Do You Love Your Blog?

Rhett told me I should write something from the heart instead of the tutorial type of posts that I usually write. With that in mind I thought I would talk about some wisdom that my father gave me many years ago. Like most wisdom fathers impart many of them don’t make much sense until you are a father yourself, although I think this one has always made sense to me.

My father was a carpenter. He spent 35 plus years working for the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool building elevators. He started on a construction crew when he was a teenager and eventually he became foreman. By the time I came around he was working in the Head Office and was responsible for overseeing the repair and construction crews for a large portion of Saskatchewan. He was a hard worker and was good at his job but I really don’t think he liked his job.

When I was a teenager I got a job at the local grocery story as a bagger. I worked hard and was given the occasional raise in pay, but I never really liked my job. I did it and I was good at it, but I hated going to work and I could not wait for my shift to end so I could do the things that I wanted to do. It was near the end of that summer when I was trying to decide if I should quit my job or keep it while I was at school. I think my father knew that I hated that job, and he told me that life was to short to do something that you did not like doing. If you love what you do then it is not work.

Do you love your blog? Is blogging a chore for you or is it something you love to do? Building a successful blog will take work, but that work will not feel like work if your blog is something that you love to do. Blogging in many ways has become sanitized. Blogger A talks about a topic, blogger B then rehashes the same topic, and the cycle continues on. The way to make your blog stand out and be different from all the other blogs is to love your blog. If you love what you do your blog will not feel like work and you will not be able to wait to get back to writing on it day after day.

I don’t know if my father would be proud of me that I learned something from him or not, but I do now that his advice then has helped me to find the work that I enjoy. As a father I hope that I can teach my son to find things that he enjoys so his work is not just something he does to make a living but is something that he loves to do.