For Love Of The Game… and The Money LOL

People tell me I write well. But they obviously haven't met the whole family yet. I suck compared to my siblings. LOL. Anyway, here's an excerpt from a note my brother wrote in Facebook. This is our youngest, Roy, who just got married and will soon be a dad. Again posting this for posterity ... or as long as blogger stays.  :)

So the dilemma becomes whether to get paid and pay the price of success or have more quality time at home and yet earn barely enough to make ends meet. Sadly, I know only a handful of people who:

a.) Understand that there are obligations that come with the additional income and/or,

b.) Are willing to sacrifice whether (not necessarily the greater good) financially or personally

People in my line of work often forget to ask three things: Do I devote enough effort in my work to get paid this much? Does the quality of work that I do reflect the income that I receive? Most importantly, do I really deserve to be here? More than most will answer yes to all these questions and yet less than a handful would not be wrong or would not be lying to themselves.

Unfortunately, you cannot really answer these three questions truthfully if you expect your work to be easy all the time. Remember, you have to work enough to stay in the game. You have to work hard to compete in the game. But to be truly the best at the game, you have to sacrifice FOR the game. And yet in this scenario, more often than not, those who get rewarded are those who show enough to fool their employers into thinking that they work hard.

Let me be clear though, I am not saying one should forsake everything good in life to deserve the kind of lifestyle we have but there IS some amount of sacrifice involved. And this includes, but is not limited to family. You have to be willing to get screamed at everyday by people. You have to be willing to endure the stress of coming in early in the morning, working your ass off to get something done and at the end of the day get chewed out for an insignificant something that you forgot to do.

People seem to be under the impression that working in front of computers is easy. You sit all day in front of the computer until your day ends. What most people don’t know is how stressful is the stupidity that we have to deal with day in and day out. The hours of endless lectures we have to endure because some idiot made some mistake in the process of doing something that should not have involved us in the first place.

The fact of the matter is, everyday at work is war for us. And war should only reward survivors. But in my world, it’s the cowards who hide in the trenches during the firefight who get rewarded over the veterans who were emotionally, physical and psychologically scarred forever by the seemingly endless struggle. And it’s sad that we live in a world like that but we do. So I pose this challenge to the readers of this note: you can’t be content to EARN it, you also have to WANT IT. Because if you can’t OWN the responsibility that you have been given, you are sadly someone who doesn’t belong here.

Here's my two cents. An added clause if I may. I agree with everything he says. But I have my limits. (1) I will not kiss my boss'es ass just because I WANT IT. (2) I will do everything to EARN IT but not at the expense of others or my principles. But then again, that's not really the point. I can't stop myself. I have angst. LOL.