because yesterday I felt sooooo grateful looking back on that frustrating Sunday in 2019. Because the work I was doing was important for our client(s), who were regular people, and more importantly the work was essential and I was doing it not because of a micromanaging detail-obsessed-on-a-pathological-level boss but instead because I myself was choosing to do it. And there is beauty and tremendous satisfaction when we work 100% by choice.
So yesterday was Sunday. Much of America was off, especially in lieu that it was a holiday weekend. But Larissa and I worked. And I didn’t mind at all and fact it helped me come to peace (redeem) that weekend in 2019 because I realized how much of a better place I’m in today.
Life, Work & Wonder 