Exertion for its Own Sake

Runners, Bikers, Swimmers -- we work for the sake of work. Work is our payment. The action of work is more important than any payment. When I move to Chicago after graduation college. I immediately joined a club, started running on trails, and started doing very intense work at a community service shelter. My entire life style was a full-time job basically, but without pay. I knew money would come if I needed it. The vital essentiality to my life was ensuring that I had that opportunity for work in my life. Loving the exertion not as toil and drudgery, but as a faithful and fulfilling profession of itself. So many people define profession as work and effort with a monetary outcome. Not so, profession should be purely work that is so powerfully meaningful and interactively poignant that its essence alone is the critical reward. We should stop placing acclaim on the paycheck as the sole means of evaluating worthwhile work. Truly awesome work is done with grace, certainty, conviction, truth, and joy. Expanding our minds to not only comprehend, but live, by exerting ourselves creates incredible certainty. Just like they say eat to live, don't live to eat. Don't work for the paycheck; work for the joy of it and the paycheck is an irrelevant (possibly and unexpected) bonus. This is incredibly counterintuitive to mainstream America, but incredibly vital.