The Thin Line Between Obligation and Opportunity

I’ve been really excited to work on Cruise Sheet recently. I’ve made some big strides and am now an actual cruise agency rather than a web site that creates affiliate links. It’s still fairly similar, but now I can control the experience the whole way through and the increase in revenue makes it look more like a viable business.

So now I’m back in that “Love Work” mode where all I want to do is work. Last night two friends and I drove around picking up Uber passengers while I sang “Drop it Like It’s Hot” on our Car-eoke system, but in the back of my head I was thinking about Cruise Sheet.

One of the things I’ve been doing is going through every single port and making sure I have the right name, region, GPS coordinates, abbreviated form, etc. Not the most exciting work, but I have a thing for neat and orderly data, so I enjoy it.

Except for the damn Galapagos Island stops. There are so many of them that every time another one popped up, I was annoyed that I had to enter it in. For a while I had a dozen or so of them sitting in the queue while I waited for normal ports to show up.

I realized how ridiculous that was, so I started thinking about it from different angles. Cruise Sheet won’t show a cruise unless it recognizes all of the ports and can validate them as a route that a ship could actually traverse, so unless I get all of the ports in, Cruise Sheet won’t show cruises to the Galapagos. I’ve never been to Galapagos, but I would love to go and I love cruises, so what’s more perfect?

And all of a sudden entering in the ports wasn’t an obligation. It was an opportunity. I got into it and made a tool to make it easier and faster to create new ports.

It’s not so amazing that an obligation can be turned into an opportunity. I think that’s happened to all of us and we get the concept. What’s interesting to me is just how thin that line is. One stray thought about how I’d sure like to see those tortoises, and all of a sudden I enjoy a formerly-tedious job.

This happens to me all the time with projects in my place in Vegas. I’ll be extremely frustrated trying to line up panels or cut drywall, but then I think about how nice my condo is going to be and I’m excited about the work again.

When I’m driving my motorcycle it can feel like transit. Just a waste of time. But then I think about how cool it is that I even have a motorcycle, that they were invented in the first place, that it’s somehow legal to drive these things, and all of a sudden I love being on that motorcycle.

It’s a thin line, so it doesn’t take much to cross it.

Usually it’s just a matter of focusing. Why are you doing this? What’s the point? Isn’t it pretty cool that you even get to do this? Aren’t you glad you’re not being attacked by a predator in the jungle like your ancestors were?

At least for today, see if you can turn obligations into opportunities in your mind. Be aware of when you don’t like doing something, and think about its positive aspects. Is it an obligation because that’s its nature, or because that’s how you’re thinking about it?

###

Photo is a long underground passage in Tokyo. You can traverse miles underground there as basements of stores link to subway stations.


Posted

in

by

Tags:

Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *